COMMENT | Searching for a villain in a story of victims

COMMENT | I was a very obedient and sheltered child, so I am borrowing the story told to me by someone close to me and who shall remain nameless.

It is set in a middle-class Petaling Jaya residential area in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

It is a story of a teenage boy and his parents.

The youngest and only boy of three siblings, he was a treasured child.

He was ferried to and from extracurricular activities and his interest in competitive sports was supported to the point where he was competing at the state level.

Then he became a teenager.

The boy’s school was within walking distance of his home. Every morning, he would walk to school with a group of teenagers from the neighbourhood.

Some days, the same boys would jump the fence of the school and find themselves in places teenage boys shouldn’t be, but often are. Places like dingy arcades and smoky snooker joints.

After that, he would go home, and his parents, returning home from work in the late afternoon, would be none the wiser.

On some nights, at 1am or 2am, while his father’s snores reverberated across the otherwise silent home, the boy would sneak out of his bedroom and...