The Political Commissar and the Beautiful People

o sooner had we come out of the idyllic, languorous days of the War years (who said: the "throes of war"?), we were again - within the space of a couple of years - plunged into an even more distressingly boring situation. By mid-1948, the Emergency was raging full swing, from the island kampung(s) to the mainland towns, and from lorong(s) to the thick of the jungles falling away from the main mountain divide.

At King's House, the official High Commissioner`s residence on a high rise in Lake Gardens, we had a new resident, after Sir Edward Gent's plane crashed on the way home. The import/impact of post-war politics came home to us in a big way. It was rumoured that a Chinese cook at King's House had casually dropped on the way home the time and date of Sir Henry Gurney`s departure for Fraser's Hill. But then rumours were all we had to go on in those days, whether as school-going lads and lasses or just working men. Newspapers though thrived on them.

In the immediate post-war years, jobs and scholarships though were easy to come by, and it was relatively easy to find a place in the University of Malaya in Singapore, even with a middling Second Grade school leaving certificate. Third graders officered the police and armed forces, and either took to teaching in private schools or tackled the technical assistants` well-paying overseer tasks.

There were few, if any, experts around. Everybody in gainful employment tried to become a specialist of sorts on his own steam. The car mechanic was one who found a discarded engine to work on. We repaired our own bicycles, made our own toys, re-invented the cinema projector for home use, and created for ourselves our own diverting games. The only free entertainment: the never-shut-off Rediffusion pop songs in four languages. We all had to make-do with every new situation the best way we could. The self-reliance we had gained (or rather something that simply grew on/in us) during the Occupation period now served us well, it could be said, and that's probably why the Japanese interregnum experience came to be branded, not without an unsettling sense of self-consciousness on our part: "A Blessing in Disguise!"

Professionals though were few and far between. The only doctor in private practice in the Brickfields area was a certain all-purposes Dr.Vaithilingam, who lived in Travers Road alongside the main marshalling yard. Another in Klang Road, almost in retirement, was the father of a Victorian David Saravanamuttu (Class of 1950) who also naturally qualified in Singapore to don his father's mantle as a general practitioner. If you needed any other treatment and for free, you simply had to traverse the town to the General Hospital, tucked away a little behind the Institute of Medical Research on Simpang Lima, and join the pitiful mass of sickly half-mortals bunched around the portals of the out-patients' consultation ward, manned by fresh recruits from King Edward the VII College of Medicine, and you could consider yourself lucky if, after waiting in the loudly wailing and bleeding-to-death stinking throng of the poor and the destitute for hours, you were eventually, virtually, pulled up by the housemen for a preliminary examination. Most of course got turned away and probably gave up the hantu before they got past Circular Road which they reached probably on all fours.

If, as it might happen, you were required to imbibe some medicine for your ailment (forget about operations unless you were prepared to render your soul to your bankers and your tattered garments to your offspring), you would have to go over to the under-staffed Hospital Dispensary and wait a few more hours if luck was on your side or come back within the next three or four days (that is, if you were still in one piece) in order to receive your potions/portions specially prepared by pounding pestle in mortar or by mixing coloured liquids from enormous glass jars sucked through rubber or glass tubing by the dispenser himself. As such, as the saying goes, the remedy was worse than the malady! You could wake up - if you woke up at all - with excruciating stomach and head pains. In any case, dispensers never died! Only overdoses of pure sizzling hydrochloric acid could kill them! On the other hand, anyone who got admitted for a few days' sojourn in the wards was actually being given a last-minute treat, like the granting of the "death-row" prisoner's last-day wish; in fact, he would be given the enormous pleasure of seeing all his relatives and secret lovers around the hospital bed shed buckets and buckets of crocodile tears before the final curtain call, or before he prematurely took it upon himself to kick the bucket in one last minute penalty shoot-out owing to the unbearable din kicked up by gossiping visitors around his death-bed. This only goes to show that, in those precarious days, you couldn't die in peace even if you bribed your doctors!

Looked at from another angle, one might say that job-wise both Malaya and Singapore then produced a generation of teenagers who were literally catapulted into the higher echelons of power and consequently into instant lucrative comfort, without having to vie with one another. The biggest and most famous general store in town, Gian Singh's, (the counterpart of the commercial complex of today) was located just off the bridge on Mountbatten Road, right behind the central market, from where the particular KL-brand of fragrance wafted down Ampang Road, Malacca Street, and down back onto Chettiar Street where it got smothered in the vadai(s), chambal(s), and sambal(s) stench. The well-worn and eminent Sikh proverb ("invented" by a Victorian: can`t really say by whom, for many bhais lay claim to the authorship, among them Surinder Singh, Devinder Singh, and Puran Singh, all stalwart upstanding Victorians, mind you!) might very well be quoted here: "Wherever you go, let the air be free!" for it applies in these circumstances as well. How? Well, I don't quite know how! Use your imagination! Long-bearded genial Gian Singh with a middle-aged pouch was the proud owner of the store, and he would receive you at the door in all beaming smiles. He even decided to set up a branch in Tokyo after the War, and so he got his nephew down from Punjab, and as the handsome lad with the over-size light khaki turban was just then of school-leaving age (his beard was a mere three or four thin strands on the chin while the side-burns appeared singed), he naturally rounded up his education at Senior One in the V.I., class of 1950. He had to do some catching up though on his English, but his knowledge of maths and science was a rung or two higher than that of the locally-nurtured. All to no purpose it seemed to us. No sooner had he sat for his O.C.S.C., he was whisked away as trainee-manager of the Tokyo branch.

