Sports brought them together, but their mutual admiration, coupled with a zestful enthusiasm for life, has sustained the Kunalans’ six-decade-long marriage.
Retired Singaporean sprinter and educator Canagasbai Kunalan, 83, met his wife, fellow national sprinter and teacher, Mdm Chong Yoong Yin, 83, on the race track in 1964.
They were just 22 years old then, breaking new ground as athletes who had embraced the sport later in life, after beginning their careers as working adults.
Mr Kunalan would go on to participate in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and pursue a relationship with Mdm Chong. Their parents, however, disapproved of the interracial couple.
Once the couple had bought tickets to see Wilson David, who was known as Singapore’s Elvis Presley. As Mr Kunalan was about to leave his home, his parents confronted him and said, “You are going to go out with a Chinese girl. If you go out with her today, you don’t come back.”
Recalling the incident Mr Kunalan said: “My eyes were almost tearing, and my hair was standing. I didn’t know what to do. I went upstairs to my room, I took my birth certificate, and I left.”
The couple cancelled their concert plans and instead found Mr Kunalan, who was then a teacher at Tiong Bahru Primary School, a place to stay at his colleague’s home.
The next day, the same colleague introduced him to the mother of one of his students, who was seeking to rent out a room for S$30 a month.
Mr Kunalan became her tenant, but several months later, Mdm Chong’s uncle and father delivered the same ultimatum: end the relationship or leave home. Thankfully, she was able to rent a room and reunite with her estranged mother, who had left her father when Mdm Chong was 12 years old.
The couple would go back and forth to visit each other until Mdm Chong decided this was no good. She wanted to get married, and the couple got engaged in October 1965. They printed out invitation cards and mailed them out to friends and family, despite knowing the latter would not attend.
That changed one Sunday morning when Mr Kunalan heard a knock on the door. It was his father. “Here was another moment where my hair stood and my tears came,” the retired Olympian said.
Acknowledging Mr Kunalan’s deep commitment to Mdm Chong, his father said he would bless the union if his future spouse would convert to Hinduism, take up a Hindu name, and have a wedding in the Hindu fashion at a temple.
“I’m a freethinker, so we don’t do any of this religious thing. In order to pacify everyone, I was alright with becoming a Hindu,” Mdm Chong explained.
Within two weeks, Mdm Chong was converted and anointed with the Hindu name – Rajeshwari.
Pleased, Mr Kunalan’s father selected an auspicious day for the marriage, which turned out to be the exact same date the couple had earlier planned, April 17, 1966, for their Western-style white wedding ceremony.
“We had planned a high tea reception at the Adelphi Hotel for four dollars per person. But, we didn’t object and said we would manage it,” Mdm Chong said.
The Hindu ceremony took place at the Sri Mariamman Temple in Chinatown.
They held the Hindu ceremony in the morning, the high tea reception in the afternoon, and, at the request of Mdm Chong’s mother, a Chinese-style banquet dinner in the evening.
“We got married three times. That’s probably how we have stayed married for almost 60 years now,” Mr Kunalan quipped.
He later qualified for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, where he set the national record of 10.38 seconds for the 100m sprint, which stood unbroken for the next 33 years until Mr U. K. Shyam, a mentee of Mr Kunalan, broke it by 0.01 seconds in 2001.
Mdm Chong forwent her athletic aspirations to look after the couple’s three daughters, and continued teaching, a vocation she held until her early retirement, around 20 years ago, after a brain tumour operation left her with a drooping eyelid and unable to hear in one ear.
Mr Kunalan retired from competitive athletics in 1979 due to a sports injury and joined the Singapore Sports Council in 2010, looking after past Olympians and other athletes who have represented Singapore internationally.
The couple’s secret to a happy marriage is to give and take, and not harbour anything. “Don’t think that I must have the last word,” Mdm Chong said, to which Mr Kunalan added: “As a couple, we must not feel that we want to be superior. We are equals.”
