Kecek-Kecek

Stamping Around the World

2012-01-25T14:20:00.035Z

Father collected stamps. He put them in a leather valise,

and that was his album. He kept his entire collection in there, stamps still stuck to shreds of envelope paper, used stamps with glueless backs, waiting to be assigned to country pages in an album that he never bought, clusters of mint stamps still clinging to neighbours by their perforated edges, and commemorative envelopes, Queen Elizabeth's coronation, Merdeka day, and some other dates that I don't now remember.

He wasn't a serious collector like his neighbour Wang Nawang, who lived three houses away from us, in the same row that looked into the market, but further down to the shore. Wang Nawang stuck his stamps with hinges, in pages of an album that probably bore the Stanley Gibbons insignia. We often saw him sit by his window, looking into his stamp collection, in a cloak of sweet smoke emanating from his pipe tobacco. There he sat, pondering over Monaco triangles, and Ifni birds with smug and quizzical looks perched on long necks, and exotic goats and native people. Where in the world is Ifni now?

Looking into Father's bag of philately I found the name S.A.Latif,

stamped in blue ink on the back of an envelope that came from Durban, Natal, in South Africa. Latif must have swapped many stamps with Father as he had many Suid-Afrika issues in his bag, but Father had postcards too from lands that stood beyond the further reaches of my imagination, and a medal issued during the coronation of Queen Elizabth II in 1953, and here and there were delightful snippets of life in San Marino and Nyasaland and Ruanda-Urundi, thumb-nailed into postage stamps that carried in them more than a faint glimmer of sunshine in a foreign country. Ruanda-Urundi, a land with people I imagined to be constantly dancing in unfettered joy, what calamity touched it much, much later.

But for all those sounds conjured in vivid mental pictures and the alliterative lure of foreign lands,Father's interest was basically local. His bag was filled with Federated Malay State issues, tigers confined in serrated edges, aroused from jungle slumber; FMS stamps with the BMA overprint, and Trengganu stamps with overprints of Japanese characters and the occupying power's own issues showing a farmer ploughing the Malayan land as rays of the Japanese sun shone behind his field.
When I too started to collect stamps, I wrote to S.A.Latif in Natal asking if he was ready for further swaps, but Father must have given more than he had pages in his album. “Please do not send me any more stamps as I have more than I need from Malaya,” he wrote back, but he also very kindly enclosed some South Africa stamps, and then I heard form him no more. My collection expanded very slowly with occasional replenishments from Father's promiscuous pile, but occasionally I bought stamps from a dealer named Lee Cheng Puan in Duku Road, Singapore. Lee sent us stamps in little booklets from which we picked and then we sent back the rest with cash for the purchase that amounted to no more than a few dollars.

Emboldened by that

I looked to further shores and found one as I was scouring through TitBits, a magazine that Father occasionally brought home from the Chee Seek store in Kampung China. There were snippets in there of human interest stories, laughter from my favourite cartoonist Clew, Charles Atlas in his leopard skin underwear urging you not to have sand kicked in your eyes by beach bullies. And then, in one corner, were the good people from the London company of Broadway Approvals.

Broadway said they sent stamps out on approval, so I wrote to them, and – to my surprise - they did: in a little booklet came Ifni and Monaco and San Marino and Helvetica and more places you could hurry to by turning the pages. They were all sent for your approval, for you to take your pick, and to send back whatever you didn't want to Broadway Approvals plus a postal order for your purchase. I took what I wanted and sold the rest to my classmates, and the whole collection, as I recall, cost $15.00 which was probably about £1 15s 3d in old money.

The world spun on a different axis in those days when trust was truly global. Which trader would think it wise now to send a collection of stamps halfway around the world to a child in primary school? I found a Broadway Approvals advertisement recently that was almost similar to the one I saw in TitBits and was touched by this tagline in their copy, “But please tell your parents you are answering this advertisement.”

Broadway Approvals, I have a confession to make after all these years: my parents didn't know.

----------------------
*I have done further research into Broadway Approvals. They were in South London, at 50 Denmark Hill. In 1956 they brought the Micromodel Company, a company credited with the origination of cut-out models of historic buildings and castles. The man behind Broadway Approvals was George Santo. Thank you Mr Santo!

Chinese New Year

2012-01-21T14:18:00.008Z

To all my Chinese readers, a very happy new year from me and from Pök Téng and Mat Spröng too.

Selamat Tahong Baru!

[Image courtesy of http://1800sunstar.com]

A Book In A Quiet Corner

2012-01-05T14:58:00.019Z

It has been almost a year now since we launched A Map of Trengganu at RA Fine Arts in a place called Solaris Hartamas.The band Diwangga Sakti played, Andre Goh sang, Jimmy Choo wowed shoe lovers, old friends and new inter-mingled, my sister baked cakes for us - old kuihs and new - and a really, really wonderful time was had by all.

Now the book is still selling well and I want to thank you all.

Yesterday I saw that Foyles of London had a few copies still on their shelves. So if you happen to be in London and would like to read about Trengganu (er, you would like to read that sentence again?) do make your way to Charing Cross. Even if the books are no longer there you'll still enjoy Foyles which, at one time, was the most famous bookshop in the world. Marks & Co (more widely known as 84 Charing Cross Road) made it to the stage, but Foyles fought the war and was both loved and hated for its eccentricities. But it is much better now.

In the second half of my secondary school years, in a school called Victoria Institution (yes, you heard it right, I was once in an institution), our English teacher told us about Foyles, what a big place it was and how he'd spent his days there reading books he couldn't afford to buy. Foyles was - and still is - like that; it leaves you alone amid its chaos and it holds no grudge for your taking your fill of its bibliopolity.

I used to spend hours in its occult and philosophy wing wondering about Aleister Crowley, reading about Greeks in a barrel and many other things too weird and wonderful.

In leaner days the building that housed the wing was sold to Waterstones, and then Waterstones grew slimmer and the shop across the road is now taken over by people who divide its ground floor between respectability and semi-pornography, and its basement entirely for the serious study of the scatological.

It warms the cockles of my heart of course to know that today, the Foyles that gave comfort to my English teacher in his hours of need, that gave me things to read on dozy afternoons, that is visited by many of the great and good of this metropolis, also stocks A Map of Trengganu.

So, if you're tired of London, as Dr Johnson meant to say, do take yourself there and buy the book, or just read it if you please, and place a discreet bookmark in it for you to return to another day.

Green Umbrellas and New Books & Old Wind on the New

2011-12-31T18:36:00.010Z

Rainy Day Cycling in Merchang
I have borrowed this photo from my friend Zaharan Razak's blogpage. Read the story behind it at Zaharan's blog, 'I' of the Hornbill, and its sad postscript here.
Not a lot happened on New Year's day in Kuala Trengganu: the winds blew stronger than ever, what Mother called anging tahong baru. Days have slipped past and months and years do concatenate looking at them from here now, but it could be that it was the Chinese New Year later in January that she was talking about, not the advent of the new one in the Gregorian calendar.

The streets were gusty, I remember, in the build-up to January, and the surf rebounding from the breaker jutting out into the rivermouth swirled above the milky water. It was the air ulu coming down from the interior, root, branches and all. What deep forests it meandered through, what hefty trees stood on the swelling banks to bid it goodbye as it dashed and washed its way through carrying buöh rengas and tendrils and sometimes a dead cow to desposit on our shore, far away.

This was the month when I would go to Mök Möh when the clouds had emptied its all into puddles on the roadside, and rain drenched the clothes of market people. Green umbrellas unfurled and plastic raincoats of schoolboys bicycling in the rain, oh what joy. Mök Möh, when time was opportune, would open a gap in the fence around her compound and she'd light the fire and fill the steamer with well-water and there was light and warmth in her little corner as she steamed putus in a row. Yellow putus with fenugreek, glistening white ones of tapioca, and plain brittle ones from rice flour.

There was something exhilarating about this recess in the rain, when a slight gleam of light peeked from the sky and people poured out from their cover, from houses, from under trees, and boys and girls - and adults too - waded in the water just flowing above the road surface in Kedai Payang. In this overflow from the monsoon drains, as they were called, came dead rats and specks of dirt that stuck to feet and left watermarks on surrounding walls. This moment of joy was called mmaing air, playing in the water, when nubile lasses raised their sarongs to show comely legs, when young lads' thoughts turned to the fanciful, when market traders muttered beneath their breaths at the lack of assistance from their sons or daughters when they were desperately rescuing fruits and vegetables and basketry from the sweep of the flow.

