The Libuk Durian massacre was certainly the bloodiest event in the early history of Tungud. However the saddest incident, which took place the following year, must surely be the story of Suppiah and Leena.
Suppiah was born on Pamol Kluang in Johore. His father, Velauthem was the driver of the road-grader. I knew Suppiah since he was a teenager. As a young lad, he served his apprenticeship with heavy plant in Johore, and he became an expert in the handling, maintenance and repair of road-making machinery.
I remember attending the service in the Hindu temple, and the subsequent party when he married Suppamah from Kluang. He was aged about 28 when, to my great pleasure, he agreed to come and join us in Sabah.
His experience was invaluable to us and he was soon in charge of all our heavy plant, including four bulldozers, three Poclain excavators, two road-graders and sundry other items of machinery. Suppamah and his two young sons stayed behind in Kluang, and he commuted back to west Malaysia to see them every few months.
When he had been with us in the Labuk for a year or so, Suppiah fell hopelessly in love with a young Cocos Island girl. Her name was Leena and she was a Hindu. It was a difficult situation.
We were however coming to the end of our roads programme, and I agreed with Suppiah that the best thing would be for him to be transferred back to Pamol Kluang to rejoin his family. He departed, and shortly afterwards, Mahid, my cook who was also the Imam, told me that Leena was going to be married to one of our Bugis headmen.
A few weeks later, to my great surprise, I met Suppiah coming off the plane at our airstrip. He came up to the club for a drink with me. He said he had returned to Sabah because he had been offered a high-paying job with a timber company in the upper Labuk. He was going to stay the night in our Rest House.
The next morning, there was a great commotion on the estate. I was told that Suppiah and Leena had run off together. It was confirmed that no boat had left the estate, and there had been no plane.
The pawang from Bayok was consulted. After elaborate incantations he informed us that the two lovers had undoubtedly fled into the jungle. Search parties scoured the boundaries with no success. Suppiah and Leena had disappeared.
Bodies found
Two mornings later, I heard shouting at the jetty outside my office. I ran down, in time to see some workers hauling the bodies of Suppiah and Leena out of the river. They had committed suicide. Suppiah’s shirt was tied to Leena’s dress and they were still linked together in death.
It was a very sad sight. I would have rather liked them to be buried together, but the Cocos Islanders immediately removed Leena for burial at the Muslim ground.
Kenganathen was our senior Hindu. He and Suppiah had known each other for years. Kong Miew had also known Suppiah on Pamol Kluang. They had both seen Suppiah the previous evening at the club, but like me, they had been given no hint of his intentions.
Kenganathen said that Suppiah should be cremated in a Hindu ceremony. We arranged for a big funeral pyre to be built. The cremation took place in the late afternoon. It was a lonely ceremony, attended only by Kenganathen, Kong Miew and myself.
Suppiah had been a popular figure amongst the staff on the estate; between us, we collected a very handsome amount of money which we sent to Pamol Kluang for his widow and two young sons.
Years later, just before I retired, when on a visit to Kluang, Suppiah’s eldest son came to meet me, bringing his mother Suppamah. He was well-dressed and was obviously doing very well. He was, he told me, a businessman, and his younger brother was a teacher in a Kluang secondary school.
Lucky escape
But let us return to the subject of Harun. His trial was eventually held in the wooden courthouse opposite the Resident’s office in Sandakan. It was very interesting. The judge was Bill Silk, whom I knew quite well. He was the Colony’s circuit judge, resident in Hong Kong.
Although I was a material witness, Bill kindly permitted me to remain in the courtroom after I had given my evidence. The proceedings were fairly short. Harun pleaded guilty with alacrity.
The young lawyer who had been appointed as the defence attorney obviously fancied himself as Perry Mason. He made much of the fact that Harun had been provoked by Maria, when she shook her broom in his face. This seemed to impress the two Assessors, but Bill gave this defence short shrift. It was an open and shut case.
There were no facilities in Sabah at the time for looking after a dangerous psychopath, and Bill had no alternative but to condemn Harun to be hanged by the neck until dead. Harun was completely unmoved by the decision.
Bill and I went down to the Sandakan Recreation Club for afternoon tea. A London visitor to the estate shortly afterwards thought it must be some sort of record for Unilever to have one employee hanged, and for another to murder 14 people, all within the course of a couple of months.
I reassured him that these were exceptional occurrences and that the Labuk was normally a very safe and happy place with very little communal strife. The estate was in fact a much safer place to be, than the average English town on a Saturday night.
After all these tales of blood and gore, I am pleased to relate that there was actually a happy ending to the Harun story. Years later, after I had been transferred to the London Office, I paid a visit to Tungud.
We were up in the Cocos Islanders’ kampong reminiscing about the pioneering days. Someone mentioned Maria’s murder. I said I was really very sorry that Harun had been hanged. One of our workers, a Javanese by the name of Satiman, piped up from the back, “Harun was not hanged, Tuan.”
“Yes, he was,” I told him. “I was in the courtroom when the judge condemned him to death.”
“No, Tuan. Minta maaf!” Satiman insisted. “I was speaking to Harun only a few weeks ago in Kalimantan. He is an old man now, Tuan, but he’s keeping quite well, and he hasn’t killed anyone for years. You remember that at the end of Konfrontasi, the Chief Minister gave a pardon to all Indonesian prisoners, and sent them back home? Harun was released at the same time.”
I met Bill Silk at a Sabah Reunion in London a couple of years ago. He was as pleased as I had been, to learn that Harun had escaped the rope.
Datuk Leslie Davidson
Author, East of Kinabalu
Former Chairman, Unilever Plantations International
The is the second part of an edited chapter from the book published in 2007. It can be purchased from the Incorporated Society of Planters; email: isph@tm.net.my
