“So who is he? Where did you meet?” I asked.
“Sulaiman is Abu’s friend from KL,” she said, and from the blush on her cheeks, I could see she was in love. “He is helping us to relocate to KL.”
“You are all moving?”
“That’s what I was going to tell you,” Fatima said. “My father feels that since we are Malays, we would be happier in Malaysia, where there are more of us…”
“But the government here is doing so much to help the Malays,” I said, “I read in the paper recently that the Action Group of the Malay Cultural Organisation (MCO) is setting up a small employment bureau specifically for Malays, to help you all get jobs. You are getting a waiver of school fees and other financial assistance…”
“But did you hear that when we move from the kampong, we Malays are not going to be able to all live together as we are living now?” Abu interrupted us.
“What do you mean?” I asked, somewhat perplexed.
“It’s already happening, Ah Phine,” Abu said. “When the villagers at Kallang were moved to HDB flats, they couldn’t choose to live in the same block. Neighbours wanted to live with neighbours. But now the government is fixing a percentage quota…”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Each block of flats can only have the percentage of each race according to its national percentage. This is the brainchild of LKY,” Abu said. “If there are 75 percent Chinese in the whole population and only 15 percent Malays, then each block can only have 15 percent Malays lah! We will be overwhelmed by the Chinese…”
“Mr Lee’s idea is to prevent racial ghettoes…” Uncle Krishna, forever the government’s champion, explained. “It’s important to get the different races to live with each other in harmony in the community, so that we don’t develop a them-and-us attitude. Then we won’t get the 1964 situation again that had caused the racial riots…”
“Yes, sounds good, but we are used to living as we are living now, amongst our own people what…” Abu said.
“I didn’t know we won’t all be moving together when we have to go into HDBs,” I said stupidly, a bit shocked. “I thought our whole kampong will move into the same estate together so we will have the same neighbours…”
“Aiyyah, Ah Phine, you tidor or what? Are you asleep or what?” Abu said.
Indeed, I was a frog under a coconut shell. Sheltered. Unused to the great big world. Probably not the brightest spark either. When I told my mother afterwards about what Abu said, she was crestfallen.
“I also didn’t know…” Mak said. “I thought we will always have the same neighbours. What will happen? At my age, it will not be easy to make new friends…”
My mother was voicing what many of our elderly villagers were worrying about. We knew that the impending move was for our own good. We would not be subjected to the vagaries of the weather and we wouldn’t have to fear our houses catching fire so easily. And we would have modern facilities. But how could all that take the place of our community and friendships which had been built up over so many decades?
In the same way that Abu and Fatima’s family were splitting from Singapore, our combined national airline, Malaysia Singapore Airlines (MSA) announced that they were separating. Malaysia felt that having their own airline “would engender national prestige”. Our Finance Minister Hon Sui Sen said the decision was due to “the divergent policies and objectives of the two governments.” MSA would cease to exist by 1973.
Change was upon us, sometimes without our bidding or acquiescence.
We were caught in a whirlpool of change. There were so many changes, so many new laws and prohibitions that we sometimes reeled from their impact. We didn’t know whether we were coming or going.
Then, in February, we heard of another change. A very major one this time. Former Deputy Prime Minister Toh Chin Chye, who was the current Minister for Science and Technology, passed the Metrication Act and set up the Metrication Board. He announced that the whole country would convert from the imperial system to the metric system by 1975.
“What?” Ah Gu said, flabbergasted. “No more inches and feet? Why can’t I say one gallon? How much is one litre? What’s this metre and kilometre, grammes and kilogrammes? Buay hiow lah! Don’t know lah!”
Traders would no longer use katis and tahils or pounds and ounces. No more yards or miles. This change was the most daunting for us.
“Please, please don’t be scared,” Mr Yap, Suhaimi and Ananda from the PA tried to reassure us. It was their job to explain the government policies and rulings to us. “It’s more easy once you get used to it. Instead of twelve inches to one foot, everything is in round numbers. One hundred centimetres equals one metre. One thousand metres equals one kilometre.”
Nenek Bongkok wailed, “Sudah lah! Forget it! I’m too old to pick up this crazy way of measuring. What’s wrong with the old way? We’ve been using it for years.”
Many of us felt the same way. Our world was becoming unfamiliar. The ground beneath our feet was shifting. When the British pulled out 15,000 of their troops from their bases at Changi, Seletar, Sembawang and Tengah, 17,000 locals were made jobless, some from our village.
My personal world was changing too. I was about to lose my best friend, Fatima. She and Parvathi had been my closest friends since we were kids. We lost Parvathi in 1964 when she refused to marry the widower her father tried to force her to marry. Fatima, in her euphoria of first love, did not notice my misery and sullenness. We were drifting apart even whilst we were still together. Of course, I