The rest of the class almost en bloc turned up in Singapore for their medical studies, excepting Surinder and another whose name escapes me for the moment who became after an eight-month training session police inspectors. Surinder however later qualified as a barrister. The few Malays in the class, like the warm and always placid Wan Mahmud bin Pawanteh, black silk songkok sloping on his ample brow and slightly tilted over his left eyebrow all the time, even during class, I think, joined the civil service and became district officers and/or magistrates and so forth. Among the Malays, the stocky and duskier Mohd. Ali and the fair and lean Mohd. Hashim, both quiet and studious lads, obtained rather good results. Some said, one or two of the Chinese boys and one Tamil even dared go in for something like engineering. Well, I never... To think that this was the experimental class that topped the Cambridge exams in the country! The BRS-fed Kwang Tse Mun (7 As), the rather dusky-complexioned, stream-lined high-jump champion and record holder (the first in the VI to execute the scissors technique), and the PRS-fed Leong Chee Kong (9 As), both of whom became specialist doctors, were the brightest boys in class, though not the youngest by far. Their scores all through the post-war years never letup, not even once, though, I should say, Tse Mun, given his performances at essay-writing, was the more talented of the two.

Sizeable scholarships for study in the U.K. or America were simply handed to those willing to study anything not provided in the local institutions of higher learning, such as, engineering, architecture, law, physics, political science, and practically all research degrees. Ganesalingam of Senior One (1950) decided to try one of the scholarships being thrown out of the USIS. When at last everything seemed to be arranged for his departure, he suddenly, and tragically, disappeared. One never knew the cause of his ailment, for he had a smile ready on and for all occasions. Tall, dark, slim, and soft-spoken, his teeth in a constant gleam, he was always in the act of pushing his straight black hair back where it/they belonged; he seemed so optimistic ever since the Cambridge results were published in the Straits Times. He was one of the brave ones: he wanted to do engineering. Some however distinguished themselves despite the circumstances. Two such Victorians, one class of 1947 or 48, and the other '46, did just that: Arthur Rajaratnam got himself a London Imperial College Ph.D. in physics, and A. Sivasubramaniam a Ph.D. in soil mechanics from Manchester University. The latter Victorian became the President of the Students Union there, in 1953/54, and was even presented to the Queen Mother! Just think of that. That's the closest a Victorian ever came to the Ma'am who left us her name.

This post-war generation with degrees inevitably became the heads of all state and federal departments, and all the services, and became ambassadors and/or nominated or easily elected leaders of the nation. In short, they all became "top dogs" without rat-racing with one another, for when the British bosses left after Independence, the gaping hollow created in the upper reaches of power simply beckoned to them, or rather sucked them into the vacuum. This top-dog-generation, sad to say though, produced only a handful of men or women of true lasting achievement.

Only a few names come to mind on an international scale rating. One dedicated workhorse surgeon and research scientist, the tenacious Victorian: S.S.Ratnam; one illustrious Anderson School historian and administrator: Wang Gung-wu; one self-effacing - and notwithstanding very well known - entrepreneur on a grand scale: the Victorian T. Ananda Krishnan; one long-known eminently-trained, indefatigable linguist: Asmah Haji Omar; two runaway billionaire cinema magnates: the Run Run Shaws; one very cut-and-dry Brahmin nominated leg. co. member and astute property-lawyer, R. Ramani, later Malaysia's UN Representative; one or two poets from either side of the Johor Straits writing in English whom I'd rather not name for fear of arousing the wrath of the Asian Eliots and Yeatses; a good many really gifted Malay prose writers, among them: Zainal-Abidin bin Ahmad (Za'ba), A. Samad Said, Ishak Haji Muhammad, Shanon Ahmad, Kamaluddin Muhammad (Keris Mas); [We'll respectfully leave politicians out of this list for after all they will all have statues, monuments, and boulevards dedicated to them to remind us of their sagacity!], and perhaps a few others who merit a place in the Malaysio-Singaporean Pantheon that I may have bypassed in my blindness. Nonetheless, these famous Malaysians and Singaporeans were/are known to have made the grade only by dint of, or mainly by, limiting the number of strings on their bows, even to the extent, in some cases, of leaving but one slender horse-hair to play their tonitruantes notes on.

