MEMOIR: Early years, #1, Watching Malay men turn into horses

I grew up roaming around the Malay village exploring a world rich in cultural tradition, immersed in the sight, sound, and sensibilities of many worlds of tradition. One vivid memory was watching for hours till late midnight the Malay dance of trance called the "Kuda Kepang"; a mystically-inspired dance form of the Hindu-Buddhist tradition brought to Johor. I remembered being mesmerized by the dance form and psyched up and stoned by the trance music as well as the incense-smelling smoke that filled the air. The dancers, mostly male started the dance conscious and ended up sub-conscious, being possessed by the spirit of horses. Hence it was called "tarian kuda kepang" At the end of the dance, a few of them went really haywire and started to ram into the audience. The guru (chief trance-inducer) of the dance appeased the dancers by feeding the, with petals of different flowers. They devoured the petals like hungry horses.

In the Malay kampong where I grew up, there were enclaves of Javanese, Bugis, Bawean, and those of Indonesian origin. The kampong as I clearly remembered had houses that were far away from each other and I was told that there were also tigers roaming. It was a newly established Malay village; perhaps whose origin is as old as the days of British Malaya.

The place where I was born, Singapore was an exciting "other world" where in my later growing up years became another place of exploration of modernity:

Singapore in 1966...



Singapore in 1938...