So Long, It Should Be A Book...

THERE WAS A TIME when KL looked and felt like a town of booksellers. There were book vendors everywhere, especially on the five-foot way of those colonnaded walks in front of shops. You could walk – as I did almost daily, after school – from Baden Powell House in Jalan Davidson at the foot of the hill, down Jalan Sultan and then along Foch Avenue and beyond and meet at least five booksellers, many in shops but some outside of shops.

Kuala Lumpur, 1884. Not many bookshops here.

I am not sure if I should count the Sun U on Foch Avenue (Lebuhraya Foch) as a bookshop though as they were actually stationers but when I looked, I saw books in there too, perhaps textbooks for Chinese schools. I always walked past Sun U hurriedly as people were always milling about in front of the shop, seldom stationary. They were punters for buses that came one after another, to Sungai Besi to Kampung Pandan to Petaling Jaya. Crossing Foch Avenue was a chore and a half and it was always a relief when you reached that road that led to Naina Mohamad, the pharmacist, in the corner, in that whole new world of Market Square.

But before Naina was a row of shops, a gaggle of bookstores all meeting in a row. I remember one was called M M Ally and the rest, well, you don't really need to know as the books they stocked were mostly samey. Magazines hanging from pegs on a line as you enter, and on tables were more magazines, books and more books in cases in the back of the shop and on the side walls. They were mostly American paperbacks, local publications, school text and the daily newspaper. As you entered a shop, on the front left, you'd see a man sitting behind a till looking at you warily, reading you for sure, to see if you would be a potential shop lifter. Now, why would anyone go out and lift books from a bookshop? Then you'd have to read them and that's too much bother anyway.

Sometimes, during a downpour, I'd dive into one or all of these shops, waiting for the rain to go away. On other days I'd walk into them too because this was right in the middle of the day and the sun was almost directly over you head and some of these bookshops were really cool. I always avoided the last shop going on my route towards Naina Mohamad as it belonged to the father of a boy I knew at school who wernt by the name of Mohamad Jaafar Sadiq Maricar, I think, looking back now. It was enough seeing him at school and to see him again now would have been like two lightning strikes in a day.

My journey along the walkways would continue until I came to a corner – I can't remember now if it was Jalan Bandar – where two South Indian brothers stood before a wall of books and more on two revolving displays. This was where I'd stop to browse and chat with one or both of the brothers and ask if they had any Thurber. I got almost all my Thurbers from them though now I see that they have moved into the mainstream, opening as a 'proper' bookshop among the eateries and shirts and silk and carpet stores in Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman with their stock in trade of prayer books, religious tracts, school textbooks and magazines galore.

Three more book stops would engage me before I hit lucky and manage to jump aboard the Len Seng Omnibus in Jalan Melaka unscathed and unmolested for the struggle to go home was stiff in those days. But we'll leave the yellow omnibus for now and go across the bridge to the building on the corner of Jalan Mountbatten/Jalan Melayu where, on the first floor of a banking house was the University Book Store. This was a proper bookshop to make all other bookshops look improper (well, save for one we shall go to later). There were shelves and shelves of books you could get lost in. (What I mean is you could hide behind those shelves; I have never got lost in a book, have you?) There was a proper gentleman in there too, I mean someone wearing old-fashioned baggy pants and a properly ironed shirt such as to prompt you to call him uncle.

Once, when I was hidden among the bookshelves, browsing things from the top and bottom of the myriad rows, out popped a little sniveling guy I used to know at school and we said hello and got into a long and loud conversation about Vietnam as the little sniveller had turned into a right Vietcong in his ways. In the heat of the conversation, and from the corner of one eye I saw Uncle coming around pretending to be checking the shelves and giving us furtive glances now and then in case we broke into fisticuffs and turn his bookshop into a post-harvest padi field. See what I mean about meeting some schoolfellows in a bookshop?

Across the road from the University Book Store was Universal, the book vendor mentioned by James Kirkup in Tropic Temper. It was at the entrance to the Masjid Jamek, with books on table-tops under a corrugated roofed old shed. There were books too behind glass-fronted cases gleaming under the fluorescent glow.

