My father and my father’s parents led lives that straddled both sides of the Johor-Singapore Causeway. Grandpa, the son of a Penang-based chemist who had migrated from Tamil Nadu, studied medicine at King Edward VII College in Singapore in the 1920s. He met my grandmother, a trained nurse, also in Singapore. They married in 1935, but apparently the union was not seen as ideal by their respective families, for he was brought up a Tamil Catholic and she a Chinese Methodist. As a compromise, they became Anglicans.
Meanwhile, Grandpa’s supervisors at the Medical College thought he would have a bri...