Are you the Malaysian Charles Dickens-lah?

The New Straits Times, a Malaysian Newspaper, has reported that there is 471 million Malaysian ringgit (£117 million sterling) sitting in the official trustee’s bank account which is waiting to be distributed from the estates of deceased Malaysians. The fund has accumulated from people who died before they were able to make their wills and there are cases where their heirs then also died without making wills.

The paper reports “Dusuki Ahmad, chairman of Amanah Raya Bhd, as saying the majority of cases were unresolved because families squabbled over assets in the absence of a will, or because the original beneficiaries could not be bothered to distribute the rest of the estate — sometimes for two or three generations.”

This makes me think of Charles Dickens’s novel “Bleak House” which opens in a shroud of London fog. For generations, the Jarndyce family has been fighting over a will in the case Jarndyce v. Jarndyce and it has become so complex with so many litigants and so many lawyers that no-one knows where it started and where it will end. The phrase Jarndyce v Jarndyce has passed into common parlance to describe court cases that spiral out of control with no end in sight.

Who will be the Malaysian Dickens and write a story of feuding families and generations torn apart by dispute?

I can see the opening chapter now:

“Kuala Lumpur. Haze {substitute “haze” everytime “fog” appears} everywhere. Haze up the river, where it flows among green lalang and padangs; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Haze on the Selangor marshes, Haze on the highways. Haze creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; Haze lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Haze in the eyes and throats of ancient Cheras pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; Haze in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; Haze cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his sweating little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of Haze, with Haze all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.”

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