“Thread some whole chillies and onions through a stick and place them outside your front doors and it will bring rain.” She advised.
So, speared into the sandy threshold outside every front door of the village was a kebab of fresh chillies and onions. Still the rain did not come. The village bomoh, the medicine man, danced and waved his arms at the clouds and chanted. But the rain still did not come.
The previous year, we were plagued by floods and now in contrast, we were suffering from drought, our rural lives governed by the capriciousness of the tropical weather. The padi or rice fields, which were usually flooded for the first seeding, were dry, their mud bunds cracking with dryness. The kampong’s four ponds shrank, leaving an edge of exposed bed where some fish could be seen floundering and flipping themselves in a frenzy of thirst. People became listless from the heat, leaves and flowers sagged with exhaustion. More people slept outdoors, on roped charpoys, folded canvas camp-beds and woven straw mats.
I wondered how the English people at Atas Bukit were coping with the heat. The scorching sun must scorch their fair skin and blind their pale blue eyes. Their delicate constitution was not made for our harsh heat.
The attap-roof, woven from palm leaves, exposed day-in, day-out to the blistering sun, became drier and more brittle. All it took was the weight of a small starling walking across it, and the attap would cave in and break, creating more holes in the roof. The attap was quickly becoming a safety hazard, poised for becoming potential kindling. A broken piece of glass caught in the folds of the attap could attract a ray of sunlight and burst into flames. The attap-roof and the wooden walls which our houses were made of were easy to burn. As kampong houses were sandwiched tightly side by side, a single spark could spread like wild fire in dry grass.
One night one of our neighbours, two doors away from our house, was smoking when he fell asleep. The lighted cigarette butt fell onto his pillow and started a fire. His attap-roof rapidly went up in flames. My parents woke us sleepy children and ushered us out of the house hastily. The small passageways or lorongs between the houses made it doubly dangerous as they became packed with people trying to run away from the fire. Luckily the fire was contained very quickly. When the drought persisted, villagers ground their cigarette butts and matches into the sand; and practised extra care to extinguish coals in stoves, candles and oil or kerosene lamps. In heat waves, the normal precaution was to douse the attap roofs with water, but we were rapidly running out of water. What made it worse was that we were running out of fresh water to drink. Our throats were parched.
The government had to intervene.
“The water truck is here! The water truck is here!” A child shouted with glee.
Like a gargantuan messiah, the Municipal Water Truck trundled down our sandy village road. It was greeted with greater joy and relief than the Mobile Library. It was a monster of a truck in size, huge with hundreds of gallons of water, the flexible hose behind it like the trunk of an elephant. We placed our pails and empty kerosene tin-buckets in line to be filled. The driver rationed the water. Each household was permitted only two buckets of water. Second Brother carried our share of the precious water home carefully and proceeded to store it in our giant, Aladdin-type of earthen jar called a tempayan. Each night before we turned in to go to bed, my mother would place empty pails and buckets outside the house in case it rained so that we had water for our washing and cleaning.
“Mari kita mandi dalam kolam! Come let us bathe in the pond!” Abu suggested.
Abu was the elder brother of my close friend, Fatima, and he seemed to have a commanding air about him. If he had been educated, he would probably be successful.
Normally our parents would not permit us to bathe in the ponds. Firstly because the muddy pond-bed was dangerous as it could suck us in. And secondly, it was not exactly hygienic, since the people who lived on the edge of the ponds had their latrines positioned over the pond and they would defecate directly into the pond. One of the village children’s past-time was to go and watch when someone was doing a big job just so that we could see the fish appearing suddenly. As someone pooped and the waste matter plopped into the water, shoals of fish rushed up from nowhere to stir the murky water to feed on it.
“No thanks,” I said. “I will wait for rain.”
Still the rain did not come. By May, we were so hot that we slept with our doors open wide to channel in any little breeze. Of course that let some stray dogs into the house, like the one who was slobbering all over me whilst I was dreaming of P.Ramlee. The worst thing was the rats which came in from the smelly drains and fields.
“The government is negotiating with Malaya to buy more water from Johor,” the newsreader announced on Rediffusion.
As a small island with no fresh water rivers to speak of and only four main reservoirs to supply the country, we were in the unenviable position of having to buy our fresh water from Malaya. Malaya was our hinterland and the Peninsula, with its spectacular mountain ranges and natural fresh rivers and waterfalls, stretched all the way north to Thailand. When we were part of the Federated States, it did not pose any issue to share the water as we were all the same nation. But now that we were not of the same nation, it became more of a concern. So perhaps merger with Malaya would be wise.
On Thursday, May 25, President John F. Kennedy of the United States announced in front of Congress his plan to put a man on the moon. It was a hugely ambitious dream. We could not even fathom such an idea. What would they use to go to the moon? A very special aeroplane? Having a Rediffusion set in our house meant we learnt about things we would never have known about otherwise. Modern technology had brought the rest of the world closer to us.