Mök Möh's putu, in all its variety, was comfort food for the weather. Hot and crumbly, dipped in sugar, or taken just as they came between a newspaper page lined with banana leaf until the chewing came to its putu core of coconut sugar. The sticky tapioca putu filled the gap in the belly until dinner time of bubur (broth) and salted fish, or, as we sometimes did in our house - the children I mean - we took rice piping hot and folded ghee into it and then, for the kick, we mixed in bits of red chilli pounded with grainy sea salt in the mortar.

We were sitting now in the dining quarter, the bucolic side of our house as opposed to the front that looked down into the urban market. From here we could look out into the kampung and Pök Wè's mminja trees and those other houses on stilts. The mother hens were not clucking now, nor goats bleated, but from narrow gaps in the floor of our tall house we heard the movements of domestic animals seeking comfort and warmth down below.

The calender was still untouched, the daily one that gave the working days in black and the Sundays in red numbers. On the top sheet, as yet untorn, was the greeting, Happy New Year. And Lin Dai, the Hong Kong film star, was smiling enticingly on the stiff backing card that also bore the name of the shop that gave the calendar to Father.

On his writing desk Father kept the monthly calendar given to him by the Pejabak Ugama (Religious Department), days of the month in little boxes and the festivals and significant days of the were inscribed where they belonged, in Jawi.

There was a bigger version of this monthly record of passing days, also with days in little boxes, that marked Racing days in Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur as well as high days and holy days that we arrived at at specific times of the year - Wesak Day and Thaipusam and the two Hari Rayas and Christmas at the end of the year.

The New Year meant a new school term, new second-hand books in the satchel, new faces perhaps in class and most certainly a new teacher. We had the book-list at the end of the last school year, we ticked at names of books that we could cadge or buy at half the original price from friends, and then, at the beginning of the new school term - in the new year - Father give us a few dollars to buy unticked ones brand new from the school bookshop, pages untouched and pristine since the day the printers put them between covers.

The cocks crowed as usual at dawn and the sun peeked occasionaly from between covers as the new old wind blew uncertainly with the light that shone through the crack of the first day of the new-born year.

God rest ye merry everyone, may nothing you dismay for three-hundred days and a bit more.

Pök Téng Rises to the Occasion

2011-12-24T23:17:00.016Z

Diary of Pök Téng II (as faithfully recorded by Tuang Wingsteak)
24th December, 1951

Photo of monsoonal coast courtesy of Ajidul.
Kalu tèngök ggining bumi Teganung ning buléh tahang jugök luahnya. Dari Tanjong ke aröh Ladang tu napök pohong ppisang tinggi lönjöng, pohong mminja dok nnari ddalang anging. Napök sura Tok Sheikh, Sura Besör, Sura Haji Mat Litör, rumöh cikgu Khalid dekat jambang ija.

Tanjong ning lèpèr rupanya, bila seperöng betol-betol baru napök Bukit Besör jaoh sayuk, sebelöh sana Masjid Putéh. Napök Kapong Ttani sebelöh Kölang, kubor luah sapa ke Sekölöh Paya Bunga. Pah tu sebelöh ning sekali lagi ada napök Tanjong Kapor, Tanjong Batu Satu, Tanjong Paya - besör jugök Tanjong ning - barulah napök Ladang sikik lepah könar batu satu.

Sebelöh Keda Payang napök pasör, pah tu balék sana nung ada Kapong China. Tu töh Mat Ppala Kerah dok jjalang kèdèk-kedek nujju ke aröh panggong Mak Ming. Banyök sunggoh pohong, banyök sunggoh orang dok jjalang gi mari. Ppala kita mmusing sikik, kelabu mata, tapi kena wak mmölèk ning sebab kalu jatoh gölök ning bbawöh nyanyelah sape-sape hök kena ddamör ppala.

Kita serabuk perok sunggoh hari ning, kalu kira ggitu dök buat setarang kerja ggining. Awang kite tu takdök kerija setarang habok tapi dok agah nök bbining. Kita dok wak dök je, tapi napök nye macang galök pulök sari dua ning, nye dok nnèwö keliling rumöh Mèk Jènak tu, macang kucing jatoh anök, nye hungga ssana hungga ssining, nök keléh jugok budök ttina garék tu. Hör, tu dia dok ddiri ccacang ddepang sasör rumöh mèk tu, kerising kerinyih dok ccakak apa dök taulah, suka gelèkèk dua-dua orang, takdök aröh nök kata. Awang kita pong dok wak jangöklah sökmö, bböjèng rambok apa serba, sapa kkelik macang lapu nye buboh minyök. Baju tu dök söh nök katalah, dok gösök siang malang, said naik ccadöng nye buboh kanji. Tapi pitih takdök sekèpèng harang, nök bbining guane?

Kita le ning serung kalu panjak tinggi-tinggi ggining. Tapi muséng anging nniup ning örang dok mitök tulong sangak takot buöh nyör jatoh ddebök atah rabong. Kemarèng Mök Song tu nasib baik dök kena pelepöh nyör atah ppala, kalu kena tu nök geröh sunggohlah, bicuk nnötöng. Tapi kalu döh tahu kita dok tinggi sayuk ning dök söhlah dok gi masok bbilik air tu kerèk sangak sebab kita dök larak nök ppaling kelaing döh, bukang sengaja nök tèngök, tapi kalu ssilak napök buléh jadi ttimbér mata!

Susöh nök cari pitih wak beli pape muséng ggining. Minggu lepah dapak jugök samah dua ambék upöh gi ppasör, tapi tu pong habih takdök sekèpèng döh sebab kemarèng habih sakör, hari ning berah pulök tingga dua butér je. Berah hancor pong maha ddö'öh le ning, döh nök wak guane, beli dua tiga cètöng pong tahang jugok dekat seria.

Mamak tu pulök dok mitök kita sapa bbuéh mulok, tulonglah catah pohong nyör tu takut ttipa atah rabong malang nnari. Tulah ambe dok atah pohong nyör ning denge gölök ning, kita asöh takdi di batu ttepi sura. Kita pong ada bawök badik jugök selék ddalang kilah ning takot jjupe ulör ccelöh daung ni. Kalu dia keluör sèkör ambe kena catah selalu, dök léh tunggu-tunggu. Kalu tidök aku dok tèngök mung, mung dok tèngök aku, göbör jugök tu.

Bukang nye kita panda sangak tebang pohong nyor ni, tapi kita dok tèngök Bachök dok buak tu napök mudöh je. Tapi dök léh serunglah, kena buak hanelang, tapi kena tèngök bbawöh jugök sekali sekala. Tadi nök naik tu bismillah bbaik döh, selawak dua tiga kali. Satu lagi bila kerabak tinggi-tinggi ning kena paka seluör pèndèk, pah tu paka kaing ssahang lluör ikat kemah keming, ppala pong kena barot semutar macang orang Barat dok mari jjua ppasör. Nasib baik jugök teringak nök pinjang seluör kecik Awang kita tu takdi, takot orang lengök tèngök kang napök kötèng-kotèng malu je.

Bila naik tinggi ggining baru napök pe'el budök-budök lari cerida ddalang kapong dok ngusék örang ppuang gila tidor atah sura. Nye petöng batulah, nye dok tönyèrlah kat örang ppuang tu, ssiang ke dia. Dia pong dok layang budök-budök tu ba'ape? Tapi dia örang gila kang, kita dök léh dok ikut èrè dia sangak, dia jjalang atah anging, kita hök dok jjalang atah tanöh ning lah patut nye dök layang dia. Betol jugök lah kita ning pong dök ppijök ttanöh le ning, tapi kita dok panjak pohong nyör, bukang dok ssaje.

Lama sunggoh kita dök makang umbok nyör, orang rumöh mesti keponang kalu kita dök wak balék ke dia. Pah tu pucok nyör ni buléh wak bukuh ttupak, pelepöh dia kalu jemör buléh wak bakör akök. Lama sunggoh kita dök makang akök, masa nniköh anök Kelesong dululah gamöknye. Tulah kita dok ingak, kalu Awang kita tu jadilah nniköh takdirnya, guanelah kita nök cari akök banyök-banyök. Kalu anök orang laing adelah jugök rasa nök cari kerija, göhék tèksi ke, ambék upöh angkat berah ke, nök gipong pitis buléh nniköh derah sikik. Takdök setarang niak nök wak ggitu, dok harap ke mök pök die je. Tu dia dok kerising kerinyih macang kera kena belacang ddepang rumöh mèk dia.

