Victorian (pen-in-cheek) Vignettes - I

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The day the kukri drew blood on…over…a Victorian !

id the blistering sun shine in all its fury? Did the heat seep through, building up a furnace pizza-fire face under a hermetic metallic cumulus lid? Or did the previous day’s fire stoked in the mud now rise to greet the iron fist of compressed heat layers? Sticky sweat though gripped enclosed flesh.

Was it one-thirty-five? or two ten? I can’t really say. Was I in 6A? or 7A? I cannot say either. One bet, it must have been 1948. Three European planters were murdered near Sungei Siput. Were they "murdered" or assassinated or just killed? The results are/were not the same. There are/were evidently many different ways to die the same death. It depended on which side you were looking at it from. I still wonder whether the historical event took place at Tun Sambanthan’s rubber estate. Emergency, of course, was a new word we attached to our growing vocabulary. I say "attached" for its connotations, more than its denotations, weighed on us for the rest of our schooldays. And still does.

***

At twelve-forty, my head reeling from stomach cramps, a bundle of thin exercise books and a couple of arithmetic and algebra hardbacks, including the grainy blue dislocating spine of General Science Part One by F. Daniel, all held together by a canvass belt, and all dangling against my shoulder blades, I had already scurried down the rough-and-tumble backdrop of blukar and lallang falling steeply away from the back of the bicycle park behind the tuck-shop, to gain in all daring speed the bus-stand on the slope opposite the Methodist Girls’ School. But first, like all the Batu Road School boys, I had to traverse a desolate track of waste flatland, dug up so often that the light brown and orange face of upturned earth, rinsed by showers, gaped, sorely wounded by sharply angular rocks in its flesh .

I say like all BRS boys. No need to wonder. The VI is what it was, probably because it was primarily fed by two already selectively drained and channelled tributaries: BRS and the Pasar Road School. The latter boys mainly hailing from Pudu, Cheras, Pasar, and thereabouts entered the alma mater by the portals; the former, mainly from the Brickfields-Travers-Bungsar area, Sentul, Kampung Bahru, and from China Town, then huddled around the old Madras theatre - excepting those of course who rode their BSA broncs to school or arrived like Colonel H. S. Lee’s sons in black Morris limousines - by the back, their freshly blanco-ed canvass shoes after a previous night’s thunderstorm horseshoe-d with extra soles of mud reinforced with grass.

In the hurry to catch the hen-coop bus, a half-sawn-off lorry, scuttling down High Street from its Foch Avenue open-air barn-station, I didn’t pay much attention to what someone shouted: "The blakang entrance close’ lah!"

Yes, I did notice something odd. On one end (now the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka end, skirted by Birch Road, I think) a huge dull-chocolate khaki tent had been in the stages of being pitched; some small wooden crates lying opened and some five or six low metal boxes strewn about. Under the flapped-up tent, some dim-looking figures perched on benches leant over a long wooden table on which stood pots and gleaming pans. My eyes strayed to rolls and rolls of barbed-wire dumped at the far end. I felt intrigued but hadn’t time to wonder. Those of us who had been through the War paid no great attention to the trappings of soldiering. We had had enough of that. Neither were we prone to fear the show of force. Haphazard air-raid bombing; chopped heads on poles planted at the entrances to bridges; frontal bayonet thrashing by Japanese sentries for those who forgot to sai kere; rotting cadavers under shredded uniforms; rusting Samurai swords under rotting rubber leaves in estates; distressed young girls gone mad after a Japanese frolicking siege… took care of all that. Only what we could get inside of us mattered, precious little of it though being ingested during those three-and-a-half years. For a good many of us, it took another couple of years before the meals were regular or substantial. When faced with hunger, and that was every day, we buttressed ourselves with dreams. We dreamt of juicy joints planted in steamy rice, and licked and sucked lips as a substitute. And it hurt, even in sleep. And chocolates? Or cream-coated biscuits? What did they look like? I remember an immaculately-uniformed Indian officer as we silently watched the Indian Army trailing past us on foot in Sungei Rengam after Liberation, break line to offer a half-opened Nestle’s bar to my sister, and for hours after that we puzzled over what we should do with it.

