Episode 1: The Leaf Pile Ambush
“Look out!” yelled Eddy. He fell right into a pile of leaves. His sister, Anna, laughed. She pointed a stick at his head like a pretend sword. “You almost stepped on the durian trap, lah! Uncle Boon will kill you if you spoil his fence again.”
Eddy sat up, leaves stuck in his hair like a bad wig. Somewhere behind the rambutan trees, a rooster screamed its afternoon complaint, and the air smelled of wet earth and frying belacan drifting over from Auntie Ros’s kitchen three houses down. That was Kampung Cempedak for you — always something cooking, always something crowing, always somebody’s little brother falling into something.
Eddy is skinny as a lamp post, and famously the clumsiest boy on the whole street of Jalan Tanjung Bungah. Anna, was the opposite — sharp-eyed, quick-tongued, the kind of big sister who could win an argument with the whole neighbourhood before breakfast. Together they were, as their grandmother liked to say, “double trouble wrapped in one roti.”
“Stop laughing and help me up,” Eddy grumbled, brushing leaf bits off his shirt. “I wasn’t looking where I was going because I was reading this.”
He held up a folded, water-stained piece of paper he’d found jammed in the hollow of the old rain tree behind their house — the enormous tree everyone in the kampung simply called Pokok Besar, the Big Tree, because nobody could agree on what kind it actually was.
Anna snatched it before he could stop her. “Wah, what is this? Looks like some kampung treasure map lah, drawn by a five-year-old.”
It really did look childish — wobbly lines in faded pencil, a crooked drawing of what might have been a well, an arrow pointing toward the old surau clock tower, and, at the very bottom corner, three words scrawled in shaky handwriting:
“Find what’s lost.”
“Probably somebody’s school project,” Anna said, though her voice had gone a little quieter than before. “Or a joke.”
But Eddy wasn’t so sure. Because right there, at the edge of the paper, half-torn away, was a tiny drawing of their own house — the blue roof, the mango tree out front, even the crooked gate that never shut properly. Whoever drew this map knew exactly where they lived.
Episode 2: Three Kids and a Very Bad Idea
By evening, the map had grown a whole audience. Eddy’s best friend, Eu Jun, arrived on his bicycle so fast he nearly crashed into Uncle Boon’s fence himself, screeching to a stop in a cloud of dust.
“Confirm it’s treasure,” Eu Jun announced immediately, out of breath, his glasses fogged from pedaling in the evening humidity. “My grandfather always says there was gold buried near the old well during the old days, before the new housing came. Maybe this is it!”
“Or,” Anna said dryly, “it’s just some auntie’s grocery list that blew away.”
“Grocery lists don’t have arrows pointing to secret locations, Anna,” Eu Jun said, very seriously, adjusting his glasses. “This is clearly a mystery.”
Above them, the sky had turned the colour of an old bruise — purple-grey, heavy, the kind of sky that meant the evening monsoon rain was coming fast. The wind picked up, rattling the tin roofs along the row of houses, and somewhere a clothesline of sarongs flapped like nervous flags.
“We should go now-now,” Eddy said, “before Mak calls us in for dinner and before the rain starts.”
They followed the map’s wobbly path — past the pasar malam stalls just beginning to set up their gas lamps, past old Encik Hassan’s coffee shop where the domino players slapped their tiles down like thunder, and finally to the overgrown patch of land behind the abandoned surau clock tower, a place kids were always told to stay away from because “nobody maintains it already, dangerous.”
The old well sat there exactly like the drawing, ringed with moss-eaten bricks, half-swallowed by wild lalang grass.
“Okay,” Anna said, peering down into the well’s darkness, “I did not expect the map to be right.”
Episode 3: What the Well Remembered
Inside the well — not deep, thankfully, just a few feet down where the old water had long dried up — they found a rusted biscuit tin, the kind grandmothers everywhere seem to keep hidden treasures in. Eu Jun volunteered to be lowered down by his ankles, mostly because he was smallest, and came back up triumphant, clutching the tin like a trophy.
Inside were photographs, brittle and yellowed. A boy, maybe ten years old, grinning gap-toothed beside the very same rain tree. A girl with two long braids standing proudly next to a homemade kite. And a folded letter, the ink faded but still readable, addressed simply:
“To whoever finds this — we buried our childhood here so it would never really leave. If you found this, come find us. We never left the kampung, we just grew up. — Bee Lian & Jamal, 1988.”
“Wait,” Eddy said slowly. “Bee Lian… isn’t that—”
“That’s Auntie Bee Lian!” Anna gasped. “The one who sells kuih every Friday near the mosque!”
