Remembering Rubber

Rubber used to be the main export of Malaysia. But nowadays, rubber plantations are becoming quite a rare sight in Malaysia, replaced by up-market residential housing projects and six-lane highways. A generation ago, life in Malaysia or then Malaya revolved around rubber. My hometown in the Malaysian state of Pahang was essentially a settlement of rubber tappers.

I grew up in a middleclass residential suburb - perhaps the first of such in the town, which itself was a sleepy hollow nestled away in the hills forty miles away from Kuala Lumpur. Even though my house was a relatively modern type of Malaysian "terrace house", it was located on the edge of the residential area, next to a large rubber estate plantation.

As a child growing up in the area, the rubber estate was my playground. I remember those rubber trees with dark green leaves and scarred trunks - tattooed by the tapper's knife, rising in formation like an arboreal army from a Tolkien fantasy. They looked oppressive and mysterious at night - hiding within its dark bosom a cacophony of insects and other strange nocturnal creatures. My hometown was also considered a "Black Area" - an Emergency era label for areas with active communist insurgencies. In some of the more remote rubber estates one could hear then the distant crackle of the occasional gunfire.

In the morning, the rubber estate in front of my house would burst to life with activities. The trees, gay and resplendent under the morning sunlight, brimmed with bustling birds. Squirrels danced from branch to branch. One could see distant specks of figures in white - the rubber tappers - collecting the day's yield of milk-white latex from cups dangling from the tree trunks. In the rising heat, rubber seeds would burst out from their pods, falling like hailstones on the roof and road, with a sound like the popping of champagne in a pastoral feast. The rubber seeds have a hard outer shell, speckled-brown in colour. As children we collected these seeds and invented games with them.

Beneath the canopy of leaves, among the sentinel-like tree trunks, we played hide-and-seek. The floor was a carpet of rotting leaves, which when stirred, unleashed swarms of fiery mosquitoes. One could easily get oneself lost deep in a rubber estate; you only see the monotony of identical trees in every direction and the sunlight is shielded away by thick leaves leaving you feeling disoriented and lost like in some tropical twilight limbo.

It is an era already gone: the romance of colonial planters, estate bungalows and club houses - those characters and scenes that populate many of Somerset Maugham's tales from the Far East. What's left today are merely nostalgic references on bar menus like Planter's Punch and books like Out in the Midday Sun by Margaret Shennan, that recalls life in the colonial era fondly.

Now living in the middle of a concrete jungle here in this Third World squalor that is Jakarta, I remember those rubber trees next to my house in Pahang: they emerge like a dream in my mind, of a lost magical forest filled with the laughter and games of carefree children.