A Kite in the Evening Sky Read online

  © 2018 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Pte Ltd

  Text © Shaik Kadir

  Photographs courtesy of the author and his family, except for images on pages 4 (bottom), 18 and 20. Cover design by Benson Tan.

  All characters in the story, except Mohamed Noor, do not bear their real names.

  A Kite in the Evening Sky was first published in 1989 by EPB Publishers.

  This edition is published by Marshall Cavendish Editions

  An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Requests for permission should be addressed to the Publisher, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited, 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196. Tel: (65) 6213 9300

  E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.marshallcavendish.com/genref

  The publisher makes no representation or warranties with respect to the contents of this book, and specifically disclaims any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and shall in no event be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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  National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Name(s): Shaik Kadir.

  Title: A kite in the evening sky / Shaik Kadir.

  Description: [Third edition] | Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, [2018] | First

  published: EPB Publishers, 1989.

  Identifier(s): OCN 1008862718 | eISBN 978 981 4794 85 5

  Subject(s): LCSH: Kadir, Shaik. | Malays (Asian people)--Singapore--Social life and customs. | Geylang Serai (Singapore)--Social life and customs. | Singapore--History.

  Classification: DDC 959.57--dc23

  Printed in Singapore

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  1 My First Kampung Home

  2 Comics and Coconut Trees

  3 Feasting

  4 Water: The Source of Life and Strife

  5 Abhorrence and Fantasy

  6 Fasting and Friends

  7 Excitement

  8 Joy and Expectations

  9 Fury

  10 A Hard Day’s Work

  11 Entertainment

  12 Fun and Games

  13 A Nightmarish Day

  14 The Kampung Bully

  15 Circumcision

  16 In the Steps of a Muslim

  17 Grief

  18 Eavesdropping

  19 Progress

  20 The “Lady”

  21 The Bar Waitress

  22 Kite Battles

  23 A Wedding

  24 The “Pontianak”

  25 Polygamy

  26 Triumph

  27 A Shock

  28 Cohesion and Tension

  29 A Discussion

  30 Sadness

  Epilogue

  A Glossary of Words and Phrases

  Source: Ministry of Information and the Arts Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore

  Kampung houses: some had atap roofs, others zinc roofs and almost all stood on stilts.

  Preface

  Whenever Geylang Serai is mentioned, our minds instantly conjure up a picture of a busy commercial hub that has an abundance of delightful food, lovely clothing and exquisite handicraft.

  What is less known is that Geylang Serai has always been bustling with people and activity even in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, kampung houses, mud tracks and fruit trees filled the place. While it was physically different, the rural life of the former Geylang Serai was no less lively or charming.

  Today, Geylang Serai has the glitter and glamour of city life. Kampung life has vanished, having faded into history with the urbanisation of Singapore, but its spirit remains. It is in the hope of capturing and conveying the unique and exciting flavour of the Geylang Serai kampung lifestyle that A Kite in the Evening Sky has come about.

  First published in 1989, this book captures an authentic snapshot of the lifestyle, mood and worldviews of the kampung people, allowing readers today to consider what has changed and what has stayed the same.

  A Kite in the Evening Sky traces the growth of a carefree boy who, amidst the challenges of kampung life, manages to fulfill the aspirations of his twice-widowed mother for a better life for the family. Besides depicting the kampung activities, the book brings out vividly the cultural and religious practices of the kampung folk of Geylang Serai and their close-knit community life that is today valued and cherished as the “kampung spirit”.

  Prologue

  It was a very hot day. I was up on a huge cherry tree in Maxwell Road Kindergarten. As I was stretching my hand to pluck a fat, red cherry, Muttu tapped my shoulder and, pointing to the far end of the road in the school compound, said, “Your father’s coming.”

  I saw him cycling up the road to the school. I quickly got down the tree and ran towards him. I ran very fast. Suddenly I slipped and fell. My father rushed over to help me. I cut my left knee and had bruises on the other. Blood, as red as the tarboosh he was wearing, flowed from the cut. My father immediately drew out his handkerchief from his shirt pocket to stop the blood with it. As he was pressing the wound with his handkerchief, a few drops of blood fell onto his Pulikat sarung.

  My father was the caretaker of the Shahul Hamid Shrine, commonly known as Nagore Dargah, which was situated at the corner of Telok Ayer Street and Boon Tat Street in Chinatown. I was born in the caretaker’s room and grew up playing in this big concrete building.

  When I was six years old, my mother gave birth to a baby girl. Some time later, my father enrolled me at the Sepoy Lines Primary School in Tiong Bahru. Again, like when I was in the kindergarten in Maxwell Road, he sent me to school and took me home on his bicycle.

  Even when my father fell ill, he still sent me to school and took me home by bus. Soon, however, his illness became serious, and I had to go to school and return home on my own.

