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| Quick Takes... |
**At the last rugby training, there was no free food or drinks given out, since no one turned up in bellbottoms or any VI girl in platform shoes, miniskirt or pigtails in blue ribbons (as requested by SW). Two players turned up, one supporter recruited for fighting, and a spectator, although it was noted that the spectator was not focusing on the training, rather he was spectating on the scenery which was parading past. In any event, the training went well, the usual few rounds (not round the field though) and then settling down to serious talk. What do Victorians talk about? Find out in the next issue! |
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**This week we have a treat from another past Victorian for you - an article from T Wignesan. Read all about how a Gurkha drew his kukri (a Gurkha's short sword, which must draw blood once it is unsheathed) over him! If you want to find out more about this past Victorian, click here to find out (you will also be able to find out how he looks like). Thanks, Wignesh, for kindly contributing your article. |
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| The Day the kukri drew blood on…over…a Victorian ! |
| T.Wignesan |
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| Did 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 in 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. |
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| *** |
| 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. |
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| ...click here to race on to Wignesh's encounter with the Gurkha... |
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| Start The Week Laughing... |
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An elderly man lay dying in his bed. In death's agony, he |
suddenly smelled the aroma of his favorite chocolate chip |
cookies wafting up the stairs. |
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He gathered his remaining strength, and lifted himself from |
the bed. Leaning against the wall, he slowly made his way |
out of the bedroom, and with even greater effort forced |
himself down the stairs, gripping the railing with both hands. |
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With labored breath, he leaned against the door frame, |
gazing into the kitchen. Were it not for death's agony, he |
would have thought himself already in heaven: there, spread |
out upon newspapers on the kitchen table were literally |
hundreds of his favorite chocolate chip cookies. Was it |
heaven? Or was it one final act of heroic love from his |
devoted wife, seeing to it that he left this world a happy man? |
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Mustering one great final effort, he threw himself toward the |
table, landing on his knees in a rumpled posture. His |
parched lips parted; the wondrous taste of the cookie was |
already in his mouth; seemingly bringing him back to life. |
The aged and withered hand, shockingly made its way to a |
cookie at the edge of the table, when it was suddenly |
smacked with a spatula by his wife. |
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| "Stay out of those," she said, "They're for the funeral." |
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| Log - On... |
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http://www.shockwave.com - Try this site if you are sending e-greetings this festive season. |
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