Excerpts from 'A Malaysian Journey' [© 1993 Rehman Rashid. Used
with special permission from author]
Taken from Chapter 6 (page 77-85, 91-94).
by
Rehman Rashid
I
had had an uneventful childhood; I had been a quiet, bookish child.
My father had led a peripatetic career as a teacher (which was why
he hadn’t been present at my birth), and he had taken his young
family with him to successive postings across the length and breadth
of the Malayan Peninsula. And it was a growing family; my two brothers
were born, at three-year intervals, in Johor Baru at the peninsula’s
southern tip, and in Kuala Krai in the interior of Kelantan, where
my mother’s equally mobile family had come to a temporary rest. Eventually
my father had received what would be the last posting of his abbreviated
life, as a senior lecturer at the Language Institute in Kuala Lumpur.
It was in our house
in Kuala Lumpur, on a dark and rainy night in 1967, that my father
first spoke to me about my future. I was twelve years old then, in
Standard Six of primary school; the next year, I would be moving on
to secondary school. My father had always been a fairly remote figure
to his three young sons; stern and affectionate in equal measure,
but still remote. Much, much later, I would console myself with the
thought that he had been saving himself for later in our lives, when
we were out our infancy and could understand more of his strong and
complex personality
That night, my father
said to me: "The Malay College is not just any school. It is
the school." That’s about all I remember, although there
must have been more. I do remember not being sure what he was on about.
I knew that I would be sitting for the Malay College entrance examinations
very soon, and I was vaguely aware that this was a place, a big boarding
school way up in Kuala Kangsar, spoken of with much respect by my
teachers. But merely sitting for the exams was no big deal; practically
every Standard Six Malay boy in the country did so, and I had by no
means excelled in school so far. I usually made the top class, but
I was also usually at the bottom of that class. But here was my father
talking about the Malay College in a way that made me feel, for the
first time in my young life, that he actually had hopes for me. And
he went on: "You must take the Sciences. There is no future in
the Arts," What was this? "Sciences"? "Arts"?
I couldn’t even draw! And I was certainly no whiz at arithmetic.
The day of the entrance
exam came, and the four of us who were the only four Malay boys in
our primary school’s top class went to take it. Ghani and Azizi were
deadly serious about it; Muslini and I larked about. The other two
were always in the top five of our class; Muslini and I were usually
in the bottom five. Ghani and Azizi were the great hopes of our school,
which would apparently be honoured to send off a ward or two to the
Malay College; Muslini and I were there to make up the numbers.
So of course, when the
results came out a month or two later, Muslini and I made the cut
and the other two didn’t. Nobody could believe it, least of all Muslini
and me. I think Azizi cried. I went home a very happy kid that Friday.
My father was at home when I got there, reading the newspaper. "Papa,"
I said, struggling to keep the excitement from my voice. "I’ve
got the results. I passed. I have to report to Malay College on January
seventh." He didn’t even lower the paper "Good," he
said. Years later, my mother would tell me it was one of the proudest
moments of his life. He certainly fooled me then.
Five days into 1968,
my father bundled his wife and sons the car and set off on
the 200 kilometre drive north to Kuala Kangsar, a small, sleepy town
dozing by a bend of the River not far south of Taiping. For all its
somnolent torpor, Kuala Kangsar had a distinguished air about it:
it was the royal town of Perak, site of the Sultan’s Palace, and the
esteemed Malay College. The school was grand indeed: great
sprawling colonnaded buildings gazing serenely out upon vast green
playing fields. Even the College’s Prep School, the traditional clearing-house
for the school’s youngest charges, was a stately edifice, tucked away
on its own corner of the campus. The Malay College looked for all
the world like an upper-crust English public school, transplanted
brick for brick for Corinthian column from the vicinity of Eton or
Harrow, and that impression was indeed quite deliberate.
The Malay College had
been founded by the British in 1905 as a place in which the sons of
the Malay sultans could acquire the rudiments of a sound British education
before moving on to tertiary institutions in Britain itself. Early
in its history, its portals were opened to the sons of commoners as
well, provided they could make the entrance grade. (I might be charitable
here, and mention only in passing the possibility that not all of
Malaya’s royal princes were always keen on a Western education, and
the stem discipline considered an indispensable part of it at the
time.)
