Everyone agrees that Norizah is a very good nurse. She is charming, polite, efficient and knowledgeable in her work. But for all her all-round professionalism, what endears her most to us is her culinary talent.
As much as she loves to cook we love her cooking. I thought it was such a novel idea when recently she cooked on the theme of ubi kayu, a sort of tribute to the humble tuber, a mini festival.
There was ubi kayu in all its culinary possibilities - plainly boiled and eaten with sambal ikan bilis, cut into sticks, laced with pounded coriander then deep fried, ubi pancake, bingka ubi and, to many of us, her irresistible pengat ubi.
As we savoured these delights the fortysomethings began to exchange fond memories of their kampung childhood when money was scarce and the versatile ubi kayu would often feature in the one form or another for breakfast.
For lunch or dinner, ubi kayu shoots made ready substitute when there was no money for vegetables. Thank God there was no one old enough in our company to wax lyrical about the role it played during that period of extreme scarcity, the Japanese occupation.
To the Malays, ubi kayu is one of mother nature's most generous gifts. Not only is or was this tuber an important source of food, it is also a source of our folk wisdom. Through the proverb Diam-diam ubi berisi, the Malays extol the virtue of quiet diligence. The easy to cultivate ubi kayu plants can teach us a thing or two about tolerance in that they do not mind sharing their space with nutrient-depleting weeds although at times they get overwhelmed by the latter.
As I took biteful chunks of deep fried ubi kayu, placing each piece on my tongue and blowing off the steam as one would with hot potatoes, I began to think of a Van Gogh painting entitled The Potato Eaters. This is my favourite Van Gogh although I have only seen it in books as I have never had the occasion of attending a conference in Amsterdam that could have allowed me the diversion of visiting the Van Gogh Museum.
Pictures of poverty
The Potato Eaters is my favourite artwork simply because of its theme. The picture tells us about the poverty and misery of rural life in Holland at the end of the 19th century. Potato, rather than wheat, was the staple food of the poor.
Van Gogh's painting depicts a sombre scene of a peasant family crouched over a dinner of steaming potatoes and nothing else, with chicory brew to wash them down. One can almost hear the enveloping silence as the peasants with their hardened faces slowly munched their frugal meal under the dim light of an oil lamp.
I guess one can easily conjure a very similar scene in rural Malaya during the Japanese occupation through to the early years of independence, except that the poverty would have been more profound.
Norizah told me that ubi kayu is now quite expensive because not many people eat it anymore. If ubi kayu is a symbol of poverty then we can loudly proclaim that we have been largely successful in its eradication. But we know that the dynamics of poverty is not quite as simple.
Abject poverty, that of the hardcore poor as they are officially termed, is easy to understand. We see examples of that highlighted in opposition newspapers from time to time to embarrass the government. They often are abandoned old folk living in shacks on the edge of the kampung. And the likes of poverty in famine-stricken, war-ravaged nations of Africa are other people's distant nightmares.
But in the shadows of elevated rail tracks where driverless trains zip past every few minutes, we still see in parts of our capital the dwellings of our urban underclass - some are outright squatter houses, others dilapidated wooden ones or severely crammed, poorly built low-cost flats that given the choice nobody would want to live in.
In prosperous high-tech KL with the crass materialism of its political and economic elite, one may say that poverty as officially defined hardly exists but what I observe in the lives of our less fortunate co-citizens disturbs me.
Unlike our neighbours, we can proudly claim that we provide our squatter colonies with running water and electricity, and every home has the obligatory VCD while not just a few have the national car proudly parked under a zinc roof. And most importantly nobody is starving. But this staying afloat above the official poverty line is only achieved at a very high social cost.
In the rural poverty of the 1950s and 1960s life can still be dignified - parents are invariably around in the evenings with their children. Nobody held two jobs simply because there was none to be had after dark. Children would help parents in their rubber small-holdings or rice fields.
In this process they learnt life-affirming values and many saw it as a very enriching experience. But in the relative poverty of the modern urban underclass, the breadwinner shoulders everything by himself most of the time. There is nothing that their children could do to help alleviate their financial constraints.
Accepted bargain for progress?
Whenever I had to take taxis in the evenings and chatted with the drivers about their work, the answers I get from them are invariably either this is their second job or they are working very long hours. I can only imagine how they would sneak home late every night, beat and tired, their children already fast asleep. Quality time does not exist in their vocabulary.
How could our ministers berate parents or children for the social and educational problems among our youth when one or both parents are seldom home during their waking hours? Religious scholars endlessly lament the breakdown of the family institution or the loss of moral compass among our younger generation whilst health professionals make careers out of the phenomenon of child abuse, sexual abuse and domestic violence.
It is such a painful sight to see children helping their parents at the night-markets to supplement the family income when their peers from middle-class homes would be having home tuition or violin and ballet lessons.
Would we not recoil in horror each time we see a family of four on a 90cc motorbike in the mornings, the toddler in front of daddy without a helmet and baby held tight by mum, presumably dropping them off at the baby sitter's on their way to work because they cannot afford a live-in domestic help?
All these probably do not count as poverty in official statistics but really I think this is an exercise in self-deception.
It seems we have come to accept that this is part of the bargain for progress and modernity, that a section of society has to make that sacrifice for our greater good, a "caring society" in reverse gear. The weak and poor willingly accept this role and they are proud to belong.
The idea that someone who puts in an honest eight hours of work a day should be remunerated in a way that guarantees a decent standard of living for his family without him having to have another job and that all breadwinners deserve adequate rest for leisure and reflection, seems difficult to accept in our society.
We would lose our regional competitiveness, they say, and think about the massive inflation - these are the arguments that would quickly stifle any rational discussion on how much should we minimally pay our workers, the people whose praises we sing each year come first of May and whose votes we seek every five years.
Minimum wage
To be fair, the prime minister, the trade unionists and the opposition have at one time or another brought up the issue of minimum wage every now and then, especially in the last two years and specific figures have been proffered, but I am not sure if these have come after much study.
In these times when the responsibilities for the basic needs of housing, healthcare and tertiary education are increasingly shifted onto the shoulders of businessmen, these figures seem woefully short of what would be required by a typical family.
Since Labour Day speeches are often non-committal and self-congratulatory, maybe we should have general elections every year if that is the only way to make politicians keep their promises.
Ah, why are these people so ungrateful? When was the last time they had boiled ubi kayu for breakfast?
DR MAZENI ALWI is a medical practitioner who takes care of sick children.