Now it was chow-time, and nothing mattered but the meal awaiting me in Vanar Kampung, a village of two rows of six houses each in long plankhouses sitting on low cement pillars and topped by zinc; this self-contained village with a common plaza in between lay tucked in from the road. It existed in another period, another anachronistic time, and within its cherry, banana, and rain tree dusun seclusion, perched precariously on the banks of an occasional ox-bow lake; this erstwhile river-bed was fed by the monsoon drain from the Lake Gardens which, whenever it rained heavily in the Klang Gates source, swelled and emptied into the new Klang Bridge bed along Lornie and Klang roads.

I had to get back for the compulsory mile-run for my house, the all-hail! Hepponstall House. Toh Boon Huah would be there first egging and cheering more intensely than the boys themselves. The headmaster had proclaimed that every boy had to finish the four 440-yard rounds on the padang whether we ran, walked or crawled. This he announced, unsmiling as usual, at the general assembly in the Hall, the school captain Ronnie McCoy at his side. Ronnie was not only the chief among the lads, he won the Rodger medal, captained the cricket eleven, and what else? You name it, he captained it. His great asset: a telling and serious calmness, a capacity for warm laughter which pierced through awkward situations, and an always relaxed athlete’s body to go with the clear-cut mind. For us the youngest in the classes (for there were oldies, the majority some three or four years our seniors, all so-called victims of the War), Ronnie was the Real McCoy!

***

One day, the HMS Malaya bell rang and shattered the monastic meditative silence of studious classes. No one knew what to do. Some teachers stepped into the corridors to exchange affected surprises. He was at it again! They didn’t much like the man for his brusque manner and under-the-breath superior tones but they unanimously admired him. He had been a competent science teacher before the War; now he was the Head! and had wreaked useful changes and introduced disciplinary measures to keep the boys on their toes all the time. Besides he was a best-selling author. His two part general science books had been compulsory reading for all boys and girls intent on entering King Edward the VIIth College of Medicine or the Raffles College in Singapore or even the Technical College in K.L., and the Agricultural College at Serdang. The teachers didn’t so much grudge him his success as to wonder aloud why he would occupy night and day a class-room converted into a flat in the science wing. He had installed a telescope in the quarters with which he spied the padang as well as the swimming pool with equal ease. At the morning assembly, a boy who spat raucously on the ground was pulled up. On another occasion, a stiff warning was issued about not letting one’s own water loose in the pool. A bhai classmate of mine retorted under his breath: "What the hec! Can he see under water, too. Big bluff, lah!" The teachers would have, I imagine, been willing to pardon him for that, too, had it not been for an unforeseeable incident.

The bell clanged louder than ever. Finally, glad that we were getting a break, we pushed sheepishly but apprehensively down the corridors and quadrangles to populate the hall yet once again in the day, half-hoping to hear the announcement of a holiday the next day due to death of a founder or a White Hall dignitary. Alas! The School Captain stood on the stage and looked over our heads. We waited or rather we fidgeted. Then, the moderately slim, erect and short figure of the Head in leather sandals, khaki shorts and safari tunic tramped lightly down the corridor leading to the stage, his eyes in a screwy fix far ahead of him. Silence crept across the floor in dutiful stages. Once on the stage, he cleared his throat and delivered his Roman edict. He was a Consul in a Shakespearian play. And Caesar was a Consul.

"The school bell can only be rung by two persons: myself and the school captain. No others may convene the school assembly." Or words to the effect. All eyes were riveted on Ronnie. He seemed to be put out by the declaration. He had an announcement to make, and he made it dutifully. "And remember," intoned the Head. "The School captain is my right-hand man!" That did it. Daniel had once and for all dispossessed the teachers of their inalienable rights and alienated them. And they never pardoned him for elevating a schoolboy over their own heads. Yet they never grudged Ronnie his brand-new status, I think. He was the model student, and there was nothing they could find to reproach him with. So, the matter ended then and there. Besides, I think, Ronnie never really abused his powers. He may have rung the bell in the middle of classes just once or twice, but certainly not as an act to relish his new-found powers.

