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.

I liked that term 'tractored-out' which John Steinbeck had used in the 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath to describe how the poor farmers in Oklahoma's dust bowl during the Depression era were driven out of their land when they could not service their debt, and the large corporations took over and introduced industrial farming using modern farming methods and machinery.

I am digressing here but I can't help but draw similarities in some respects between the plight of Malaysia's urban underclass and that of the 'Okie' families driven out of their land and searching for a new life in California as farm labourers and fruit pickers, as represented by the main characters in the novel, the Joad family and their friend Jim Casy, aka Preacher.

In a dilapidated truck, they joined the hordes of the dispossessed on Highway 66 and headed for California. Tom Joad's (the novel's hero) grandpa and grandma died along the way, brother Noah lost his mind and left the family, followed by brother in-law Connie, who had his own personal ambition and found the poor but closely-knit family claustrophobic.

No heroes

Once in California, what followed was an intense, many layered drama of survival, anguish, hope and struggle to maintain their human dignity. There was the squalor of squatter colonies, the desperate search for low-paying farm jobs, the exploitation of migrant workers by playing them off against each other and encouraging picket breakers, the agitation and strikes, the police deputies siding with farm owners, the brutal murder of Casy who turned labour organiser, Tom's revenge of his friend all very stirring.

The fictitious hero, Tom Joad, continues to live beyond the novel, perhaps in a way as the American equivalent of Jean Valjean of les Miserables . Woodie Guthrie, the folk singer and radical labour activist wrote a song Tom Joad a few years after the novel was published and Bruce Springsteen wrote The Ghost of Tom Joad , evoking the novel's hero as a symbol of the struggle of the underprivileged against injustice in '90s America.

But in the simmering cauldron of Petaling Jaya Selatan and its environs there are no heroes. The media columnists, academics and commentators of the Malaysian scene have eloquently presented their analyses but even ordinary Malaysians who cared to give this a thought would have had no difficulty in seeing the warning signs that one day things will come to a head.

In the self-assured euphoria of the boom years everyone was busy making their pile and no one saw any incongruity that in the shadows of the gleaming skyscrapers that rapidly crowd our urban skyline and the mega projects that were supposed to signal our arrival, an urban underclass comprising largely of Indians and Malays was growing - poor, neglected and marginalised. No one saw any moral contradictions on a path of development driven by greed, corruption and ego-massaging.

Poverty dehumanises, brutalises and hardens, especially the young. But perhaps I must qualify this as applying largely to modern, urban poverty. As a young boy in the late 1960s reading Malay short stories and listening to radio dramas, I had the notion that the poor are generally virtuous, law-respecting, readily emphatise with those worse off than them and that their condition motivate them to break out of their lot.

Hedonistic materialism

I used to hold the idea that the poor live with a quiet dignity, even nobility. This may not be entirely true, but this romantic view of poverty is not totally false either, for a number of our illustrious founding fathers had their origins in this environment.

But there is some thing ironic about modern, urban poverty. The family dwelling may be a ramshackle wooden shack with no proper sanitation and piped water is shared communally, but no squatter house could be called a home without the ubiquitous television and VCD players, titillating the poor with a make-believe world of hedonistic materialism.

Children are deprived of a decent family life as both parents are often forced to spend a great part of their waking hours outside just to earn enough to keep the family afloat. This must have been the seeds for the breakdown of positive moral and family values, the drugs problem, crime and gangsterism in the squatter colonies that have been highlighted in the media in the last year or so by community leaders and academics alarmed with the plight of the marginalised urban poor, particularly the Tamil Indians.

If that is not bad enough, in Malaysia's complex multi-ethnic society, the domination of race-based politics adds a dangerous element of volatility which will not take much to erupt into violence in shanty towns inhabited by the economically hard pressed, neglected and poorly educated segment of society.

They may be marginalised, neglected and sometimes despised, but for a long time they are the faithful supporters of the dominant ruling party with their system of political patronage based on race. Every five years they are suddenly valued for their votes and given new, unrealistic promises. The camaraderie and excitement of election campaigns provide a welcome respite from their daily grind and the extra cash from the candidates is certainly useful.

Milk of kindness

In the last pages of The Grapes of Wrath , Tom Joad's sister, Rosasharn went into labour in their box car as rising flood waters begun to engulf their temporary shelter. Her baby was stillborn and eventually the Joad family had to abandon their box car to higher ground where they came upon an abandoned barn.

There they found a boy nursing his father who was dying of starvation. In a touching gesture, Rosasharn bared her lactating breasts and offered them to the dying man to suck.

While we will always need the flow of the milk of human kindness to affirm our humanity, above all, we need the new politics that will ensure social justice, genuine racial harmony and equitable distribution of the nation's wealth.