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| FOR THEIR FORESIGHT AND DEVOTION 20TH Issue 25th December 2000 |
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| ...continued... |
| The Political Commissar and the Beautiful People |
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| There were few, if any, experts around. Everybody in gainful employment tried to become a specialist of sorts on his own steam. The car mechanic was one who found a discarded engine to work on. We repaired our own bicycles, made our own toys, re-invented the cinema projector for home use, and created for ourselves our own diverting games. The only free entertainment: the never-shut-off Rediffusion pop songs in four languages. We all had to make-do with every new situation the best way we could. The self-reliance we had gained ( or rather something that simply grew on/in us) during the Occupation period now served us well, it could be said, and that`s probably why the Japanese interregnum experience came to be branded, not without an unsettling sense of self-consciousness on our part: "A Blessing in Disguise!" |
| Professionals though were few and far between. The only doctor in private practice in the Brickfields area was a certain all-purposes Dr.Vaithilingam, who lived in Travers Road alongside the main marshalling yard. Another in Klang Road, almost in retirement, was the father of a Victorian David Saravanamuttu (Class of 1950) who also naturally qualified in Singapore to don his father`s mantle as a general practitioner. If you needed any other treatment and for free, you simply had to traverse the town to the General Hospital, tucked away a little behind the Institute of Medical Research on Simpang Lima, and join the pitiful mass of sickly half-mortals bunched around the portals of the out-patients` consultation ward, manned by fresh recruits from King Edward the VII College of Medicine, and you could consider yourself lucky if, after waiting in the loudly wailing and bleeding-to-death stinking throng of the poor and the destitute for hours, you were eventually, virtually, pulled up by the housemen for a preliminary examination. Most of course got turned away and probably gave up the hantu before they got past Circular Road which they reached probably on all fours. |
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| If, as it might happen, you were required to imbibe some medicine for your ailment (forget about operations unless you were prepared to render your soul to your bankers and your tattered garments to your offspring), you would have to go over to the under-staffed Hospital Dispensary and wait a few more hours if luck was on your side or come back within the next three or four days (that is, if you were still in one piece) in order to receive your potions/portions specially prepared by pounding pestle in mortar or by mixing coloured liquids from enormous glass jars sucked through rubber or glass tubing by the dispenser himself. As such, as the saying goes, the remedy was worse than the malady! You could wake up - if you woke up at all - with excruciating stomach and head pains. In any case, dispensers never died! Only overdoses of pure sizzling hydrochloric acid could kill them! On the other hand, anyone who got admitted for a few days` sojourn in the wards was actually being given a last-minute treat, like the granting of the "death-row" prisoner`s last-day wish; in fact, he would be given the enormous pleasure of seeing all his relatives and secret lovers around the hospital bed shed buckets and buckets of crocodile tears before the final curtain call, or before he prematurely took it upon himself to kick the bucket in one last minute penalty shoot-out owing to the unbearable din kicked up by gossiping visitors around his death-bed. This only goes to show that, in those precarious days, you couldn`t die in peace even if you bribed your doctors! |
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| Looked at from another angle, one might say that job-wise both Malaya and Singapore then produced a generation of teenagers who were literally catapulted into the higher echelons of power and consequently into instant lucrative comfort, without having to vie with one another. The biggest and most famous general store in town, Gian Singh`s, (the counterpart of the commercial complex of today) was located just off the bridge on Mountbatten Road, right behind the central market, from where the particular KL-brand of fragrance wafted down Ampang Road, Malacca Street, and down back onto Chettiar Street where it got smothered in the vadai(s), chambal(s), and sambal(s) stench. The well-worn and eminent Sikh proverb ("invented" by a Victorian: can`t really say by whom, for many bhais lay claim to the authorship, among them Surinder Singh, Devinder Singh, and Puran Singh, all stalwart upstanding Victorians, mind you!) might very well be quoted here: "Wherever you go, let the air be free!" for it applies in these circumstances as well. How? Well, I don`t quite know how! Use your imagination! Long-bearded genial Gian Singh with a middle-aged pouch was the proud owner of the store, and he would receive you at the door in all beaming smiles. He even decided to set up a branch in Tokyo after the War, and so he got his nephew down from Punjab, and as the handsome lad with the over-size light khaki turban was just then of school-leaving age (his beard was a mere three or four thin strands on the chin while the side-burns appeared singed), he naturally rounded up his education at Senior One in the V.I., class of 1950. He had to do some catching up though on his English, but his knowledge of maths and science was a rung or two higher than that of the locally-nurtured. All to no purpose it seemed to us. No sooner had he sat for his O.C.S.C., he was whisked away as trainee-manager of the Tokyo branch. |
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| The rest of the class almost en bloc turned up in Singapore for their medical studies, excepting Surinder and another whose name escapes me for the moment who became after an eight-month training session police inspectors. Surinder however later qualified as a barrister. The few Malays in the class, like the warm and always placid Wan Mahmud bin Pawanteh, black silk songkok sloping on his ample brow and slightly tilted over his left eyebrow all the time, even during class, I think, joined the civil service and became district officers and/or magistrates and so forth. Among the Malays, the stocky and duskier Mohd. Ali and the fair and lean Mohd. Hashim, both quiet and studious lads, obtained rather good results. Some said, one or two of the Chinese boys and one Tamil even dared go in for something like engineering. Well, I never… To think that this was the experimental class that topped the Cambridge exams in the country! The BRS-fed Kwang Tse Mun (7 As), the rather dusky-complexioned, stream-lined high-jump champion and record holder (the first in the VI to execute the scissors technique), and the PRS-fed Leong Chee Kong (9 As), [see Victimes16], both of whom became specialist doctors, were the brightest boys in class, though not the youngest by far. Their scores all through the post-war years never letup, not even once, though, I should say, Tse Mun, given his performances at essay-writing, was the more talented of the two. |
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| ...click here to race on to the end of this tale!... |
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| Back to page 1 of this issue |
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| Copyright 2000 keen All rights reserved |
| copyrihgt of photos/articles contributed belong to those who contributed the photos/articles |
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