From the grooming of princelings the
College had turned to the creation of an "administrative elite"
for Malaya. It was intrinsic to the British scheme of things in Malaya
that the Malaya would administer the country on their behalf. This
is not to say that the other races were denied educational attention—other,
even more venerable, schools were already functioning in Kuala Lumpur
(the Victoria Institution, founded in 1890) and Penang (the Penang
Free School). But none were expressly reserved for the Malays alone,
and consequently there were relatively few Malays in any of them.
This was not due to a lack of ability, as the Malay College was to
be instrumental in proving, but of opportunity. Until well into the
20th Century, to be a Malay in higher education was to be a royal
Malay. The peasantry (and of course, this was long before the development
of anything like a Malay middle class) was virtually immobile.
The Malay College changed that, and by
the 1980s and 1940s had begun turning out the country’s first
Malay lawyers and men of letters. They would come to play a crucial
role in the genesis of Malay, and Malayan, nationalism, and many of
them would be intimately involved in the courtly dance of legalities
that would eventually result in the blueprint for Malayan Independence.
And more: Malaysia’s second prime minister, Abdul Razak Hussein, the
Tunku’s successor, of whom there will be more to tell, would be an
alumnus of the Malay College.
It was indeed a grand old school, and
its reputation was well deserved. My first impression, however, was
of bedlam: a horde of twelve-year-olds and what seemed to be their
entire extended families, seeking out their allotted bed-spaces in
the dormitories, being endlessly hugged by weeping mothers, grandmothers
and aunts. I was happy to find Muslini amidst the chaos, although
he seemed altogether too dazed to be coherent.
The day drew to an end; the families
were waved a tearful goodbye. We had our first mass meal in the dining
hall, in which were hung framed group photographs of the College’s
previous First-Form intakes, and were sent to our beds at nine. There
were ninety-two beds in the four dormitories of Prep School. Within
the soft white drapes of their brand-new mosquito nets, ninety-two
young boys fell asleep on their first night away from their homes
and families. From that day on, home would be a place we would only
visit on holidays. It was all for the best that we were utterly exhausted.
I awoke the next morning
in the Malay world, and it felt as if I had never so much as seen
it before in my life. I had never heard Malay spoken so naturally
and easily before. Mine had been an English-speaking upbringing, my
father had insisted on it, as that was the language that would "give
auto world". But here was the Malay world, and in all its diversity
of regional tones; Kelantanese in particular was a delight to the
ear, but virtually incomprehensible. This being North Perak, however,
most of us from the rest of the country would soon shade into the
particular patois of Northern Malay in our speech, adopting with ease
its rotund simplicites.
English remained, thankfully
for me, the medium of our instruction, as it had been throughout our
education so far. But soon after I went home for the first term holidays,
I overheard my father tell my mother, his voice thick with disgust,
‘You hear the boy? He sounds like a Sayong Malay!" (Sayong being
a decrepit little village buried amidst banana groves across the river
from Kuala Kangsar.)
I think he meant for
me to overhear the exchange, rather than address the point directly
to me. I think he understood that the damage done to my speech was
the result of a young boy’s effort to fit in with his peers in an
alien environment. My first months at Malay College had indeed been
difficult. I had never realized how un-Malay I looked. I was one of
the tallest among us, even at that age, my shoe size matched most
of their fathers’, and my various Indian bloodlines had unmistakably
manifested themselves in my facial features and complexion. Coupled
with my limited command of the Malay language, I was the butt of taunts
and sarcasm.
Once, at a meal-time,
one particularly vicious lad had gleefully emptied out half my cup
of black coffee and topped it up to the brim with soy sauce. Downing
the noxious concoction with unknowing gusto, I reacted in the expectedly
spectacular manner, spraying the walls with coffee, soy sauce and
spit. "There!" chortled that scum-sucking little baboon,
"Now you’ll be even blacker!"
I wasn’t the only one
mocked by the juvenile racists among us; this may have been the Malay
College, but this was also Malaysia, and more than a few of us betrayed
on our faces the Chinese or Indian elements of our ancestries. But
I was nonetheless one of the least "culturally Malay" all.
For there was something else that set me apart from others, and this
only the most irredeemable joked about- I didn’t know how to
pray.
