I WAS caught completely offguard when trudging along a cemented path, outside some houses in Bangsar and towards the shopping centre at the top of the hill.

Young plants by the side, beautiful and ornamental yet hardly appropriate; the plants were all thorns. Morbid as I can get, I imagined tripping and being impaled on the thorn-tipped leaves.

AN early chapter begins with a sentence as good as any Dickens opening: "Several months after my 25th birthday, I discovered that I was, in fact, only 23 years old." If the events of the past had been very different, mi