In April, I wept at the news of the death of one of my heroes, Civil Rights movement leader Martin Luther King. He was assassinated in a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was trying to do so much for coloured Americans2, and yet there were people who thwarted his mission. During this time, I was reading lots of spiritual-type books and was inspired by the Zen teachings of Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. He and his fellow monks had engaged in non-violent protests against the Vietnam War. When he went to give a lecture at Cornell University in the US, the Vietnamese government refused to let him return to his home country. From that moment he was exiled, and later, when he met Martin Luther King, he told him about the plight of the Vietnamese people. Dr King spoke strongly against the Vietnam War, and nominated Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The humble monk had told Dr King that the Vietnamese people considered Dr King a Bodhisattva, an enlightened being. When he heard about the assassination, Thich Nhat Hanh said, “America gave us Martin Luther King, but they could not preserve him.”
A different kind of buzz happened in May. The Singapore Pools was formed. It operated under the Ministry of Finance and introduced a Bulgarian Numbers Lottery Game called TOTO, which was a combination of the words “Totalisator” and “Lotto”. The reasoning was that there was widespread illegal gambling in the country and the government needed to manage it. In this way, the government was satisfying the gambling lust yet controlling it at the same time. It was true that gambling was an innate habit with some, particularly with the Chinese. They were the ones who created the Chap Ji Ki, a home-devised lottery, prevalent in kampongs. Such people gambled at the slightest provocation—even ants crawling to their nest became an opportunity to gamble!
In the new game of TOTO, one could pick 6 numbers out of 49 to win the monetary prize of $500,000. Half a million dollars! The amount was staggering. No one in our kampong would have ever seen that kind of money! So far, villagers had only been playing with Chap Ji Kee and Tontin, winning paltry sums of money. Our people started running around almost in a frenzy to learn about how the system worked, and to procure a ticket. For fifty cents, the price of almost two bowls of noodles, one was given a sunshine of opportunities. Hundreds of queues snaked around the Singapore Pools premises, as people surged forward to buy the ticket for the first draw, which would take place on 9 June.
Naturally, I bought one ticket for my mother.
The inaugural draw took place at Victoria Theatre and was telecast on TV, and our house was crammed with neighbours, each one of us holding our precious ticket in our hand, our dreams poured into the small square of paper. Some of the people started to build castles in the air, telling us what they would do with the win. Then silence fell as the draw began. We watched the screen with bated breath, as pretty young girls in short shift dresses stood on stage with a placard each of the 42 numbers. As each set of numbers was called out, the girl would come forward to the front of the stage, holding her placard high: 42, 11, 43, 28, 36, 39 and the additional number was 9. No one won the top prize.
We sighed. Castles came crashing down. None of us won anything. The moral of the story was that opportunities should be created from insightful decisions and work, not through gambling.
More sad news followed on TV. When we didn’t have TV, we could not put faces to famous names, but now the medium had given us intimate views of them. Senator Robert Kennedy, brother to the late John F. Kennedy was shot. Our villagers expressed sorrow over the tragedy, and ruminated over the theory of the Kennedy curse.
But when a tragedy hits closer to home, the impact was greater. During the Family Planning campaigns, one of the Maternal and Child Health clinics set up in rural areas to educate the kampong dwellers on birth control was in Sembawang. Sadly, a couple of the midwives who were on night duty there were raped.
“Alamak! Our opportunity for work now gone,” Mahmood lamented. “Gar’ment now say cannot drive pirate taxis. So very susah.”
“Ya lah,” Ah Beng agreed, flicking his Good Morning towel in a desultory manner. “Cannot earn living. Cannot feed family.”
Both of them were our local pirate taxi drivers. They fetched people here and there, but did not have any proper licence to ferry passengers, hence the name “pirate”. There were thousands like them across the country, who did not undergo the stringent tests that a proper taxi driver had to undergo because of lack of money and education. When they transported schoolkids to school, they put an extra board in the back seat to create two-tier seating, so that they could cram more children into the back. Sometimes a pirate taxi could cart up to 10 children or 6 adults in one taxi. Of course, this was a high-risk factor if there was an accident. Especially since the pirate taxis were not insured to carry passengers. When the need had been great, due to a poor public transport system and the inability of the majority to afford travelling by taxi, the government had turned a blind eye, but now it was ensuring that taxi drivers were properly trained. This new government was a new broom that wanted to sweep things clean.
“You don’t have to be jobless,” civil servant Uncle Krishnan advised. “There are more jobs out