Eu Jun’s eyes went round as satay skewers. “And Jamal… Pak Jamal? The retired schoolteacher who always shouts at us for climbing his fruit trees?”
The rain finally broke, fat drops smacking against the leaves, and the three of them dashed for shelter under the clock tower’s crumbling awning, laughing and soaked and buzzing with the electric thrill of knowing something nobody else knew.
“We have to bring this to them,” Eddy said, hugging the tin to his chest like it was made of glass. “It’s theirs. Not ours.”
Anna, for once, didn’t argue. “Yeah,” she said softly, watching the rain turn the dusty road into little rivers. “Some things you gotta return, not keep.”
Episode 4: The Trouble With Growing Up
The next morning brought bright sun, steaming roads, and a new problem: nobody knew exactly where Auntie Bee Lian lived, only that she appeared like clockwork every Friday with her rattan basket of kuih, sold out within the hour, and vanished again until the next week.
“We wait until Friday,” Anna decided, though her patience had never been famous.
But Eddy, never one to sit still, had a different idea — a terrible idea, according to Anna, which of course meant he loved it immediately.
“What if,” he said, grinning, “we make our OWN map. Back to the well. And leave clues around the kampung. Like — a scavenger hunt. If Auntie Bee Lian and Pak Jamal really grew up playing detective games here, maybe they’ll recognize it.”
“That,” Eu Jun said, “is either genius or going to get us in so much trouble.”
It turned out to be both.
They spent two days chalking symbols on walls old-school kids might remember — a crooked arrow near the coffee shop, a drawing of a kite by the football field, a small chalk star outside the surau. Word spread through the kampung the way word always does — fast, twisted, and thoroughly gossiped about by every auntie on every porch.
“Aiyoh, these kids drawing nonsense on my wall!” complained Uncle Boon, though secretly even he seemed curious.
By Thursday evening, their plan had either worked brilliantly or completely backfired — because standing at the old well, waiting for them with crossed arms and deeply confused expressions, were none other than Auntie Bee Lian, kuih basket still balanced on her hip, and Pak Jamal, reading glasses pushed up on his head.
“Which one of you,” Pak Jamal said slowly, “has been drawing my childhood all over this kampung?”
Eddy gulped. “That would… be me, Pak.”
Episode 5: The Whole Story, Finally
It turned out the truth was simpler — and sweeter — than any treasure hunt.
Bee Lian and Jamal had grown up right here on Jalan Tanjung Bungah, best friends since they were smaller than Eddy, forever getting into scrapes exactly like the ones Eddy, Anna, and Eu Jun had just survived. Before Bee Lian’s family moved briefly to the city for work when she was twelve, the two of them had buried the tin as a promise — whatever happens, we’ll always belong to this kampung.
“We never actually forgot about it,” Bee Lian admitted, sitting on the well’s mossy edge, voice thick with memory. “Life just… got busy, lah. Marriage, children, work. Forty years passed like one long Friday.”
Jamal chuckled, wiping his glasses. “And then some cheeky boy starts drawing chalk kites all over the neighbourhood and suddenly I’m eleven years old again.”
Anna elbowed Eddy. “See? Not a joke after all.”
They sat together as the evening call to prayer rolled gently across the rooftops and the smell of dinner fires began curling into the sky — durian season winding down, replaced by the sweet smell of pisang goreng frying somewhere close. Bee Lian opened her kuih basket and handed round pieces of kuih lapis, still warm, colours layered like a tiny rainbow.
“You three remind me,” she said, “that some maps aren’t really about treasure. They’re about remembering where home is.”
Eddy, mouth full of kuih, nodded seriously — the most serious he’d been all week.
Episode 6: A New Map for Old Friends
That night, under the mango tree, Anna helped Eddy draw a brand-new map — not of the well, not of buried tins, but of the whole kampung as it was now: Eu Jun’s grandfather’s coffee shop, Uncle Boon’s durian fence, Auntie Ros’s kitchen, the football field where they all played until the streetlights buzzed on.
“What’s this one for?” Eu Jun asked, peering over Eddy’s shoulder.
“For us,” Eddy said simply. “So when we’re old like Auntie Bee Lian and Pak Jamal, and we forget stuff, we’ll have a map to remind us who we were.”
Anna smiled — actually smiled, not her usual smirk — and added one final line at the bottom of the fresh paper, copying the very words that had started it all, except changed just slightly, just enough:
“Find what’s here.”
Because that, they realized, watching fireflies blink lazily above the grass as the monsoon clouds finally cleared for the night, was the real treasure all along — not gold in a well, not old secrets buried in tins, but a kampung full of people who never really stopped being kids at heart, and three friends who’d found something worth remembering long before they ever needed a map to find it again.
The End…