On the same day, in our village, where the residents were mainly Malay, we were celebrating Hari Raya Haji. This was not a huge affair like Hari Raya Puasa which commemorated the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, but instead this was mainly confined to those who had completed the Haj, a religious pilgrimage to Mecca. People like Pak Osman who had done the pilgrimage wore a songkok or white cap on their head, to denote that they were hajis. On this special day, they had to make a trip to the mosque. After that, they would celebrate by sharing food with neighbours. In our kampong, each of the different races made a point of sharing food with the other neighbours on their new year. I absolutely loved the custom as it meant there was food to eat.
Pak Osman’s wife made the most delicious ketupat, rice cakes made from boiling rice in coconut-leaf bags for hours. These were cut into cubes and eaten with her superbly mouth-watering mutton curry and selondeng or fresh grated coconut fried in aromatic spices. The juices in my mouth ran whilst waiting for the food to be delivered into our home.
It was in the afternoon, whilst we were in this joyous mood, that we heard the terrible news that came over Rediffusion. An attap-kampong, similar to ours, located on the Bukit Ho Swee hillside in the central part of our island, had caught fire. The village was not far from River Valley, where Karim was rehearsing for his performance that evening. We knew from our own kampong that their village would be tightly packed like ours, so a fire in this scorching heat would mean that their attap-roofs were very dry, so they would act like kindle, and the fire would spread very quickly. The other reason for its spread is that, like our kampong, there was probably no running piped water in the houses at Bukit Ho Swee. Like us, they had to rely on wells and a standpipe that was some distance away. So it would be a huge task to put out the fire easily. We could easily imagine how terrified the villagers must be.
We curtailed our celebrations and huddled around the Rediffusion to wait for more news. We became more worried when the reporter said that a strong wind was picking up in that part of the island, fanning the flames as they crackled across rooftops and wooden walls. Before long, we did not even have to sit by the Rediffusion to understand the extent of the fire, because outside, huge clouds of black smoke were billowing into the air. We could smell burning rubber. The fire had spread to a ru
bber factory where sheets of latex waited to be processed. The stench of burning latex was horrid.
Throughout the day, the fire burned and spread. There was a stark band of bright sunlight above the tree-tops, but beyond that the sky was dark as the winds took the smoke up higher.
Karim came home to tell us how he witnessed the raging conflagration.
“It’s horrible! Horrible! There were minor explosions. I think when the fire got to the oil mills and motorcar workshops. When it ate up the timber-yard, the flames grew brighter and became huge, red and orange. The fire engines were screaming their way to the kampong, followed by the police and ambulance. It was chaos. I don’t know how the people are going to run away...”
We had experienced a kampong fire before, and though ours was small, we knew what it would be like, people trying to escape via the narrow lorongs in panic, bumping, squashing and falling over each other. We knew that the kampong at Bukit Ho Swee was much larger than ours and had well over two thousand attap-houses, jammed tightly together, each wooden wall and attap-roof feeding the fire’s voracious appetite. Our hearts were filled with sorrow. We could only listen to the Rediffusion and watch the sky darkening deeply, and pray that the people, especially the children, had time to run.
Next day the female announcer’s voice was sombre, almost trembling as she reported the aftermath, “Four people died in the Bukit Ho Swee fire yesterday and eighty-five have been injured. Sixteen thousand people have been made homeless...”
Considering the circumstances, it was astonishing that more people had not died. Thank goodness. But sixteen thousand homeless! It was a tragedy on a huge scale! It was our country’s worst kampong fire. It decimated the whole village and relegated it to the annals of history.
The government had the huge task of finding housing for all the homeless people. It was one of the PAP’s biggest challenges. Although the smoke eventually disappeared and the smell in the country returned to normal, there was a dark pall hanging over the nation. But other compelling issues surfaced for the PAP. The bid for merger had caused dissension. Certain people expressed dissatisfaction with the government, making allegations of victimisation and unfairness. The previous year, the Minster of National Development Mr Ong Eng Guan had formed a break-away political party, the United People’s Party. Then Dr Lee Siew Choh formed the Barisan Socialis (Socialist Front) Party.
But it was not all doom and gloom.
1961 was the year when significant changes to the law made life more tolerable for women. The Women’s Charter was brought in, making it illegal for girls under sixteen to have sex or to be married off. This spared Parvathi temporarily from being married to the pock-marked older man. Men were not permitted to marry many wives and were now financially responsible for their first wife and children. There was more protection for women and children against abuse, especially physical abuse. But though this was made legal, it was still not easy to implement, as women like Parvathi’s mother or my own mother would not have the wherewithal to report such cases.
Though those of us living in the kampong would never dream of aspiring to go to University, we cheered when we heard the news that a woman, Professor Dr Winifred Danaraj was appointed Chair of Social Medicine at the University. She had graduated from King Edward VII College of Medicine, which was established in 1905 as the Straits and Federated Malay States Government Medical School. She was awarded a Fellowship in 1950 and was also a Queen’s Fellow. She had also been a Postgraduate of Harvard School and London University of Public Health. First Mrs Hedwig Anuar, who became in charge of our National Library, and now, Dr Winifred Danaraj. They were our trail-blazers.
