Tales [not so tall] of "Timmy"
the not-so-very-polite Malaya Hall Cat
in London!  

ou might recall how some crank recounted in Victimes20 that the top-dog [I wonder what "Tom" the Disney-Cardboard-Cat would have to say about this!] post-war generation simply made it up there to the rarefied atmosphere of top-power positions by just getting a degree or higher training diploma when Britons vacated their key supervising posts after Independence. Well, where do you think most of them gathered some time or other to fluff up their fine feathers? You guessed right! In Malaya Hall! The students’ hostel in London (though you could be a government servant or a budding politico to qualify for residence there) was also the seat of the U.K. Malayan Students Union (MSU). It was generally thought that those who passed through the hostel’s portals would someday be among the elite of the country, and you would not be far too wrong in arrogating the truth of this assumption. Tradition had it that since Tunku Abdul Rahman, the country’s modern-day paterfamilias, was a past MSU president, and Tun Abdul Razak, the vice-president, it was only natural that future leaders of the region, too, should be hatched from this sanctified nest! Of course, Singaporeans also followed suit, since they had as yet to make enough duit to be able to rent their own hall. To tell you the whole truth, they couldn’t even afford to have their own cat! So, I had to double-up as a pet for them as well! The future Lee Kuan Yews trained here under the guise of a political body, called the Malayan Forum (MF). Even the Malayans in it, like Joe Manuel Pillay, an engineering student at Imperial College who never got to practising his profession [he was a Victorian, too, I’m sure, for I heard some guy say something like that, unless this is yet another mantelpiece day-dream of mine], ended up running the island’s airline business not long after the fifties.

Time: End of 1958 onto 1959 and beyond.
Scene: Malaya Hall in Bryanston Square, Marble Arch, London (off by a few streets from Oxford Street).
Players: A liberal sprinkling of brilliant Victorians (minus one or two copy-cat traitors) and a whole host of lesser homo homo sapiens!

Straight from the cat’s mouth: November and the pea-souper fog clamped down on London as if an out-of-space gargantuan turtle settled down on the Colonial Capital of the Commonwealth to hatch voracious-minded, bitter-ly fomenting colonial brains, and you could hardly even see lips opening before your eyes in Hyde Park if you were unfortunately seized with the urge in the thick of autumn. The choice experience of living for days at a stretch smothered by the undersides of a giant turtle then was an experience Malaysians/Singaporeans of the seventies onwards could not have had the luck to have under their belts. [Everybody wore belts in those days, including chastity belts (this is first-paw information from my lowly height, and don’t forget the French pill saw the light only in the sixties), and Orson Welles-type braces, I can assure you!]. Some still say the foggy mind-boggling experience was not just due to British phlegm but rather because the typical stiff-upper-lip diners/bitter-swillers/revellers warmed their posteriors at raging coal fires in every home, and, of course, castle! The use of coal in hearths, as you know, was banned later on; hence the clear skies over London since the seventies, but the odours still lingered on from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I’m told (you must know, I didn’t make it past the sixties, so don’t believe that nonsense about a cat’s nine lives!), and this I swear by the whiskers of my wild forefathers. I should know for one of my favourite hangout spots was the library fire-place, and the gossip I overheard there – law books opened on first pages remained unturned for weeks - was enough to turn even Pantagruel’s stomach right round and inside out! Most of the library gossip sessions was chaired by one, the late S. M. Ponniah, a fortyish businessman from Seremban, who had a brood of Chinese girls always following him around because he shot around a few Cantonese phrases, while another Balasingham from Ipoh, nicknamed "Baby" (probably on account of his wholesome baby fat), for fear of competition from the former, chaired his tongue-wagging marathons in the lounge much to the chagrin of a clique of inveterate chess-playing Bar-students who were quite obviously training day and night for a showdown with the great Russian grand masters. Anyway, don’t be amazed: if the law students didn’t gossip non-stop even while watching others move their fingers over the chess-board once in every two hours, how d’ya think they could have become loyar-buroks!