  One afternoon, I was sitting beside my father fiddling with his fingers when he turned on his side and suddenly became completely motionless. I shook his body violently, calling out loudly to him in a frightened voice. My mother who was in the kitchen came running to us, but my father was already dead. I cried the whole night. I even refused to go the following morning to the cemetery for the burial.

  My mother had nobody in Chinatown. My maternal grandfather, whom I came to know for the first time, got us a room in his relative’s house in Lorong H, Telok Kurau. I did not go to school for a few months after my father’s death. When we moved to Lorong H, I was enrolled into a Primary One class again the following year, in Telok Kurau English Primary School.

  My mother later married a widower, an elderly Indian man. The marriage was arranged by my grandfather. Not many months after, my stepfather went to India to visit his relatives, saying he would return within a fortnight. But a week later, my grandfather broke a shocking piece of news to my mother. He said my stepfather had died in India. My mother looked worried. She told my g
randfather that she was pregnant.

  About this time, Hari Raya Aidiladha came and we went to visit a relative in Paya Lebar. That evening, my relative’s neighbour wanted to take his child and a few other children for a car ride. My mother allowed me to go with them. Having never been in a car, I enjoyed the ride, although I felt a little uncomfortable as five other children were also sitting in the back seat. After a while, the breeze through the open windows made me fall asleep. When I woke up I became conscious of bandages on my leg and forehead. I was in a hospital!

  Much later, I learnt that the car had crashed into an army truck along East Coast Road. Four children were killed instantly and one adult died in hospital the following day. I also learnt that someone had told my mother that I had died in hospital and so some neighbours and relatives bought the burial items and went to the hospital to collect my “dead” body, only to find me still alive.

  I stayed in the hospital for some time. When I was discharged, with a cast that stretched from waist to foot on my left leg, we moved to a new kampung in Geylang Serai.

  Shaik Kadir at 3 years old, with his mother at a friend’s house in 1949.

  1

  My First Kampung Home

  The chirping of the birds woke me up. My sister was still asleep and my mother was not in. The kitchen door was ajar.

  Among the chirping sounds, one was exceptionally louder and shriller. It seemed to be getting nearer and nearer to my window. Slowly, I lifted my legs and carefully got down from where I was lying. With my crutches under my armpits, I went to the window and looked out. The chirping was coming from a tree just outside.

  Craning my neck, I looked up at the tree. Clusters of jambu air were hanging all over it. I spotted a brown bird nipping at the light green fruit. Two jambus fell to the ground, joining the many that were already there. Suddenly a tiny yellow bird jumped onto a branch close to my window, chirping continuously in its loud and shrill voice. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it dived down onto a lower branch, stood there for a second and flew away, leaving only the chirping sound of the other birds.

  I smiled. Turning around, I looked at my new home. It was a small rented room with a cement floor. The squarish room was part of the zinc-roofed house standing on metre-high wooden stilts.

  When we were at the Shahul Hamid Shrine, we had a wooden platform in the caretaker’s room on which we laid mats for sleeping. Here, in this room, there was a similar platform, but it was much higher. It was an ambin really and it occupied about half the room. We had spread a pandanus-leaf mat on the ambin and we sat, ate and slept on it. The surface was hard but we had soft pillows for our heads.

  The room was big enough to contain our possessions of one big wooden trunk, two medium-sized steel trunks and a little cupboard about a metre high and half a metre wide. I kept my school books and other things in this cupboard which had a glass door. This cupboard, my mother told me, was used to keep her cloth dolls when she was a little girl. The trunks and two or three boxes of items were kept under the ambin.

  While I was surveying the room, the kitchen door opened and in walked my mother, holding a basket. My mother, who had a dark brown complexion, a high nose and naturally curly hair, smiled at me.

  “Be careful when you walk. Use your crutches carefully,” she said as she placed the basket on the ambin. She took out a loaf of bread, some things wrapped in newspaper and a small bunch of rambutans from the basket. “I bought this for you,” she said, handing me the bunch of rambutans.

  A couple of days later, the landlady lent me a stool because the ambin was too high for me. So every day I would sit by the window on the stool and look out at the birds and the jambu tree. I also watched the chickens and ducks that passed by my window. I would admire a mother hen for her motherly love of her chicks. With a big brood of chicks following her, she would peck at something on the ground and all the chicks would surge to it, trying to eat it up. When a passer-by got too close to them, she would suddenly become grumpy and spread her wings to shield her chicks.

  There was no electricity in the house. Kerosene lamps and pressure lamps were used. We had two small oil lamps to light our room at night. We carried one of them with us whenever we went to the kitchen. Outside, unlike Chinatown, there were no street lights and so the kampung was very dark and quiet. During the day flies menaced us, and at night mosquitoes took over. They bit us, dived into our noses and made irritating sounds in our ears.

  One day, while the landlady was talking to my mother, she noticed the mosquito-bite marks on my sister’s arms and legs. She then gave us an old mosquito net which had a few big holes in it. My mother patched them up and we all slept under it. From then on, the mosquitoes ceased to trouble us.