But the question still remains: Did the country produce any intellectuals? Did some sort of "intelligentsia" arise in the country? One might not be wrong in assuming there indeed might have emerged some such entity but it remained conveniently hidden to the public eye. But then, surely one must be wrong? Right or wrong, there was no gainsaying the fact that this special species of Homo sapiens was a rare breed, albeit, few and far between! Not, perhaps, until one stumbles across a Victorian who had to stop schooling at seventh standard. His weltanschauung was perhaps somewhat uni-prism-ed, or at least coloured, glimpsed, as it were, through the tinted glasses of his implacable ideological stance, but he was totally loyal and equally sincere vis-à-vis his wished-for world. As sincere as he is, ironically, today in his adherence to religious commitment, I'm told. He is still living, living a detached life as a recluse in a foreign country. He was a personal friend and honoured guest of several top leaders behind the post-war Iron and Bamboo Curtains. He discontinued schooling (or rather had to), to work in the accounts department at Town Hall, that is, after his father retired from the Customs Department. The family first lived in Imbi Road, and then retreated to the confining lack of privacy in a lean-to/shack on a promontory overlooking Chinese farmlands in the primary jungle-covered hills along 2nd and 3rd miles on Klang Road.

For anyone who didn't know of his family origins, he could not be easily placed at first sight. His complexion practically "white" (he could have easily passed for an Italian), his extremely fetching looks almost faultless in their proportions, his English locution non-dialectal, his manner cheerfully polite and serious, even reserved, his slight build of medium-height impeccably athletic - he was in short an enigma. His conversation though eminently Marxist-oriented, even Trotskyite-ish, ranged over politics, poetry (he favoured Shelley over Keats or other contemporary Romantics, barring I think Lord Byron), history, and sociological issues with an élan that could have cowed his British jailors with Ox-bridge backgrounds. The important thing was that he was self-taught. There was no way by which he could have been indoctrinated by anyone in person, unless this transpired through his own selective reading. Which schoolboy in those days would pour over every page of Sabine's Political Philosophy? It was not a school text book. Even if one may now see the futility of the chimera he might have vainly chased after, at least one thing's certain: he was, and most probably still is, an intellectual in every sense of the word! That's probably because he constantly questioned the situation in which the country was being placed. And he was a Victorian who made his own particular - though not winning - choice in life.

Quite often, he would disappear from his post. One suddenly did not notice him cycling down Brickfields in all haste during lunch time, his clean white shirt and black longs flapping in the gusts he stirred up; he always looked straight ahead, a hint of desolateness, I used to think, shading his mien into a permanently introverted expression. The British authorities must have felt a stint or two in detention might give him a break, no doubt, from his pen-pushing job. But then, he always re-emerged. He enjoyed the favours and protective solicitude of Sir Clough Thuraisingham, then nominated leg-co member and later Member for Education. All good (or even sad) things had to have an end, and in March 1952, he was given two weeks to do a disappearing trick or face yet another spate of detention. All the British had to go on was inconclusive evidence, and so rather than keep him under constant surveillance, the no-nonsense Templer regime, decided not to dilly-dally any further. A magistrate's court issued a banishment order in his name. To my knowledge, he became the first officially proscribed Victorian. Since his ancestors hailed from an island in the Palk Straits, he returned to Ceylon, where barely a year having gone by, he became the General-Secretary of the General and Clerical Services Union of the country. He remained a political activist and dedicated trade unionist all his life.

Yet, he narrowly escaped detention for life under the British administration. Three days after he embarked for Ceylon, a top-level courier from MCP headquarters in the jungle was shot down by the security forces. In his courier bag, the proof the authorities had vainly sought to be able to put him behind bars for good: a letter from MCP HQ addressed to Political Commissar E. Thirugnanamoorthy! (aka E.T. Moorthy).

Coda

The engagé Victorian, as can be expected, had/has three very beautiful sisters, who are still in the region with their families. The eldest married one of the most famous school-day Victorians, the intrepid S. Nadeswaran (Class of 1948), Calypso and Negro Spirituals artist, dramatic performer, and later, after emerging from Raffles College (where he was jailed with the "Fajar" group on the eve of the final B.A. exams.), and qualifying from Australia, became the City of Singapore's Assistant Town Planner, though just as swiftly he fell from grace. A robust figure crowned with Tyron-Power-ish magnetic looks, he used to thrill us all youngsters with his own performances on the stage of the assembly hall. Paragnanamoorthy (E.P. Moorthy), younger brother of the political commissar, once wrote a one-act play that Nadeswaran directed and the two acted in: one of the landmarks in the display of VI's artistic talents. Even the always morose or menacing-looking F.Daniel burst out laughing during the performance. The late E.P. Moorthy, the budding playwright, turned to teaching in Taiping after school, and then settled in Singapore with a Malay lady, his wife. The eldest brother, E.S. Moorthy, also a Victorian, settled in Singapore, at first as a trade unionist... and then learned how to toe the line. Nadeswaran, by the way, passed away in Singapore last May.

"Nades" had a way of making a joke of everything, the usual glint in his eyes turning to white fire. Asked about other schoolmates and what they were doing some years back, he said: "What schoolmates? Everybody is queuing up to make the Straits Times obituary columns!"

© T. Wignesan December 12, 2000, Paris

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