I knew I was Muslim,
and I had taken some pride of identity in being so. But my instruction
in the faith of my forefathers had been largely left to an irregular
succession of mumbling religious teachers in primary school, and what
little I gathered from their lessons seemed mostly to do with ancient
Arabian history. They had instructed us in the Arabic script, and
I had earnestly traced the slithery curlicues and spirals into my
copybook—it was greatly more akin to drawing than writing. My father
had seemed pleased with those efforts, but he himself never played
much of a role in imparting to me the details of ritual and prayer,
beyond an annual trip to the mosque at the celebratory culmination
of the holy month of Ramadhan. Was he derelict in his duties as a
Muslim father? Enduring the humiliations of Prep School, I thought
so. But later I was to think not. I believe my father was again holding
himself in check until such time as I was old enough to understand
a glimmering of his own profound, numinous, almost mystical faith
in Islam. The ritual observances, with their mumbles and chants and
prostrations, were merely a mechanical underlay to the true transcendence
of the religion. He would leave it to the mechanics to drill me in
the a/if-ba-ta of it all, and come in to apply the vital finishing
touches when I was older.
But perhaps my father
underestimated my growing capacity for discernment. Even as a child
of eight or ten, I had found it well-nigh impossible to attend to
instructions delivered with a disregard for what all these arcane
sounds, these "‘ashaduillah"s and "bismitlah"s,
meant. This was lslam? Sounds? Snaky script and goateed
gurus? After the first few teachers had rebuffed my first curious
questions, I had simply ceased to pay attention to any of them.
And then it was all too
late. Six months after I’d gone to Malay College, in July 1968, eleven
days short of his thirty-ninth birthday, my father died.
My mother was widowed
at thirty-two. Alter a compassionate interval, she had to leave
our
quarters at the Language
Institute and make do as best she could for herself and my two brothers,
who were ten and seven respectively. She managed with such energy
and, ultimately, success, as to reveal the true depth and power of
a personality that had been hitherto held in abeyance to her husband’s.
But my father had lived long enough to have seen me to the Malay College,
and I had a new family, of sorts; certainly, a new scaffolding within
which to brace myself against loss.
When I returned to
Kuala Kangsar after the funeral, it was to find a quiet gift of sympathy
waiting for me. My father’s death had been reported in the newspapers,
and it had emerged to my schoolmates that he had been a man of Malay
letters, a lecturer and librarian, who would be remembered with affection
and respect by those who had known him. If I remember rightly (and
if not then let me be thankful for the gloss of memory), even the
scum-sucking baboon of the soy sauce incident offered me his condolences.
I was glad to receive them.
But he would revert
to form soon enough, and later that year I would be begging my mother,
through streaming tears, to get me the hell out of that awful place,
so full was it of vicious racists.
The despair would pass,
however, for at the core of it the Malay College was still a school
of the elite, the cream of Malay youth, intelligent, inquisitive,
alert young men, and once I discovered my niche there the unpleasantness
of the first year would fade. The friends I made there would remain
as close to me as brothers for the rest of our lives. And there was
no question but that we had the ministrations of some of the best
teachers we would ever have.
It was engaging to
watch the new patterns of friendship emerge and develop among us.
We were divided into the College’s four "Houses", named
after the first rulers of the four Federated States of colonial Malaya:
Idris of Perak, Ahmad of Pahang, Sulaiman of Selangor, Mohamad Shah
of Negri Sembilan. This was a daily framework of association- Prep
School’s house divisions were arranged according the four dormitories—and
it swiftly supplanted the more natural tendency among us to
aggregate according to home states. Few of us had know any of the
others prior to coming to Kuala Kangsar (Muslini and I were an exception
proving the rule), and our first year at the Malay College was a safari
through an exotic terrain of new friendships.
Some would form tight
little cliques: there was, for example, the cabal that for two
years called itself "FANS" and daubed the title everywhere
in chalk. This was an acronym formed of the initials of Fauzi Omar
of Kedah, Amin Ariff and Salman Ahmad of Perlis and Nik Mohamad Nassimof
Kelantan—a quartet of prideful bosom buddies, flamboyant and loyal
to the core, and one which demonstrated the growing irrelevance of
home-town loyalties to Malay College boys.
It was one of the most
important benefits of the Malay College, once the school had been
shed of its royal pretensions. The College brought home to its charges
the truth that intelligence and potential had nothing to do with birth
or breeding, and that there was indeed a unity of Malaysian states.