But we'll cross the road and walk again along Jalan Melaka to Jalan Ampang by the river flow, down below from the monumental AIA building on Bukit Nanas was a row of old fashioned shop-houses with names that commuters on the Len Seng omnibus rides will remember, Ong Yoke Lin, selling Carrier air-conditioners, and the head of the infamous Black Cat jutting out from above a shop-house that became famous in a scandal that woke the town one fine morning to headlines about assorted women who went to work in this joint with their clothes uncollected from the laundry.  

All right, all right, we're digressing, it's a book shop we're looking for here, for there, between the sleaze and the air-conditioning was the City Book Store, another 'proper' bookshop. The City was in a strange place to be for a book store, away from the pedestrian flow and away from the centre of it all. But there you are, my dear, I went there looking for a book but the police came and bundled me away into the van with some semi-clad ladies of unknown provenance.

But we must go now. The Len Seng bus has just trundled past from the direction of Gombak, going back to the dust mill of Jalan Melaka and I must be going home.

Going Back to Tropic Temper

IF READING IS ENJOYABLE because it partly awakens the autobiographical memory, then that's recompense enough for the reader. I recently re-read James Kirkup, in life a man of many parts – teacher, poet, translator and no mean autobiographer. He is largely forgotten now but in an episode of his life best forgotten now, he gained notoriety for a blasphemous take on the crucifixion, in poetry, in a gay newspaper. He went from there into obscurity in a self-imposed exile in Angorra, resurfacing now and again rather bizzarely as an obituary writer in The Telegraph newspaper.

It is in his travel writing that Kirkup has touched me poignantly, still afternoons in familiar alleys, jalousies hanging half unfurled in the arches of walkways, assorted people both annoying and affable, taking you back to moods that nudge at dormant remains of distant days. Kuala L'Impure as Cocteau called it (he did?) for which Kirkup devotes a whole chapter, rude and charmed in equal measure - Skuala Lumpur, Stuff it up your jumpur – but you can't help but feel that somewhere in there is a liking for the capital that everyone who lives in it, loves it or loathes it, calls Kayel (KL).

Kirkup, in life, played many parts. A dramatist was one, but he became renowned, briefly, as a poet. His autobiographical writings were savoured by the cognoscenti, and he travelled and became a competent  translator of Japanese literature and he taught in Japan and Kayel at the University of Malaya where he lectured, among other things on James Joyce, an author he enjoyed only in small doses who nearly drove him off his head with heavy internationalism and ponderous urbanity.

Kirkup in Kayel is hilarious and annoying with a will to fascinate. And this is where reading becomes autobiographical: I saw the tail end of the Kayel that he describes, slowly going to the dogs, felled, relics and trees, to make way for a new, robust capital. And like him I too was a failed teacher at the University of Malaya, heart throbbing still as I read Kirkup describing his entrance to the Arts Concourse, skirting the 'muddy, weedy lake' and the faculty buildings and the Library, 'all in severely modern style, quite impersonal'. It is a shame though that he pulled his pen away from descriptions of characters within – and there were many – who would have enlivened his sometimes scabrous jaunts in Malaya.

Tropic Temper is a panacea for hearts wrenched from the true nature of Kuala Lumpur because it turned into a gleaming capital. This is Kayel when horses were still racing on the racecourse, the very ground where today stand the Twin Sisters. It is strange though that Kirkup does not mention that at all, the horsey folks I mean, and the book was written, for goodness' sake, in 1963.

A capital, any capital, is best approached without company. Alone, that is, with mind uninterrupted, to ponder and legs to wander and head holding conversations with self about things and wherewithal. Kirkup was very much a loner, so internal conversation is rife in this little gem that comes to us from the Kayel that was there not so long ago but now seems to be aeons away. Readers become of like mind, wandering, and into these old nooks and crannies come a warm glow. Never mind what you thought of Kayel, Kirkup, but this is Kayel once again now. Thank you.