Sometimes, when I was bored stiff by the interminable gossip, I’d paw through the Sunday Times feature pages or what was left of it in the lounge, and finding myself feeling drowsier, I’d quickly revert to the gossip sessions. Oh, I know what you’re thinking! "So, he thinks he can read as well!" Well you got it all wrong. Lemme let ya inta a seecret. There’s a guy called Bernard Pivot, the all-time reading champion of the world! Lives in Paris and runs a literary book show on the tele for the last quarter of a century. Every week, he invites five or six writers of all sorts and jabbers away with them about their books and their lives. Anthony Burgess, who taught in Malaya and Brunei, politely called that kind of talk "literary gossip", but oddly enough, even the Nobel Literature Committee takes him seriously enough to consult him on their annual choices. So, one day, another journalist got the idea of interviewing him on his ability to read some ten hefty books or so every week. The journalist wanted to know if he had a reading committee that read and took notes for him. You know what Pivot said: "No, but I’ve got my cat!" There you are! The real champion reader of the world is a cat!

On one such gripping evening I groped my way by holding on to the pig-iron thick black spiky railings on Upper Berkeley Street, and after knocking and trampling over several au pair girls from the Continent (to their great delight, of course), finally managed - after narrowly missing other teetering tipsy Malayans and Singaporeans fully fortified by several pints of bitter from their Masons’ Arms ego-boosting refuge - to cover the hundred yards or so to Bryanston Square, but, I’m afraid, quite accidentally (no Freudian slip here I swear) got down the back alley and found myself in front of the garage entrance that we were all told by the News of the World the middle-aged Defence Minister Profumo and several other nefarious cloak-and-dagger characters, knocked on to see a certain Miss Christine Keeler, aged 23, most evenings when their pristine and prim wives played bridge in their parlours with the butler. (I still don’t know why the paper paid millions to get the story when Malaya Hall occupants had an open view of the proceedings from their second and third storey windows.) Sometimes, when I went caterwauling on the back landing-roof with the likes of that Cartoon Tom, cuddly Christine warming herself in a negligee at the radiator between sessions used to beckon and call soothingly: "Come here, cute Timmy Baby, come! You lovely, Pussy-Boy!" She must have heard my name in very high places for I was a very famous cat already then in the fifties!) Right at that moment, a Rolls Royce rolled down the slope leading into the back alley, and an helmeted bobby waved his baton in my face. I managed to get out of that muddle by following the smell of stale fish curry emanating from the Malaya Hall kitchen.

To those who haven’t an idea of what this "lodge" (pardon the expression): the three-storey double (that is, two normal houses with of course two entrances) lodging house could be like, imagine a college in a Red-brick university, replete with English Warden (Mr. Osborne, a former, according to the-best-of-accounts, Imperial Indian Army colonel), and Irish Housekeeper (Miss Trotter). Under their supervision laboured several Malay (including one Indian Muslim lady) assistants, and one Hungarian-Jew refugee caretaker who also exercised the eminent profession of physiotherapist on the premises, mostly on Malaysians [term to include down-under Tumasik Sinkehs as well] tired of eating the same fare week after week, prepared by a mixture of Malay chefs and European lady assistants. The personnel "lodged" (sorry again, the word keeps coming back despite the care I exercise; forgive me for sometimes all the paw-licking I do gets in the way of my memory. How? Well, I don’t quite see why this should interest you! Guess I’m not a very civil cat, eh?) in an adjunct back quarters facing the back alley where Miss Christine Keeler exercised her charms on the British Cabinet most nights.

