IPOH: Fifty years on, a tragedy that took 40 lives here still gets her teary-eyed and puzzled about a stranger who tried to warn her about the rockslide.
P. Mariyaee was only 19 years old when the disaster struck at the foot of a limestone hill in Gunung Cheroh on Oct 18, 1973, during a downpour.
It killed 40 people of the then Kampung Kacang Putih, besides destroying 20 houses and crushing cows and goats.
Most of the villagers, who were Malaysian Indians, were busy preparing for Deepavali, which was about a week away.
“I remember that day very well. Sometime between 5.30pm and 6pm, an unkempt old man in dirty clothes approached me, telling me to run away as rocks were going to fall,” she said.
Mariyaee told her family and other villagers about what the man had said, but no one took her seriously.
“And just before the rockfall, the cows and goats started to become restless. They were making all sorts of sounds,” said Mariyaee, who is now 70 and works as a caretaker of a Hindu temple inside the limestone cave.
She said that the catastrophe happened about an hour after the man’s ominous words.
Mariyaee managed to flee as her house was not that near the site, but her brother lost his wife and their two children.
“My sister-in-law’s body was found floating in a nearby pool three days later,” she said.
Some of the bodies of other victims have never been recovered.
As for the stranger, she said the villagers later theorised that he was a pious person.
Mariyaee was among two people who recounted the dark episode during an event yesterday organised by the Perak National Archives Department.
Another former villager present was T. Subrumaniam, 62, a kacang putih seller in Buntong.
(Gunung Cheroh was the previous base for kacang putih sellers in Ipoh. About a year after the rockslide, these traders moved to Buntong, which remains popular for Ipoh kacang putih.)
Subrumaniam, who was 12 years old at the time, recounted:
“I was watching TV and suddenly the power went off. It was raining very heavily and the winds were blowing with great force.
“When I went outside to have a look, there were already policemen, firemen, ambulance and army personnel at the site,” said Subrumaniam, whose father was the Kampung Kacang Putih chairman then.
For a whole year, he said curious visitors would come to the site of the tragedy.
Among those who attended yesterday’s event were two other villagers – Joyah Saad, 61, and V. Krishnamah, 74.
Joyah said the rockslide took the lives of her father and older sister.
“My father was in the shower and my sister was at my neighbour’s house, helping them to make cookies for Deepavali.
“Other villagers came to my aid, taking me out of the house.
“There were trees falling everywhere. It was raining heavily. The winds were really strong, causing the roof to be blown away,” she said when met at the event.
As for Krishnamah, she lost her mother, sister and a brother.
“I had gone out to buy clothes for Deepavali, and when I was on my way home, a relative told me about the disaster.”
She camped out at the hospital then.
“The bodies of my three family members buried under the huge boulders have never been recovered until today,” she said.
For years after the tragedy, she said that she could not bring herself to visit the site or attend Thaipusam at the Sri Subramaniar Temple in Gunung Cheroh.
State human resources, health, Indian community affairs and national integration committee chairman A. Sivanesan, who launched yesterday’s event, said a memorial would be constructed at the site soon, with the cost estimated between RM30,000 and RM40,000.
Prior to the 1973 tragedy, he said there were two other similar incidents, in 1927 and 1940, at the same site.