***

I was too troubled that day by an additional vision. Our history teacher was besieged with scabies. His hands practically bleeding, his paperback History of England in tatters in one or either of his hands while he painted with the other far-off dazzlingly bizarre pictures (that is, then to us the Ulu-boys) of Henry the VIIIth and Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth I’s mother, strolling in the Tower courtyard, her severed and bleeding head conveniently tucked under her arm - his shirt conveniently open for a quick voracious spate of scratching that led down to the groins, he kept losing his temper once too often, and we all knew why, and we all sympathised. Scabies ravaged K.L. in those days, and lucky those who were spared. I remember how Leong Chee Kong, the top boy of the class, the school, and the country, always neatly attired, his clear bright laughing/mischievous eyes and strictly Bryl-creamed head delicately balanced on a lean, frail body (I had never seen sweat on his torso: he always brought his lunch to school, did his homework while we raced home, and prepared his lessons ahead by at least a week), was both alarmed and revolted. "Allahmah, why can’t he stay home, lah! I can’t concentrate watching his hands!" or words to the effect escaped his angular upturned visage.

None of us blamed the master for his pitiful condition. If anything, we commiserated silently while he took us on flights eight thousand miles away and over a century and a half, from Henry the VIIIth to Charles the Second. To this day, what I know of this period comes mainly from him. And so he shall remain unnamed. Later on, when I commuted in the weekends from Seremban, I would see him with his demure, newly-wed wife at the inter-state bus-station, right there between the Rex Cinema and the Malay Mail building, looking inordinately subdued, his flaming temper obviously under check, quietly seated on a bus heading Kajang way. There was that singular measure of dedication in him that generally characterised the Victorian staff.

Like Ganga, the Great! Himself the 1920 Rodger Scholar! The master who moulded victorious Victorians in 8A by teaching them all the subjects excepting science and sent them away with the words: "Someday you’ll all thank me for insisting on the commas and semi-colons and the dots!" – a faraway visionary look entering the cherubim gleam in his eyes and healthy rosy-red cheeks, the neat white squat turban sitting in ill-proportion to the well-tweaked and knotted moustache and beard, his hirsute manly full-blooded arms jutting out of well-ironed light-blue short sleeves. Thank you, indeed, Mr. GANGA Singh! And these famous lines recall his name and his richly melodic stentorian voice in an oft-studied poem: DA! "Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves/Waited for rain, while the black clouds/Gathered far distant, over Himavant./The jungle crouched, humped in silence./Then spoke the thunder//" Da! Datta! Dayadhavam! Damyata! Like Lim Eng Thye, the no-nonsense science hardtask master, whose fore-and-medial fingers dug into tons and tons of callow Victorian flesh every year to eke out perhaps the best results in the Senior Cambridge exams. Like the ever youthful-looking and sincere Toh Boon Huah, like the warm and confabulating T. Navaratnam whose Victorian half-brother Thangathurai nicknamed "Mr Bones" and later "Sinatra" for his crooning ability was the first to take to the airs as a commentator on Radio Malaya and settle in California to be close in all likelihood to his namesake and sosie, like the two Britishers: Jones in 6A and Jackson in Senior One who even if they did not quite plan their teaching methodically infatuated me with their swiftly modulating whispered speech, and encouraged me to write.

***

By the time I reached the Chinese Assembly Hall corner, I could see the rickety-rackety half-lorry half-cart picking up passengers at the corner of the old VI building and Sultan Street, and I knew I had to leg it across the bridge in a dash. The bus overtook me and pulled away without stopping. Unless I’m hallucinating - or perhaps it was years later - one thing’s certain, the conductor on the Brickfields bus was an African, a dark stocky close-cropped self-assured robust figure. He scoffed at us at will. Some said he was a champion boxer come to the country for a match, lost it and stayed back, for he had had nothing to go back to. Whether it was true or not, he was strong enough and forbidding enough to stop anyone trying to catch the bus once it got started. If you insisted, he would yell at you and leave you totally flabbergasted.

