The Chiku Unmasked

Almost five years now since the first visit to JB and Reaz Corner beside the India Mosque. On that first visit and in the day or two subsequent taking dinner at Reaz the photograph of the Kaaba had puzzled and intrigued. The Kaaba had never been sighted previously, nor even attained a name. Arches and minaret forms gave hints of general location, but that was all. The sense of some kind of sporting arena, with what seemed to be a misplaced focus on the little black cube. The undertaker directly opposite Reaz advertised his product in the window. Here on the rise the interior lights there were left on overnight, unlike at the competition down nearby in Jalan Trus, Straight Road. At the undertaker around on the straight the chaps occasionally sold various fruits from baskets on the pavement out front—at least in more recent time the business had been developed in that direction. Today when a lorry made a delivery late afternoon at the old uncle and auntie’s fruit stall near the undertaker on Jl. Trus the entire chiku fruit was sighted for the first time. For a crate of small, pointy, potato-like fruit the old auntie presented the lorry driver one 100 ringitt note and one other high denomination that was not caught. A month ago at the cut-fruit stand outside the Chinese teahouse where lunches were taken there had been no chiku. Now despite the drought the fruit was plentiful. Steve the American writer and photographer who had lived in the region fifteen years and relished chiku had recently admitted never having sighted the fruit in its jacket. A day or two ago the fruit vendor at the teahouse had informed that chiku grew on tall trees and needed to be harvested; fallen fruit would be overripe and inedible. (One of Robert Lowell’s poems had memorialised an impeccable vegetarian who would only partake of fallen fruit.) In youth Razali the lame Indian food-stall holder at the teahouse had fallen from a tree picking fruit; a subsequent motor-cycle accident had done the rest for Razali, currently seeking a more affordable hip replacement in Thailand or Indonesia. There are small framed photographs of Mecca and what might be an awning-covered Kaaba on the back wall of Reaz Corner at present; not the large, dazzling earlier picture. The lads there at Reazare North Indian, conversing in Hindi rather than Urdu—and certainly not Tamil. (One had attained a modicum of expertise by now). The India Mosque immediately next door conducted services in the latter language. As in Singapore, the Tamils were the largest Indian group in Malaysia. Yesterday a Malay friend who needed to perform her maghribprayer after a couple of hours of café-sitting and chatting had been unable to do so at Masjid India, as the community there frowned upon unscarved women. Reaz has a barber-shop on the corner itself and the eatery sits on a platform above.  Marvellous naan and vegetable, raw onion and teh under RM10.