Impacted by the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression, Devan Nair relates how his family came to Muar to stay with P.C Joseph and his family. In his memoirs, Devan Nair recounted the following story:
“My father found himself jobless. We had to leave the black wooden bungalow [in the Kemendore Estate]. The family first found temporary refuge in the home of a family friend in Muar, a middling town in the state of Johore, some twenty miles from Jasin. He was a police superintendent, and lived with his wife and children in a government bungalow in a suburb of the town. This refuge lasted for not more than two months, as my father hated the thought of imposing on the generosity of his friend for too long.”
“[During] this period, my brothers and I attended school for the first time. It was not much of a school. There was only the teacher and his wife, who taught a bunch of fifteen children – eight Indian, four Malay and three Chinese. Among the Indian children were my two brothers and I, and three sons of the police superintendent. The eldest of these was James Puthucheary, who was to reappear in the forties and fifties as a comrade in a clandestine revolutionary organization called the “Anti-British League” and consequentially, a fellow political prisoner of the British colonial administration in Singapore.”
“I vividly recall the occasion when a group of boys were discussing the future of a frog one of them had caught. One boy propounded the theory that frogs did not have blood, like humans. He produced a long pin and gleefully suggested that we stick it into the frog. The other boys enthusiastically accepted the idea, but I recall with shame that I did not protest, even though I was made queasy by the proposal. In any case, I had no idea how to justify any protest. James, who is two or three years my senior in age, was not a member of the group planning the outrage. But he happened to come by just then, and became very angry indeed when he discovered what was happening. He snatched the frog from its captor, but nobody dared to object, for the good reason that James was the tallest and strongest boy around. And he lectured everybody on how wicked it was to be cruel to animals. “How would anybody here like to be pierced with a pin?” he demanded of the silent group. Then he walked with the frog to a nearby ditch, squatted down and allowed it to hop away from his palm into freedom, with a dramatic ‘God bless you.'”