The dining-room and "great" hall were in the basement. The ground-floor was taken up by the Warden’s office, opposite the reception; the general toilet, the library (actually a small room with the always locked glass book cases, banked against one free wall without the door or fire-place, containing some official government publications, and an ample mahogany table that took up most of the floor and around which muggers mainly for Bar exams chatted away while looking at the birds through two open windows walking past on the pavement or idling alongside prams in the always wet, scrub-or-bush-filled closed garden in the middle of the Square. The second house’s less-frequented entrance led to a hall which was seldom in use, for one had to get the permission of the Warden to enter this well-guarded domain. A notice board in the stair-well proclaimed the occasional event in the premises.

Tubby M. Tharmalingam (Victorian class of 1946 and elder brother of Dato’ Dr. M. Shanmughalingam), Imperial College engineering student who married Home Affairs (& later Deputy Prime) Minister Tun Ismail’s sister, once organized a yelling session with K. M. Panniker, the famous Keralite-Indian diplomat, sporting a Lenin-ized-goatee beard, in there. In our story, it became the venue for the MSU elections-booth! There were toilets and bathrooms at every turn and on every floor. One thing that was never in short supply: sizzling hot water, which was often enough given so much free rein, you would think when you came out of the lift in the stair-well that you were entering a Turkish Bath! And you were not far wrong either: the central heating system was turned on full-blast almost all through the year! To think of the uses one could put paid-up tax money to!

There were only a few rooms on the ground-floor, all meant for "official" use. The handsomely boyish-looking but authoritative Zain Azraai, Class of 1951, later an eminent Victorian: the late Ambassador to the USA and the UN, Secretary of the Treasury, and Chairman of Malaysian Airways, occupied the room between the library and the warden’s office. His genial father Zainal Abidin had been the Director of the Drainage and Irrigation Department, and whose office was suspended in the middle of one of the General Post Office spiral-stair towers in K.L during the mid-fifties. "Zain" had then become a foreign serviceman, while learning French and diplomacy at the London School of Economics and dining for the Bar at the same time, that is, after coming down from Oxford where he did a P.P.E. (Politics-Philosophy-Economics) degree. Zain oozed confidence all the time. Except for official occasions when he immaculately attired himself out in Hector Powe suits, he was always neatly dressed in a black blazer, light-blue shirt, Oxford-something tie, dark brown flannels, and strictly shining well-heeled leather shoes. From behind heavy dark horn-rimmed glasses under well-Bryl-creamed straight dark hair parted on the left, his eyes held the cool his position demanded, and his cool cultivated cultured Oxford tones soon earned him the admiration of all, though none dared call him friend, except for a cute tiny Chinese girl with long flowing silky black hair. He was the President of the MSU in 1958 and ruled over a committee that only sparked into existence during Deepavali celebrations in October, or when some dignitary from KL dropped in on official business.

He was accompanied in this training-tour by Selangor javelin champion K. T. Ratnam, (PSC Class of 1952), who could easily have passed for a Spaniard, and not just because of his fair complexion; he held the post of information assistant to Inche Mohd. Sopiee (supposedly Tunku’s adopted son) at the Malayan High Commission branch at Trafalgar Square. "K.T." (pronounced "Katy" as he was familiarly called) of course didn’t live at the hall: he occupied a posh flat near Baker Street, which he shared for a while with K.J. (pronounced "Kajay"; PSC Class of 1953), his younger brother, then come down from Seattle after his M.A., on a Singapore-funded scholarship, to do a Ph.D. on Malayan communal politics at London University, but later Katy barricaded himself in a flat in Bayswater, close to Ceylon House where a good many Malaysians (or Xin Jia Po-Malayans) dined when the Malaya Hall menu featured lamb or pork chops for the pièce de resistance. Ceylon House food prepared by Singhalese cooks tasted infinitely better to Malayan Indians. Every dish flowered with coconut shavings while sauces lavishly wallowed in coconut-milk. Little wonder then Indo-Lankan-Malayans were infarction-prone! One might say that if Singhalese cooks served the Tamil freedom fighters in Sri Lanka, the civil war there could be infarcted overnight! I’m talking of the time extending from about 1955 to 1959, mind you, when I was the Official Malaya Hall Cat, my main duties being to listen in on the gossip and to mew in amusement while giving myself a thorough cat-lick!