It gave us other women a chance to dream. We had not dared to hope before, especially those of us who were brought up in poverty and in the villages, under strict rules made by our fathers, uncles and brothers. Now it looked as if there was a small window opening, a window that was allowing light to pass through so that women did not have to remain subjugated by men. It was a significant moment for young women like us. Maybe life could be different for young girls like Parvathi. All was not lost.
For the first time in our lives, we felt that we could really aspire to be what we wanted to be.
THE NEW YEAR began well indeed. Our own university was born. What used to be a division of the University Of Malaya now became the autonomous, fully-fledged University of Singapore. Appropriately, the inauguration took place on January 1 at the Bukit Timah campus, just off the eponymous road. Built on a forested hill, the placement of the white buildings was reminiscent of classical British institutions of learning, with a clock tower, arched corridors and quadrangles opening onto manicured lawns.
Every time we had a first, whether it was the first university or the first local head of state, it reinforced our identity as a self-governing country, free from the clutches of colonial power. Like a toddler who has to discover his own confidence and ability to walk, our country too had to find its steady feet.
My father, who worked in Bukit Timah, had to cycle past the university campus each day, and he told us how awe-inspiring it looked. This was spoken by a man who did not think that women should be educated! Luckily, my eldest brother did not share our father’s limited view of women.
“Come on,” Eldest Brother said to me. “Let me teach you a game.”
He taught mathematics at St. Andrew’s School, which was just across the river from our village. Eldest Brother liked games that tapped his left brain and had an analytical edge. He produced a wooden board that had black and white squares on it. The board was placed on a disused orange-crate. The slatted crate once held oranges that were sold in the market. These empty crates became our tables or chairs, since we could not afford real furniture. Then Eldest Brother took out the beautifully shaped wooden figurines from the box and set them on the board. He had found the set at Robinson’s Petang, the Thieves Market at Sungei Road, by Rochor River. Someone had playfully nicknamed the outdoor bazaar after the most expensive English department store on the island, Robinson’s; but added a twist in petang, which meant afternoon, to suggest its lack of authenticity – and the name had stuck. Eldest Brother displayed the two sets of figurines, one opposing the other.
“This game is called chess,” he said with authority.
He patiently told me the name of each piece, its position on the board, the direction it could move, and its role. I was amazed to learn that all the pieces on the board existed to protect the King. Once the King was unable to make a move without being taken, he was considered to be check-mated; and the game would end. It was such a novel and bizarre concept for me that I became riveted to it.
“I thought men are always the ones who protect the women? How come the King can only move one square at a time when the Queen can move any number of squares? Is the Queen more powerful than the King?”
“If you stop jabbering, I’ll explain how the game is played,” Eldest brother said, with some impatience. “This game was conceived in India and was styled after a battle. Maybe they had a matriarchal society then.”
Though I was hopeless at maths, I loved the game – it was so exciting, with so many different moves and permutations. And secretly, I loved the fact that it was the Queen, the woman, who had the most liberal moves on the board.
“Not bad, not bad,” Eldest Brother said when we played. “Maybe you’ll be our Girl Wonder.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s a play on words,” said my schoolteacher brother. “There’s a student whose name is Tan Lian Ann and he’s been nicknamed Boy Wonder. He represents Singapore in the chess championship and he’s only fourteen! He just beat defending champion R. E. Fontana in the Malayan Chess Open in KL.”
“Wow,” I said. “It shows we don’t have to be limited either by age or by gender.”
Teaching me chess was Eldest Brother’s greatest gift to me. It became my life-long passion. Not that I played well enough to join in any competition, but it gave me
hours of pleasure. Later I told my best friend Parvathi about the rudiments of chess.
“Imagine a woman being more powerful than a man!” I said.
“Huh! That’s only a game,” she snorted. “It’s not like real life, is it? In our world, our fathers and brothers control us and tell us what to do, how to live. If the Women’s Charter had not come in, my father would have married me off last year when I was only fourteen! To a pock-marked man who’s twenty years older than me!”
We looked at each other. The image of that pock-marked old man with the bad teeth must have flashed across our mind’s eye at the same time. We giggled. It was a shared moment of intimacy. Of course we could laugh because we thought the danger had passed for Parvathi.
But for someone who had no schooling, her prospects were indeed dismal. However, I kept on trying to reassure Parvathi that times were changing and that women were getting opportunities they never had before. When I read in the Straits Times about Ong Cheng See, our first local female graduate to be admitted as an advocate, I raced to tell Parvathi about it.
“You see! You see!” I said exuberantly. “We have another woman who has broken the traditional mould! If we can have women as lawyers and as prime ministers, it means you can break out of your mould and not be forced to marry.”
“How?” She asked, her eyes flashing. “How? When I work in a paper factory? I’ve no spare money and no education. Those women had rich parents who sent them to school and university!”
Our village was not more than ten miles from the city, but in many respects we seemed worlds away. The difference between the rich and poor was a greater chasm than our huge monsoon drains. Now that I could read the newspaper, I realised that our kampongs were sometimes perceived by city folk as ghettoes, where street urchins ran riot, where filth and germs perpetrated, where gangsters hid, and where the pontianak, the female vampire, still roamed.
Kampong Spirit Page 13