The College trained us to see ourselves as part of a national Malay
identity, and to take pride in that. Some sons of sultans were indeed
among us, but there was nothing to set them apart from or above the
rest. (The Sultan of Perak’s son, for example, afflicted with a slight
malocclusion of his upper jaw, was universally known by the sobriquet:
"Bugs". As in a certain well-known Hollywood hare.)
My niche was what had
seemed such a liability and embarrassment when I first got there,
the English language. I became a school debater and a fixture in the
College magazine. English, for our generation, was an effortless alternative
language, yet there was still considerable respect for those of us
most fluent in it. It set a certain seal on the Malay College’s quality,
that our English debating team could hold its own against those of
the nation’s other great schools, notwithstanding their more expansive
resource of Chinese and Indian youth. For a mere Malay to stand up
and strut the oratorical boards, his arguments prevailing, his eloquence
and arrogance more than match for those of his Worthy Opponents...
there was some pride in that.
I made the debating
platform my personal bailiwick in the five years I would spend at
Malay College, and although I would still rather have been a sporting
superstar or a scholastic wunderkind, I held my own, helped my school
satisfy its addiction for winning, and was as a result largely forgiven
for my cultural deficiencies as a Malay. Rehman (kind of name is that?
"Raymond"? You sure it’s not a spelling mistake?) might
not have been able to extricate himself from the slightest
literary tangle in Malay, but in English, ho, you should have
heard him! That guy could talk!
Friends
AH, KAMIL, you great
gruff bluff bear of a man, what’s with you these days? If only life
were a rugby match, eh? We could make something of it then, no joke,
hey, we could charge across the touchline like avenging giants, they’d
be blowing in our slipstream like rags ... well, you could,
anyway ... I’d just be cheering you on from the sidelines, shredding
my throat in exultant praise of your heroism...
Sure, we know the truth
here: you made the First Fifteen, while my College rugby career lasted
ten minutes. (Joe Baker, lah, the bastard, made me run two laps of
the field for turning up late for our first rugby practice,
remember? Prep School? 1968? Wrecked my rugby career before it even
started...) But you had some good times on that field, didn’t you?
I’ve remembered that one moment from that one game ever since, not
that I give a shit which poor school we destroyed that afternoon on
the Big School field—no, there was just that one try you scored, mate,
that was sheer brutal poetry. You charged the last ten yards to the
line with three of their players streaming from your torso like banners
in the wind. It looked like your jersey was in tatters, but no, the
tatters were your opponents. There was no stopping you that day, Kamil,
you were magnificent.
Yeah well, we’re not there anymore;
we’re here now, late thirties already. Marriages and families ...
maybe the less said about them the better. I didn’t go to yours, you
didn’t come to mine, and see what happened? But what the hell. We’re
still young. Young as we’ll always be. Sure, it’s a bit disconcerting
going back to Kuala Kangsar for the Old Boys’ Weekend having the present
boys call us "Uncle". Kinda focuses mind that, doesn’t it?
First it was "Abang", which was cool really; made one feel
quite grown up. But "Pak Cik"? O unkind cut!
Do you get the impression
they’re not like we were? Sure you do. Hell, we were unique! Last
of the pre-69ers, that was us. And the first batch to score
100% passes at Form Five AND win the national schools rugby championship
in the same year—now there’s something to be remembered for!
But the changes came thick and fast after 1969. "Elitism out,"
"Malay College no different from other schools." But the
school remained true to its founding ethic even then: it was still
reflecting the Malay ideal. First it was for the royals. Then for
the "Malay Administrative Elite". Then the new nationalism.
And then, during the years of uncertainty and drift, the College was
drifty and uncertain. And we were there to watch it happen. Headmasters
came and went every couple of years, and after Ryan and Aziz they
all seemed to get progressively smaller, didn’t they? What kind of
weird culmination was Charlie Tot, for instance? Flailing around like
a dervish with his cane—you got it once, didn’t you? For some stupid
macho stunt like smoking, or something. But I never did. I was an
angel. I didn’t smoke my first cigarette until I was twenty, the same
year I lost my virginity. (Come to think of it, it may have been the
same night, so much for the evils of smoking.)
