Looking Back: Days of grated ice balls and `tikam' Zainal Aznam Yusof | New Straits Times | November 26, 2006
http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/nst/Sunday/Columns/20061126092011/Article/index_html A gentleman recently reminded me about that. I am just wondering if my father had known and was a reason why he wanted me enrolled there. The gentleman also stated that the school was not actually along Batu Road. He is right. It was about 150 metres away. A loop road, he said it was Broderick Road, served as our access route to it. Actually there was a small padang in front of the school and after that, a number of single-storey cream- coloured wooden buildings housing some government departments. These buildings took away the school's open frontage and view of Batu Road. It was along the loop road that school buses, parents, trishaw men and hawkers waited. The teachers discouraged us buying anything from the hawkers, but some of what they sold was difficult to resist. So we bought our five cents worth of sweetened grated ice balls or 10 cents of ice-cold pineapple flavoured drinks which were really nice on a hot day. Others went for the ice cream man who also had attached to his box a small wooden wheel for those who wanted to spin and try their luck at getting more than one cut of an ice cream bar. Sometimes there were peddlers offering a form of lucky draw (or tikam). This was paying for and pulling off a small piece of folded paper among the many that were pasted onto a card. Inside each was a number. You win something if you obtain a number that corresponded to the same-numbered prizes attached. These were usually some small cheap toys, pieces of sweet wafers or prawn crackers. This kind of lucky draw was all over town in those days. I still think it was fun and quite harmless as nobody ever got hooked on it. The cendol man was always there along with the chee cheong fun and yong tau fu seller. The latter would stand patiently beside his bicycle with all of his wares in a box secured to the back carrier. The chee cheong fun, brownish taufu skins and stuffed taufu, splashed with black and red sauces before a sprinkling of sesame seeds, was served on small metal saucers. It looked tasty but, surprisingly, I did not see crowds of boys going for him. I did not know why. After two or three sales, he would push his bicycle and cycle slowly away. Somehow I felt sorry for him. But he would be back again the next day and every schooling day after that. I was glad. His was a lesson in determination and perseverance. Apparently there were also gangsters or just aggressive young schoolboys. They even extorted five cents protection money from their victims. I did not face that kind of problem; but I did encounter some young touts, outsiders trying to sell playing-card-sized pictures of I knew not what. We were quick to move away when these touts appeared because they looked bully-like and intimidating. You did not want to get into a fight and be expelled from school because of them. The gentleman also asked if I remembered the double-decker buses plying from Foch Avenue. According to him, that service was stopped because of complaints that passengers in the upper deck could see into the bedrooms on the first floor of shophouses. I had always thought that the real reason was economic. But I cannot forget that crowded Foch Avenue terminal because it was there that I witnessed a very angry bus worker swinging away with a nightstick at his workmate during a quarrel. I did get a little frightened and confused seeing two full-sized adults going after each other with such tempest. Looking back I cannot help but recall and wonder about many things. I feel nostalgic over some and want to laugh over the rest. It was early that you were thrust out to face and chance life by perceiving others and things "as you are and not as they are". That perception thus was your own unique reality not knowing it was different from others'. You almost certainly did not know that everyone and everything teaches and makes you become what you are today. I now know what the blacksmiths opposite Odeon cinema did. I watched them pant and sweat, forging on the anvil red-hot pieces of metal pulled out of the burning coal furnace. "It must be difficult," I remember thinking, never seeing the end product of their labour. It could have been that the blacksmiths themselves, working on part of a process, did not know where the pieces they worked hard on eventually ended up. I suppose teachers too have that same question about their pupils. My constant wonder is always the unglamorous name of Batu Road. If batu was translated it would read as "Stone Road". That road ran through a busy shopping area and ended before the court building and Selangor Club padang. Why the name and how did that name survive during the British days together with the Princess, Hale, Broderick, Mountbatten, Campbell, Church and Bluff roads connected to or around it? In the end it did not. Batu Road, if it matters to anyone, is the present Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman. Maybe we should leave it now just at that.