It is funny how old, lost colonials in search of soul end up at the Majestic. The place where Kirkup 'lived' is indeed The Majestic (even if he doesn't say so), a hotel now severely damaged by 'restoration'. The Majestic drew odd people, another, an Englishman who stayed back after the end of Empire also carried quite a tail. No, that's no spelling error, he did, by reputation, have a vestigial tail, but that's another story. Journeying every day from his hotel, Kirkup sees the beginnings of the new Masjid Negara, he walks to the Masjid Jamek and then he speaks of the Nabokov that he picks up from the Universal Book Store. The smarmy man there urging him on to further delights, including an invitation to look into salacious words like 'vagina' in, bless his heart, an English dictionary that holds those words in store.

I know the Universal Book Store. It stood teeming with rubbish and books (the rubbish part were books too I should hasten to add) just at the entrance to the Masjid Jamek where now stands in ugly nondescrepitude, a station of the LRT. I think I may have met the smarmy man too.

Here's Kirkup's visit to the Pasar Minggu (the Sunday Market in Kampung Baru):

"A narrow wooden bridge over a stream can take only two single files, moving in opposite directions. A notice says that the city council will not be responsible if the bridge collapses. The packed crowd moves very slowly across the bridge, giving rise to opportunities for discreet attouchements. This is one of the haunts of the "billy-boys," the name given to young male prostitutes, and of one or two elderly female touts. But for the most part it is the scene of happy family outings, where groups of modest, gentle, friendly country people in gay sarongs can stroll and eat before catching the last bus home to their country kampong."

Once Father took me out of school for a week for a visit to Kayel where he was to attend an important career-enhancing interview (he was aspiring to rise, from telegraph operator to Special Grade Clerk). The son of the family we lodged with took us, one night, to a teeming place of foodstalls and pandanus mats and milling people. We walked slowly, in a very narrow lane, forward, as others were also moving, slowly, towards us. It was called Jambatan Gesel, the son of our hosts told me as I blushed in my reluctant-to-be-enlightened schoolboyish way. Ah yes, the bridge, I may have known it too.

Tropic Temper, Kirkup, J., Readers Union, Collins, 1965. First publication, William Collins & Sons, Ltd, 1963.

Pretty As A Portobello

A LONG PATH TO THE RIVER, meadows and trees and cows dotting the grazing field. Yonder houses, yonder trees like tufts of hair on the heads of hills. Wispy clouds in the skies of blue, what lies behind the trees I wonder. As bucolic as the pheasant's cry, rolling as far as the eyes can see. Bridges across the waters, coming to me.

I passed by this patch of countryside. I was enticed by the roll of land and the sky and water blue. I fell in love with this span of earth, so I bought it. It cost me £10.

It's as pretty as a picture. It is a picture. It looks like a landscape in oil by a master painter. It is a landscape painting in oil by someone who is, to me, a master painter because I cannot sketch, nor paint, nor draw. I can barely read the signature in the corner. But no, not Constable. Constable paints landscapes that are as pretty as a photo. No, not Turner, the impressionistic expression isn't as hazy. But I love it, even if it came in a cheapo-cheapo frame, but it is on canvas all right and the patina of time is there, layered over the oil.

People, the Portobello Road has sold me a picture for a song and it is now staring at me. It feels like the countryside is looking at me through the window of its bedraggled frame, and it is sitting on a pile of books at a jaunty angle.

I do not have to go to the National Gallery now, I have a landscape by a Master right here at home. Now I can, like some Lords of the Manor, sit and sip my Earl Grey and look at the country. When the car boot trader handed it to me for the tenner, I think he asked if I was going to get it valued. No, of course not: I have bought it and have had it valued by me, myself and I. And it makes me feel like a million dollars just looking up to it from my work in Bill Gates' Windows. Well, he may have the billion dollars but I have the oil.

Inflating the Hippo

LONDON CABS ALWAYS ATTRACT attention: their odd shape and their wide turning circle. "Don't just look at the cab," I tell visitors. "Look at the drivers. They are very interesting fellows."

