Friendship, probate and rain

I met up with my old school pal, Shaun, last night. Our friendship goes back more than five decades. We had known one another since our Form One days at Penang Free School. Last week, he had invited my wife and I to join some of his relatives and friends for dinner. Where I was concerned, it was to thank me and another person for going through the hassle of signing statutory declarations as witnesses to his parents' wills. It was no hassle, I protested, because when I chose to become a witness for their wills 20 years ago, I knew what to expect. 

Basically, the Grant of Probate must be obtained from the High Court. From what I learned from my friend, he had been flying in and out the country several times in the past two years in order to settle his parents' affairs. Last Friday was the hearing for his mother's Probate. The Judge examined his identification papers in order to ascertain his status as the executor and beneficiary.

Dinner over, we have to drive back to the mainland in a pouring rain. The rain was light enough when we left the New CRC Restaurant but towards Scotland Road, the rain grew heavier. It was a crawl once we reached the Lim Chong Eu Expressway, traffic flow reducing to as slow as 20kph at one stage. When I reached the end of the Penang Bridge, I made a decision to use the old Federal Highway to get to Bukit Mertajam.

The North-South Expressway was my normal route but I did not want to use Chian Heng Kai Road at night, certainly not in the pouring rain, because the road had been recently resurfaced and the contractor was slow to redraw the traffic lines. It would have been mighty dangerous for me to drive on a dark unmarked road with no street lights.

So I chose the old Federal route instead. I had another decision to make as I reached the Bukit Tengah roundabout. Should I proceed to the roundabout or should I take the flyover? Both directions would allow me to reach home at about the same time. Then I noticed a long queue of cars going to the roundabout while the way to the flyover was clear. No big decision for me to make here as I drove by the queue; flyover it was. 

However, by the time I reached the top of the flyover, as it curved right, the traffic had slowed down to a crawl. A second crawl for my drive back home. There was no turning back. I had to join the lanes of traffic. When I inched towards the end of the flyover, I could see all the vehicles slowly converging into a single lane. Much of the road was flooded and nobody knew how deep was the water. Nobody wanted to find out too. So all lanes began converging into one and we drove along very slowly and keeping a fair distance between cars. Pretty soon, perhaps driving some 200 to 250 metres along this stretch, it became safe enough to drive normally again. By now, the clouds had more or less cleared away and the rain became a trickle.

But there again an anxious moment when almost reaching home. Would I have to drive through another stretch of flood waters at Kampong Baru? Thankfully, not. No sign of floods here unlike the last time when I drove in the pouring rain. And so, we made it safely home. A normally uneventful one-hour journey became almost one-and-a-half hours for me last night.