Nation

Alor Star lives on in my heart

ALTHOUGH I lived in Alor Star for only the first 12 years of my life, it will always remain home for me.

My father, who was from Kuala Selangor, left his hometown to seek his fortune in Penang before the country gained independence.

He later moved to Merbok, where the ancient Bujang Valley is located.

There, he and a group of people opened a plot of land and planted padi.

Decades later, they were each granted a piece of agriculture land by the government.

In Merbok, he befriended a local family who introduced him to their distant kin in Alor Star.

And that was how he met my mother, an Alor Star local of Indian and Siamese parentage.

Until today, when I visit Thailand, I would politely say “Mai phut Thai” each time locals address me in their mother tongue.

I suppose long before the Anglo-Siamese Treaty was inked between Siam and the British in 1909, there was not much difference between the people of Saiburi (the ancient Thai name for my home state) and those living up north in the isthmus of Kra.

Ancient history aside, I grew up in Alor Star in the early 1980s.

The state capital then was a sleepy hollow.

So sleepy that things taken for granted in other places, such as KFC and McDonald’s, could be seen only in advertisements on the television.

If memory served me right, the first KFC in Kedah was opened in either 1987 or 1988 in Sungai Petani, the town where I spent five formative years getting my secondary education at Sekolah Sultan Mohamad Jiwa, away from my family.

Like the rest of Kedah’s landscape, Alor Star was flat.

The land was so flat that if I stood in the middle of the padi field near my house, I could see Gunung Jerai (between 50km and 60km away) on my left and Gunung Keriang (a limestone hill 8km away) on my right.

Alas, all these are only memories to cherish now, with development having sprung up near my parents’ home in the last 20 to 30 years.

Coming from a flat land, I used to yearn for the rolling hills, a notion I must have picked up watching Julie Andrews singing happily on the hills, which she claimed were alive, in The Sound of Music.

Little did I know that I’d get what I wished for later in my adult years.

But the hills (in the Klang Valley) are far from being alive with songs sung for a thousand years...

However, back then, I didn’t know that I was living in a place that I’d call a piece of heaven in later years.

The grass is always greener on the other side, but nothing could be greener than the padi fields in the planting season.

I yearn for the simple yet fun life that Alor Star offered me.

I miss my childhood home and the moments when mak and ayah were still around.

Life will not be the same again now that they’re just part of my memory.

I grew up seeing my parents toiling away in the padi field.

At times, I would follow them to the field, a vast square plot of land filled with muddy soil, ready to be transplanted with pre-germinated padi seedlings.

Ask any of my peers — we enjoyed playing in the muddy padi field as much as children in other rural areas had fun playing in a river.

Of course, there were also river-like aqueducts dug up for irrigation.

If you paid attention during history lesson, you may remember learning about a mid-19th-century Kedahan statesman called Wan Muhammad Saman.

His name is now immortalised in the irrigation canal that runs from Alor Star to the foothill of Gunung Jerai.

Measuring 36km, Terusan Wan Muhammad Saman is the longest canal in the country.

Besides playing in the padi fields, we also had fun splashing in the canals dotted all over the state.

A river runs across my village called Sungai Anak Bukit.

It connects to Sungai Kedah in Alor Star town (which was granted city status on Dec 21, 2003) and flows all the way to Kuala Kedah before it merges with the sea.

My elder siblings — two brothers and three sisters — were excellent swimmers, having spent much time bathing and playing in the river.

And that was before we had running water in our village.

By the time I was born, we had tap water supplied to our home.

We went to the river to bathe and wash clothes only when there was a disruption in the water supply.

I almost drowned once. This happened when I followed other boys to play in a man-made pool.

Fortunately, an older boy saved me in the nick of time.

I never told my parents about this and they also never asked me about it.

But in retrospect, I’m sure they knew what happened to me on that day.

I just hope I didn’t cause them much heartache for being adventurous and not having the guts to own to the mischief I was up to while growing up.

But then again, we were kampung folk.

Maybe it was nothing out of the ordinary.

They had other things to worry about.

I always loved the months of February and March, a period known as “musim timur”.

It was a dry and windy season. It was when the padi fields dried up and the green stalks of the padi turned golden.

In other words, it was the harvesting season.

Once the crops were harvested, the field would be dry and windy.

It was a perfect time to turn it into a giant playground.

And there’s no better time than to fly kites.

We used to make our own kites using newspaper and bamboo.

The more skilled and creative kite-makers would have the fanciest wau, with some flying so high up, making a “woo-woo-woo” sound.

The dry season was also the hottest time of the year.

However, the strong and cold winds made up for the hot weather.

A hot and windy afternoon was perfect for an afternoon nap on a pangkin (a raised platform under a house or tree) or hammock.

Now I can no longer enjoy the breezy “musim timur” in my parents’ house due to the development taking place near our land.

I used to enjoy this special time of the year, having lunch at Pokok Pisang restaurant nearby. Alas, nothing lasts forever in this world.

I was shocked to learn that my favourite lunch spot was torn down during the last fasting month.

A friend told me that it had been relocated.

Besides the delicious food, what made it special was its ambience, which reminded me of my mother’s old kitchen.

While I welcome Alor Star’s change to catch up with the rest of the nation, I’ll always remember and cherish the town that I had spent my childhood years.

It is now gone, living only in my memory and heart. Just like my beloved parents.

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