I could still remember well that evening in mid-1990, doing our night rounds where the diarrhoea ward was last on our itinerary. Of the toddlers and infants that had come in that evening, she remained fresh in my memory as though I had only seen her last week.

For, unlike the others who were all wearing disposable diapers, hers were fashioned out of worn out kain batik . Cut into squares and folded diagonally, they were hardly functional for situations like this. I immediately understood that I was looking at poverty, for I imagined that even the most radical environmental crusader would not go to such lengths.

Her small size belied her age, her hair was coarse and dry, her big eyes darting and her skin was made all the more dry by the diarrhoea. Those were tell-tale signs of malnutrition. Her mother was in her late 30s, thin and small like her, she could only speak very limited Malay and as she grimaced in anxiety I could see the effects of years of betel-nut chewing.

The kain batik she was wearing looked like it would soon be creatively turned into diapers. I checked her address on the case notes. Judging by her demeanour, I imagined that she must have recently drifted to the city slum when the estate she had been living in all these years was 'tractored-out' to make way for development.

Badly damaged

And then there was Anuradah, sad Anuradah. Everyone still remembers her well because she was with us for many weeks just over a year ago. Sitting alone on her bed in the children's ward, she cut a very forlorn figure and I think no one had ever seen her happy. How could she be?

At nine years of age, she probably understood very little of what her illness meant but she rarely had visitors, not even her mother who had to feed, clothe and school the rest of her children, all on her own because her father rarely came home, and when he did, drunk and penniless.

Anuradah suffered from a severe form of rheumatic heart disease, her heart muscles and valves badly damaged by antibodies that were supposed to fight a throat infection. This is a disease that almost exclusively affects children of poor slum-dwellers and those who live in conditions of overcrowding and poor sanitation.

She was lucky she had an aunt who was very concerned for her welfare and took her from her shack in a shanty town at the edge of the city to the hospital, brought her home when she was a little better, only to bring her back again within a few days. But having her own family and a full-time job, there was only so much that auntie could do.

While most children recover the initial phase albeit many having permanent valve damage that may require surgery in adult life or even in adolescence, Anuradah just did not respond to the medications and had a protracted, inexorable course towards the inevitable.

But what moved everyone was seeing her father turn up unexpectedly on the last day, reeking of alcohol, weeping and hugging his dying daughter.

Formula 1 racetrack

In times like this, as the violence in Petaling Jaya Selatan begins to subside, my thoughts naturally go out to the families of Anuradah and the little girl with the batik diapers. They are a testimony to this nation's breathtaking progress that people in the west view with much envy.

I could well imagine that Anuradah's family is an archetypical representation of the predicament of the Tamil Indian urban underclass. Driven from their poor but secure plantation life when 'tractored-out' to make way for factories, golf courses, Formula 1 tracks or maybe a new administrative capital, they drift to the cities in search of a new life which their limited Tamil education hardly prepares them for. And like the poor Malays, all they can afford are wooden shacks in the squalor of shanty towns on the city's outskirts.