A MULTITUDE of Malaysians, young and old, attended the birth and growing up of Lat the Kampung Boy in the pages of Berita Minggu and The New Straits Times (NST) of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Kampung Boy was framed in an idyllic picture, portraits of innocence and mischief, personality types that prompted laughter, or a smile, because in them we instantly recognised ourselves, family members and friends.

When the antics of this village imp were collected and bound in a book in 1979, The Kampung Boy went supernova. 

Hundreds attended Lat’s book-signing sessions in malls all over the country. In Singapore, his appearance drew 500 fans, among them the family of the president.

After which, the Kampung Boy moved to town, grew up and went global.

So where is the kampung from which Lat drew his stories and drew his cartoons? Which is the kampung that had three, four children perched on an adult bicycle, wobbling their way into mischief, vine-swinging like Tarzan for a joyous splash into the river? Where is that earth-gobbling monster of a tin-dredge?

Is it Kampung Lalang, Kota Baru, Perak, where Mohammad Nor Khalid was born March 5, 1951? Where the chubby kid acquired the family nickname of “bulat” (round), shortened to Lat. 

Or any one or a composite of the several towns in several states – Butterworth, Kuala Batas, Muar, Kluang, Mentakab, Kampung Baru (Kuala Lumpur) – where the peripatetic family briefly rooted, on manoeuvre with the 5th Malay Regiment because Lat’s father clerked for the soldiers?

Or Sg Rokam? Where the family finally had a house to call their own in 1963, not a temporary rent while waiting for the regiment’s next assignment. A unit in the Kg Sg Rokam low-cost housing scheme. A RM3,000 house paid over 14 years at the rate of RM32 a month. A move up socially, from the typical noisy-in- the-rain zinc roofs of kampung houses, with their asbestos roof.

Sg Rokam bordering Taman Golf in Ipoh where Lat bought a plot of land in 1991, built a house and had the family move in at the end of 1997, a visit they thought was going to be an inspection of the empty new house, but which ended with them spending the night there, Lat ignoring the kids’ horrified protest about an absence of air-conditioning, let’s go and buy some mattresses.

Lat said his kids were too urbanised, becoming mall kids. He wanted them to experience the stream of life in the kampung in which he was immersed.

One is prompted to think of the words of the American novelist Thomas Wolfe from his posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again (1940): “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood… back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame… back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time.”

Evolution, progress and development, change – call you what it will – but there is an inexorable process and mindset that will erase anything of Yesterday that is in the way of their preoccupation with Today and Tomorrow. Sorry, past shelf life. Recycle.

It’s a given – there will be change.

Lat is in no mood to tour the absent landmarks that studded the landscape of his childhood. The social magnets of Ipoh then, the cinemas, had been derelict for ages. The new draws are clone malls, with their clone food outlets and stores. The Tanjung Rambutan bus-station (the name then a synonym for the mentally ill) with its smoking buses, ice-kacang stalls and loud pop from jukeboxes – gone, silenced.

Nasi kandar stalls under giant, spreading aged rain trees – all gone, trees and all. The monstrous earth-gobbling tin-dredge had transmogrified into a cement factory dusting the landscape.

And most of his “cronies” have passed on. Hence, his refusal to tour physical and personal ghosts.

Lat’s house in Taman Golf faces a golf course – for once, a truthful name, instead of a Green-this and a Park-that, and you get concrete-ville condos with a flyover 6m away. The frontage is a cross-breeding of influences – the top half looks like a kampung house, the ground floor could be any bungalow in any suburb in any town.

To settle the question about his kampung, it’s Sg Rokam, the family’s first home now occupied by his sister and family members. Kg Lalang, his birthplace, just contributed scenes of joy in the river.

Many stories, in Lat’s own voice, can be found in Lat: My Life and Cartoons (Editions Didier Millet). It has a wealth of photographs of Lat through the ages, from an early one-year-old nudist, to the immortalised Mrs Hew with her butterfly-glasses, cheongsam and beehive hairdo (in Lat’s cartoons, often with a rotan in hand to quell riotous spirits), to an 18-year old Lat astride his 350cc AJS bike. Shame. Cartoons destroyed a potential career as a postman or a Mat Rempit.

Lat is not just a cartoonist caricaturing politicians and the common man, planting them in Formula 1 powered, armpit-to-armpit packed mini-buses or dealing with convoluted bureaucracy, to prompt a laugh.

He tells the stories of multi-glottal, multicultural Malaysians in compressed vignettes, the penglipur lara (traditional village storyteller pre-television, yes children, once upon a long, long time ago there were long, draggy nights with no TV1 and TV2 to entertain us) for a changing Malaysia. Our stories.

The parts of Kg Sg Rokam fringing Jalan Gopeng have succumbed to the ubiquitous sprouting of shop-houses and terraced living, just like any other Malaysian suburb. In the heart of the kampung, many houses showed extensions and a melding of modern features that Lat derided for losing the authentic look. An inevitable consequence of upward economic mobility.

They were a few traditional kampung houses in isolated patches that had resisted the lure of cosmetic or physical surgery, but they looked lost, fading into anonymity, dwarfed or dilapidated in comparison with their tarted-up neighbours.

Nostalgia is an opiate. Nothing stays forever.

The kampung may be going. But the kampung never left Lat. That’s where Lat’s kampung is. In him and all of us who grew up with and during the times of the Kampung Boy. The search for an actual neighbourhood was a grail.

One would like to think that’s where it is, rather than its resurrection in Rumah Lat, a projected heritage kampung project in Batu Gajah, on land provided by the Perak government, with the Ministry of Tourism dreaming of hordes of tourists spending money to get a glimpse of staged traditional kampung life. – April 3, 2017.