FOR a time, he was the lift operator in the imposing building at the corner of quite the grandest square in Metropolitan London, red and white stripes still a-fluttering from its rooftop to this day, star points denote the number of member states, Malaya, then Malaysia, thirteen of us now, in a flag flying against the sky away from home.
There is a photo still of the group. I got mine from the librarian at our present high commission, at another square less than a kilometre away in a leafy, dignified area of town. It was a day of moment, our students abroad, men of our military division over here for training, faces peeking out of a window, all gathered one mid-morning, the dawning of our first day as a nation.
“I left my job at KTM, packed my belongings in a bag and left home,” said En Abdul Aziz, now a sprightly man of 77. “That is the building I worked in,” he said. He twirled his hand in a circle to show how the lift was operated by a crank in the operator’s hand, before the buttons.
The first high commissioner on the day of our break from Britain was Datuk Nik Kamil, a distinguished Kelantanese, who later became our permanent representative at the United Nations. The Datuk read our Declaration of Independence, and then, later, those of the Christian faith proceeded to offer prayers in the nearby St Martin in the Fields where almost a hundred years previously, Charles Dickens read his A Christmas Carol for the first time to London.
“I started work as a messenger boy at Malaya House when it became our Trade Commission,” En Abdul Aziz said. But in his day, perhaps 1960 (he isn’t sure now if it was that or 1959), the high commission had moved to Portland Place, in the northern part of town from the south of its beginnings. The high commissioner was also now another man, Tunku Yaakob, elder brother to our first prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman.
“A very impressive person and a real gentleman,” he said of the elder scion of the House of Kedah.
Later, when he was promoted to the post of clerk, En Abdul Aziz was transferred to Portland Place. Working there as receptionist was a Mrs Dunn, En Abdul Aziz said. Mrs Dunn, an English lady returned to England, had her heart in Malaya for two reasons. One, was her beloved husband, the planter Mr Dunn, who was murdered by Communist terrorists. Another, was her real love for the land.
When she died in the early 1980s, she left a large bequest for her body to be interred beside her husband in Cheras and for her friends to be at the Christian cemetery in Cheras for the funeral. En Abdul Aziz received enough funds to accompany her body home.
“Looking back now to how times have changed,” he said, “I was then also charged with the task of taking our daily despatches from the high commission to a British intelligence signals station in Whitehall for the message to be transmitted in code to Kuala Lumpur.
“One day,” he said with a note of regret in his eyes, “I stopped by the little post office that was then near the Embankment station in Charing Cross and must have dropped the message as I was doing my other chores.
“I had nothing to deliver in Whitehall and worse, I had to go back to the high commission in Portland Place to break the news to them.”
The first time I met En Abdul Aziz was in the late 1970s when, as a rookie reporter in London, I had to make many telephone calls daily to our high commission.
En Abdul Aziz was then an officer at its information office, so, I suppose, he was forgiven.
“What feelings do you have now about this anniversary of our Independence?” I asked.
“Many people and many events,” En Abdul Aziz said. “My mother, my beloved country, my years here, now, and our flag flying in this distant land.”
It is encompassed by the Malay word sayu, an untranslatable rush of gentle emotion that moves you as if you’re swaying in the ocean, stirring up thoughts and sounds and happiness and pain. It is such sweet sorrow, such longing. Perhaps, longing in the Portuguese saudade is in its parts, perhaps regret embroiled in a mixture of loss and love.
“That’s much too much for me,” he said. “But it is a funny time for me to be thinking of my Mum. From the day I left Malaysia, my Mum stopped cooking her masak lemak,” he said. There was a distinct note of sayu in his words.
“That was my favourite dish,” he explained. “She missed me so much that she couldn’t bear holding it in her thoughts.
Now, when I think of my country, especially on the anniversary of its Independence, I remember these thoughts.
“It is important because in Malay, one’s beloved land is Ibu Pertiwi, our Mother, our land.”