A MEMOIR ;WHEN I WAS 9 NO. 1

MY LIFE-HISTORY

Borned from a poor and rural family in the disrict of Sik , Kedah. Life was then very harsh for the family as I was born at the time when the Japanese invaded Malaya . My poor mother and father had to work hard as food was scarce . As everybody knows the Japanese confiscated anything for their own use ……..especially rice . My family had no choice but to eat tapioca cooked with leaves collected from the forest . Since small my diet was either mashed roasted bananas or ubi torak rebus . And I presumed most of the babies in the village ate that too.Yeah, I was brought-up in that kampong , far in the jungle . The jungle life I got made me more or less like “ Kunta-Kinte” . The jungle was a “city” by itself . The experience of jungle life made me experts in certain fields . I can collect leaves , roots , shoots of trees that can be eaten .I could trap pelandok easily , I was able to catch them alive through a special method of drumming the ground. The pelandok will come jumping and dancing ,thinking that it was King Solomon’s beating the drum . Nowadays no way I can catch them . There are no more pelandoks . Everyday climbing up trees was a must . Then jumping down using the akar kayu like what the Tarzan used to do . Most fathers and mothers never bothered their children daily activities . The jungle was our playground . We too played football . We kicked pameloes all over through shrubs and bushes . Of course barefooted..I cannot remember how the hell I was sent to school . I was a good scholar . I never skip attending school. I liked attending school. It was here that I learned to ‘love’ school teachers . And teachers ‘love’ me too . I often brought presents to my teachers . Mostly fruits of the jungle . Petai is no acceptional . My teachers also like buah lemba . It is a magic fruit : If you eat buah lemba , the plain water that you drink gets sweeter . Daily I walked about 2 kilometers to school , through the deep jungle…….half-way naked because I had to cross through padi fields.After which had to wash myself in the river……..from mud and what not….at that time we had no books , only slate ( a computer during those years)