Coincidence or.....?

It has happened twice! Last year on the same date, 8th March, the anniversary of my mother's demise, I lost something very valuable.

It was an old carved jade pendant which my late mother had chosen for me and she had designed the cluster of diamonds at the top. It hung on a gold chain round my neck and the lovely piece of jade made me feel closer to my mum.

Unfortunately, it went missing and I only realised it later that day when I reached to rub it between my fingers as I was wont to do. There was no way that I could recall when or where it could have dropped earlier that day.

It was a painful loss and I recalled another incident when my favourite bangle also went missing. It was on my wrist that morning when we held prayers for my late father but when the prayers were over, the bangle was gone! I was looking at it during the prayers so it was definitely there when we went into the temple. My siblings and I searched for it in the patch of grass where we had walked through on the way out but it could not be found.

One philosophical way to look at it was to deem it an exchange in order to avert a worse thing happening to me. It sounds superstitious but in a way it is logical too!

This year, on the night of Mar 8th, hours before I was to leave for the airport, something happened.

I had been looking forward to this Hong Kong escapade for sometime. My spouse and I would be meeting up with my niece who lives there. As luck would have it, I had a bad fall.

Fortunately I landed on my butt and my desperate grasp of the toilet bowl prevented me from sliding further and hitting my back and my head where the damage could have been really bad. As it was I couldn't get up and my daughter had to haul me up from the floor. The pain in my right knee was unbearable.

Drat it! I thought.... this was going to spoil my holiday..how was I going to walk to the places I wanted to visit? It was a few hours' miserable on-off sleep as I had to get up at 2 a.m. to get ready to catch the 3 a.m. bus from Sentral to the Low Cost Carrier Terminal in Sepang.

Well, painful though it was, I limped my way through. It was excrutiating to heave myself up the steps to board the aircraft.I couldn't put any weight on my right foot as the shafts of pain shooting up the length of my leg were like arrows of fire.

The worst was yet to come! On arrival at Hong Kong airport, we got our tickets for the hotel shuttle bus. However, the bus was way down in the basement and there was no lift. I had to drag myself painfully, step by step all the way, while the ticket officer walked quickly ahead. He kept looking back to see if I could catch up but there was no way that I could hurry.

I finally made it to the bus and on reaching the hotel, I was grateful for the respite. It was a cold 9 degrees Celcius, a world away from the blistering heat of Borneo.

I downed 5 capsules of a super nutrient and a bottle of Hydrogen water which I had packed in my luggage. A couple of hours later, I felt much better. My knee didn't hurt as much although I was still limping. My spirits lifted and we started off to look for the bus that would take us to my niece's apartment building.

Unfortunately we couldn't locate the bus stop so we opted to take the taxi which was quite a hefty sum when compared to the bus fare. It was ten times more!! Even then, the jovial taxi driver wasn't quite sure where to take us as we didn't know the local name of her area. We only knew the English version, not the Cantonese version.

After searching for landmarks mentioned by my niece, he finally dropped us off where we would have stopped, had we managed to come by bus. A couple of phone calls later, my sister came to meet us halfway and we got to Ani's apartment safely.