The presence of Malaya Hall in the town centre created a sort of Malaya-Singapore residential zone in the vicinity. Students without scholarships (rooms at MH were mainly – though not necessarily - meant for people on government-funded sojourns in the UK) therefore found digs nearby so that they could dine/whallop so-called Malayan chow for just half-a-crown (two shillings and six pence) at a time. The rule was that you paid for the main dish, and then you could help yourself to as much as you could swallow of the rest, which included rice, sweets (unless the place was invaded by Malayans or Singaporeans bringing in their big-eating Swiss, Swedish, and German girl-guests after hectic activity), coffee, tea, milk, butter, jam, bread, fruit of all kinds and so forth. Some of the lads from outside lived on, say, three half-crowns a week; they stuffed themselves with enough of the extras to live out the lean days, between 1956 and 1958, for ever since Britain was forced to grant the Federation of Malaya its independence, nearly two million unemployed roamed the streets of London and other provincial towns and fought over remnants flung out every night from hotel kitchens into rubbish bins. I was told – vicariously of course - that to know what real misery was, you didn’t have to be born in some slum in Singapore or kampung in Kangar. Students therefore mostly lived either up the cheaper Edgware Road leading up to the Finchley Road area or in the enormous rectangle bordered by Bayswater Road (the extension of Oxford Street, the longest street in the capital), Notting Hill Gate-Queensbury, Paddington, and naturally Edgware Road. One street however running close up from Edgware Road: the Upper Berkeley Street took in Malaysian boys and girls, especially at the Masons’ Arms pub end, right in front of an enormous Lodge (so now I see why the word kept intruding in my memory since I used to go there to ease myself on the finely-cut solid stone culverts!).

Much of the following info comes directly from the library, whereas most of the above chat from the Masons’ Arms, which explains why the above stuff is a bit disjointed. I get about quite a lot for a cat. Sometimes as far as the Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, right opposite the Cumberland Hotel and the corner Lyons Self Service, with Marble Arch standing firmly in the middle of the traffic junction on Oxford Street. So here goes:

One Malaya Hall fixture was a permanently lean, swarthy, intermittent clerk at the Maidavale Inland Revenue department in Baker Street (a small pebble’s throw from MH), a permanent scar staring at you from his forehead over always reddened doleful eyes, an erstwhile horse-racing reporter for the Malay Mail; granted special access to the upstairs floor of the Masons’ Arms even when it was closed to the public, he seemed to occupy some kind of special position amongst the local Malaysians and the Malayan Students Unit. He was supposed to be a clerk but apparently did no clerking! He was always going up, and then down, to the pub and back. He, too, was supposed to be reading for the Bar, I don’t mean the other bar, of course! He was well-connected to one Inche Harun bin Idris, later Selangor Menteri Besar (1964) and Chairman of UMNO Youth (1971), the top-ranking Malayan at MSUnit which was the official administrative body for student affairs. Government sponsored visitors and scholarship holders all connected with them on arrival and found all sorts of assistance in settling down, payment of per diems and that sort of thing. It was then headed by a Mr. Baker, a kind, understanding sort of person, who had served in the colonial administrative service, if I’m not mistaken in Kelantan as well. Some law students from Singapore, always on the lookout for I don’t know what at the entrance to MH, and always on the ready to rag any newcomer, some of the most un-bankrupt-able info-sources, who later became High Court judges only to recede into private practice later, often found temporary or part-time employment in the MSUnit. Some guys whispered that those who worked for the MSUnit were actually "Malaya-Singapore Usurpers" or "M-S Undercutters" or something like that! But I think that’s because they were simply " jes jealous, lah!"

