Last year, I decided to brave the drive into the dirt road in Buangkok where the last of Singapore's rural villages were built, since 1956. As the lorong (or alley in Malay) permitted only one car to pass through, most of my photographs were taken on the go from my nifty Fiat Bravo. It wasn't as hard to navigate as I had expected since bigger vehicles could make their way in to Lorong Buangkok as well as there was a juncture broad enough for three-point turns.
My eldest brother who took the tour with me looked somewhat mesmerized as we tried to match the nostalgic scenery to our memories of a time when we grew up in Kampong Silat. I had expected to see more activity, but was mainly greeted by ruined gates and fences, and wild flora; and painted wooden houses thatched with zinc roofs, mostly decorated with telegraph lines overhead.
The vegetation that were instantly recognizable were banana, papaya, sugar cane, tapioca and coconut trees. Other than a woman supporting a ladder for a man picking fruits, not another person or animal was seen on that overcast day. Perhaps the geese and chickens had all gone to roost. And today's dogs are more kept than let free to roam.
I read from a local daily a while ago that the current village owner Ms Sng Mui Hong collects a token rental of $30 per month from some existing 40 home owners there. A very kind and generous gesture by the owner who inherited the more than 12,000 square metre land from her father Mr Sng Teow Koon, a traditional Chinese medicine seller, who passed on in 1997. I had rushed to see the kampong as I understood that its days are numbered. The public flats nearby in Sengkang are testament to new development inching into its compound (or kampong - a likely derivation). Ms Sng's three older siblings had already moved to modern public housing.
Fresh laundry aired in the open and a brand new truck parked in a fairly large porch were signs that the village is relatively inhabited. What came to mind was the friendly neighbourhood with different cultural emblems in the surroundings and days when families exchanged festive goodies and called on each other's homes for a spoonful of salt, sugar or some rice grains.
My dad once built a house on a piece of land in that era. He also made a tiny round wooden table for my four siblings and me to take our dinners alfresco. My baby brother often fell asleep while eating only to be awakened by the tap of a cane. I froze in time momentarily... visualizing my brothers catching spiders in the backyard and keeping them in matchstick boxes or 555 cigarette packs to draw them out later to pit against other kampong boys' spiders. I remember weaving through the tendrils of broad bean creepers in our garden that made up an L-shape around the parameters of our compound.
I remember my sister and me snapping open the five o'clock flowers with our fingers when they didn't open after five pm. We so dubbed the flowers as they tended to bloom at five in the evening. I remember Dad changing the fabric mantle of the kerosene lamp, and as he pumped up the pressure in the lamp, the mantle gradually became luminous. I stood watching, spellbound, like the girl watching her lit matchsticks floating in the wintry night sky in Hans Christian Andersen's the Little Match Girl.
A tan, rugged middle-aged man in a coarse cotton navy shirt and shorts and sporting a khaki canvas-wrapped oval hard hat would come through our gate, bearing on his shoulders two oval black metal buckets (one was empty and the other was full of human waste he collected earlier). He would head straight to the squatting toilet (some ten feet from our gate) to replace the day's collection from our guts.
I remember my dad bathing us kids with a plastic bailer he used to scoop water from a concrete well-like tank he built to store water. My parents would politely exchange niceties with our neighbours over the fence, while I'd engage one of their little girls who hobbled around their compound as if she was playing a solo one-legged race. I remember Dad's metre-long glass tank of gold fishes, sword-tails, and guppies; and one neon blue vase containing fighting fishes. They were the main ornaments in the cement-paved verandah. He would grow "iron plants" from stumps padded with cotton wool and pot them in water in ceramic dish-like pots, mostly emblazoned with ducks.
I remember cringing as I chanced upon tiny white lizard eggs in my mum's fabric bag with wooden handles hung upon a nail on a wooden beam in the longhouse-like bedroom that accommodated the entire family end-to-end. My siblings and I would drape our grey flannel blankets on nails and build tents in the bedroom. Two small flights of wooden stairs led up to one door at each end which were the openings to the long wooden bedroom. To chase away the mosquitoes, Dad would regularly fumigate the house by placing a clay jar containing "kam-bit-yen" in the vacuum between the raised wooden platform of the bedroom and the cement floor.
I remember climbing up a slope to admire countless lilac water hyacinths floating on a pond at the back of our wooden zinc-roofed house. I relish the evening concertos performed by frogs and toads. They evoked a cozy feeling on rainy days.
I often visited the sprawling herbal garden of a quiet, old couple who only sold herbs for a living. The thin man of slight build wore a Pagoda brand white cooling T-shirt matched with pin-striped baby blue pajama pants, while the woman wore samfu and had her hair pulled back in a bun capped with a black turtle shell. The wild garden felt like a little Eden where nothing unnatural stood. It was early days' aromatherapy when I inhaled the essence from the herbs that Grandma bought and boiled to wash her long hair. Think of it, those were the only times I saw her letting her hair down.
I remember Dad bolting our main gate at 236-A Silat Road one day, saying that a riot had erupted, and we needed to shut ourselves in from being splintered by glass shards, a fallout from Guinness Stout bottles used as weapons of war by the rioters.
Oh, where were we...?
Opmerkingen