THE MEMOIRS OF MUSTAPHA HUSSAIN - Malaysia Today

Farming to Feed Hundreds 263
first?” While I was thinking these thoughts, he assured me, “Don’t worry
Enchik, you can check me out from the people living near me.” Again, I
decided to go by the villagers’ philosophy of “Let it be!”
With no radio, no TV and no newspapers, days turned into months
very casually and calmly. On the 45 th day since Yeop Embin’s verbal
promise, he turned up at my doorstep to unload bunches of maize on to
my yard. “Please count how many there are in this load. I will bring the
rest.” This is a perfect example of honest-to-goodness Batu 20 villagers
I knew during those trying years. These anecdotes were only three of
countless stories of poor people pleading for help. Had I been a village
moneylender, I would have raked in a lot of money. There were villagers
who came to exchange their land grants with rice but I refused all except
that of Haji Putih. After the war, I returned the grant and wrote off his
loan. We were friends during and after the Occupation.
The ugliest common disease was leg yaws. I had one on my shin.
Villagers attribute it to lack of sugar. This may have been true, but in my
case, I had been infected after a poisonous tree stump had pierced my
foot. Still, yaw-afflicted boys were saviours in the community. Once,
when Japanese authorities demanded young men as conscript labour for
the Death Railway, we Batu 20 folks met secretly with the not-so-poor
Chinese and collected some money which was handed to our representatives,
a group of young men with those awful gaping leg sores. We told
them not to worry as they would definitely be returning home. True
enough, Japanese doctors who examined them in Taiping turned them
away. They then spent the money we gave them for a couple of fun-filled
days in Taiping before returning to Batu 20. After that, the Japanese did
not come to collect conscripts from our village.
The Chinese community in the area respected me greatly for one
incident. A dresser, a health assistant, had told their leader Ah Soo, who
was suffering from pneumonia, that I had M&B 693 tablets that would
help him recover. Ah Soo’s son came for the tablets asking how much
they cost. I told him, “If you want to pay for it, just pay one cent.” The
Chinese respected me for respecting their belief that medicine must be
paid for to be effective.
Whenever a villager came across a dead body, they would report
the matter to me instead of the village headman. I would then ask, “How
much rice for the mat? How much rice for digging the grave? How
much rice for burying?” The body would then be buried according to
Muslim rites. The mat was used as a shroud instead of scarce white
cloth. Sometimes, when a mat was unavailable, banana leaves were used
instead.