Jacob’s Cream Crackers

My father died on the 8th of May 1963, eight days before my seventh birthday.

I cannot remember growing up with an elder male in the house. I often wonder what life would be like having a dad, someone to look up to, someone who tells what to do and someone to be afraid of when things go wrong. It explains somewhat my stubbornness and why most of my close male friends tend to be at least a decade older than me.

We grew up in a small village about nine miles from the town of Melaka on the Malay peninsula in 60’s. The old two-lane bitumen road from Melaka to Singapore meanders through the village. On the western side of the road lay the rice fields that stretches right up to the mangrove swamps skirting the Straits of Melaka.

It costs about 30 cents for the 9-mile ride to Melaka town on the rickety creamy yellow Malacca Omnibus Service (MOS) bus on the Melaka-Muar route. The village of about a handful of families of farmers and fishermen lived on the eastern side served by a small coffee shop ran by an Indian Muslim family and further down a Chinese family who traded in coconuts and eggs, at least as far as we kids know. We’d get 5 cents for one coconut or a chicken egg which we had inadvertently stumbled upon in some farmer’s chicken coop that we'd very quickly exchange for peanut snaps or iced lollies at the Indian coffee shop. It was a basic no-questions asked free market co-existence which exemplified somewhat the simple life in rural Malaya in the 60s.

My father was the headmaster of the local primary school located along the main road halfway between the egg buyer and lollies seller. He was taller and fairer than the locals and unlike the other villagers who lived in traditional stilted houses we lived on a house set square on the ground, solid, with running water no doubt influenced by my mother, a city girl from Singapore. According to my mother she was working as a nurse when she met my father. But looking back I feel there was more to their meeting, another gap among the fresh sliver of memories of life.

My second earliest memory as a child is the most vivid. The smell of fresh timber as I walked among the wood chips and sawdust as Hassan the builder planed the beams for the first stilt-less house in the village. My earliest memory was when I was a year or two old being lullabied in a hanging sarong cot while my mother grumbled about the noise from the boys playing football nearby.

My father decided to retire at fifty-five. He idled his time smoking Rough Rider cigarettes while sitting on his rattan chair on porch leaving a black smudge where his head touched the wall. A few weeks before he passed away, I remembered him standing by the window as a contented prisoner behind the horizontal wooden slats watching my two brothers, sister and I run around the cherry tree. Standing quiet, not a word, perhaps deep down knowing his time has come. Earlier he had asked me to run to the Indian coffee shop to buy some Jacob’s cream crackers for tea. Growing up in a British colony its common for the educated to have tea and biscuits around 4pm at the end of the day’s work.

Mum would make a pot of Ceylon tea sweetened with Nestles condensed milk and placed the tea pot and cream crackers on the small table on the verandah. We would spread margarine on the crackers then sprinkle with sugar and dunk them in the sweet tea.

But on that particular day we were too busy playing and ignored him. He wasn’t angry. But I cannot forget that memory of him standing silently watching us, like a broken projector with a loose reel, flashing the same image over and over in my mind.

Several weeks later he was gone. He had woken up to go to the bathroom, fell and lost consciousness and died the following morning. I was woken up by the sound of people talking in the living room. I got up and saw my father lying face up on a palm leaf mat in the living room under the kerosene lamp. He was surrounded by the local village ladies in their long loose dress and head scarf some chewing tobacco and others silently reciting verses from the Quran as they looked up at me, the eldest.

By the time we got up later in the morning he had been taken by ambulance to the Melaka General Hospital. And being kids we started playing again, riding big adult bicycles around the compound under the care Auntie Buruk a neighbour.

Around noon we heard a loud cry from an Auntie Buruk when she heard news of my father’s passing. Chegu (Teacher) Awang has left us children. Stop playing. He is gone. He is gone in her sobbing voice.

His body was brought back to the house and prepared for burial. While the village elders sat on the floor of the living room reciting Quranic verses his body was cleansed with water and camphor and covered in a plain white cotton shroud. As the smell of camphor wafted out from the window my sister and I stood outside watching the slow trickle of cleansing water drained out from the side of the house, darkening the dry sand then swirling aimlessly before disappearing quietly. Somewhat tells the story of living in high speed. You arrive, you change the color of your surroundings, wonder aimlessly for a while before you leave without a trace.

Later when his casket was carried out my siblings and I were gathered and asked to walk under the casket before it made its way to the local mosque. I realised now the 8th of May 1963 was the day that remains deep in my memory.

The next day I was dressed in my school uniform, white short sleeve shirt and dark navy blue shorts. I walked with my Uncle Yusoff to the main road hanging on to two cream crackers stuck with planta margarine. Uncle Yusoff had come up from Singapore when news of my dad’s passing reached by mother’s family. My mother had some months earlier arranged for a teachers’ car-pool to pick me up daily on their way from Melaka town to my school, the Merlimau English School. His dad passed away, said Uncle Yusoff to the teachers when their beige Morris Minor came to a stop. He can stay home, said one of the teachers. I watched as they slowly drove off, sadness written on the faces of the two young women teachers in the back seat. Yet another memory etched as the Morris Minor faded away at the 9th milestone on the old Melaka-Muar road when life nudged me on to another trajectory as I clutched on to my margarine-smeared Jacob’s cream crackers.