Bila napök dia dari sining rasa macang nök gi sèkèh ppala dia, tapi dökkanglah kita nök tingga kerija ning, dok tinggi langgok ccelöh buöh nyör.

Parök jugök tebang nyör ni, tèngök tangang kita ning habih bbèce, betih habis nnelah sebab dok ggatong ke batang nyör tu. Kita tèngök Bacök wak ggitulah, dia ppaok ke batang nyör denge dua belöh kaki kemah kkeming, pah tu dia ggatong ke batang nyör sebelöh tangang, sebelöh tangang lagi dok tetök batang nyör lepah sekaki, sekaki, dia tohok bbawöh satu satu. Pah tu dia gelösör turong, catah lagi, sapalah habih dia turong bbawöh pohong, tinggal akör je.

Nnelah jugök betih kita wak ggining, dök apalah sebab kita bese sökmö döh wak kerja ggining, sapa keluör orak merèh, dok akat sasök Wang Ngöh ttepi pata tu. Kerija kita ggininglah, kena buléh buak serema, bukang macang orang kerija pejabak, dok ccökoh je atah kerusi, nnuleh ddalang bok.

Nasib baik jugöklah kita paka seluör katök Awang kita takdi sebab ada dua tiga èkör kerengga masuk ddalang seluör, kita dang kerènyèk dulu, kalu tidök terok mbènglah, bukangnya buléh lömör minyök rima!

[For translation, go here.]

Diary of Pök Téng

2011-12-20T17:42:00.013Z

We have found the diary of Pök Téng, as faithfully recorded by Tuan Wingsteak, an Englishman who left the colonial service to go native in Kuala Trengganu's Ujong Tanjong in the 1950s. He spent his life among the fishermen and enjoyed especially his conversations with Pök Téng, a local odd job man and native sage. We are fortunate that Tuang Wingsteak recorded some of his conversations with Pök Téng in a notebook, found in the glove compartment of his Austin Riley that was donated to the Trengganu Museum (yet to be built) by his next of kin in England when his pen ran out of Quink and he himself finally deceased. Tuang Winsteak, as he was known in Kuala Trengganu, wrote in Jawi in his notebook,
in Pökténgspeak:

December, 20th 1951.

Monsoon in Kuala Terengganu courtesy of Malaysian artist Anuar Dan
Bila dengör ömbök dderu tu naik kemarok pulök, nök makang ikang sarök. Tapi le ning, muséng tutop kuala, ömbök kasör, orang dök kelauk. Napök nye kena dok derumöh je lah, dok makang ubi török. Kalu nök makang pisang tu kena jaga lah sikit, kalu kena pisang dök mölèk tu naik mmulah perok, betang demang. Orang rumöh ambe kata pisang bakorang tu baik kalu beri orang baik demang. Dia tohok sebutir ddalang bara api takdi, pah tu kita makang masa tengöh panas berasap, hilanglah rasa luga, rasa macang nök mmaing rödak pulök.

Muséng turong air ulu ning laok mengaung siang malang, macang bbunyi rima je ssepék ccelöh batang buloh. Kemarèng ada budök pasör tu jereloh ddalang pasir rebih ttepi pata, nasib baik dang ppaok ke dahang pohong bbaru. Kalu dök habislah dia hanyuk ke Pula Rèdang, dudok denge Tuang Puteri, dok dengör Mökyonglah tiap-tiap malang. Tapi ssiang jugök ke dia habih nnelah peha sapa ke lutut. Dia dok nnönènglah di dahang pohong tu takdi sapa orang gi ambek denge perahu jalor buat naik ddarak.

Nök gi dok ttepi pata pong gerung le ning sebab anging kuat bawök masok macang-macang benda atah tebing. Kalu ssilap dok ccakong ttepi pata tu kena buöh rengas, ssiaplah sariyang pulök dok ggaru punggong. Le ning napök nye kenalah gi buang air ddalang rök sebab takut tèngök tebing dok rebih. Lagi pong anging nniuk kuak sangak, ssilap buak, kaing ssahang pulök kena tiup di anging, ssèlok lah napok seluör kkatök.

Kerepok lèkör pong takdok setarang muséng ggining, maklong sajalah muséng ömbök kasör ning örang dök gi kelaut, Mök Song pong dök gètèl kerepok.. Hök ada kerepok kering je, tapi nök görèng minyök nyor takdök setitik hharang, habis Sèmèk tu nye buat minyök rambot. Napök nye kena gi ppatalah ambik pasir halus dua tiga cètöng nök buboh ddalang kuali, bila panah tu mölèk jugök buleh görèng kerepok. Natilah dulu, hujang dok turong ning, pasir pong tengöh basöh jjerok.

Mölèklah dok derumöh petang ggining, kalu ada rizki dapak makang ubi kayu denge nyör parok. Lepah kena air kawa segelah gök jatoh ddebing selalu lah, tidor sapa ggarék .

* * *

Kita ssètök sapa jatoh ppale dari nyör kömèng, ingaknye guroh bbunying dari lauk. Bila buka mata baru napök bumi gelak gelemak, api lak dari atah Bukit Tteri nnyala lik-lik dari jaoh, bunyi dari Sura Haji Mat Kerici tulah yang jadi ambe ssètök. Budök-budök pasör le ning takdök kereja serema sebab ikang dök naik, nye dok kkupol ddalang sura, pah tu nye beratang pukol geduk. Habih rèng nye pepöh kulit lembu tu, dengör sapa ddarak.

Dalang dok jjalang balik tu jeremböng denge Mèk Munöh dok tengöh kutip kayu api ttepi pata. Kita teringat nök kkabör kerepok hok ambe beli dari dia dulu tu dök mölèk. Kita kata ikang tu gatal tapi sebab anging kuat dia silap dengör, nye bedal ppale kita denge peranyöh.

"Bukang ambe kata mung Mèk, tapi kerepok tu yang gata." Tapi bila muka dia masang ccatung tu dia wak dök je apa hok ambe cakak.

Bila balik nök cerita guane ke orang rumöh, döhlah ppale mèröh mmerang, nye ddenyuk pulök macang kena sengak ikang ddukang. "Ba'pe yang muka mung bekök nnötöng, tu Yaténg?" orang rumöh kita tanye sambil tangang dia dok ayök tepong nök wak kuih bèke.

"Döh nök wak guane," kita jawak. "Bila jjalang ttepi pata ta'di kita ssèmbak tali sauh Wang Mang. Jatoh gguling bating, teratok ppala bbira wakaf."

"Tulah mung dök semayang ggarék," dia jawak. "Orang gi semayang mung dok nnètèr ttepi laok!"

[For translation, go here]

Before You Grow Old

2011-10-26T23:36:00.003Z

We are all gulity, sometimes, of bungling around without knowing where the head is or where hangs the tail. Dök tahu ppala èkör is normally used to describe such caper, when a person goes on blabbing out of their depth, or when a person intrudes in the middle of an argument and takes the wrong end of the stick, so to speak. Cats sometimes do this when they chase their own tail, but perhaps they are not all that clueless, perhaps they are having fun, it's hard to say. We'll have to think about Wittgenstein and his lion here.

The head (ppala) and the tail (èkör) are chosen here because they indicate direction, the head being on top in a person and in the front in an animal. If a person had a tail it would no doubt be placed in a part generally described as his back, but in an animal the tail is definitely its rear. So a person who does not know the head from the tail, dök tahu ppala èkör, does not really know the flow.

But you could do worse than chase your own tail. Take the kid who kicks the bin and pelts the dog and runs the stick on the picket fence at the bewitching hour. Dök jjuruh haröh, which is several grades below the clueless, for here is a deficiency in the department of pe'el. Now pe'el is from the Middle Eastern area, فعل (fe'el), which means behaviour.

“Tengok pe'el tu!” are words of warning, “Look at that behaviour!” and the pe'el could run a gamut of things - söngör for one, goes beyond funny. A söngör boy is funny beyond the bounds of acceptability. He pulls faces at Pök Su, the village elder, he laughs and jumps over Mèk Som's basket of kerepok lèkör, he giggles as he taunts all and sundry. A söngör person is never an adult and is almost always a boy. Then there's the headless chicken of a behaviour, nanör that is, a runner here and there sans direction or purpose, incorrigible behaviour beyond naka, beyond söngör and eventually heading for the Henry Gurney School.

"Dök jjuruh haröh sunggoh budök tu,” lacking in decorum (jjuruh) is he, lacking in direction (haröh) is that boy, and really, really so.