There was only one thing to do: stay out of the sun. I had had enough of it. Every weekend and some afternoons, and entire days during holidays, playing cricket in the open. The years I had to leg it in the outfield waiting for balls to drop out of the burning sky and into my plywood hands! There was nothing doing until I passed the two or three rows of typical wooden low-lying Railway quarters under zinc roofing and supported on squat cement pillars to the left, the bridge over the shallow condensed-milk-looking waters of the Klang River, the Louis Seize-like unhinged shutters of the MGS to the left, the "railway" hill with the Suleiman Building (Income Tax, Inland Revenue, and the Registration Office) on the right (and the overhead railway bridge looking irreverently into Majestic Hotel) and found the shelter of the five-foot way in the first row of shop-houses after the church downhill. That’s where they said the scabies originated, from the women who plied their trade after dark, painted Kurosawa phantoms which suddenly spirited themselves from behind pillars as you passed.

Cold comfort though. There was that open space to traverse where the Puchong-cum-Port Swettenham bus-line operated, and once past the Scott Road entrance and a relatively cooling five-foot way again until you hit the rain tree shaded avenue with the Railway and YMCA grounds to the left. All along the railway track to the right a high dull buff-coloured cement wall skirted the marshalling yards. A solitary signal cabin peeped above this wall. Years of engine smoke mixed with engine oil greased the walls and roads, and when it rained lightly, the roads oozed with a filmy veneering of technicoloured oil. And that’s how the sharp-angled corner before you hit the straight stretch leading to the Cathay cinema got a bad name: Hantu Corner or Sial Corner!

***

I can vouch for a twistingly tortured experience, the only real road non-accident of my life right there. It had rained the previous night. This was many years later when I returned for the first and last time to the country. I was driving a second-hand blue "beetle" Volkswagen. I was doing about thirty or forty miles coming up from the Cathay cinema. Wong Phui Nam, the poet, another old Victorian whom I had never heard of at school, was on the passenger seat. As we neared the corner, I slowed down, but kept the conversation going all the same. I took the corner as usual as I had done on innumerable occasions before that day. Then suddenly the car accelerated all by itself and went into frantic spins: then it jutted, pranced, and charged forwards, then it shifted to the right, then left, forwards and backwards until the rear finally rammed into the railway wall and extinguished itself. You’ll kindly note the engine in beetle VWs is in the rear. Perhaps blue is a sial colour. I remember being aware of the Chinese shopkeepers and children coming out to watch the merry-go-round and shaking their heads in despair. When the mata-mata arrived, even they said the angular corner was notorious for strange inexplicable accidents. Hantus or no, one thing I remember distinctly: I had never seen Phui Nam’s face redder! All he had to say, shaking his head dismally after the rough ride: " Lucky for us, there was no traffic coming the other way!"

At Cathay cinema, of course, I stopped to peer at the posters and check the times of shows as if I didn’t know them by heart: 2.30, 6.30, and nine p.m., and the eleven o’clock cheap matinee shows on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. The pause refreshed me somewhat. Was Howard Hawks’s western with Jane Russell in the lead role playing at that time? There was that one scene in bed in a forlorn shack that got her talked of for years by all the boys of the capital. Yes, you’re right, she’s the one, she possessed the ripest unripe papayas on the silver screen, and much was made by all who saw that scene as to the degree of her nudity and what ensued in bed. Disputes flourished long and wide on the subject during school intervals and which were hotly extended while returning home. The poor girl, finally got pinned down, for good, with a capital "P", and the matter was quickly settled after that, especially after Gary Grant and Ingrid Bergman took it upon themselves to break the all-time kissing record right in front of the camera, from penthouse door to balcony overlooking some lit-up city.

