Jane and I were classmates in my primary school days for 3 years from Std 2 to Std 5. We were both loners, don’t talk much in class and are always ‘hiding’ in the back seat rows!
I was very shy in school back then, a backbencher who never went to kindergarten unlike most of my classmates. I was thrown straight into Std 1 and barely know how to speak English nor Bahasa Malaysia. So, I couldn’t communicate with my other classmates who already had a headstart in basic English and BM. So, I only had a few kind friends who would play with me during recess time.
But it was not the same for Jane. Born with some facial disformities and a defomed right arm, she was left at the doors of our school soon after birth by her parents and raised by the nuns. Abandoned and not wanted, it has been a world of loneliness and loveless except for the company and care of the other ‘sisters’ and nuns who lived in the orphanage.
Classmates shunned her, afraid to approach her nor play with her because of her looks. During recess, she would quickly ‘disappear’ to the nun’s quarters and reappear when recess time is over.
I never knew much about Jane till one day our English teacher read her composition where we had to write about our family. That was the day then that the whole class knew that she is an orphan.
Jane never completed primary school or maybe she did somewhere else but I never saw her again after Std 5. No one seems to know where she has gone or what has become of her.
Thinking of Jane as I listened to this song and wishing her well and hoped that she is finally blessed with people to love and to love her in return.