N. Narayanan : my life in 1930s Singapore (Part 2) : Family and Life

Family and Life Mr N Narayanan was born in December 1927; that makes him to be about 84 years old in 2011. The Singapore he had witnessed, not many are still around to give testimony. Those who are, might have faculties that have been ravaged by age. Fortunately, Mr Narayanan remains sharp and articulate and surprisingly agile. Recognising that time is robbing him of friends and family, he spends his spare time catching up. He says he uses email everyday. I find myself privileged to be able to talk to him. As a sci-fi enthusiast, he was like a time machine to me, transporting both of us to a time and place I could only imagine from sepia photographs. When he related that playful incident at the site where Clemenceau Avenue was being constructed (see Part 1 - Schooling)), I had a sense of abject disconnectedness. Being born in the 60s and having done most of my schooling in the 70s, I had thought Clemenceau Avenue was always where it was. Going to Yaohan in Plaza Singapura in the 70s, I would often alight at Clemenceau Avenue and walk that short distance to Yaohan's tunnel entrance not far from that Silver Spoon restaurant and cafe. If someone were to ask me when Clemenceau Avenue was built, I would say it was probably in the last century or so, when horses trotted on it. It would never occur to me when the modern one was built. And so it is that I learn now that it was some time in 1931. Singapore is often paved over much and I wonder if others feel the same as I did with that avenue named after a French prime minister. When places are modernised too often they lose that certain "je ne sais quoi". Mr Narayanan tells me that one of his early homes at the time was at Cuppage Road, near Cavenagh Road end. When he was about four, the family moved to a terrace unit at the junction of Kramat Lane and Buyong Road. These roads are still on the map but the area has been completey overshadowed by hotels and shopping arcades. As his family fortunes improved, they moved to a three-and-a-half storey high bungalow along Newton Road, two or three houses from where a flower and plant nursery once stood. That big house was no doubt sufficient for a family of five boys and four girls. But it also had room for compassion and kindness. His father had never forgotten where he came from and would offer lodging to fellow Indians passing through and too poor to afford a place to stay. Mr Narayanan's father, Mr Narayana Iyer, had come to Singapore from Kerala, India when he was just a lad of seventeen and a half. To get to Singapore, he had to travel from the south-west coast of the Indian sub-continent to the south-east coast where one of the shipping ports of Madras and Negapatam (present day Nagapattinam) was. That meant traversing some 300 miles of south coastline of the country. From Negapatam, he would board a steamer ship and take that seven-/eight-day journey to Penang, a Straits Settlement and common disembarkation point for many Indians, mostly the unskilled and uneducated. Some would take that additional one-and-a-half day to Singapore. Mr Iyer did just that. Because he was schooled in typing and bookkeeping, he soon found work as a clerk at a rubber plantation some 40km up in Johor, Malaysia. As plantations then were mostly owned by ang-mohs (white men) and serviced by Indian coolies, Mr Iyer's ability to speak English proved an asset. He was able to act as intermediary between boss and workers. But working and living in a plantation is not without its hazards. Mr Narayanan recalls his father's friend telling him that his dad's abode used to be up a tree. "He had to climb a ladder up to his house every night. Many tigers roamed the jungles and rubber estates then, it was not something to be trifled with!" At the time, much of the rubber was being tapped in Malaysia but then processed and traded in Singapore, the entrepot hub of South-east Asia. Though the plantation owners were mostly white foreigners, the middlemen in the business were Chinese. They were making greater profits via trading. This situation did not sit very well with Mr Iyer's boss, Mr R.S. Stanton Nelson, a Scotsman. He decided to have a piece of the pie, and so, together they and another man (an Eurasian), came over to Singapore to start up an office. Over the years, that office became the well-known RS Stanton Nelson rubber brokerage firm. As the fortunes of the company grew, so did Mr Iyer's. He got married and settled down in Singapore. In time, the family grew to include five boys and four girls. Surprisingly, of all his siblings, Mr Narayanan was the only one not born in Singapore. He explains: "I was the odd one out because for some reason, my dad sent my mom back to India to be looked after by her family until I was born. Six months later, I was brought back here to live." As mentioned before, the journey back to India took nearly eight days by sea. "It must have been tough on the ladies," notes Mr Narayanan, as his mind drifted back into the past. "India was a British colony then and folks from there often rode the steamer ships that plied the seas. Unaccustomed to such travels, getting seasick must have been a real possibility. For Chinese women, their journey must have been even tougher. They sailed mostly in junks which weren't as comfortable as the steamer ships. Perhaps