Some years ago, when a London cab driver by the name of Fred Housego won the prestigious Mastermind contest on television, people started to look at London cab drivers as more than just non-stop blabberers who took you on journeys back and forth when all you wanted was just a period of quiet travel.

"I had that famous pianist in the back of my cab once Guv, " they'd start as you sink into your padded chair. And then they'd go on blah blah blah. This was the gist of a cartoon series that ran for a long time in the satirical magazine Private Eye. London cabbies are a deep mineshaft of unsolicited tales of intrepid travel.

Under brain imaging it was found that London cab drivers have bigger hippocampi than the average person. This came from their two or more years spent cramming up the entire map and knowledge of London locations into their brains, 25,000 streets and famous buildings and the whereabouts of theatres in the road that leads to Trafalgar Square. The hippocampus, that brain area associated with long term memory and spatial navigation grows and grows. It is proof, if anything, of our brain's plasticity and ability to develop, no matter at what age, when we learn skills.

There are debates raging about the benefits of it all. London cab drivers know London from the top of their heads but they perform poorly at recalling complex visual information compared to those who failed the cabbies' test or those who did not do it at all, so Professor Eleanor Maguire of the University College London found in her research. But that may be the red herring in the trail: for me it shows that the brain can be taught to become cleverer or to grow more muscle, to put it in the vernacular.

There is nothing we do that does not affect our brains directly, and the follow-up to that may bring other benefits in the way we think, or the way we move or the way we relate to other people. Other research in neuroscience for instance have shown that the brains of a person from a collectivist community  reacts differently to external stimuli compared to the brain of a person from an individualistic society. So can charity, empathy, generosity and so on rise by osmotic process to become part of your hard-wired nature if you give enough stimulation to the parts that give them muscle?

Take poetry. I cannot think of a society on this earth that is not moved or swayed by the power of sounds, good words recited in a soothing, euphonious scheme of rhymes and metres. Shamans recite their incantations in powerful, poetic sweeps of images and spells. It is difficult not to be moved by poetic prose, hard to hold back tears when you your heart is tugged by poetry.

Music does the same to people: familiar music wakes up areas that can move us to tears. I myself cannot hear our Negaraku in foreign lands without feeling the true sense of nostalgia, and that is the feeling of longing for one's homeland. When men of the Royal Malay Regiment were invited to do guard duty at Buckingham Palace some years ago many Malaysians were moved top tears when they heard them play tunes from the songs of P. Ramlee under that famous balcony. It is not surprising therefore to learn that music moves you along the same channel in your brain that also makes your spine tingle when Richard Burton reads Under Milk Wood in the half light of the gloaming.

These are the posterior cingulate cortex and medial temporal lobes, unpoetic as they are, your brain regions that become active when your are just sitting and relaxing. They also wake up the autobiographical memory, your mood for introspection and self-examination too. So is poetry important then? It is because it wakes up the inner you that cares about how you relate to yourself and things and others. It soothes and smoothes the rough inner self and makes us aware about who we are.

So there are places where poetry is eschewed, prose-writing pooh-poohed as sidelines in our mainstream interest of everyday living and wealth-accumulation skills. We can do that of course and lose more than just a little.

ILLUSTRATION: The Knowledge Area for London Cabbies.

A Blonde In the Night

MY STAB AT POLITICAL COMMENTARY came many years ago when, in a meeting with Ken Livingstone in the then new, gleaming, south-leaning City Hall, I made this very perceptive remark. "Mr Livingstone, aren't you the person made famous by Private Eye magazine as Dave Spart?"

His reply was a rather bemused look.

But I must tell you about City Hall the new, a gleaming building as I said because it is made of shimmering glass, is shaped like a misbehaving boiled egg and leans towards Borough Market. Ken Livingstone was its first occupant after a long absence, the absence being caused by Mrs Thatcher's petulance when faced with the taunts of Ken the Red (another moniker given him by the London press). When Mag the Thatch reigned as PM, she had to look daily at the old County Hall building just across the river from Parliament to see banners that proclaimed things such as the number of unemployed in Britain and so on. So one day, peeved and her iron body sizzling hot, she went to Parliament and got the government of London abolished.

