The smells of my kampung in Jay Bee

Opinion  |  Azly Rahman

Published: Today 3:30 am  |  Modified: Today 3:30 am

   

COMMENT | I am the city and the village and the house that I inhabit. I am what I am from the history that shaped me, including if the city is stinky and whether I grew up amongst those who died gangsta high in the hippie sixties. I spoke their language and learned how they have lived or not lived their lives. Had I been one of them, I would not have lived to tell you this story. In America where I had never dreamed I’d end up.

I get my mental libido, amongst divine sources, through language. It structures my inner reality. That is the beauty of imagining what each word looks like and means in my ‘mind’s eye’.

As a child, I was fascinated with words. As in the character in Jean Paul Sartre’s story, Nausea, I’d sit in the bus, look out of the window, and get high first on the rugged and gangsta lullabying motion of the monstrous vehicle that was the T Hakim bus service in my village, or the Johor-Singapore Express from the sinfully smelly town of Johor Baru to the Rochor Centre in Singapore.

I’d read the words on signboards, read billboards, read name of streets.

Sitting here now in my library amongst a few thousand books, a billion words, I’d close my eyes at times to go back to my life in a drug-infested Malay kampung in the sinful, smelly town of Jay Bee. In the high-on-pills ‘pil khayal’ Seventies. Of the Tasek Utara protest to a soundtrack of Deep Purple and the Rolling Stones.

Johor Baru of the Seventies was the stinkiest, smelliest, sweatiest city in Malaysia. The bus station smelled like a concoction of petrol and piss. Of dust and dung and people walking around like mutating Americans in denim.

Ah, her river of life - the Segget River (above) – smells like rotten eggs, budu (fermented anchovies paste), cincalok (fermented krill), kimchi and old Swiss cheese altogether to give Johor Baru, and its politics, that stinky, rotteny, cheesy, pungent stink.

The kind of stink described in Sasterawan Negara Shahnon Ahmad’s great Malay late 1980s post-modern novel, Shit, written about that stinking period in our history.

But names ease the stink, and I love names. The names of people in my kampung. The names of friends and elders.

Apa nama? What's your name?

Abong. Abu. Mat Kempong, Mat Lambong, Engeh. Mat Lantok. Mak Embon. Mak Piah. Mak Arah. Mak Som. Haji Leman. Haji Lihin. Pak Itam. Mak Itam. Mak Tekah. Mak Bone. Mak Embon. Mak Minah. Mak Munah. Kak Jah. Kak Ros. Kak Noi. Pak Ya Tukang Rumah. Pak Haji Dolah Daging Lembu. Pak Bilal. Pak Mudim. Pak Man Burung. Pak Mamek. Pak Man Porres (Osman who worked with the Forestry Department). Pak Ali Asko (Ali the Army man).

Pak Man Batman (the shopkeeper who looked like Batman). Petom (raped by the huge water pipe that ran from Johor to Singapore and got pregnant). Adik Petom (Petom’s sister, later raped as well). Bhai Roti. (the Bengali man in a flowing dhoti who sold freshly-baked bread on a WWII German-Army-looking motorbike).

Names of people with stories to tell me. And with their names and stories, I am going to rap and rhyme, and tell stories of my days in the Sixties in Sin City, Jay Bee.

(Note: This is an edited version of the preface for Azly Rahman's forthcoming memoir.)