From K Gurunathan

Putting an elephant into a pot is an old Tamil proverb. The reductionist’s ability to boil down the large and complex into its simple essence.

Looking at my brother K Sugumaran, or Sugu as he was known in media circles, you’d think this an easy task. He stood at just over 5ft; the family joke being that his size was a result of the staple diet of ubi kayu (tapioca) during the Japanese occupation of Malaya in the 1940s.

His small stature belied the intellectual giant with a reputation in secondary school of having read every book in the school library, supplemented by the volumes held at the Penang Library and the USIS library. We often found him with his head buried in a fat book. Titles on literature and philosophy dominated.

He was the eldest and smallest of the family of seven boys and two girls, and the apple of our father’s eye. The upkeep of a large family on the meagre salary of a government clerk did not stop Father from stepping up for Sugu.

The Boy Scout uniform festooned with badges as he became a troop leader. The box camera and the chemicals he needed to develop photos in the small darkroom he set up under the stairs. The confrontation with the school principal when Sugu was stripped of his prefect’s badge.

Sugu, well-versed in the Hindu and Buddhist philosophy on the transmigration of souls through rebirth, crossed swords with a teacher, a Catholic brother at St Xavier’s Institution, on whether animals had souls.

He was reported to the principal for being rebellious and disruptive and stripped of his position as a prefect. My father heard the story over dinner and turned up at the principal’s office the next morning with Sugu.

The principal concluded the disciplinary action was wrong, opened the desk drawer, and handed back Sugu’s prefect’s badge. All’s well now, right? No. Sugu took it and dropped it in the office dustbin. Now this was a rebel in full flight. He was a marked man and I suspect so were the rest of us.

That streak would surface in his writing. A fan of Ernest Hemingway, his advice on the rudiments of good writing started with this: “Master the full stop before you go to the comma”.

His mastery of the English language came through the use of the simple sentence. He used it like a razor blade in his regular column, Sugu on Sunday, covering the range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

One described in detail the failed attempts of a mosquito trying to negotiate its way through a jungle of body hair to suck his blood.

Occasionally, he would alight on the famous and powerful, to skilfully and subtly shred their bloated egos with very fine but telling cuts.

Of course, there was the darker side. His classic old school journalism came with a life of hard drinking and smoking like a chimney, and the tough breaking-in of rookie journalists.

Being of small stature and from a minority culture, Sugu had to fight to become a giant. But many in his shadow were helped on their way to their own careers. This is one elephant I can’t squeeze into a pot. Not yet.

K Gurunathan’s brother Sugumaran died on Aug 4 at the age of 78.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.