Monsoon Cuppa, 25th December

You can go back to the place where you were born, but you can never go home, wrote a sage whose words I pray will not come true as we’re planning our travel back to Kuala Terengganu by bus this Christmas holiday. The last time I travelled that way to the East Coast was aeons ago, on some mad MARA charabanc that sped through the dark night along winding roads and up and down hills, driven by a man who, I hoped and prayed, may have been suffering from all sorts of delusional conditions (being in the grand prix was one of them), but I just wanted him to be suffering also from insomnia. I just couldn’t imagine him falling asleep while doing the turns at a ton, and then us sleeping folks waking up in deep ravine on the edge of a hill.

Not that we were sleeping though. I for one was suffering from his non-stop blaring video of some demented kung-fu fighter going Whish! Whack! Zapp! and leaping into the air somewhere along the Karak highway. We were - and still are - a nation of megablasters. There wasn’t a public place then - as now - that didn’t have music blaring or the beast in the idiot box blasting out some meaningless over-loud pap. We sometimes chide ourselves for not being a nation of reflectors, thinkers and readers, but we treat silence with such dread that we must have piped music, wide-screen television and screaming and shouting everywhere.

On Christmas day, at last, GUiT is going back to its spiritual home, the Keda Pök Löh Yunang in Kedai Payang that now goes by the name of Alam Akademik. I am so happy that we are all going there for what Encik Abdul Karim (a member of the Alam Akademik family and the Pizzaman. that we all love and know) agrees shall also be known as the day of the MONSOON CUPPA. This will be a people’s launch of GUiT where we will all come in to take shelter from the rain and drink a cup of tea, and I’ll read a paragraph or two from GUiT if the mood takes me. But already the scene is set: a kindly senior man who calls hmself Pök Daud has been going around taking photographs of scenes from GUiT that are still standing in KT and he’s promised to hand me a set of prints, for which I’d like to thank him now; my friend Ku Wé has invited me to tea at his Pura Tanjung Sabtu; and a few friends have promised to rope in a few more friends for the day. So in all I expect there will be about 10 people milling about in Alam Akademik sharing memories, collecting their orders for GUiT, and drinking lukewarm tea. So this will be the MONSOON CUPPA unlike the other.

Meantime my publishers are already making preparations for their second print run of GUiT. I shall talk about that when the presses are rolling but for now I am so honoured by an initiative started by a couple of bloggers with a wonderful idea, and they have very kindly named it the GUiT Kampong Memory tag that invites people to share their own childhood memory. You must go here to read a very interesting account of growing up days, and then here, the blog that started it all.

Also thanks for those who have left comments to my postings below. In reply to one of you, yes, GUiT is available in London, from Stanford’s (The Travel Bookshop) in Long Acre, Covent Garden, and from Probsthain’s at their main shop opposite the British Museum, or from their branch at London University (in the Brunei Gallery, SOAS).