“Lekat pah ttua, kö'ör!” Kö'ör is an anxiety word, a fear that something will be so. Until adulthood that is – lekat pah ttua, when – God forbid – they become part of kaki hanyar, the flotsam and jetsam of our ordered society.

Selamat Hari Raya

2011-08-28T17:04:00.009Z

How nasi himpit is made.

Come Raya morning, chaos rules. It is the same today in our household: time is flying fast and there is no sign of that button for the baju, and the shirt's unironed, oh woe is me.

And then I hear the genta, long clanging sounds from far away, atop the hill, and Raya resonates down to us down below, through closed shops and houses in Kuala Trengganu. Children half awake from a full night of weaving and running in the dark and looking at faces lit up in the yellow light of Chinese lanterns that fold up like bellows but are now stretched to their full length by the weight of candles.

There are ships among houses, no, not sailing ones, but close, too close to the stairs of the house of Pok Wè or Wang Semail, and other people who have money to take to the shops for crepe paper and glossy sheets in bright colours. Bamboos split into uprights and longer ones, joined together in horizontals, curved in the bow and papered over to be ship shape. We have seen them coming in, navigating the narrow neck of Ujung Tanjung and Seberang Takir across the water, the Hong Ho and the Rawang full of goods from Singapore. Now we have them made up from bright paper made bright by the lights of flickering kerosene lamps, in the front yard of some houses, trailing from mast to stern with twirled crepe of pastel colours, and perhaps a flag up there, no, not of Trengganu, but an unwashed kain lepas – a long sheet of workman's shoulder rag – to flutter into the winds the news that it is the night of Hari Raya.

We are tired now but the day's fresh as the dew, and hearken now to the sounds of Bilal Deramang and his companion Bilal Sa'id in two voices, one sonorous the other gruff, oh how beautiful and sad, the tugging in the heart sounds of the Takbir! And klaaang! and klaang! go the genta, an old bell on Bukit Puteri. The maidens living up there in the mist of legends must have been klaaanged from their slumber.

Now Father's looking smart with the apex of his handkerchief sticking out from the little pocket on the left breast of his baju, a place where the folded handkerchief with the bunga rampai potpourri sticks out in full aroma on wedding days, but Hari Raya isn't a potpourri day. Today it reeks of attar that came back with pilgrims from Makkah; his middle is wrapped in not quite the finest, but a good enough songket of Trengganu, bought from the shop of his friend Ustaz Su. And he wears his well-creased trousers to match the shirt, and that is the signal for us all. We are now ready to go.

Hari Raya is always a problem for me as I have trouble keeping the sampin tightly wrapped in the middle. It slides down the slippery trousers of some silky material, bought from the shop of our Tamil friend Abdul Hameed, and when the middle wrap starts to slide down, it needs to be readjusted and re-folded, and then twirled into a holding belt in the middle. It will be a great embarrassment if it comes down to rest on the floor around the shimmering trouser legs in the Masjid Abidin in the middle of prayers.

Around the Masjid, under the henna tree and the entrances towards Kampung Daik and another near the row of taps opposite the Lay Sing photo Studio are already teeming with people. Ku Haji Ambak and his sons in Middle Eastern garb, the paterfamilias with a round hat that seems to have been woven from some exotic straw, and their long robes brushing against other people in more familiar bajus tucked into the middle songkets glinting in the morning air. What a merry feast of Trengganu colours.

I always have my eyes at this time on the magnificent house that stands outside the mosque for that's our stop after prayers. There will be men handing out coins to children at the gate of the mosque and we'll be handed ten cents if we're lucky, but in the house of our uncle Ayah Pa and his wife Che Da (it's her family house actually) there'll be beleda with a crusty coat of sugar in the plate and ketupat to dip in peanut sauce and probably a cake laid out on a tray, made by a company called Big Sister, and there'll be buah ulu and laksam and maybe some nasi dagang too with the coconuty meat of the ikang aya (tuna).

The shops are closed but the mood is high. Adults exchange greetings and pleas for forgiveness for transgressions during the year, and the day's just about to start and it will end with us all bloated in the chair. There is a good view of the mosque from our uncle's upraised house, into the compound where the bilal will probably be seen in conversation with the imam, where people who are mosque regulars are still walking here and there. And there, outside the front mihrab tip of the mosque are the long stone pillars standing in rows, memorials to the royal family's deceased members.

The middle wrap of some fancy cloth is abandoned now and hands are dipping into the lower pockets of the Malay baju now jangling with coins and rustling perhaps with a dollar note or two. The lights are now fading into asar, time for the afternoon prayer, and we will soon be imbued in deep melancholy – of songs that endlessly sing the Hari Raya, of sounds that are gone but still droning from afar, lilting back and forth in memory, and lights and colours here and there.

As I sit here now thinking of that I see Mother now after her days of preparation in the kitchen, her face smiling, not basking in the joy of herself, but in vicarious pleasure from the enjoyment of seeing her children on Hari Raya.

Our beloved and departed family members, may Allah bless them all.

And I wish you all, my dear readers, a happy and blessed Eid ul Fitri.

Passing of A Friend

2011-08-14T00:22:00.010Z

I have to record with great sadness the passing of my dear friend Tengku Ismail Tengku Su at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London at approximately 4.30 pm London time yesterday, Saturday 13th August.

Tengku Ismail was in the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital for more than a month after suffering two heart attacks. He was here on a mission for his beloved Terengganu, to exhibit some of his songket collection at the Royal Weave exhibition at the Prince's School of Traditional Arts in July and for a presentation at Asia House.

He was given an emergency angioplasty procedure and stenting at the Royal Brompton to clear a clogged artery but recovery eluded him. For much of his time in hospital he was under induced sleep and even another angioplasty done later gave only minimal help to the damaged left ventricle of his heart.

His brother Tengku Yusof was by his bedside at the time of his passing.

I shall always remember Tengku Ismail as a very pleasant and cheerful man with much love for Terengganu handicraft, especially the weaving arts. He was responsible for the preservation of many Terengganu traditional houses which he brought together to his Pura Tanjung Sabtu resort in Kuala Terengganu.

He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the genealogy of the Terengganu royal house and was responsible for a beautiful facsimile reproduction of the Trengganu edition of the Tuhfat An Nafis, the original copy of which was kept by his family. He brought a copy of the Tuhfat to present to Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales. In a rare moment when he was awake in his hospital bed, Tengku Ismail asked me to write a dedication in the book he brought for the Prince, but the Terengganu Duke of Songket - as he styled himself - never recovered from his illness to make the presentation.

His leaving us in this blessed month of Ramadhan is especially poignant for me as I remember in my childhood days that it was in this month that my mother would rush to the Tengku's parents' house in the precinct of the Istana Maziah to order for each of us a hand-stitched suit of Malay baju for Hari Raya. His late father, Tengku Su, was known for his tailoring skills and it was from him that Tengku Ismail inherited his interest in handicraft, design and weaving.

He was a student here in the early 1970s and coming back here gave him special joy as he was keen to revisit his old haunts. His legacy will be his works of design for the Terengganu royal regalia. He had friends throughout the world and his mild eccentricity made him an especially endearing man.

He turned 60 in hospital surrounded by friends. The Yang di Pertuan Agong DYMM Tuanku Mizan Zainal Abidin and the Raja Permaisuri Agong Tuanku Nor Zahirah visited Tengku Ismail in his hospital bed earlier this month.

Tengku Ismail's funeral service will take place at the East London Mosque on Monday 15th August before burial at the Garden of Peace in Ilford. May Allah grant him jannah and place him among the righteous. Alfatihah.

NOTE 15 Aug.: Bureaucracy took time to process documents needed by Tengku Ismail in his to final journey home. His funeral will now take place on Tuesday 16th August at the place stated above.

Tengku Ismail Tengku Su

2011-07-18T15:10:00.007Z
My dear friend Tengku Ismail Tengku Su is still in hospital here in London after undergoing an emergency angioplasty last week.

He was here on an invitation to the Prince's School of Traditional Arts and the Asia House, to give a presentation on the Royal Weave - the Trengganu songket - a subject close to his heart. This is a trip he has been working on very hard and the result was a stunning display here in London of this weaving heritage that Trengganu so excels in. Indeed, Tengku Ismail has often referred to himself jocularly as the Duke of Trengganu songket.

He was taken ill very suddenly after his return from a trip to Istanbul and was immediately admitted to the Chelsea and Westminster hospital. He suffered a heart attack soon after he was admitted to the Royal Brompton Hospital awaiting further medical intervention.

