My Paternal Grandfather - A Rubber 'Towkay'

In my last posting, I talked about my father and his motivational talks. Unlike him, his father - my grandfather that is - was quite well-to-do. He was said to have been born in the year 1901. He died in 1990 at the age of 90. My paternal grandfather owned many rubber smallholdings. He had many people - including my father and an uncle - tapping rubber for him. I have fond memories of him.

Once a month back then, a pot-bellied man would arrive at my grandfather's house where he and his workers gathered. The potbellied man would then weighed in the rubber sheets. Once the weighing process was over, he handed over monies to my grandfather and took away the rubber sheets. Now, my 'important' role started immediately after the pot-bellied man left. My grandfather would call me to his seat and asked me to 'calculate' the sales and the amount due to his workers. I would tear off a few sheets from my exercise book and start writing. He would orally mention the amount of rubbers sold and the unit price and I had to tell him the sales amount. For every worker, I had to also calculate the gross amount and the net amount after deductions of advances that my grandfather made to each of them. Only then the workers would get their respective due.

One interesting thing to note is that, I didn't actually produce those figures. My grandfather had actually known the answer beforehand. My role, which I discovered later, was only to confirm his calculations. When I say his calculations I don't mean that my grandfather was literate. His was purely mental mathematics...! Usually when I told him an answer from my calculations, he would say either.."uhh umm yes!" or "would you re-calculate it?" The latter response happened when my answer didn't tally with his (mental) calculation. In all cases, his were proven correct as he would say yes after my second or third time tries.

In olden days, the rubber weight was measured in terms of kati and pikul (catties and piculs). Sixteen tahils made one catty and 100 catties made one picul.