Goodbye My Kampong

in the same way that someone would eat the Malay delicacy called tulang. Eventually the bottom of the ponds was revealed, stony with some debris and caked with mud. Some forsaken fish were left quivering and flapping on the pond bed. Like them, our village was dying a slow death. We stood at the edge and looked down with dejection into the vast caverns. Our world, as we knew it, was crumbling around us. For months, clouds of dust hovered around the space that used to be our ponds. The sounds of the diggers and excavators were the death knell that pained us. Our village was mutating even whilst we were living in it. It was an unsettling time. The lorries came with mountains of gravel and earth, excavated from our surrounding hills; forests were being denuded.

The landscape of Singapore was rapidly changing. The end of the kampong era was nigh. All across our island, kampongs were slowly being cleared in stages, and residents moved to spanking clean HDB flats. There was a major plan to reclaim the East and West Coasts to build Changi Airport, and the kampongs on the coastline with houses on stilts had to be destroyed. It was so sad. Our legendary Sang Nila Utama had landed on the East Coast when he had traversed the sea from Indonesia to come to Temasek, and where he purportedly saw the lion that gave Temasek its new name, Singa Pura—Lion City. Should there not be a plaque to commemorate the historical place where he had stepped ashore? After all, we have a statue of Sir Stamford Raffles on the spot where he first landed. Why not the same for Sang Nila Utama?

For hundreds of years, seafarers and pirates, descendants of the Orang Laut or Sea People, had made their homes in houses on stilts by the coast upon re-settling, so that they could still feel part of the sea when the waves rushed underneath their houses. Many of them became fishing folks. Their history was being wiped out with the land reclamation. These villages, framed by swaying palm trees, had given character to our beaches and coasts, but they would all be a thing of the past soon. Their beaches were our picnic areas, their sea was where we kicked at the surf or swam. My mother often took us to visit a relative in a house on stilts at Pasir Panjang. How I loved to look through the gaps in the wooden floor boards at the waves ebbing and flowing underneath the house. I felt mesmerised, lulled into a state of half-sleep. One did feel that one was out at sea, which was what the Orang Laut must have needed to feel.

“How we fish from 10-storey HDB blocks?” the coastal villagers asked, with tears in their voices.

With the death of P. Ramlee, another era was coming to a close, the era of homegrown Malay film production and music. Puteh Ramlee, popularly known as P. Ramlee, was born in Penang, and he died in KL on 29 May, at the age of 44. He had a heart attack in the early hours of the morning and succumbed to it half an hour later in hospital. For a man who was the icon of the Malay film industry for years, famed for his acting, singing, composing and directorial achievements, he died a penniless, broken man. He had acted in 66 Malay films, directed 35, composed 250 Malay songs and sung about 30 of the latter. His most prolific period was when he was based in Singapore, from 1949 to 1964, working with Shaw Brothers. The films were produced at 8 Jalan Ampas studios in Balestier, and many of the outdoor scenes were set in Alkaff Gardens, where I first saw him with his pencil-thin moustache and fell in love with his smile and charm. The timbre of his voice had a way of catching your heart, whatever the lyrics. He could be serious or humorous. Whenever he released a new film, I would hanker to go and see it, at first in non-air-conditioned cinemas, then later in air-conditioned ones, like Alhambra, Cathay and Capitol.

Going to the movies was the main positive thing I could remember about my father. He was a film buff, and he made me love them just as he did. He introduced me to horror films with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. Ah Tetia never took my mother out much, but when a P. Ramlee film came out, he made it a point to give her a treat. When we watched an English TV programme, I had to translate it for her, but when we watched a Malay film together, there was no need to do so. Thus, we could laugh or weep at the same time, bonding us to each other in an extraordinary way. So, in some way, P. Ramlee also represented for me my moments of closeness with my parents, particularly rare with my father. My mother and I had the knack of picking up lyrics easily, and we would sing P. Ramlee’s famous songs together at home, or together with Karim, as he strummed the tunes. Although I enjoyed P. Ramlee’s comedic films, like the Bujang Lapok series, I found his dramatic ones like Ibu Mertua Ku more heart-rending. In remembering P. Ramlee, I was also reminded of my mother and the happy times we sang his songs together.

P. Ramlee married his third wife Saloma in 1961, after two earlier divorces. Saloma was a very beautiful singer and actress, who also made appearances at Alkaff Gardens. It was wonderful to see them on celluloid after having seen them in person, as if there was a kind of familiarity and ownership. When TV came out and films became less popular, Shaw Brothers were not producing as many films as before, so they advised P. Ramlee to return to KL, where there were better opportunities for him to continue his film acting