Bintong Park

Text by Ronni Pinsler 

My family lived in Bin Tong Park , very near by Hadji Alias, in the 60s. I remember cycling past the kampong many > times, but didnt dare to go in , except one time, when a malay resident offered a soft drink and told me stories about the Pontianak female vengeful spirit, that was reputed to live in the area. I  suspect now that such stories of spooks and spirits were created by the samsu gang to keep out unwelcome visitors. If we want to find out more about this place, perhaps we should try to find a suitable malay website.

Another memory of living at Bin Tong Park was the sometime appearance of Tamil cowherders, not sure if they came from the same kampong at Hadji Alias. They watched over 8-10 straggly cows who would leave a trail of dung on the road. Sometimes the “cowboys” asked me for some potatoes which they would cook in a fire made of dry cowdung. After a while they would pull the spuds from the glowering ash. It was fun for me , 10 or 11 then to share this illegal picnic, illegal because if my Dad knew about it, i’d surely get an earful! Another fun thing my gang and I loved to do was to light some firecrackers set in a cowdung pile, set off when some limo car was just passing by. To see a car getting splattered was a great source of joy to us, made a diversion from playing fighting spiders, and during “confrontasi” curfew when we would scamper around monsoon drains pretending we were terrorists avoiding the vigilantees patrolling the area.