DEC 8 — It has been five years since my mother passed away. My father is still hanging on to the old shophouse and various other memories. The last time I went back to Kelantan, we kept talking about various old cakes; some of them I have never seen, but only heard, and some have disappeared from the village and the food market in Kota Baru. He said he used to sell some of them at the coffeeshop.

A few months ago he said to me that he wanted to renovate the little “Chinese goldsmith house” my mother left me. Though I resisted the idea at first, later I understood that he needed something to do. Now that little house is fully alive as a kopitiam. My father is very excited about that rented-out shophouse and asked me to buy coffee from there.

Since he was not well, I decided to stay the night, sleeping in the living room, formerly the coffeeshop. The whole night I could not sleep, and not only because of the noise from the road which is still being used for transporting goods from Thailand to Malaysia.

The whole night my mind dwelled, not on my mother, but this time on my father and me. About how he taught me to make kites, catch those little fishes from the “parit” (irrigation canal) and the “sawah” (padi field), and how to get the cuckoo bird to sing.

He was always excited to see the good grades in my school report and my medals when I won sports competitions, but not happy with me taking part in poetry-writing and poetry-reading competitions. He once threatened to burn my poetry collection if I did not stop that interest, a few months before the Sijil Rendah Pelajaran.

He said: “You will not be able to support your life as a writer or artiste. Look at them, even P. Ramlee died very poor.” But after my doctorate studies a few years ago, he stopped saying anything about my artistic life.

Yesterday, when he got better after his fever I asked him about his memories of the Second World War, the Japanese Occupation and the Death Railroad. His eyes grew big and excitedly, he started telling us about the war, about how he was working with the British master, Mr Anderson, and how he was forced to work for the Japanese quarry. He had just married my mother when the war broke out and in fact my eldest sister was born during the Japanese Occupation.

He went on to tell us about how he helped save five village men from being sent to the Death Railroad in Burma. Every day he had to bring food to them in a hiding place away from the village.

That place was also known among villagers as a very ghostly place, where “bomohs” sent bad spirits. That was the last place a villager would want to hide, the Japanese soldiers thought as they knew the Malays were afraid of ghosts.

Years and years later after the war, they sent back people from the village who had worked on the Death Railroad, but clearly they were not the same anymore. Most of them couldn’t speak and some had simply gone crazy.

In my first Malay play that was nominated as Best Malay Script at the Cameronian Arts Award 2007, I wrote about my visit to Singapore with my mother in the 1970s.

She thought she saw someone who looked like her long-lost cousin at Masjid Sultan. Her cousin was taken by the Japanese to work on the Death Railroad. When she went back to Masjid Sultan on the next visit, she was told that he had just died a week before.

My sisters and cousins only remember the time after the war when they could rent a bicycle for five cents a day. Nothing can be bought for five sen now, maybe not even 50 sen.

As for me, I only remember watching “Sarjan Hassan”, the Malay movie about the Second World War, with P. Ramlee as the hero. But I wonder how many people actually know and remember the first attack in Malaya which took place in Kelantan, at Pantai Sabak and Pantai Pak Amat, not far from the present Sultan Ismail Petra Airport in Pengkalan Chepa.

In fact the invasion was ahead of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Today is the 70th anniversary of that attack. I wonder how much has been written about it.

Years ago I met the guy who wrote the book “Japanese Occupation in Malaya”, Datuk Mike Wrigglesworth, when he visited my former office in Bangkok, in 2000.

The book is about his experience as a British Army war officer in Kelantan and how they fought the war. He went on to stay in Kelantan after the war. When I went back to Kelantan and tried to locate him, someone told me that he had died just a few months before.

How much of the story is left with us after our fathers and grandfathers leave us? My father was 15 years old then, now he is 85. How much longer will the memories stay with him? Next to his bed on the side table there’s a little fish, “puyu”, known to be a small but strong fish, in a clear bottle. It symbolises his strength and sturdiness in facing his hard life.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.