He is now on an induced sleep to give his body adequate rest after a chest infection last week. Please remember him in your prayers.

UPDATE

My Dear Friends:

Thank you for your prayers and to those who have emailed asking about his condition, this is the latest [21/7]:

Our dear Tengku is still in a very serious condition and has been induced back to sleep to conserve his energy for the fight. He is now back on the ventilator as his heart is causing some concern. Please do continue your prayers for him.

Three Weeks to Now

2011-05-14T10:46:00.002Z
My last book-signing appearance,
Sunday 8th May, at Borders, the Gardens.Three weeks have gone and I'm back here, at base, and it has been very exhilarating and very tiring too. And I'd like to thank all you people who braved the traffic, impossible parking arrangements and impetuous cab drivers and impossible horrendous shopping malls to be at the book-signings. Thank you MPH and thank you Borders who hosted the last book-signing at their Gardens outlet, and they brought in some delicious East Coast kuih from Wau Penyu!

Needless to say the experience has been something special for me to meet all you good people who have been kind, generous and a great change from all that shortbread that I have been nibbling while sitting before the flickering screen of an old steam-powered PC. Good-hearted people are less damaging to the waistline and more nutritious for the soul. I love you all.

I met some heart-breaking people too in my travels but I shall not write about them here. They shall be consigned to a place less merry. They shall be Elsewhere.

When a man in Dungun, or in Marang or in Besut says “Aku nök gi Teganung sekejak,” where is he gallivanting to? How could that be when he or she is already in Trengganu? Well, the place they are going to and the direction their SatNavs are set for is Kuala Trengganu. I hope that answers a question I have been asked: why do you give your book the title A Map of Trengganu when all it speaks about is Kuala Trengganu?

That's the simple answer. The more difficult one needs some reading because, in the Introduction to AMoT I did express the hope that Growing Up in Trengganu and this present one will together shape a map of Trengganu. So the two books are complementary.

So my thanks to all of you too numerous to mention, but I must mention two persons I am deeply indebted to: Raja Ahmad of RA Fine Arts who very kindly provided the venue for our Celebration of AMoT on Sunday 1st May and to Fazli Ibrahim who organised the do. It was a wonderful day for me and I hope you enjoyed it too.

Thank you My Dear Friends...

2011-05-05T02:42:00.000Z
...And good reading people.

News just in shows that A Map of Trengganu is Number 2 on MPH's non-fiction list (Number 1 is Tun Mahathir's recently published memoirs, A Doctor in the House); and Growing Up in Trengganu is at Number 12.

From what I've heard from APD, our distributors, Monsoon Books in Singapore no longer holds stocks of GUiT, meaning another print order, the 4th, will have to be done very soon as it is also becoming rare in the shops.

Last week I ordered 90 extra copies of AMoT for the Celebration at RA Fine Arts: The Gallery. APD telephoned me to ask if they could have them back as they are also running low of AMoT and Singapore has none left in their warehouse.

I am very, very grateful to you people out there, my friends all.

A Map of My Travels

2011-05-02T03:48:00.007Z
We had a lovely time, then the band played on.
Dato Andre Goh, accompanied by Dewangga Sakti,
singing my favourite Tudung Periuk.The celebration that we had for A Map of Trengganu was a raving, raging success. Thanks to everyone who helped: Fazli, Kak Teh, Ishak Nengah, the Dewangga Sakti group and everyone at RA Fine Arts: The Gallery that agreed to work on May Day. And a big thank you especially for Raja Ahmad for lending us the venue.The Old BBC Duo.I thought I had strayed into someone else’s party, there were so many great people. Dato’ Jimmy Choo was there and Dato’ Andre Goh who sang my favourite Tudung Periuk. And then Trengganu’s favourite Adnang Osmang sang his ditty and Dodi delivered a most amazing rendition of the Syair Awang Goneng, accompanied by the Dewangga Sakti people. It took me by surprise, and I just stood there in the background, speechless. Somewhere among the crowd was Dato Raja Baharin, the man who designed the splendid floating mosque in Kuala Terengganu, and Tengku Ismail Su, the Duke of Trengganu songket was there too.
The Amazing Dodi reciting the Syaer Awang Goneng.What was conceived as a little celebration with family and friends became a roaring success. I saw so many old friends in the crowd, so many former colleagues in the New Straits Times, many friends that I had made from the blogs, and many-many more people I wish I had known and met, and they were all there: Dato' Rejal Arbee, Dr Lee Soo Kim, Leung Thong Ping, Dr Sean Foley, Sharon Bakar, Adnan Osman, Pokku...just in one corner.

Pak Daud, the man I mentioned in AMoT, p. 197, was there too. He made this special trip with his wife from Kuala Terengganu. Thank you, thank you. You were celebrities too, like Jimmy Choo.Faces in the Crowd.A big thank you too to my sister Wan Asma who baked all the Trengganu cakes: jala mas, ropa, akok, Trengganu curry puffs, and she had time still after that to fry some mee.

Many more were lost in their travels. This Solaris Dutamas place proved to be such a needle in a haystack of modern high rise towers that some just gave up and went home. Others were taken to another Solaris, just a stone’s throw away. A very old friend I’d not seen for many, many years – since our student days in London in fact, came on a wheel chair pushed by his son. They were seen wandering in an adjoining building, and then, somehow, arrived at the right building. Only to be driven back by the lack of amenities for disabled people in this ultra modern development. He just bade me farewell at ground floor level, promising to make contact another day.Reading at MPH Mid Valley
The previous day I did a book signing at MPH bookstore in Mid Valley. I was overwhelmed by so many wonderful people there too.

My final appearance here (promise)will be at Borders at the Gardens, 8th May, 3 -5 pm. Borders tell me they are making this a Terengganu afternoon, with Terengganu cakes and A Map of Trengganu. Hope to see you there.

AMoT at MPH

2011-03-26T06:49:00.018Z

A Map of Trengganu will make its debut at the Kuala Lumpur Bookfair 20th to 23rd April though I am not sure if I shall be making an author appearance there as it is almost impossible to get a response from the organisers. It will be nice to hear from them yea or nay but that's not how things work in Malaysia.

However, I shall be signing copies of AMoT at MPH Mid Valley on Saturday afternoon 30th April, insha Allah. It will be good to see you there.

Read the first 27 pages HERE. Go to Monsoon's Catalogue.

Monsoon's cover blurb for AMoT:

Following the runaway success of Growing Up in Trengganu, Awang Goneng now takes his journey further to map out the town where he was born. This book looks at the terrain of Trengganu, the landmarks that are still standing and those that have fallen to rubble at the hands of developers, the winds that bring chill and change to the inhabitants of his coastal town, and people – the important and the ordinary – who walked the streets and breathed the air that is laced with more than a whiff of dried shrimps, the sweat of toil, the aroma of röjök in Pök Déh’s plate, and salt coming in with the spray from the South China Sea.

A Map of Trengganu gives a vibrant and extraordinary topography of the land and its people for the uninitiated and for those who are familiar with the terrain and territory. Time does not stand still in Kuala Trengganu as Awang Goneng notes, but it moves at a different pace in every fascia, and then it is gone forever. So who moved the clock tower from the roundabout in the town centre? You’ll soon be pondering this important question and many more things that you never knew about Trengganu

A Map of Trengganu

2011-03-11T20:36:00.002Z

Click on image to enlarge

This is your sneak preview of Monsoon's poster announcing a new arrival to its stable, A Map of Trengganu. This is the book that you have helped to make, and I thank you all, from the cat meowing in Australia to all you good people who have been coming here to read, skim through or to add your comments. And of course to that little dog in Brazil too, that has benefitted from GUiT's solution for keeping quadrupeds from going astray. See here and here.

AMoT will make its debut at the KL Bookfair 23rd April - 1st May.

A Map is Not the Territory

2011-03-10T12:32:00.005Z
At long last, with a sigh of relief I can say that I have just put the finishing touches to my next book, A Map of Trengganu (AMoT), and it is now at the printers to be printed, covered, bound and dressed up for somewhere to go: the Kuala Lumpur Bookfair 23rd April - 1st May.

Already I'm all nervous and draped in cold sweat thinking how it will fare when exposed to the sunlight of this mad, wide world. But it will be another one for my slim shelf of modest scribblings anyway, and good luck to the publisher and distributor with the two-thousand or so copies lying idle in their warehouse. I have already said to myself and those who have asked that AMoT shall be my last book about Trengganu.

