By Sam Trailerman
If I had to name one not-so-virtuous habit I’ve kept, it would be this: reading while eating, or eating while reading — I’ve never been sure which led the other.
It began in my teens, back in the early 1970s, when afternoons stretched longer than they do now. We were lucky then — the household’s daily ritual was The Straits Times, later The New Straits Times, spread wide across the table like a paper tablecloth. If I recall it right, that broadsheet, 22 × 27.5 inches of newsprint and ink, cost 50 sen or less.
And what was 50 sen in those days? To borrow the old Penang way of putting it for us famously thrifty Penangite it was “as big as a bullock cart’s wheel.” That single coin could buy you a steaming bowl of curry mee, heaped with all the extras, and still leave you full enough to sigh.
That’s when the habit took root: me, a newspaper the size of a sail, and a bowl I’d forget was there because the words tasted just as good.
I even found joy in reading the labels on soy sauce bottles, there at my usual Indian-Muslim stall in the 1980s, while I worked my way through heaping plates of fried noodles. And if it was Nasi Kandar to take home, I’d always ask the uncle packing it to please use only the old English papers, no other kind would do.
There was nothing quite like it: savouring every last grain of rice while my eyes wandered over every printed word, even if the news was already a week stale. The ink, the smell of curry, the rustle of yesterday’s headlines it was a feast for more than just the stomach.
The 1990s were kinder, with a steady pay check in my pocket. Back then, if a good book or magazine caught my eye, I’d find a way to make it mine, no questions asked. I didn’t think twice about subscriptions either Reader’s Digest among them. It’s gone now, folded April 2024 after 86 years, and somehow the shelves feel a little emptier for it.
That little monthly was my teacher in so many ways — broadening my vocabulary, feeding me stories that informed and lifted the heart at once. At its height, it reached 40 million souls across more than 70 countries, 49 editions in 21 languages, even Braille. The largest paid-circulation magazine in the world, they said. The first issue rolled off the press in 1922, and I still keep a replica of it, proud as anything, like holding a piece of time itself.
The late ’60s and ’70s belonged to Fanfare and Galaxie, those lively teen entertainment magazines that felt like the whole world folded into glossy pages. They had a corner where you could write in to make new friends pen pals, we called them. We’d trade letters, hand-written and stamped, waiting weeks for a reply. I wonder if today’s Gen Y or Z, raised on instant pings and swipes, would even know the slow thrill of a pen pal.
I was especially fond of the Agony Aunt column in Galaxie. That’s where I first learned, back in 1974, what an “agony aunt” even was someone who’d weigh the tangled problems of strangers and offer a little borrowed wisdom. Questions like, “A is good-looking but arrogant while B is plain but kind, who should I choose?” Or the heavier ones: “My parents won’t let me go out or watch TV, only study, study, study I feel like ending it all.” Reading those pages, you felt less alone, like someone, somewhere, understood the ache of growing up.
Sadly, Fanfare and Galaxie have slipped off the racks for good like so many print treasures, swept aside when tastes shifted and the online tide came in.
I still keep my 40 little pocket-sized books from the Combat Picture Library series, World War II stories and anecdotes published between 1960 and 1985. They fit in the palm like a secret. Sadly, a few of those well-thumbed volumes were lent out over the years and never found their way home not like the faithful boomerang we were promised as kids.
And then there are my Lat comics, bound as books and guarded like family heirlooms. If any Malaysian who loves our home-grown comics and caricatures claims not to know Lat, well… that person’s surely been “a frog under a coconut shell” all this time.
To me, Datuk Mohd Nor Khalid, Lat as we all know him is more than a cartoonist. He’s a social commentator, a cultural icon, Malaysia’s own mirror held up with a wink. His pen has danced across newspapers, magazines, graphic novels, even postage stamps and the sides of buses. There’s a magic in his lines: they can pry a grin out of the dourest face, and make you remember what it felt like to laugh without reason, the way we did back then.
I guard my Lat collection the way Gollum once clutched that ring — precious, irreplaceable, a small trove of joy no one else could truly understand. I’ve already promised one of my nieces: when I finally kick the bucket one fine, far-off day, the whole lot will be hers to keep. May she turn those pages and hear the same laughter I did.
Lately, I’ve found myself slipping back into that old, faithful habit of reading. The one keeping me company now is a book about Manicasothy Saravanamuttu Sara, to those who knew him a journalist of rare calibre who had so much to do with that once-legendary Penang paper, The Straits Echo.
I’m only halfway through, but each chapter feels like a door creaking open to another time. With every page, I get a quiet, privileged glimpse of the people and events that stitched together this lovely country of ours, Malaysia and of course, Penang, always Penang back when the ink was still fresh and the future still being written. And so the pages turn, but the love of reading stays, inked into the heart like an old bookmark never removed.
Some treasures don’t gather dust. They gather years, and they gather us.
Nganasegaran (tapessam@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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