  During the day, when I became very tired of sitting at the window, I would hobble out to the compound. There, on a mat placed under a tree, the girls would be playing “five stones” and the boys, close by, would be having their game of capteh.

  “You should not go out there. What if you fall?” my mother cautioned me whenever I wanted to go out of the room.

  “I’ll walk slowly. I’ll take care of myself,” I replied earnestly, afraid she would try to stop me. But she never did.

  The capteh could be played individually or in teams. Each player, using his leg only, had to keep the capteh in the air for as long as he could, counting every kick that he made. The one who scored the most number of kicks would be the winner.

  There was a boy called Mahmood who could keep the capteh going for at least fifty counts at any one time. I admired Mahmood’s skill. Knocking the cast on my leg with my knuckles, I wondered if I ever could play capteh, let alone play it as skillfully as Mahmood.

  2

  Comics and Coconut Trees

  A few weeks after the removal of the cast on my leg, I was able to walk properly. Very soon I was able to play games with the boys. We played tops, marbles and bola hentam. Of course, capteh was our favourite. Mahmood and I often teamed up in these games.

  “You shouldn’t play capteh or run about,” my mother warned me. “You must not forget what happened to your leg. It is not strong.”

  “Don’t worry, Mother. I am OK now,” I replied as I walked away, looking at her big stomach and feeling quite happy that soon there would be another member in the family.

  Mahmood and I made captehs using cockerel feathers. Chicken feathers were easy to get as chickens were reared by many people and they wandered everywhere. We would chase a cockerel, corner it somewhere, grab it tightly under our arms and pull a few of its beautiful feathers as it squawked and struggled to free itself. But we made sure that the cockerel was not harmed or injured. Often we would get claw marks on our arms and scratches on our legs as we chased it all over the place, but that never stopped us.

  One evening, my mother clutched at her stomach in pain. She told me to call the landlady. The landlady quickly called a bidan and that evening my mother gave birth to a baby girl. For a couple of weeks, I didn’t go out to play with the boys. I had to help my mother with the household chores. Then one day Mahmood came looking for me. He invited me to his house to look at the many storybooks his father had bought for him, and I accepted the invitation gratefully. It was nice to be out again.

  While most houses in the kampung had atap roofs, Mahmood’s had a zinc roof. A jambu tree with its flaming red crop of fruit was right in front of his house. I looked up at the fruit hugging one another in large clusters. Looking up at the same time, Mahmood said, “Let’s have some. I’ll ask my mother to give us some soya sauce mixed with green chilli. The red jambu is not sweet like the green jambu. It will taste better if we dip it in soya sauce.” With that Mahmood ran off to get a bamboo pole from under his house. He hit the fruit with it, collecting a handful of them for me.

  Later, when Mahmood went to his room to get his books, I sat admiring his house. The rattan sofa was comfortable. There were pictures of the family on the wall. I got up and looked at some of the pictures. As I w
as looking at them, Mahmood came in, placed three storybooks on the table and went back to his room. I picked up one and started looking at it. While I was doing so, a woman, tall and fair and with hair rolled into a bun, walked in with a tray of jambu and soya sauce. She smiled at me and asked me to help myself to the jambu.

  Mahmood took a long time to come out. When he did he had with him a stack of comics.

  “Ah, I see my mother has brought the jambu,” he said, and we started eating them.

  The comic that attracted me immediately was the Beano. I grabbed it and eagerly turned the pages. I was familiar with the characters. When I was in hospital, somebody had left two issues of Beano on my bed and I had read them over and over again until I knew the characters very well. Mahmood also had another comic series, Dandy. He asked me if I would like to borrow them. Happily I took a few issues of the comics and a storybook as well. For the first time, I began to read. From then on I borrowed many of Mahmood’s storybooks.

  One day, my mother said, “Now that you can walk properly, you have to go to school.” She was breast-feeding my baby sister. My other sister was sitting near her on the ambin stroking the baby’s head.

  I had, in fact, forgotten about school. I had been away from it for more than seven months already and I didn’t really like the idea of going back. I tried to make excuses. But they apparently did not convince my mother.

  “You will have to go to school. Your father told me never to stop your schooling however poor we are,” she continued sternly.

  I looked at her serious face and then at Mahmood’s storybooks on the ambin.

  “Yes, I’ll go to school,” I replied, and saw a look of relief on her face.

  Telok Kurau English Primary School was some kilometres away from my home but it was the nearest school. Although I had not taken the final examination for Primary One, I was admitted into Primary Two.

  I walked to school. I would take the same route most of the time. From Jalan Sunggoh, I would turn into Jalan Modin where a big house stood. The owner, an Indian Muslim, sold Indian acar in small bottles. I had once gone there to buy a bottle of acar. We ate it with plain, hot rice and pappadom. Entering Jalan Alsagoff, I would turn right and reach a wooden bridge over a stream. Near this bridge, a Chinese girl sold ice water on a pushcart. There were times when I would buy a drink from this girl on my way back from school.