On the day of our move, my elder brothers and Karim stopped by to help us load it. Unbeknown to us, our mother had kept her dapur arang aside, wrapped in old newspaper. This was the clay stove that she had cooked on, using charcoals, the same one which she had used as an oven. Now she carried it in her arms.
“Mak! You don’t need this!” Third Elder Brother told her. “There’s electricity in the flat! And a very nice gas hob! Besides, it will smoke too much in the flat!”
“My one!” she said adamantly, hugging the old stove to her as if it was something precious and she could not bear to part with it.
“Mak,” I said gently, to persuade her. “Really you don’t need to cook on this anymore.”
“I want!” her voice rose some decibels, which was totally uncharacteristic of her.
My brothers and I exchanged looks and shook our heads. We knew she was already traumatised by the move, and we did not want to upset her further. It was easier to give in and let her take it. Hopefully she would eventually get used to using the gas hob at the flat; then she would probably get rid of the dapur arang of her own accord.
She sat next to the lorry driver, holding on tight to her clay stove. All of us sat at the back of the lorry, me carrying Robert. We leant against our meagre possessions and faced out at our remaining neighbours, like Nenek Bongkok and Karim, who had come to say goodbye. What would become of them? Nenek Bongkok swore she would not move. Karim was planning to rent a room from one of his fellow band members. Our throats were constricted, so we were not chirpy but we did make promises to keep in touch, though we didn’t know how we were going to do this. We had given our new telephone number to Karim in the hope that at least he would keep in touch. Nenek Bongkok would not know how to use the village telephone.
“Selamat tinggal! Goodbye!” Nenek Bongkok said sorrowfully.
“Selamat tinggal!” we said, our voices catching in our throats.
We were saying goodbye not just to our friends and neighbours, but also to our kampong and to a way of life. We would never experience this sort of life again in Singapore. Just as the lorry was pulling out, Karim took up his guitar and sang, “Those were the days my friends, we thought they’d never end...”
And I couldn’t help myself and allowed the tears to roll down my face.
Epilogue
KAMPONG Potong Pasir experienced another major flood in 1978. It devastated the remainder of the village. Two thousand poultry and pigs died, floating belly-up down Kallang River and making a great stench. The low-lying farms and houses were destroyed by the heavy rain and mudslides. After that, the final clear-out began. Bulldozers, diggers and mechanical cranes invaded the village, like alien monsters. They uprooted ancient trees unceremoniously, some of which we had climbed and loved. The attap houses were broken and crushed, years of history tumbling down and disintegrating. None of these things mattered to the labourers. They did not feel what we felt about the place. On the outside, it was just a shanty village of wooden houses with old-fashioned attap-thatched roofs. How could they know what the village had meant to us?
The whole kampong was razed to the ground. Totally wiped out.
All over Singapore, villages were demolished in phases throughout the 1970s, a few in the early 1980s, changing the landscape of Singapore forever. Only one tiny kampong on the mainland, privately-owned Kampong Buangkok, stoically remained, now dwarfed by high-rise flats. Most of the ones in outlying islands also disappeared, except for a few houses left in Pulau Ubin. Cemeteries like Bishan, Choa Chu Kang and Bidadari were dug up, graves exhumed, including my father’s. And in their places, HDB tower blocks rose.
For the first year in our new flat, my siblings and I would nod our heads sadly as we watched our mother struggle to cope. There were many old people like her who had difficulty in adjusting, especially the fishermen and fisher folk from the East Coast, who could no longer fish or smell the sea. Several people like Sivalingam went missing. It was rumoured that some gave up and committed suicide. But the latter was not official, no numbers were recorded. Others stared listlessly out of their high-rise, louvred windows onto long corridors, wishing for the days when they had walked about freely in open spaces, surrounded by fields and trees, and neighbours who asked after them.
Every day, our mother would squat in the corner of the beautifully-fitted kitchen of the flat to cook on her clay charcoal stove, its smoke darkening the freshly-painted walls.
Acknowledgements
I am eternally indebted to the National Arts Council for approving the FY2016 Creation Grant for me to write this book, as they did with Kampong Spirit - Gotong Royong: Life in Potong Pasir, 1955 to 1965. The funding was an enormous help for a senior like me.
I am very pleased that I managed to hear stories about my kampong
