Those were the days…growing up in the best kampung in Malaysia

 

I was born in the best kampung in Malaysia, and I can prove it.

My kampung, Permatang Damar Laut, lies in the southeast of Penang island, flanked by two hills covered by jungles, and in the midst of rubber plantations, wild berries and orchards that have some of the best durians in Penang, which by definition mean some of the best durians in Malaysia.

A small stream ran at the foot of each hill, on which grew nutmegs. The poor Chinese farmers tried to deter naughty Malay boys from stealing the fruit by hanging freshly slaughtered pigs’ heads. It worked at first, but then, well, what are boys supposed to do when they come across fruit trees?

The hills dipped into a shallow bay, teeming with fish. Fishermen, working solo, would get off their boats and wade into the sea with a seine net and pull it ashore. With the net trailing in the water, the fishermen resembled monitor lizards, or biawaks, hence this type of fishing technique became known as “pukat biawak”.

Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

Across the bay are two islands. Pulau Rimau – Tiger Island – to the east is at the southern entrance of the shipping channel into Penang port, in the days before the Penang Bridge effectively closed that route. It has a lighthouse, though no tigers, and some of our kampung folk had jobs as lighthouse keepers there.

To the west and further out is the uninhabited Pulau Kendi – kendi being Malay for pitcher which the island (half) resembles. It has clear water and lots of fish, though it’s said to have lots of ghosts too, on account of it being remote enough for people to cast away their unwanted spirits there.

Talking about ghosts, I grew up with them. They do everything from guarding property to harming people, if you believe the stories. The dangerous ones were supposedly unleashed by Siamese shamans – “bomoh Siam” – a term that sends chills down everyone’s spine.

The beach was then lined with mangroves and were fertile breeding grounds for fish, mollusks, crustaceans and other sea creatures. The mangrove trees were harvested for timber, charcoal and construction piling. There were stingrays of up to 10 or 20kg to be found among the muddy mangroves.

The beach had seaward-facing concrete forts built by the Brits (or perhaps the Japanese) to defend the airfield in Bayan Lepas from a sea invasion. Most have crumbled into the sea due to erosion, in spite of the many groynes built to prevent it.

One day an undiscovered and buried WW2 mortar exploded when somebody set up a stove to cook a wedding feast over it, causing some injuries.

I’ve eaten turtle eggs laid by sea turtles. Some were dug up by my father who, upon retiring, walked the beach most mornings. One turtle even came right up and dug a hole under somebody’s stilt house, and was almost sold for food until it was pointed out that you’d get arrested for killing it.

We would see dolphins in the sea, and the occasional dead one washed up ashore. Once every few decades or so a whale carcass would also wash up ashore, probably killed by the propellers of the many ships entering or leaving Penang port. That would create excitement for months.

So, too, the occasional ship or boat sinking in the sea. There’s a wreck visible from ashore even today. A small private aircraft crashed into the sea in the late sixties, and police and rescuers and even a helicopter landing on the beach created a memorable day.

In 2004, the Aceh tsunami damaged many houses on the waterfront and caused some injuries but no deaths, even if elsewhere Penang lost 52 lives. The mud from the tsunami even reached my home’s front yard. The sea water killed the lawn and it took years before the grass grew back.

Even until recently, we had deaths from fishermen who didn’t come back from the sea. We also had deaths from people eating poisonous horseshoe crabs. In earlier times, falling off trees – coconut or chempedak trees especially – were killers too, as were the occasional snake bites. The “bomoh Siam” were often blamed for these.

The kampung lies on a series of ridges where houses are built on the elevated parts. The low-lying parts were marshy and swampy, full of nipah palms, fighting fish and snakes especially in areas not yet drained for vegetable farming or pig breeding.

The nipah palm fronds were turned into thatched roofs for our houses. The spines of the roof were made of the slit trunks of the areca nut palm (pokok pinang, from which Penang got its name). The areca nut itself is chewed with betel leaf as a mild stimulant. It’s also carcinogenic, which we didn’t know then.

The nipah palms also produced delicious bunches of fruits which looked like tiny coconuts. Its sap, as well as the sap from its cousin the coconut trees, were used to make palm sugar or brewed into toddy. In those days, Penang had special government-run toddy shops, though not in my village.

The far end of the swamps were levelled into padi fields that stretched for miles until they were taken over by factories and houses. The padi fields were lined with irrigation canals with lots of fish, but living in a coastal village, we only ate seafood and never developed a taste for freshwater fish.

We had lots of wild pandan plants and cashew trees. The pandan fronds, after treatment, were woven into mats.

Coconut trees were everywhere, including one each for me and my siblings, planted when we were born as was the Malay custom of those days. The coconut trees were harvested every 40 days or so. We’d ask the Indian coconut-tree climbers to bring down young coconuts from our favourite trees; they would bite on the stems of the nuts and climb down with them so that the coconuts didn’t fall to the ground and split.

Some parts of the kampung had deep pits where coral was dug up and burned in a big kiln and turned into slaked lime, or kapor. My part of the village was called Permatang Bakar Kapor for this reason. Lorry loads of empty clamshells from seafood restaurants were brought in to supplement the kiln when the pits ran out of coral.

I’ve experienced rice farming, I’ve followed my mother to tap rubber and collect herbs and firewood, I’ve helped at the food, vegetable and fish stalls and sundry shops that my parents operated at one time or another, I’ve tended durian orchards, and I’ve caught pit vipers that we sold to the nearby Snake Temple in Bayan Lepas for two ringgit each.

For more money we’d sell venomous snakes such as cobras to my brother-in-law who worked at the Penang General Hospital herpetarium where they produced antivenin. We sold them non-venomous snakes, too, that they fed to the cobras. Most of the time, when we saw snakes, we’d just whack first and ask questions later.

TO BE CONTINUED…

 -FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.