My friend and ex-classmate, Jamil Ahmad, adjusted himself on the opposite root. For a while, we said nothing. Our minds gallivanted back to the days when we used to gambol around these very same roots almost daily.
Ah! If only the trees could talk, what tales they would tell. For these shade trees in King Edward VII Primary School along Jalan Stesen in Taiping, planted in 1910, have felt the hands, feet and bottoms of thousands upon thousands of pupils.
I could see myself in the faces of the pupils who were now sitting or playing on the portion of the large roots that protruded above ground.
Enviously, I watched as they indulged in innocent laughter and innocuous mischief; as if that was all that mattered. And they are right, of course. If there is one lesson that children can teach adults, it is this: Only this moment matters. Live this moment well, and all our yesterdays and tomorrows will take care of themselves.
We knew it too when we were children, you and I. But as we grew, we allowed ourselves to wallow in a cloud of collective societal amnesia; we started squandering too much time on the past and future. And simply forgot to live in the present.
Jamil startled me into the present. "Do you remember the tuck shop?" he asked, pointing to the small building near the field. Tuck shop. These days they are known as canteens. Our language reveals our age, I ruminated.
I looked at Jamil and wondered if people like us were anachronisms in society. At a time when everyone is talking about racial and religious divides, our friendship has stood the ravages of time. We had driven from Kuala Lumpur a day earlier and put up at his family house in Aulong.
Jamil and I had been together in the same class in the same school -- King Edward VII -- from Standard Two to Form Six. He joined KE VII in Standard Two when his station-master father was transferred to this historic town.
When we were in secondary school -- and more mobile -- we became close, eating in each other's house, singing Beatles and Bee Gees songs and playing football together.
And we have to thank, in large measure, our parents and our school for our sense of balance, of give-and-take, and respect for others. We have to thank what has come to be known as the Tiger Spirit, at KE VII, for helping us appreciate unity in diversity.
Which is why we decided to make the trip to Taiping to participate in the parade around town by students and old boys of the school in conjunction with its 125th anniversary. KE VII had started as the Central School in 1883.
Joining the 2000-plus Edwardians, also known as Tigers, we walked a distance of about 3km. As the mass of red and black t-shirts passed our local rival, St George's Institution, loud roars rent the air. The sporting students of the school-across-the-drain (as it is known to generations of Tigers) crowded the doors and windows of their classrooms to cheer us on.
Taiping people, ever so gracious, waved as the parade, led by a group of old boys on polished and modified old motorcycles, went past. Those driving vehicles waited patiently; no one sounded the horn. Some were clearly amused.
They would have been even more amused if the original plan of getting tiger cubs from the Taiping Zoo to lead the parade had materialised. Unfortunately, the tigress ate up all three cubs about a week before the walk, and just about a month after giving birth to them.
Still, there were enough Tigers on the prowl in Taiping on July 31.
And there was unalloyed joy in the eyes of the old boys. For -- like Jamil and I -- they had all touched base and returned to their roots.
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