But you weren’t afraid
of being a rebel. Perhaps we expected it of you. After all, we kept
electing you President of our year all the way up to Fifth Form. You
did all right, though. Remember the Great Food Revolt? We were in
Form Three or Four. There was schoolwide unrest over the slop they
were serving us to eat every day. There was a call for a food boycott
on a particular night. Some of the Fifth Formers were saying we should
overturn our plates and walk out. This was serious— there was
something deeply offensive, even immoral, about doing that to a plate
of rice. The night arrived. We milled about the dining hail, uncertain
of how far this should go. Everyone waited for someone to tip the
balance one way or the other: would we sit down and eat, or would
we walk out? And you did it. You said, "Ah, enough!", and
you picked up your plate of rice, banged it upside down on the table,
and walked out. And we followed you, feeling positively revolutionary.
Yes, and maybe that’s
why you got caned ... but hey, it may have been stupid and juvenile,
but you acted like a leader, Kamil. And we made our point; the food
wasn’t quite so bad after that. I know you enjoy this memory too—after
all, it’s one of the reasons Aji and Mae and even Lan still call you
Our Leader when you turn up at one of our bashes at MCOBA.
Not that you turn up
at the Old Boy’s Association all that often. Neither do I. We have
our reasons, I suppose. I so much respect Wan Katak for all the work
he does for MCOBA. Meli, too. But Wan’s the One, isn’t he? The Main
Man, the Lynchpin. There’s one guy with his life in order.
CEO of a finance company, penthouse office, Mercedes Benz in the parking
lot, gorgeous wife, lovely kids, always on the blower talking megabucks
... and still the least pretentious dude in the world, happily keeping
in touch with the rest of us. Katak’s a credit to everything MC stood
for.
But it seems most of
us are doing okay these days. Aji’s still sharp as ever. (His was
the most memorable criticism I ever received as a writer. Many were
telling me to lighten up on the bombast, but Aji put it this way:
"Kalau budak Kolej pun tak faham, apa tah lagi lesser mortals?")
Mae’s going great guns in the Foreign Service. Mat’s Assistant
Editor of The Malay Mail and winning journalism awards
hand over fist, the sod. Wano’s rich, full stop, and Ali probably
owns a chunk of Saudi Arabia by now.
Ah, but you know all
this better than I do; at least you’ve been here while I’ve been arsing
about all over the world for lack of a home to believe in. But you
know, I’ve been back a while now, wandering around the country. I
stopped by KK. I stood on Station Road and watched a football match
on the Big School field. It felt strange, and strangely exhilarating,
to stand with all those geeks and their bicycles on the other
side of the fence where they’ve been since the dawn of time, watching
from the cheap seats. College boys still seem to play a game of football.
Ah, that glorious field! Those grand buildings! From that distance,
I could believe nothing had changed; they might have been us in those
white uniforms, in that black-yellow-red kit. They might have been
us
...eating paus in
Yut Loy and toast in Double Lion. Sneaking out to watch films at Kapitol.
Feeding the jukebox at Pak Kassim’s, annoying the girls from GEGS.
(But come on, were ever really annoyed? We were MC boys, we
were the Best and the Brightest, and if they didn’t think so it was
their loss, right? The boys from Clifford School, now they were annoyed.)
Maybe I’ll see you back
there, Kamil, come the next Boys’ Weekend. Whoever gets there first
books a bed in Pavilion for the other. Any bed will do; you know how
soundly we all sleep when we’re back at MC. Something in the air I
suppose.
Or something else; something
in our pasts; something in our souls. Something to do with being children
growing up together; meeting at the age of twelve, parting at eighteen-but
never really parting at all. That’s the best thing MC did for us I
think. No matter what cars we’re driving these days, nor who’s high
and who’s low, who’s rich, who’s not, who’s "made it and who
hasn’t and whatever any of it means ... none of it really mailers
when we’re with each other. No bullshit between College boys, Kamil.
We know each other too well. Maybe that’s all an "Old Boys’ Network"
is: a mutuality of knowing.
Given the ordure we’ve
had to swallow since we last swaggered around Kuala Kangsar on a Saturday
morning town leave in our white uniforms, the constant remaking of
the Malays cording to models that change with the moon, that’s something
to be grateful for. None of us is truly alone, and when the changes
come, we change together.
Fiat Sapientia Virtus,
hey? Let Wisdom be Virtue. (But what does that mean, exactly?)