The Malayan Forum boys, all ferocious Singapore PAP supporters, courted only their own company. The placid and jovial Joe Manuel Pillay; the strictly genial and courteous Tang, the chartered accountant; the tall, diffident and chubby Chuah; the self-assured, sociable but circumspect Dr. Lee Suan Yew, younger brother to you-know-whom; the staid, unsmiling and smug-looking Padmanaban, a London University law degree-holder; they were all there in the lounge listening to BBC reports of the 1959 Singapore elections, and the whoopies! they produced that day! had me in a daze. Couldn’t catch a cat-nap at all in the lounge! From that day onwards, the Malayan Forum became a sort of secret society. Every one in there belonged to a special club, for they knew they were assured of a staunch and smooth future in the island republic to come. Two curious absolutely non-political islanders: the jovial and talkative Edward Lam and the serious and troubled-looking Phillip Williams! Edward later became a Supreme Court judge in Brunei, I heard, but I’ll not put my bottom sen on that. Phillip also did an LL.B. at London U., but he struggled with himself almost daily, not knowing whether life was worth living as a lawyer. He slept on the floor for months in Edward’s room, always managing to get out before the girls arrived to do the beds in the mornings. I heard this story from a very reliable source, and Zut! I’m not telling! Phillip was constantly wracked by spiritual doubts; so he read Hindu Philosophy by Hiriyana, lent by a certain Whacky [more on him further down] and entered into serious discussions with the latter and questioned him about Buddhism. Whacky used to visit the Buddhist Vihara in Gloucester Road. At that time, Phillip lived at the British Council hostel in Knightsbridge, and they used to take long walks in Hyde Park. Suddenly, on the eve of his final LL.B. exams, he wanted to abandon everything to become a monk! It took a lot of subtle persuading for him to accept the reason for taking (and passing) his exams. The last Whacky heard of the sensitively pensive Phillip was that he did finally become a Buddhist monk in Japan! He was a character similar in scope and depth to the hero of Somerset Maugham’s Razor’s Edge !

So to get back to the story, Malaya Hall soon became an Inn (or even Temple) like one of the Inns of Court School of Law at Holborn where one dined to become barristers. Everybody tried to become a lawyer in those days, for it was rumoured if you got called to the Bar, a red-carpet boulevard opened up in front of you leading to the higher echelons of political power. Post-war political history doesn’t disprove this dictum. To get admitted to Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, Inner Temple, and Middle Temple, you didn’t need A-levels; just a school-leaving something or other, and a recommendation from the Federation’s Director of Education certifying you were "a gentleman of honour and means" and pay a deposit fee of a hundred guineas. That’s all! Then you were required to keep terms for three academic years, each year made up of Michaelmas, Trinity, and what’s that other term called? Attendance at lectures which were dispensed at Lincoln’s Inn – a high cathedral-like drab and desolate fifteenth or thirteenth century solid structure, replete with gargoyles and grapevines or what looked like that and which was not designed to be centrally-heated for in those days lawyers were also obviously knights who wore solid all-in-one-piece armour, of course – wasn’t compulsory; in any case, if you attended any one of them, you attended them all, for the simple reason you heard nothing that was taught, owing to a missing gene – that which conditioned acoustics - in the architects of those crusading Middle Ages.

So Malaysians paid for private tuition. Famous houses running courses: Gibson & Weldon in Chancery Lane; Rapid Results College (rapidity guaranteed but not the results), correspondence courses from Oxford, and other private-tutor chambers, like Hart’s Chambers where students like M. Shankar (Class of 1951: Rodger Scholar), whose father Mahadev was the private secretary to the Chief Justice in Malaya before Independence, were privately tutored from eight to five, five days a week, until they got through come hell or brimstone! The only requirement for Bar students, I’m given to understand, was that the student was compelled to keep terms by dining! This is of such capital importance for lawyers that I’m going to give you the menu at one of the law Inns. Why? Now imagine you passed your Final Bar Exam with First Class Honours (though, except for one former Malay Attorney-General Abdul Kadir, no-one then ever managed such a feat.) In those days, only two guys from Singapore, both called Gunaratnam, managed to get Second Class Honours. One Guna, solidly-built, tough-talking and always helmeted motor-bike rider, studied while working at City Hall! but, unfortunately, Poor Guna didn’t have the luck to use his brains which he almost lost in an accident and now vegetates in Johor.