AMoT will be different from GUiT in some small ways. It will have more original writing than GUiT which came to this world as a garden of Kecek-Kecek gleaned from the years. I have written many long pieces and re-written many of those that were picked from here to put between AMoT's covers. And our wonderful designer Sinead in Ireland has done a beautiful cover for AMoT that I am sure will delight all you bookshop browsers who delight in looking at a book in a bookshop and replacing it onto the shelf once you've read page 99 while the impoverished author struggles to keep warm at home on a diet of stale bread and cold water. (Who was it who recommended testing a book this way anyway?)

I hope some of you will buy the book even if it isn't big enough to stop your door. I hope too that all those people who did me the honour with GUiT will do the same come April. Meantime, here's a snippet from a page of A Map of Trengganu, not page 99, but another:

Unhinged By ThoughtA message in the head transferred to paper; he’d insert it into the crack in the lamp post, sometimes he’d pin it to the lumber. Thoughts from his troubled past, written in Jawi, always in Jawi, the Arabic script adapted for Malay sounds, pencilled in the adept hand of an experienced scribe onto scraps of white school exercise-book paper and left there to flap in the gust of passing vehicles.

No one took any notice of Haji Chik’s notes, the rants of this dishevelled man, hair uncombed, greying at the temples and wisps of curls, his batik sarung pulled knee-high, reeking with the dirt and dust of Tanjong. Distant thoughts, the angst of now, put into the squiggles of a lead pencil in disgruntled bits fallen on rocks of despair. In daytime he produced his handiwork, impervious to the people who’d pay him no mind anyhow, he’d walk into Pök Löh’s café to give a vigorous stir in his teacup as he soliloquised.

There were signs in Kuala Trengganu and writings on the wall, some painted large in the hands of Che Omar, a gangly shadow of what he once had been, with never a shirt on his back, his sinewy legs protruding from dark khaki shorts, never weary from daily travel, always a bucket in hand and a paint brush. He walked with purpose, never fast, his bucket of whitewash connected to his head, expressing thoughts that he’d paintbrush onto the walls of Trengganu. Lofty Omarian thoughts gleaming on Trengganu walls in whitewash, some outside the old building that later became a Catholic church where he and his companion lived.

Head Noises and Ferry Tales

2011-02-17T23:07:00.004Z
A Map of Trengganu will be out in April. Here's a sneak preview from one of the places on the map, where a prehistoric monster ruled the water:

Everything stopped at Bukit Datu: lorries, cars and motorcyclists and pedestrians, bicycles and the red and yellow buses of Kuala Trengganu. Suddenly the head-banging noises of the snarling engine, whining and roaring at every gear-change, the desultory talk of people trying to get over the maddening whirr, and then everything came to a standstill.Everyone got off the bus, now on brakes and tilting dangerously with the incline towards the river. Travellers had sounds in their heads that defined their journey, children slept as soon as the bus pulled out of the terminal, but even in their sleep they heard the roar and the chatter and when the monster ground to a halt, the silence became even louder.

I have walked many unsteady times down to the water's edge, head emptying of discordant noises and bleary eyed after the sleep when the road meandered through padi fields and the bus drove past country houses on stilts, huddling close to each other. People, there were always people moving about, around and in the middle of nowhere: women with baskets on their heads, men scything grass in open fields, children and their mothers with timba for bailing water from the wells. They were crossing the road and walking towards the trees beyond the padi fields to their homes among the hills and the belukar. When the bus moved it whisked you into somnolence's revolving door, coming in and out between sleep and wakefulness, taking you into dark places and bringing you back into broad daylight. And then the noises of your dreams became intermingled with voices raised in conversation, the grind of metal, the fumes of diesel.

Bukit Datu was the farewell to Kuala Trengganu, even if there was Kuala Trengganu still on the other side of the river. Disorientation took its grip very quickly when you woke up in the bus and saw that everything was standing still and there were birds flying as birds do when there's a body of water, sometimes a cawing sound, a kite maybe, high in the air, and cutting across the flow was the river ferry.

Here's To Another

2010-12-31T12:02:00.008Z

Anging töpang kecang sunggoh
Air böh nèllèh pah Balék Bukit
Tahong lama ning nök gi döh
Bulang pong gerhana atah langit
Di negeri sejok kabörnya sejok ddö'öh
Di negeri panah pong hujang belambök
Setahong nök gi, habihlah kèsöh
Jangang susöh nati ada se lagi èsök.

The winds whirl and blow ever so strongly
The flood rises to the hill of Balék Bukit
The old year's now leaving so wearily
The moon in the sky's now eclipsed
'Tis freezing they say now in the north
The hot zones pour with rain 'n' shower
A year passes by, so the tale endeth
Courage, for tomorrow there'll be another.

We at Kecek-Kecek wish you our readers a happy and meaningful new year 2011.

Awang Goneng, Mat Sprong and all who sail in here.

Photo credit: Starpic

Urbi et Ubi

2010-12-17T11:51:00.011Z
To be called ubi török is to be consigned to the bottom of the heap because ubi török is Trengganu rhyming slang for cörök, bottom of the class, a dunce with a double 'd'. Of the things that are taken into account, cörök is the last of all.

This is a good time to be talking about ubi, in this piang böh, the season of the floods. Piang is an almost forgotten Trengganu word (and perhaps Kelantanese too; piyæ?). It began most certainly from piantan, which Winstedt in his unabridged Malay-English defines as 'auspicious', but it is also used euphemistically to mean 'usual time'. So piantang böh, the usual time for floods, would have come to Trengganu in a very convoluted way, from piangtang to piang, and so on to piang buöh, piang duku and piang piala muséng jo'ong...the fruit season, the duku season, and the Monsoon Cup and a heigh nonnie-no.

And there's something there that we may have forgotten too. The fruit season wasn't just known as piang buöh but as piang buöh kayu, season of the fruit of the trees. Rainy day women with rainy day fruits, in baskets that are carried from boats to markets on the river-banks or at the intersection of roads in Chabang Tiga, or in the bay area in Tanjong in Kuala Trengganu.

Although the ubi is not, strictly speaking a fruit, it comes with the monsoon crop from the forest trees, and it holds a special place in wet weather. There is something comforting about the tapioca arriving steaming hot on a plate while the day rages with the monsoonal shower, or the large tubers that rise from beneath the earth and sitting oven-ready on the newsprint laid out in the pasar. One theory about the ubi's rise with the downpour is that in this season of wind and floods, the ubi have to be dug out before they are damaged by the water.

Chuck a tapioca into the fire, roll a sweet potato in there too - ubi kayu and ubi setela - but some of the bigger ubi are meant to stew in the water, muttering incessantly and spitting in the air as the liquid boils and pushes the salt through the ubi's pores. There was the ubi ppayang that got its name probably from its girth, bulging beneath its skin like the earthen jar or the ppayang as we call it in Trengganu. Tenderised by the heat and moistened in the boil, a slice of this ubi takes the look and feel of your nasi kapit or compressed rice that travels well into the peanut sauce with the satay. I'm not sure if this is the same ubi that some folk call the ubi nasi.

The are many more ubi than rise above the soil, little dark ones like ubi kemili whose name in the local lingo is too rude to mention now. Then there's the hefty ubi gajah, the elephant in the room of the ubi world. The keladi is an ubi too, mushier in its outer layer when taken fresh from the boil and fuller in taste on a gloomy day when cats drop and dogs hurl from the sky. Ubi is the primordial food, a basic comforter, and a crop always in deep storage whenever the hunter gatherer goes out on the prowl.

That probably explains the ubi's lure. What better to embrace on a cold day than the steaming carbohydrate, dipped in sugar. For the mellower taste, the preferred dip is nyiur, the pristine coconut, shredded and salted. But there are others who prefer to dip it into nnisang, our coconut sugar. Ubi and its accompaniment, on the selasör, the rain can pour for weeks on end and the wind may blow, but the yam and the sweet potato, the tapioca and those myriad others, this is seasonal food, much like turkey on Christmas day.

Photo credit: I have stolen the picture of keladi (yam) [above] from Pak Zawi's wonderful blog. Thank you Pak Zawi!

Days in the Water

2010-12-10T11:44:00.015Z
I am delighted by the many very interesting reactions to Muséng Sejok. I loved them all, especially the place maps and persons long gone who came back to our midst. From the many delightful reads I feel I must do a very quick translation of Zulomar's description of his childhood in the water. I enjoyed it immensely as it is a narration of times now lost. I hope you will enjoy it too. Thank you Zulomar, and thank you all of you who have left your comments.