 

Ken was sent into the wilderness for a long time.

It was at the turn of the new millennium that they decided to revive London's government, so they built the new leaning legislative building on the riverbank with a view of the Tower of London and a magnificent office block owned by the property acquiring section of our dear EPF. Ken was returned home again by London's voters to be their Mayor for two terms until he was trounced by another bloke.

Two Fridays ago, I was gadding about in a little district when the pavement before me was suddenly blocked by men and women in a scrum formation. As I approached them I saw the blondie Boris Johnson talking into many microphones. This was, to remind you, election week. So I took another stab at my long forgotten art: "Boris," I said. "You're violating local by-laws. You're blocking the pavement."

Boris was the other bloke above who trounced Ken in the votes, and he is still, now, in office. As great grandson of an Ottoman Turk, he is used to being heckled by the crowd so he studiously ignored me and continued to pontificate. He could not though, in this day and age, send my head to the block.

Boris, as is well known, does not need microphones to make himself heard but this time he was talking to the media so he had to pour his spiel into various mikes. Once, as writer for the Spectator magazine, he became an irritant to various learned and erudite writers there gathered in the Staggers' Library with his very loud telephone talk coming in from the corridor outside. When he finished, someone asked him what that din was all about. "Oh," Boris said, "I was talking to New York."

"With your voice Boris, you don't need a telephone to speak to them," replied one wag.

What I meant to tell you is that even though Boris ignored me on the pavement, he really did not. Last night, just three days after the general election (where Boris came in as MP from a safe seat) he came back to me in a dream. For some reason I was involved in an invite for him to speak to a crowd and as dreams are the most bizarre events in your sleeping life, there he was, standing patiently before me as I was washing my hand from water that was spouting from an overhanging pipe.

"Ok," he seemed to be saying to me. "You can do that, I'll wait."

"No Boris," I said, "You don't have to, this isn't a ritual."

"This isn't a ritual?" he replied. And then he went for a walkabout, during the course of which many people asked him to pose for photographs. So he walked jauntily as they snapped. And then he turned back and smiled. Perhaps a signal to me to say, "See? I can do that whenever I like."

Note: The Mayor of London is not the Lord Mayor of London, of which more later.

 PHOTO: The new City Hall building on the bank of the Thames with Tower Bridge spanning the tide.

Up the Harrods Escalator

I SPOTTED THESE LINES from a poem while taking the up escalator in Harrods this morning. Ozymandias. Not the whole tale of the traveller, not the whole glory and despair of the King (said to be Ramses II) but a snippet of its most vainglorious.

"My name is Ozymandias
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

That's all I could read. Even the reproduction of the Traveller's tale on Mohamad Fayed's wall is not available for viewing now. No entry. Wall under repair.

The impermanence of things, the short life of glory, the proneness of egos to self destruct. Stones crumble, walls needing repair, even glory has to be retouched. In that distant land the Traveller saw two trunkless legs of stone, and half sunk in the sand, a shattered visage. The land is far away and lonely and level sands stretch far away.

So haunting and enough to send a cold chill up the spine and a mystery wrapped in distance and time. Flatness, loneliness and decay of grandeur undone, ego falling flat on its face in the sand. How befitting, in the ostentation of Harrods that was once Mr Mohamad Al Fayed's flagship company (now the property of sand-filled Qatar). This is the territory of Arab opulence, princes of the desert drive up in their booming expensive cars just to park them by the roadside for the deprived to see. The princes, probably plebs with newly found wealth, strutting Ozymandias-like, look at my works and despair.

This is one of the most famous sonnets in the English language, in iambic pentameter. Some say this is the greatest in the language yet it was written in no more than a quarter of an hour when Percy Bysshe Shelley engaged in a playful contest with his friend Horace Smith, a poetry-scribbling stockbroker.

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

"And on the pedestal these words appear --
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

- Percy Bysshe Shelley