The other Gunaratnam, who lodged at the Knightsbridge British Council hostel, a kindly middle-aged soul who broke off his teaching career to do law was not given to gossiping, and that’s probably why he did so well. Greying full-shock of bristly hair crowding his almost-always sleepless eyes betrayed by puffy cheeks, he was always looking for ways to encourage the younger Malayan apprentice-Turks of the Bar. All to no purpose!

The rest: Third Class loyar-buroks. Do you think you could start off as a barrister-at-law after passing then? Wrong. You had to have three years of dining-terms under your belt, and only then you could get "called". Be one of the Chosen Few! Savvy? There were about three weeks of dining days in each term, and you had to dine cloaked in a black cape [if you don’t know what this looks like, think of an Araucanian pontho or an Inca poncho; okay, never mind! think of a sarong tied to your neck, and you’ve got it!] and mortar-board, with your fellow-students, seasoned barristers, law professors, members of the Bench and distinguished invitees, like Princess Margaret, for three nights each term.

Now for the menu: Each dinner commenced to loud floor staff-rapping "Oye! Oye!"s with a soup (often a thick pea or a thin chicken noodle soup: I wouldn’t for the life of me touch it even with my wet paw though, for you could hardly see the noodles in it!) which you had to ladle up with a silver spoon specially designed in the 16^th century for Gargantua and Pantagruel, a main dish of either roast beef or lamb chop with French beans and baked potatoes, a sweet like rice pudding, together with a glass of Porto or white bouquet-less wine, costing you three guineas! For that money, down old Campbell Road stalls you could dine, without cape or sword, for a trimester with your entire family, pets and lovers included! You could take the Bar exams three times a year, and it did not matter how many times you failed. Since the Tunku was supposed to have taken twenty-five years to get "called", other prospective lawyers (meaning all) with the premiership in view, tried to emulate him! Some government scholars however just dined and got called and were whisked back at the tax payers’ expense to occupy top seats and dine in grand style forever after! More about this – who knows – later on! But, ssshhhh! keep this under your topi for the moment!

So to cut the story short, MH became with time the Bar Inn for Malaysians studying law in London. Only trouble was that for some it even became a casino! Other students had to go for lectures and other extra-curricular activities as soon as breakfast was over, and the kitchen supplied these industrious students with packed sandwiches as tiffin in lieu of lunch. Doctors came to take their final part two F.R.C.S., M.R.C.P. or M.R.C.O.G. and so forth exams at - of all places - the Royal College of Surgeons in the Lincoln’s Inn fields, and some of them like Leong Chee Kong (Class of 1950, Rodger Scholar) made it a point of staying at the British Council hostel in Knightsbridge, behind Harrods. Ronnie McCoy (Class of 1948, Rodger Scholar) came breezing into MH once and then shot out like a wau in a gale. Others had to go for their piano and/or violin virtuoso lessons at the Royal College of Music or to study nudes at the Slade School of Art, or pout My Fair Lady tunes at the School of Speech and Drama, etc., and you didn’t see them at MH but at dinner time. So the place was monopolised by Bar students and many attended the poker sessions raging in some room or other among Chinese students exclusively, with the exception of one big-boned, plethoric and bloated Jaffnese Tamil, otherwise a nice guy really, whose father sent telegraphic remittances overnight in answer to frantic telegrams to make up for his losses.