"Kalu ingak piyang ujang & mase boh jamang kecik2 dulu memang sedak mmaing air.

"Di Beladau Kolam kalu mase air boh besor memang sedak mandi ssunga - air keruh macang teh susu & memang derah. Ambe dengeng saing2 ppakak turung dari se kkalang pah tu ppakak peranyuk ikuk aruh air, naik pulok kkalang laing hok ddepang - stak Kkalang Pasor naik Kkalang Che' Ming, hok beraning lagi peranyuk sapa Kkalang Sekoloh. Naik pokok Rengah (pokok Rengas - pokok bergetah yg kalau kena boleh jadi kudis) pah tu terjung sunga dgn macang2 gaye - (silak2 buleh lawang penerjun Sukan Asia/Komanwel he he...). Kalu gatung tali di pokok Rengah buleh wak tali Tarzeng terjun sunga. Kadang2 ppakak lawang aruh derah sapa lenguh gi ttepi. Bowok tangguk buleh takak udang & ikang.

"Kalu air boh koho besor, air nnembok tebing sapa ttepi rumoh. Kawasang rendoh hok ade air jjadi tepak mmaing - papang, batang pisang wak jjadi rakik. Sapa kecuk bberuk abih kaki tangang - biru hherang sejuk ketor. Ade mase jugok jjupe ulor, kale jeking. Serung pulok bile pikir smula.

"Jamang budok2 dok mmikir bahaye. Kalu pikir smula muking dok beraning doh nok buak. Tapi ALHAMDULILLAH takdok hok mati lemah sebak mmaing air boh.

"Llening takdok doh hok mmaing air ggitu. Sunga pun jjadi tepak org bele ikang Talapia, Ppating & Baung dlm sangkar.

"Piyang ujang memang sedak makang ubi kayu/stele rebuh cicoh nyor, minung air kupi. Llening kalu musing ujang, kg. Kubang Jela & Banggul Tuan Muda banyok org jjua ubi ttepi jalang.

"Hmm....sweet memories."
"Going back to the rainy season and the floods during my childhood days it was a joy to be playing in the water.

"In Beladau Kolam during the big floods we loved to play in the river - the water was muddy like milky tea and flowed very swiftly. My friends and I went down to the river. Starting from one jetty we went down with the river's flow, and then we went up again at the next jetty downstream - we started from the jetty at the market place and then went up again at the Jetty of Che' Ming, the braver ones drifted on to the School Jetty. We climbed up the Rengas (gluta renghas) tree (the Rengas tree has a sap that can cause the skin to blister) and then we dove into the river in every style that we knew - (we could have competed in the Asian/Commonwealth Games diving competition he he...). If we attached a swing rope to the rengas tree we could have used it like Tarzan to dive into the river. Sometimes, together, we swam against the swift flowing river and retired to the river bank when we were worn out. With a landing-net we would have been able to catch some prawns and fish.

"If the flood water continued to rise, the overflow would go to the edge of the houses. The low lying parts now filled with water became our play areas - we used planks, banana stems as rafts. We played until our hands and feet shrivelled from the cold - we turned blue and had the shivers. There were times when we encountered snakes and scorpions. It gives me chills thinking about all that now.

"Children never thought of danger. If I think about it I don't think I'll have the courage to do all that now. But ALHAMDULILLAH (Praise be to God) no one drowned while playing in the flood.

"Nowadays they don't play in the water like we used to. The river has become an area for the farming of tilapia and catfish.

"The rainy season was a good time to enjoy tapioca/sweet potato dipped in coconut shreds, to drink coffee. Now during the rainy season many people sell these roots in Kampung Kubang Jela and Banggul Tuan Muda, by the roadside.

"Hmm....sweet memories."

Muséng Sejok

2010-12-05T14:58:00.013Z

Sejok ngökkör badang habih ketör gelitik
Serebangnya kaki rasa macang nök jjerik
Döh nök wak guane le ning anging muséng sejok
Keluör rumöh pong baju habih basöh jjerok
Sapa kambing bbiri serema dök keluör setabok
Habih serema nye beratang dok nnusuk ddalang gok
Lainglah budök-budök jadi kesukaang pulök
Gi mmaing air böh Kkeda Payang roungabauk*
Suka gelèkèk llaki ppuang, sèlök kaing tarék naik
Nök gi ngarrong air böh sapa ttiang Kampong Daik
Dari Keda Pök Löh Yunang
Sapa ke Ah Chin tukang jahit
Kalu demang rasa tekök macang döh nök serök
Kita singgoh kkeda Pök Ali kita gi beli minyök
Air kölöh sejok ssiak, bulu roma ddiri kkulék
Dök léh tunggu lama döh masok waktu ggarék
Ddalang sura habih air turong hanyyar atah lata
Pah tu masok anging sejok pulök nung dari pata
Air ssembor keluör dari mulut Pök Löh Tuk
Dia dok ssörang ddalang ujang muka kkeruk,
Pasa Seberang rumöh dia gamök oh, pasa bini anök
Barangkali hök tulah cerita dia bök-bèk bbuéh mulok,
Dok jauh bang dengör, nök gi dekat tu takot
Pah tu dia mmusing ligak sebelum dia naik bot,
Tolong gök sape-sape gi ddapor rebus ubi török sikik
Cicöh gula denge air kawe sambil makang tepong ba'ik.

*roundabout

Watching The River Flow

2010-11-10T14:48:00.013Z
I'm sorry I've just been sitting there watching the river flow.

Your response to my request for pape has been tremendous and I apologise for the silence as I have so enjoyed listening in to you people chatting to each other that I felt there was no need for my intervention. Please keep your chats coming in. About Kerepok Görèng Pasir (thank you Anonymous and Cik Qaleh Teksi), yes I do know about kerepok 'fried' in sand. I think we did try that a few times at home, and without the oil the kerepok did taste different. Mother used to say that sand from the pata (beach) was best for this purpose, but after seeing what they did on the pata, using their sarongs as burqas, I began to doubt that.

Sdri Norziah, thank you for responding to Sdri Nadiah's request. I think you are more qualified than I to give out recipes for such a complicated thing as Rökök Arab. I've never rolled a Rökök Arab in my life, nor made Bèkang, and even the simplest things I find quite hard to do, like wrapping Pulok Lepa.

And what an array of characters: Mök Lèbör, GUiKP's wife's grandma, Cikgu Ja'apö, Mr Isaacs, Nik Smara and a host of Möks that made our little town twirl, Mök Long, Mök Mèk and Mök Pèr.

Cucu Pök Löh Standok is right of course about Kerepok Kulit, the rolled kerepok made from the discarded skins of fish. That was special but only available to those who lived near the kerepok makers. We were lucky to have been the neighbours of Mök Nab and Mök Song, both kerepok makers, so we did know what it tasted like, but I do have my suspicions about Cucu Pök Löh's waxing lyrical ("Khepok kulik buatang Semek Dara Ttanjung") about his fish skin kerepok as the very name of its maker does suggest that there was more than his taste buds at work there.

All this talk about kuihs surely has paid off, for not only has it brought so many of you here to share your foodie talks and recipes, but it has also brought from afar Sdri Ninotaziz, a talented writer, blogger, folklorist and a poet too. I have quite forgotten what Badak Berendam looks like, perhaps you have a photo? And thank you for giving that Trengganuspeak-in-verse a home, am so honoured too.

But I must say a word about Rökök Arab before I go. That's eggs, ghee and a host of other good stuff all rolled into a cigar and so special it was that we got ours from the vicinity of the Istana Maziah, made by the hands of Mök Nöh who lived in Dalam Kota. As Anonymous (Sdri Norziah?) rightly points out, Rökök Arab isn't Apék-Apék, the latter being just thin crispy crackers that sometimes - if flat - concealed picture cards (as Mr Van N'dot found in Dalam Bata) and - if rolled - were used as straws for drinking hot Milo.

So thank you all: Ajidol, Aliff, Che Qaleh Teksi, Cucu Pok Loh Standok, GUiKP, Mmekkolang, Nadiah, Norziah, Zulomar (for the Berönök) and the various Anonymous contributors. To Semek Dara of Tanjong, a special thanks for having lit up the early life of Cucu Pök Löh. And thank you too all you good people who commented earlier (for names please see Comments below).

Please keep the conversation going, and your recipes coming in.

If you're a newcomer, please read these too:
A Bèkang From Kölang
Your Recipes Please!"

