NARAYANAN Ponnusamy knows the Masjid India area like an old and precious friend.

For close to 50 years, it was both his playground and the place where his family started and grew their remittance business.

The 73-year-old has lived through a national emergency and other disasters that have scarred the historic enclave but which have also transformed it for the better.

And Narayanan believes that just like in the past, something positive will come out of the coronavirus outbreak that has turned Masjid India’s stall-choked streets into a ghost town.

For several months after the May 13 riots 51 years ago, Masjid India, like the rest of Kuala Lumpur was under Emergency for about six months.

Today, three buildings in the area, which are home to up to 8,000 residents, have also been cordoned off from the rest of the country with barbed wire and guarded round-the-clock by armed policemen and soldiers.

This is after Menara City One, which is the northeast section of the triangle-shaped enclave was locked down after 17 residents tested positive for Covid-19 on April 1.

Seven days later, the Selangor and Malayan Mansions, a five-minute walk away were also locked down after 15 cases were detected among the migrants living there.

The buildings were put under an enhanced movement-control order (EMCO) where residents are barred from leaving and no outsiders can enter.

Covid-19 victims from Menara City One and the mansions worked in the Masjid India area.

“I’ve seen the May 13 riots and in the early 1970s when a massive flood turned Masjid India, Jalan TAR all the way to Chow Kit into an ocean,” said Narayanan, who lived in the enclave with his parents and eight brothers.

“The waters went up to the first floor of the shophouses. Almost everything was destroyed.”

But the area sprung back to life months later and the entrepreneurial spirit that made Masjid India what it was roared back to the point that today, there is almost no trace of those floods.

“During May 13, KL was under lockdown. But when we came out of it months later, things felt different. It felt safer,” he said.

“We used to hear frequent tales of robberies but after May 13, it seemed as if the gangsters never returned.”

Positive outcomes

On the map, the enclave, named after its Indian Muslim mosque dating back to the 1850s, looks like an upside-down triangle with its top “base” bordering Jalan Dang Wangi in the north.

The other two sides are straddled by Sg Gombak on the west and Sg Klang on the east.

Cutting through the middle of the triangle is the busy Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman.

Back in the 1960s, the area where the mansions and stores, such as Mydin, Haniffa and Semua House now stand, was a cramped village that stretched from Jalan TAR to Sg Klang.

The village, which by the 1960s had turned into a slum was called “belakang mati” and a notorious red-light district.

Residents at the time believed that the vice dens were cleared out during the Emergency, said Narayanan.

“The whole of KL felt safer afterwards. You could see women walking home at night after that. So even though a national emergency was imposed, something positive came out of it afterwards.”

He believes this can occur again in Masjid India.

The mansions are now home to about 5,000 to 6,000 migrant workers who are packed 10 to 16 into a four-bedroom unit.

“Maybe the MCO will allow the authorities to review such living arrangements and afterwards make it illegal to allow so many people to live in one unit.”

Mariana Isa, a researcher into local Kuala Lumpur history, said the mansions themselves were a solution for a problem that had nagged the city’s planners in the 1960s.

“The wooden village homes were so cramped together that accidental fires would break out and engulf their neighbours quickly,” said Mariana who co-wrote Street Names, Towns of Malaya with Maganjeet Kaur.

“So the authorities demolished parts of the village and built the first public housing units which are Sulaiman Court, Pekeliling Flats and the Selangor and Malayan Mansions.”

So, in this way, the fires that plagued Masjid India gave the area and the rest of Malaysia its first concrete and comfortable public housing unit, a scheme that is continued to this day in other parts of the nation. – April 10, 2020.