Taxed By the River

If you look up an old copy of the AAM Guide to Driving in Malaysia and take the road that wends and bends up Bukit Kijal, you'll see as you're coming down on the other side a breathtaking view of the beach in Kemaman, the sea framed by steep hillsides, coconut trees with leaves waving so nimbly and the sun shining bright in a cloudless sky. This was the view I saw many times in our journeys home from Kuantan by bus or taxi, and then maybe a few times more in our trips from Kuala Lumpur with Father when he drove us home in his ailing Hillman Minx and then later from inside a tank called the Volvo 122S that Father picked up from the yard of a second-hand dealer.

In 1936 the young colonial officer M.C. ff. Sheppard, delighted to be re-posted to Kemaman, found the beach there as beautiful and alluring as when he’d left it in 1934, so much so that he wondered how his fellow countrymen, coming as they did from a “nation whose youth has been spent on holiday at Margate, Broadstairs, Filey or Bude” could have left it alone and unspoilt.

Kemaman may have been beautiful and the place to be but not to all of Shephard’s fellow officers. In 1923, G.E.Clayton, a man who survived the Great War mentally and physically intact, found the solitude and the quiet life in Kemaman just too burdensome to bear. He took out his gun and just blew his life away. His successor had much the same view about Kemaman, but instead of pulling out his gun, he took out his pen and wrote his resignation letter just a week after being condemned to this life of beach, sea and sky.

I had no views of Kemaman except as a stopping place after the stomach churning roller coaster roads that we knew as jalan ular (snake road) after Kuantan, and the Kemaman ferry, the floating platform that bobbed up and down from one side to the other of the Kemaman water. Kemaman looked to me like a vast place, with villlage houses sheltering under coconut groves and miles of mostly straight but pot-holed tarmac to Kuala Trengganu. And then of course there was Geliga, that enchanted stone on Kemaman's shore.
A boy who was our cousin or maybe in a position further removed in the kinship line, went on a bus ride to Kemaman one day and came back with other unfortunates stretched out in the back of a lorry. They were all laid out fully clothed, with lungs still drenched in brackish water after the bus lost its brakes in its downward journey down the steep slope to the Geliga ferry. It plunged straight into the swollen river. That was a very long time ago but I can still see them all stretched out on the tarpaulin when the lorry pulled into the street light just after dusk for the bodies to be collected by grieving families.

It marked out Kemaman as a distant place in my mind’s eye, with loopy roads and deep rivers in the shadow of a steep hill. It was, after all, nearly a hundred miles away from Kuala Trengganu. And then there was a town called Chukai shimmering in reflection in yet another body of water. Chukai was allegedly named after the tax (cukai) collectors that kept their post on the river banks, but Mother told us a different story. There was, in times past, she said, a crocodile in the Kemaman river and because of its habit of regularly snapping up local inhabitants for food the place came to be known as Chukai, i.e. the place where the crocodile exacted its toll.

When crocodiles no longer swam the river and drill platforms rose along the shore, the trunk road from Pahang through Kemaman was lit up in the nights by a tall gas flare that signalled that one was entering oil country. It seemed aeons ago now when Tuan Separd (Sheppard) left his local idyll to take up further posts in the rarefied air of Kuala Lumpur, and then staying on after Independence to become the first curator (I think) of the Muzim Negara before moving on to distinguish himself in other things, not as ‘M.C.ff’ but as Abdul Mubin Sheppard, writer, historian, socialite, Tan Sri, Dato’ and Haji.

Kemaman had its ways of luring people. As the historian Heusseler put it: "For bachelors who were not overly reliant on clubs and European society, it was a paradise of vast, empty beaches and tiny kampongs dreaming under a tropical sun, peopled by ra'ayat who were as attractive as they were shy and suspicious of outsiders."