I was once picked up by an English girl in the corridor on the second floor at about 11 a.m. sharp when she came out of the toilet, and since she caressed me with soothing words I didn’t resist being taken into a private double-room. When the door closed behind me, I tried with all my might – honestly, no kidding here – to get out at all cost but I’m afraid the girl wouldn’t let go of me. I think she fancied me! I didn’t realise until much later that she wanted me with her to caress for she was feeling lonely, the poker session in the room had been going on non-stop since nine the previous evening. Around a small table sat three Chinese lads and the Jaffnese Tamil. At any one time, something like sixty or seventy pounds sterling (you needed only twenty-five pounds a month to survive in those days) lay in a heap beside beer bottles and trays filled with ash and stubs. Oily white paper wrappers with the soggy remains of fish and chips and corned-beef littered the floor. When I entered, hugged close to the bosom of the girl, nobody even stirred. Such was their concentration, they could have passed with flying colours any exam if only they devoted just one fraction of their attention to subjects like Real Property or Private International Law. What got me was the stench. The windows were kept lowered and bolted. Smoke replaced both oxygen and carbon dioxide. You could have thought you stepped absent-mindedly into the Guys and Dolls book or into the screen version of The Incorruptibles on Al Capone! So now you know, to concentrate fill your room with cigar or better-still M-smoke and stay awake all night!

I was going into the library from the stairways leading to the canteen for a long-needed snooze at the hearth (there was only the usual thick-skinned mackerel for dinner that night) when I heard my name mentioned, followed by hilarious laughter. Naturally, I was concerned for my reputation! Being a cat didn’t mean you humans could get away with running the feline race down within ear-shot of a minority of one! The voices emanated from the queue forming for dinner tickets. At a small desk placed on the landing a shortish, roundish, ball-headed British writer who went by the name of Dickins sat and sold tickets to mostly over-fed Malaysians. And he was even paid a salary for that! He surveyed everyone as though he was from Scotland Yard. Normally, he had a high, heavy old-time Remington typewriter on the table as well. He was writing the biography of some Irish writer. I heard him tell Singapore Brando, an erstwhile Singapore journalist, that he founded the Poetry London magazine before the War, together with the quite talented and enterprising Ceylonese poet-editor Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu. Phew! I unloaded that in one go! Since then I wasn’t very keen on meeting up with the latter ten-poem poet who claimed he was an hereditary real-life prince from Jaffna (the dynasty’s last known royal family, mind you, was beheaded by the Portuguese, after having been taken to Goa in 1619-20 and been given the choice of life through conversion to Catholicism first) while also claiming to be the nephew of the renowned and respected art historian and philosopher Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (the latter’s surviving son denies any relationship whatsoever), though he did make for himself a formidable name as the "Prince of Fitzrovia" among the London war-weary literati. (Fitzrovia being a collection of pubs in the Russell Square to Soho area where famous writers and poets met less famous women every evening to drink themselves numb while intoning New-(Old)-Verse [barring Dylan Thomas and the like] till they became stone(d)-deaf and had to be evacuated before closing time.)

Oh yes, Singapore Brando! He was a curious character. At first, his entire ambition was limited to publishing an article in the Reader’s Digest. But, unfortunately for him, ever since he saw Brando in a T-shirt in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ Street Car Named Desire shouting out for his screen wife Stella from down the stairs (I must say, physically there was nevertheless the faintest likeness possible), he decided Brando resembled him, so he sported only T-shirts with the sleeves sing-sing over tightly-pinching pants, with an On the Water Front black leather jacket slung casually around his shoulders. All his mannerisms: the way he stood, the way he talked, like Brando’s Mark Antony in Julius Ceasar making his funeral oration over the latter’s punctured body, the way he waved his hands, all became branded with the Brando style in Hollywood films. And when he saw Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata, that was the end: he fancied himself taking Singapore first, then Malaya, then Thailand, then China itself with the populations following him en bloc! You remember the scene when Emiliano Zapata (Marlon Brando) with his hands tied behind him, rope round his neck, led by the dictator Porfiro Diaz’s mounted police through Indian maize fields? And the peasants - to the solitary beat of drums rising to a crescendo - crowded out the police. And then Brando cried: "Cut", that is, the telegraph wires, and the 1911 Mexican Revolution was launched! That’s it, that was his innermost dream! He must have imagined himself, every night, standing on a Singapore bridge, right arm raised in an L over his shoulder, crying out: "CUT!" And when he realised that neither Lee nor Mao were likely to budge an inch, he decided he would become their eminence grise! So, he took to reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Existentialism? and attended evening classes to learn Greek and Latin while taking an external degree at LSC. Here, too, the competition being rather rough, he decided to join one or the other of the British MIs, both for all I know (this must be due to the Guys and Dolls & Godfather Brando influence) in order to put the screws on all Malaysians whom he imagined could have stood in the way of his becoming the ALL-ASIAN Brando, the five-star intellectual-novelist and revolutionary-philosopher!

