My name is Gana

A group of us government employees were bored at times when we had completed our allotted tasks and had nothing to do. This usually happened towards the end of the month. So we devised a plan to visit cinema halls to while away our time. The theatre manager was a friend of ours as he was our house mate.  We got a clerk in the office involved and told him to alert us if the boss was looking for us. If that happened, the clerk would call up the theatre manager who would insert a slide in between film footages to call the office. We would ring up the office, speak to the clerk and check if we needed to return to the office. We dared    not return home as we had a nasty boss who would drive to our homes to check if we had gone home. That’s how nasty he was. Just as we had a clerk as a    confidant, he too had his spies to give him information of our misdeeds.  However there were very few moments he was able to track us as we seldom returned home. That was frust...

  Our village was beset with a shortage of drinking water.  Every home had a well dug at the rear of the house. The water was good for bathing and washing but not for consumption. A stand pipe was erected on the edge of the metalled road close to every home. This water was meant for drinking purposes. But some villagers misused this facility by bathing and doing their washing at this standpipe too, leaving other irate villagers waiting for long hours to collect their drinking water.  We had one enterprising plumber named Ah Soi who was prepared to lay pipes to enable drinking water from the stand pipe to be brought into our homes. This was illegal of course but you had to pay RM5 per home although the water consumed was about RM2.    The villagers did not complain as the convenience of having drinking water at home far outweighed the    small outlay. The revenue collected would be pocketed by Ah Soi and purportedly shared with the little ‘Napoleans’ i....

  When I first started work in the enforcement division of the Ministry, I was given files on places of employment that had just one or two employees. This was to ensure that the new officers would not cause blunders and    embarass the Department. The other purpose was to close files on former places of employment that had ceased to engage employees. One day, I was given a file on a money lender’s    place that reportedly had employees. I parked my Vespa scooter in the verandah of the shop and strutted    into the office. Those were the initial days of my employment when I could not afford a car.  When I introduced myself, the money lender greeted me, opened his safe and carefully removed a one dollar note from a bundle and handed it to me. I was puzzled and enquired what was that for. He told me to keep it for my expenses. I gave him a stare and shouted at him. He thought I was unhappy with the amount and he dipped his hand once more into the sa...

I do not know where and how we arrived at this name. They are neither foxes nor do they fly long distances. They do fly however for short distances from one tree to another and always after dusk and in the dark. It’s usually more a jump than a flight. They are actually large bats. One hardly hears them or sees them as they are nocturnal creatures but their presence is clear when you look at the fruit trees in the compound.  I have    fruiting ‘rambutan’ and ‘mata kuching’ trees. At least I am able to eat rambutans as they have a layer of hairy skin    that hides the fruits and is not    vulnerable to attacks from flying foxes. But the mata kuching has tender skin and are easy favourites for these creatures. These flying foxes have large bodies and wings that can span more than a metre. They fly in the dark and often end up dead when they crash into live electric wires that are wired from pole to pole that transmit electricity to light up street lights....

  In the sixties of the last century, there was no direct    road from Kluang to Mersing in Johor. One had to travel from Kluang    to Yong Peng then head on to Kota Tinggi and then travel the coastal road to    reach Mersing. The powers that be then decided to build a metalled road directly from Kluang to Mersing - one with a distance of about 60 kilometres. The proposed new road was to cut through pristine jungle which was the habitat of many wild animals. We had elephants, tigers, black panthers, civets and a large number of reptiles. To the Government Officers sitting in air conditioned offices in the Federal Capital, the lives of wild animals did not matter.  The developers of the roads viewed the massive profits that could be derived from the opening of new roads. First there was revenue from the timber that could be harvested from the jungle clearing, then the contracts to develop new townships along the newly opened up    roads. ...

  When I worked in the rural part of Johor, our Land Rover driver was a Muslim. One day when we were travelling the rural roads, a wild boar dashed from the undergrowth and was in the process of crossing the road when it hit our vehicle. We brought our vehicle to a stop and got out to inspect the damage to our vehicle. Sure enough there was a huge dent to the mudguard of our vehicle. We looked at the carcass of the boar and realised it was indeed a huge one and surprisingly did not suffer much bodily injury. The three passengers were non Muslims while the driver was a Muslim. We decided to take the carcass home as we knew a cook who ran a stall in the market and would relish such a prized possession.    But the problem was we had a Muslim in our midst and had to consider his sensitivities.  We decided to bundle the carcass in some rolls of sack and drag it for a distance of 10 kilometres to the market. We went to the nearest stall which was 5 kilometres away bought s...

  We lived in a kampong where there was an abundance of wild boar hunters. These hunters were not professional hunters but took up hunting as a hobby during their free time. These hunters usually indulged in their pastime during weekends when they had their rest days. Their hunting grounds were the forests surrounding our village.  We village folk used to await these hunting days as there would be enough meat for every house in the kampong. Times were hard and families could not afford to buy meat often and we always looked forward to these hunting days as it meant meat for every household following a hunting expedition. The kampong was located near a Catholic Church. For some reason there were only    Catholic families there. We were the only Hindu family and to this day, I do not know how my mother managed to rent a house in the all Catholic neighbourhood . One    possibility    is that she was a teacher employed in a Catholic Tamil school and t...

      I used to spend a lot of time with my friends at the club where we played billiards and skittles. I used to be good at the game of skittles and used to gamble for small    stakes. I usually visited the Kinta Indian Association after office hours at around 5 p.m. and played until around midnight. On weekends we used to play the game until the wee hours of the morning. The winner usually bought dinner for the club attendant as compensation for the extended hours.  On days when the takings were good, the attendant would also be given a cash reward    by the winner so that he would not complain about the long hours to the club committee members who rarely visited the club after office hours. Our relationship with the attendant was so good that he would trust us with the club keys which we used to return to him at his home after we had closed all the doors and windows of the club after the game.  On weekends, we used to break our game around...

If there is a person I am grateful for - it has got to be my mum. She was a product of the 1920’s    when women were frowned upon if they were seen outside their houses. That was an era where women had to be indoors and a career for them was unthinkable.  However my mum got herself a teaching position before her marriage in a private school teaching Tamil. She was taunted by her relatives and neighbours, who felt the place for girls is the kitchen and girls should learn domestic skills and be prepared to run a home and take care of children. Eventually she had to agree to give up her career, marry and become a housewife. That satisfied her neighbors and relatives but there was none to help her out of her misery when she complained that her husband’s income was hardly enough to run a home. It appeared her neighbours and siblings were just waiting to end her carefree and happy life and push her into poverty.  My father’s income was not sufficient. Besides his love for ...

In the days when my mother was growing up there were very few openings for girls. Girls used to marry on reaching puberty sometimes as young as 12 years. My mother was 18 and she was considered    an “old maid” then. She was a Tamil school teacher in a private school. The headmaster was a lecherous old man who likes to grope the young female teachers who were called up to his office under the pretext of discussing work assignments. When she complained of this behaviour to my mother her response was to take the convenient route. “Leave your job. Be prepared to get married. I shall send out word to my contacts to find a boy for you”.  And so at the age of 18 she married my dad. My dad was born in Durban South Africa but migrated to a town known as Palani in India before the family moved to    Malaya. My paternal grandmother used to be paid in gold nuggets when working in South Africa. She had shown me the gold nuggets when I was an infant.    My parents ...