***

Then, the tranche from Cathay, the block of shophouses, past the dirty yellow walls of the road level Post Office right up to the shelter of the two rows of shophouses on the left was a veritable ordeal. The first row housed the famous Mrs. Devaki Krishnan’s sundry shop where the only taxi in the vicinity could be found, that is, if the private Austin sedan was not being used by the budding politician for canvassing purposes. She won the first Municipal elections in K.L.; her name spread far and wide. Who talked of feminism in those days? Here was a liberated suffragette, long before Mr.Bandaranaike was assassinated to catapult his wife to the first world woman premiership. A V.I. teacher, too, S. C. E. Singham, contested and won a place in Town Hall, an event which did not cause much regret among the occupants of the VI hill: he had a glib, sharp tongue that sometimes, quite unnecessarily, cut into us and rankled our virtuous/virginal sensibilities. But his "political" campaign was a real treat for us greenhorns. He rode seated on the bonnet of a car with a loudspeaker, while the loudly following cavalcade took on the proportions of a real circus announcement. At the second row, the then famous letter-writer sitting in an unkempt half-dhoti at marble-top tables in the last Chinese coffee shop or in the two other Tamil restaurants held forth on all subjects, a forlorn local Socrates. This Readers’s Digest-type figure, sporting a pre-war Cambridge School Certificate, suddenly turned up after the War, his lean pale face resembling Swami Satchithanandar who elected residence at the Vivekananda Ashramam and where the latter mainly preached Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. He said he studied Sanskrit for six years in India. I had always wondered who gave him the "swami" title. Later, he flourished as founder-director of an orphanage in Klang Road, where he could put aside his long toga-like saffron robe and relax, no more thought less of by envious Tamil husbands whose wives found in him the paragon of Hindu calmness in wisdom.

Chan Ah Tong Street or the Hundred Quarters, and the triangular roundabout where the Brickfields bus turned back was always a straggly mess of uniformed children: Bukit Nanas Convent girls in dark blue knee-length tunics and MGS girls in shorter mauve-coloured overalls. I couldn’t help being struck by the heavily-starched, well-ironed breast-and-skirt pleats. Behind the Hundred Quarters stretched Well Road to the Buddhist Temple, and beyond to the general rubbish dump and the toddy shop, and from which quarter would emerge now and then T. Ananda Krishnan to play with us the ragamuffins of the region in the pit of the Chan Ah Tong padang. Another Victorian then in Thamby Abdullah Road, now a world famous scientist and professor-doctor in Singapore: S. S. Ratnam, class of 1946, reigned over the band of "Little India" (there was a shanty Sikh Kampung, too, ensconced between Vanar Kampung and Thamby Abdullah) in his erectness and sobriety. His brother S. T., also a Victorian, rose to become the Director of Tourism in Singapore. The other batch of Ratnams on Travers Road (K. T., the Ambassador, K. S., the Professor of Pathology at Singapore, and K. J., the Vice-Chancellor at Universiti Sains) were MBS boys, though K. T. and K. J. became Victorians by attending post-school certificate classes at the VI, as their father, Mr. Kanagaratnam, taught at MBS – supposedly a rival school - and of which he became the first Asian Head.

Past the padang pit on the left the last row of shophouses on the right ending at the Khalsa Press, where the only private telephone was to be found, available free to all the area’s unashamedly calling public. Opposite, there were three houses, two of stone, and one of wood on stilts. The famous Vias sporting brothers: Freddy and Johnny, both St. John’s Institution boys, occupied the middle stone house and where most of the youngsters in the area trained to become able cricketers in the private nets alongside their place. How often Victorians had wished on the playing fields that the brothers had joined the VI! Behind their place loomed the barricaded stone house of the Arumugams. Big stone house children never of course played with… The third wooden house bordering the nets was equally famous, not for its legitimate occupants, but for a diminutive wiry young man called Maniam. His mother simply settled in the shade of the space in between the high stilts and made a home for Maniam and his sister for the rest of the postwar years. Maniam’s prowess: no-one could catch him! He was the undisputed three-mile and ten-mile champion of Selangor and of the country, if I’m not mistaken. I had always wondered how he managed it. European spectators at Selangor Club often rose to their feet while they cheered him stealing a lap or two on his adversaries. I was so intrigued by his success that he confided in me one day. "A day or two before the run, I soak two or three pounds of chickpeas in water, and the night before, I eat them all, one by one", he said, a conniving mock-leer lighting up his dark sober features. I guess he felt there was no danger in letting me in on his secret.