that's the reason why few came along with their men folk." In the middle of 1935, his father took the whole family back to India to marry off his eldest sister, who was thirteen and a half and a student at Raffles Girls School then. "Indian and Chinese children at the time were married off young. For South Indians, the age was before 14. But although they married early, the 'couple' consummated and co-habituated their marriages only later," explains Mr Narayanan. The journey to solemnise his sister's marriage was not an easy one. "We boarded a Lloyd Triestino Italian ship that brought us to Colombo, Ceylon after a three-day voyage. We then crossed the Palk Straits to reach the southern tip of the Indian continent, what is now Tamil Nadu state. From there, we took the landed route back to our village in Kerala." According to Mr Narayanan, the family later returned to Singapore where his eldest sister resumed her studies at RGS, becoming the only married student there. But when her husband came to visit and to take her back to India sometime in 1938, his sister had little choice but to comply. "It was something expected of her to do," says Mr Narayanan. Though his eldest sister's studies came to a premature end, his other sister went on to finish her Senior Cambridge exams in school in 1940. At the time, Mr Narayanan was studying at Victoria School (see Part 1 - Schooling). He remembers visiting the secondhand bookshops at Bras Brasah often and dropping by Raffles Library (later renamed as National Library) afterwards. "To get to Bras Brasah, I would hop onto a trolley bus. The fare was just two cents for the standing room section. There was also an eight-seater First Class section." According to him, the trolley bus would start from its Newton Circus terminus; make its way down to Rochor Road and then North Bridge Bridge. He would get off at Capitol to walk that short distance to the library. However, Mr Narayanan's visit to the library and his studies would be cut short by the threat of WWII. His father had decided that Kerala was a safer place for the family and so sent everyone back in 1941. His father himself remained behind in Singapore, probably feeling too pained to leave after having built up so much in his 30-year career. By then, he had also become a prominent figure in the Indian community. Much was at stake. But months later, when it became apparent that the Impregnable Fortress that was Singapore was becoming indefensible, his father too boarded a ship and headed back to India. It was February 1942, just before Singapore surrendered to the Japanese. By then, Mr Iyer had certainly come a long way for a seventeen year old boy who first landed on Singapore's shores in 1911. I knew he provided his family with a big house to live in. But what else was there? Mr Narayanan then shows me an old photo of himself as a child standing next to his father's car, a Baby Austin - a car not too different from the Ford Model A common in those times. Next to him was a chauffeur. In another picture he was standing next to a cow, obviously at a farm. "That farm in Lim Chu Kang belonged to Mr Max Bell from Fraser & Co., a share brokering company. Their family and ours were close. That farm was like our weekend retreat," Mr Narayanan recalls wistfully. So more than material gains, Mr Iyer also gained the respect and affections of his fellows in the industry. A small portrait of Mr Iyer stands on a shelf in Mr Narayanan's living room. It was taken sometime around Chinese New Year in a photo studio in the year 1913 - two years after he first arrived in Singapore. The back of the photograph bears his neat handwriting in pencil. In the picture, he is standing, one hand resting lightly on a side table. He is dressed smartly in a high-collar white shirt and dark suit, tie pinned neatly in place. His waist coat chain is visible. His laced leather shoes are as immaculate as the rest of him. Looking at the young man, you see a boyish charm. You also see someone who is confident and determined to make something of himself, a fact that his son Mr Narayanan attests to. "He went about it in his own affable way. Before my dad left his village, he had not seen a Chinese or Malay before, maybe an ang-moh or two. But he worked well with folks across all ethnic communities, cultures and religions. That was quite something." Unfortunately, this young man did not live to see beyond his 55 years of age. He succumbed to a heart attack on the night of an office party along Nassim Road in 1948. He was the company's managing director. In his passing, he left behind a legacy not just to his family but to generations of fellow Indian immigrants that with education, determination and a spirit of enterprise, the unreachable might just be attainable. Mr Iyer's son, Mr Narayanan might not have completed his education at Victoria School as he wished, nor was he able to use his degree earned in India as he pleased, but he found success no less as Singapore's first Indian stockbroker, just as his dad was Singapore's rubber broker. Somehow, I can imagine his father looking down at him and saying, quite proudly, "That's my boy, an Indian done good." And for such a thing, there is no measure of its effects across the sands of time, across an ocean to other small villages where perhaps stand a man-child, hand on suitcase, ready to take that leap of faith.