So, as I was saying, I heard my name mentioned, followed by laughter.

"Who’s going to be the next president?" said one necktied law student in the queue for dinner. He probably hurried back hungry from having dined at the Inns of Court.

"Tim!" came the cool straight-faced answer from the guy in front of him. The entire line of diners at MH guffawed and giggled. The giggling continued unabated when I turned to look, feeling rather abashed and even abased, my status as the "Official MH Cat" taking quite a bashing. I took that as an affront. I didn’t want to be the President or King of any nation or any association which was totally defunct like the MSU. I’d rather be the Treasurer of a Swiss Bank. At least, I can get my cut on the quiet. No, me, I was for democracy with a capital D. Then, my attention was arrested by one guy who didn’t laugh. I had seen him coming for dinner two or three times a week, and he would carefully put away all the extras until closing time. He was one of the "three half-crowners" I spoke of earlier on. He had a dirty long light brown raincoat on, and from under which could be seen a pair of frayed striped trousers and worn-down hush-puppies. And sticking out from his two pockets, I could see he was reading the paperback versions of A. J. Ayer’s The Problem of Knowledgeand J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. His lacklustre hair was hardly groomed as though he had passed the night at the Euston Station waiting-room without more than a used tube ticket in his pocket, and a three or four-day old stubble grazed his sharp chin and lean cheeks. There was a dreamy look about him. I recognized him. He was the guy who organized the film shows and the concerts for the Deepavali celebrations the previous two years, but he wasn’t a member of MSU. How’s that? I can’t say why. I noticed he would – when he came in – adjourn to the TV room where he would warm up until about 11.15 p.m. Then he would rush out. I once followed a Siamese cross she-cat which was in the habit of passing Bryanston Square around that time. And when I caught up with her under the Marble Arch, I saw this guy rush into Hyde Park by a side-entrance just when they were closing the main gates at the Speakers’ Corner end, and the bobbies began their patrol rounds in twos. He was one of the million or so unemployed in London, I heard "Ponna" say.

"Who’s Tim?" he asked quietly and pulled on the sleeve of the guy who first made a joke of me.

"What? Tim, donno ah?" He laughed even louder and pointed at me just standing there on the landing looking like one of the drenched pariah cats struggling to get a fish-bone in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. The whole incident had the effect of a severe beating my ego might have sustained if it was exposed in the nude. Me? The president of the MSU for 1959. I know of better fates than that! "Anyway, Tim or Tom, we can make anyone President. Vote anyone in!" I was even more hurt by the inclusion of that tinsel Tom into the comparison.

Then, this guy that everybody called "Whacky" stood for a few moments silently until the derisive laughter died down. Then he said, a sense of resolve entering his usually saddened face: "Over my dead body!" His voice lent a sort of soft cutting steel to every word. Everybody stared at him out of curiosity. They knew who he was. Then they burst out laughing again. Dickins joined them in the merriment. He didn’t quite like Whacky: he was used instead to the company of posh princes who had nothing else to do but write poetry.

[The stage is set; the players are in place. Only other players and their lines are yet to come! If action be the life of drama, then strike up the band and play on!]

To be continued…..

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