THE MEMOIRS OF MUSTAPHA HUSSAIN - Malaysia Today

28 Memoirs of Mustapha Hussain
During their leisure time, the brothers, who had quickly learned to
speak Malay, loved to smoke anghun (a red-pigmented Chinese tobacco),
using unchui, a Chinese water pipe that produced a small gurgling sound.
The redder their eyes, the more intense their enjoyment. Nevertheless, if
a customer walked in, they would immediately leave their water pipes to
attend to the valued customer before returning to smoke their pipes with
great gusto.
Sometimes, they smoked the same red-coloured tobacco using a small
bamboo pipe that could be carried wherever they went as they entertained
their customers. But I noticed they did not touch rokok daun (the Malay
cigarette of tobacco wrapped in dried nipah palm shoots) or the Indian
cheroot (tightly rolled cigars made of tobacco leaves).
One morning, while looking for one of the brothers at the back of
the shop, I saw older brother Ah Kim inside a mosquito net. On taking a
closer look, I saw him smoking a small pipe while lying down on a
wooden head-rest with a small oil lamp next to him. He looked lost in a
dream and was oblivious to my calling his name. That was the first time
I saw someone smoking opium.
The Chinese I knew were peculiarly attached to their mosquito nets.
If they moved to a new house, it was the first item they brought. Because
they smoked opium inside their mosquito nets, the nets smelt of putrid
opium, thus the Malay advice: “If you want to buy a mosquito net, do
not buy one that belonged to a Chinese.”
Opium was then an indisputable British monopoly, sold by an Opium
Clerk sitting inside a small shop-house that had small windows with rusty
iron bars. The front of the shop had a small opening with soiled frames
in the wall, through which the clerk received money from customers, and
through which he handed over a tiny amount of opium. The Malay Opium
Clerk was hugely popular with the Matang Chinese. Before he sat down
at the coffee shop, a chair would be pulled up for him and a cup of coffee
would appear instantly without him even requesting it.
The Chinese were fastidious beyond words about oral hygiene. Each
morning, as Sikh policemen at the Matang Police Station lined up for
inspection, Chinese living in shops across the street also lined up, not
with guns and carbines, but each with a basin of hot water, a toothbrush,
a small tube of toothpaste, a tongue scraper and a face towel. (The tongue
scraper was about six inches long and half an inch wide.)
At that time, Malays and Indians were still cleaning their teeth with
their fingers. In place of toothpaste, they used fine sand or ash from their
firewood stoves. If they used any brush, it was ingeniously made by
pounding and flattening keduduk (Indian rhododendron) branches or