At last, the homestretch. On the right, the Chinese saw-mill, followed by the Tamil barber’s dingy ramshackle hutment. Often, the grating noises of the mill lingered late into the night. Some pressing order to meet, of course. Huge trunks destined for the mill blocked the entrance to Vanar Kampung, and the heavily loaded trans-peninsular lorries churned the pathway leading to the two rows of wooden and zinc longhouses into an un-negotiable slushy rivulet and which encrusted bore tire marks during droughts, fingerprinting as it were their midnightly passage.

***

By the time I gained the VI rear-rise, I had already crossed a straggly lot of Victorians coming down. They didn’t say anything. One or two of them stopped, seemed to hesitate, then followed me making a beeline for the school. All of a sudden, I too stopped in my tracks. The place had changed. Across our well-worn path leading to the tuck-shop lay menacing rolls and rolls of barbed-wire. I was practically late already at that time. Had to wait for a bus on the way back. Getting back down to the road and then circling the entire VI compound to the padang seemed such a roundabout way to touch the nose, as the saying goes. So I looked for an opening. In the distance, a lone Gurkha soldier, his oversized rifle slung on his back, eyed me. I had already managed to get a foot into the barricade, and I refused to turn back. I could hear the soldier’s sharp clipped barked commands, at first, and when I got through the barbed-wire barricade and onto the high flatland, I espied the soldier gesticulating in my direction in an attempt to make me stay away. I stood still for a moment, and then I tried to take a few steps forward, hoping to make the tuckshop-cum-science-wing end before he got to me. He was posted at the other end where the tent was now fully erected, down by the swimming pool end.

Then, it happened. He unslung his rifle, shouldered and took careful aim at me. By then, I knew I had to run, but I stood still and pointed to the school, indicating that I was a schoolboy. He waved his rifle at me. I took a few steps forward. Without further warning he came swooping down on me from the distance, his rifle flailing at his side while his right hand sought the dagger (kukri) on the thick leather-belt strap positioned on his left hip. He must have thought I was Min Yuen, perhaps even a top-secret courier! I remained petrified for some moments, but soon collected my wits about me and tried to find my way back. It was too late. He was upon me. His kukri drawn, the artfully curved blade flashing and gleaming despite the lacklustre sun.

It was then that I noticed he was only a lad. Perhaps seventeen or even sixteen, perhaps he might have dissimulated his age to enter the Chindit-famed force. In any case, Gurkhas look eternally young, but this lad had tears in his eyes. He stopped within arms reach, his kukri-held right hand poised for the slash. His beret somewhat tilted, a sheaf of rough straight black hair graced his forehead. For a few burning moments, our gazes met. For how long I cannot say. To tell you the truth, he seemed more terrified than I had been and not certainly because I was the braver. I had gone all tiny in that one moment.

He said something, I imagine, in his lingo that I could not follow. The words sounded rushed and full of anguish rather than anger.

After a while, his tears welling-up again, his breath short and snorting, he turned his face, took a long breath, brought his kukri into his left hand and with which he clasped the naked blade and drew his right hand up in a gentle swish. His left hand remained closed, but I could see a trickle of freshly drawn blood on his wrist. He wiped the blade on the back of the hand and returned it to its sheath. His eyes didn’t meet mine any more. Neither did he utter a word. He turned and trundled back, forlornly, I thought, in the direction of the tent.