Then & Now....ABOUT ME & MY BARBERS

(Extracted from IPOH ECHO Apr 16-30, 2008)
http://www.ipohecho.com.my/ (issue 48)

Dato' Seri Yang Rashdi sadly passed away on 3 July, 2008 - ALFATIHA
It was his wish to see this blog lived on long after he is gone...

This morning I went to have a haircut in town. My grand-daughter Ijan is coming back from KL and she complains when my hair is unkempt and not properly trimmed. Day after tomorrow there will be an important event at Villa Indera. Somebody is getting married. We have not had a wedding in the family since 2005. But that is another story.

Today, I am preoccupied with memories of trips to the barber shop. My father had been pretty strict about haircuts himself. He made a point of supervising this regular cutting and trimming himself.

It was quite an outing, us packed like sardines in the small - we called it a "baby car" - Austin 7 (PK 2037). I had an older brother, two younger brothers and there were our two sisters, the last two additions in the family. Being "special" they always sat in front, beside our father who drove. Our mother, Akidah had died when the girls were mere toddlers. I am talking of a time in the 1920s.

GREAT FUN
We enjoyed getting our hair trimed except for Tum, the youngest. She would cover her face with her arms and needed much cajoling from both our dad and the Indian barber.

It was the protocol of the day that my older brother and I should be last in the haircutting queue. This gave us sufficient time to kill and be entertained. The barber's shop was one of six or seven little establishments - they were no more than shacks - at kedai bawah Gunung Pondok just at the foot of, yes, Gunung Pondok. Pekan Gunung Pondok was then a tiny, thriving world. People going to Kampong Lalang, Setor, Sungai Ati and Paya Ranggam and beyond to Laneh passed through these little village-shacks where they could buy local cooked food and vegetables. And, if they wished or needed one, they could drop and have their trim in the shop where two Indian barbers worked.

A few yards away going into Pekan Padang Rengas, about a quarter of a mile away from the row of shops, was a railway gate that was closed whenever a train - a passenger mail train or goods train - would chug its way up north through the famed Bukit Berapit tunnels.

MY TURN
Waiting for my turn at the barber's, I was intrigued to watch the hugh locomotive-engines chugging away, white steam or smoke spiralling up and over their funnels. In those days, Padang Rengas Railway Station was a must for all trains going up north or south. The locos sometimes needed power to push them up Bukit Berapit or required "controlling" any long line of the mail or the good trains sliding down the rails from the hill after a very heavy downpour. This happened a few times.

Suffice to say I was never impatient while I waited to be called to have my hair cut. The barber shop of my childhood was quite cosy. It had only two hair-dressing chairs and when the kids came, a plank of wood was placed over the "arms" for them to sit on. Sometimes, I would doze off in the barber's chair. It was so pleasant having my face massaged. But there are occassions I would suddenly sit up with a jolt, thinking the barber might, out of the blue, lose his mind and cut off my ears or nose! This phobia remains with me to this day.

We had a different type of "air-conditioning" then. We had punkahs - a broad cloth attached to a frame with a cord operated manually by a man-servant called a punkawallah. It worked for many of us. In fact, it made one so drowsy. Later, a radio was added to the set-up and it naturally played Tamil songs!

TIME PASSES
In the 1960s, I worked in the big city's State Secretariat and found myself a barber that suited me. His shop was on a river bank, behind the Secretariat building. There was nothing posh about the establishment but it was tidy and everything was in order. The Indian music was perpetually on! This barber shop introduced me to Bay Rum, a hair tonic that was very popular in those days. It was French. Your head was massaged using this tonic; sometimes it was rubbed gently all over your face. It could last on you for as long as three weeks!. I paid the princely sum of between $1.50 and $2.00 each time I visited that river bank barber. An extra 50 cent was levied for a shave if you needed one and for the Bay Rum rub. It was cukup berbaloi sekali.

Later, when I was in the State capital, I frequented a barber shop known as the 'Hollywood Hair Dressing Saloon'. It reminded me a lot of the shop in the Federal capital years earlier. This Hollywood Hair Saloon was manned by two or three nearly middle-aged barbers. They were very experienced, very gentle and very courteous. When they saw me coming up, one of them would wait for me at the door and usher me gently into a seat. The Hollywood Hair Saloon also had its brand of 'in-house' hair tonic. It was not as potent as the genuine Bay Rum - its fragrance would last only a week - but satisfying enough.

RECENT BOUTS
A few years ago, I tried two different barbers in our small pekan. My visit to the Chinese one was never repeated. His shaving razor was blunt; it hurt! The Indian entrepreneur was OK professionally in the beginning but he developed the tendency to push my head about; also, he enjoyed chatting loudly (and endlessly) with a friend who was loittering about or talking to his wife who was in the kitchen.

More recently, I made a rewarding discovery when I visited Romeo Tukang Gunting in town. It was run by two youths from India both of whom confessed to me that they graduated from a Barbers' Academy to earn a Barber's Certificate!

I recall having a good look at the row of half-sized bottles arranged neatly below the big mirror in front of me. They contained a bright pink liquid very much like the colour of Bay Rum. I requested a splash. I was told by the barber that it was not Bay Rum - he quoted something about it in Indian! He had not heard of the long lasting fragrance. The hair-cut and the splash of liquid that was non-Bay Rum cost only RM7.00!

This brings me to my last memory of barbers and their shops. During the transition period called interregnum (the time immediately following the surrender of the Japanese and the period of the British Civilian Adminstration), I was, of course, jobless. One fine day my father handed me a box containing a set of hair-clipper, a razor blade knife and other paraphernalia a barber needs. He said, "Rashdi, while you are waiting for a job - and it may take time for the country to settle down for you to find one - why don't you learn to be a barber? There's money in it! Everybody needs a haircut. People have to see you sometime!".

My father meant well but I just could not understand how he'd want me to be a barber - why, I'd attended a very well-established and well-known institution in the whole country!. I was young and proud. At that time there were only two Malay barbers in the village-town. I would not mention their names here but in time the two would be remembered as the nucleus of the famous or as the infamous API Movement, forerunning of our modern Youth Movements!.

DATO' SERI YANG RASHDI BIN MAASOM
Termaktub di Villa PiJ Indera
Kampong Buiai, Padang Rengas