A Brief Family History

      Where do I begin? There is no beginning to this story and there will never be an end. It will and always will be an ongoing process of story writing with its characters changing over time.

      As for now, I will go all the way back to the early 1930’ in a beautiful little village in Punjab when a little baby boy was held into the reassuring safe hands of a young farmer, Mal Singh. Baby Jaginder Singh is now the new member of the Sindhu-Brar clan which descended from the Bhatti clan through Jesul Bhatii. Despite the simple, wonderful life in Punjab, Malaya seems to offer more for the ambitious Jaginder Singh. Thus, he sailed to Johore, a foreign land which will later become the home to him and generations after him. His brother, Sardara Singh soon followed and they became the first generation of Mal Singh’s decedent in Malaya. Jaginder started off by selling clothes from India and later venture into some money lending business which was apparently a common job description for early Punjabis in Malaya. As arranged by family, he marries the beautiful sixteen-year-old Gurnam Kaur who is the daughter of Gobind Singh, a police officer from India who was sent to Malaya by the British. She was born in Malaya but had to move back to Punjab after her mother’s death as her father was arranged to remarry. Jaginder Singh and Gurnam Kaur are the proud parents of six children and the youngest, Mhinder Singh happens to be my father.

      Growing up, my father was a typical Punjabi boy, with his patka and his kara and his undying love for his chai and dhall. After finishing college, he was posted in Keningau, Sabah as a Medical Laboratory Assistant where he met my mother, Collen Sigar, a young Lun bawang women from Sugiang Baru, a little village in Tenom. They met in the hospital where my mother had to translate for her aunt who does not speak Malay. My mother is the child of Sigar Minagung, a strong Lun bawang man who migrated from North Kalimantan at the age of seven. Lead by his father, Minagung Tabed, they walked through the thick jungles of Borneo for eight days with the hope of a better life. They had nothing more than their heart and soul when they arrive at Sapung, Tenom. They built a house in the interior of Tenom and settled there for generations to come. It was in this little village that he met the love of his life, Sifai Udan, a young Lun bawang women who also migrated from North Kalimantan for the promise of a better life. She came to Sabah at the age of twenty with her cousin brother and started a new life here. They got married and had seven children with my mother being the third.

     I was born in Keningau, Sabah in 1995 but I lived in Pontian, Johor since I was barely 4 months old. Our small family of four started off by settling in our late paternal grandparent’s house and continue to relocate around Pontian throughout the years. My parents decided to live a separate life when I three and since then I have two places I call home and now three, with Sarawak being on top of my list.