There were millions of flies!

Mr S. Rajamanickam interviewed by Chan Kim Yin in May 2018 People were discouraged from coming here in the 1950s because of flies attacked to dried shrimp fertilizer used by vegetable farms Another thing that discouraged people from coming here was the flies. All around were vegetable farms, and they were using prawn dust as fertilizer like in the Cameron Highlands – shrimp dust. There were millions of flies. You couldn’t just sit here without flies all on your face. There was the rubber estate and the farms behind my house. Lorong Kong Kuan went through rubber estate. When I used to come here during the weekends, we used to trap these flies by mixing latex, sugar and coconut oil, mix them into a paste, and put it on a cardboard. Within minutes, the cardboard would be covered by flies! Pancharatnam’s brother, Ananda, used to come along, and there were rubber trees behind my house. We’d go and tap, take some latex and mix it up.