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Glossary

Appa (Tamil) = father
Amma (Tamil) = mother
Patti (Tamil) = grandmother
Thambi =younger brother
Pellai (Tamil) = son
Pekan (Malay) = town
Kampung (Malay) = village
Orang Asli (Malay) = natives

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This is my last will and testament. And it is a tale so strange I myself can hardly believe it. But I have to, as it comes from my own diary.

It was a misty morning in a tropical rubber plantation in Malaya

1st September 1940

My name is Ramachandran. I am 8 years old. I live in a wooden house in a rubber plantation. There are a few more houses like mine nearby. Our house compound consists of a wooden building partitioned into 3 rooms and a kitchen. The toilet is a separate wooden booth outside. We have a front yard and a backyard, both of which are barren save a pathetic vegetable patch in the back and a chicken coup at the front. A makeshift mailbox marks the entrance. Outside my house are a few houses like mine and a vast rubber plantation. If you were a little bird flying in the sky, you would probably see my little neighbourhood as actually like a small clearing in the middle of a seemingly endless rubber plantation.

The rubber tree plantation is everywhere. Rubber trees; tall and sturdy guarding our house like sentinels. There must be at least a thousand of them, or more. They are very funny looking, all wearing cups on their trunks. Tappers make a cut into them with sickle-shaped knives and milky fluids will flow out of the tree into the cup. I couldn't help but imagine the trees are crying, after being cut into like that. Patti says the milk cannot be drunk but is used to make rubber. I have never seen what rubber is. When I asked patti what's rubber like she pointed to the tires on the white Sir's motorcar; all black and dirty. I cannot imagine how something so watery and white can turn into something that's so black and hard, even though I have a pretty good imagination.

My patti rears chickens in the backyard. She always tells me that our house isn't really that small, because our real home is the house building plus the whole plantation surrounding it. She always says that when I'm lying dreamily on her lap on those warm nights, sitting outside the house, looking at fireflies. We do that often, especially when appa comes back from work feeling angry and slamming doors in the house. Sometimes the whole house shake, but it never did collapse like I always think it would. During those times, patti will bring me out of the house and we will sit on the little stairs

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