A Bèkang From Kölang

2010-11-02T14:01:00.005Z
It isn't exactly a flood, but I've received some good recipes and some intriguing ones in answer to my call for the dishes of old Trengganu. Thank you, thank you everyone! Please look up your old notes, recipe books, and those old Trengganu Bus Company tickets where you scribbled as you spoke to Mök Chöh about those ingredients for that cake.

Meanwhile, here's a note from Ajidol, formerly of Kölang:
"Ambe nok kkècèk mengenai 'pape' sikit . Teganung kite memang besohor dgn 'pape2 tradisional nye. Tapi, pape yg selalu orang böwök ketike ggi nawak orang sakit ialah 'bèkang' . Ade dua jenis bèkang ... 'bèkang kuwöh lemak' dan 'bèkang kuwöh manis' . Bahan2 ramuan asas utk buat bèkang tu mudöh didapati di kedai2 runcit biase. Di UK nung pun ade belambök! Iaitu, telör,tepong gandum/beras, gule mèröh/nnisang. Tu jer ! Care2 nök buwat bèkang tu .... ai, kite dök tau pulök ..ning dèmè kkene tanye blogger2 ppuang kite laa .
Ning kite ada selit gambö 'bèkang kuwöh manis' . Mitök maaf laa kerana kelihatan 'beluah' dgn kuwöh tu ."
"I want to talk a bit about our cakes. Trengganu is indeed famous for its traditional cakes. But the one that people often take with them when visiting the sick is 'bèkang'. There are two types of 'bèkang'...'bèkang kuwöh lemak' (bèkang with the creamy sauce) and 'bèkang kuwöh manis' (bèkang with the sweet-sauce). The basic ingredients for this 'bèkang' are easily obtainable from your ordinary grocer's shop. They are plentiful even in the UK! They are eggs, wheat/rice flour, brown/coconut sugar. That's all! As to how bèkang' is prepared...well, I don't know. For this you'll have to ask our lady bloggers.

I attach herewith a photo of bèkang with the sweet sauce ('bèkang kuwöh manis'). I'm sorry it looks a mess sitting in the sauce."

Thank you Ajidol.

Your Recipes Please!

2010-10-28T13:46:00.005Z

Tuang-Tuang and Puang-Puang,

Now it's your turn to write.

If you have a favourite Trengganu recipe (the long forgotten ones are specially welcome) would you like to share it with me?

I am collecting Trengganu recipes with special emphasis on those kuih, pape, or dishes that are rare or are about to disappear, not just in you but from the face of the earth of Trengganu or from this whole, wide world. The last time I saw bèpang was years ago, and apang dèwa remains but a dream and the last time I ate that white crusty dödöl from Besut, Megat Panji Alam was just about to leave for Pahang (and a sad story that was too). And do you know what a buöh mölör is?

Well, when was the last time you ate real beluda? When did you last dip your fingers in genuine, non-coloured, non MSG-laced budu? Those lauk and cakes of old Trengganu are vanishing, maybe you do know some and would like to share.

I don't know what I'm going to do with them, but collecting them now sounds like a good thing to do. My email address is in the sidebar. Your recipes of old Trengganu please and if you have photos to show what they should look like, the better. But no pranksters please. I shall be harsh with them and shall send them curses and a few spirits too along the way, like the hantu mata mèröh mmerang* (the ghost with bloodshot eyes) who is not at all user-friendly.

The photo of kkölèh lemök above comes from citarasawan.blogspot.com. It's a wonderful repository of recipes and I commend it to you.

-----------------------
*Hantu bbalik rök. The one hiding behind the bush.

A Bit Taken From There

2010-10-07T16:38:00.008Z
This page hasn't been updated since the dawn of Hari Raya, I know. My sincere apologies to you all. Time is flying ever so swiftly and I am now doing the finishing touches to my next book, and I've already decided on its title, A Map of Trengganu. But don't you all start pulling your hair out now and scream in unison, "Oh no! Another?" This will be my last book on Trengganu - well, in this shape and form at least - I can promise you. So be calm, go placidly now and have another bite of the kerepok lekor.

What comes after this? I don't know. Insha Allah, I shall hope to move on to other things. Take the life of Mat Sprong, perhaps, and do a bit of work as private eye.

But in the meantime, to keep this space occupied, here's an extract from one of the chapters, about our house in Kuala Trengganu -

In the central part of our house was a long bookshelf, hung tall between wall and central pillar, and looking from halfway up the wall, gathering much of the dust that blew in from the activities in the pasar, stood Tok Wan, the paterfamilias in his white dress uniform, grim and standing among the kesumba (annatto) bushes that coloured my fingers red whenever we visited his house in Kampung Raja.

I'd lie on the sofa sometimes past midnight, reading the Dandy or Beano, when distant voices would take me to the back to see Father, still on his mat, deep in prayer. Then he'd rise too to peek into the dark outside as the chanting grew louder. "They're doing the ratib awör," he'd say. The ratib was sometimes done by a group of people who'd move about in the village in the quiet hours to chant prayers and zikr for the peace and well-being of our little community. It was an eerie sound that broke into the night from far away, and even as they came nearer and grew louder, they were still disembodied and unreal to a child.

People in the area often referred to our house as rumah tinggi, the tall house. It wasn't tall by any earth shattering standards, but it stood on taller legs than the average Trengganu house. From the surung it gave us a good view of the pasar, and standing at the window each morning we could see a myriad of people go by, the market traders and their baskets of fruit, and South Indian merchants sitting behind heaps of onions, coriander seeds, dried chillies from Madras, and fenugreek; and sugar in jute sacks and kerosene drawn from a metal container with a metal manual pump, screeching metal against metal that gave our teeth a funny feel.

People looking at us from the front of the house do not know what vistas we had from other windows: Pök Wè's tall mminja trees and one corner of the surau's roof almost touched our dining room window, we could see the shoreline from another, and from the back of our house we looked down into a dark lane that people seldom used, here we stood back to back to a long row of gloomy-looking ancient houses and the incessant murmur of Pök Anjang the röjök man, scolding his wife or his workers.

There was always people bantering around the surau, and the splashings of water from the community well and the thump!, thump!, thump! of the wooden pounding sticks mashing the fish in those mortars where Mök Nab and Mök Song made kerepok. The kuali at Pök Anjang's was always clanging, even when he did not speak, and the voices of women and children were always rising from the lanes and the houses around us, and Hindi songs from distant radios and the blaring public service broadcast from the electric bellow that the Information Department had placed in the upper floor window of Bhiku's café, regular news breaks and song requests from Radio Malaysia.
-------------------------------------------
A Note for the Perplexed: Like GUiT, "A Map of Trengganu" will come with a glossary.

Our Good Ship Raya

2010-09-05T16:30:00.008Z
They made ships, do you remember ships on the eve of Hari Raya?

I was reminded of them by my good friend Wang Ripéng ( who now resides in Kemamang). Wang Ripéng was a handsome besepctacled guy, a couple of years our senior at school, and he wielded a stout staff, for he was also a stalwart of the 1st Kuala Trengganu, a wanderer in this life of happy wandering, a tier of knots and a reader of Scouting for Boys, by Lord Baden Powell. How times have changed, if someone were to write a book called Scouting for Boys now he'd surely be taken away in a Police car.

Wang Ripéng wrote to me yesterday asking if I still remember the ships that were on shore, but for some reason I've completely forgotten about them now. Until, that is, I received his mail:
"Abg Pin teringat pada masa dahulu semasa warga Kg Tanjung menyambut Hari Raya. Tiap-tiap rumah yang ada laman, akan membina kapal dengan hiasan bendera serta lampu2."
"I remember those days, how we members of the Tanjong community celebrated Hari Raya. Every house with a compound would have a ship in it, decorated with flags and lights."

Why ships? Perhaps because we were coastal people, used to seeing those vessels coming in from Singapore - the Rawang and the Chusan and the Hong Ho - bobbing up and down in the water, all lit up and smoke churning out from their funnels as we looked at them from the sands of the Ujung Tanjong shore. These were vessels laden with our cargo of dreams, what waters had they been through? What surprises for us in store? They were normally rice for the shops and sugar for our tea, and a few other less mundane things like agar-agar from the Borneo waters and vanilla essence and oranges and fruit preserves from China.

We built our Raya dreams in a ship, constructed from bamboo frames and made over with glossy coloured paper from the Indian shops, and crepe paper streamers in pastel colours. There were coloured pieces in triangular shapes, all hanging in a row on a line that stretched from stern to funnel, and this was our good ship Hari Raya.
"Di kawasan dekat kedai Awang Tahir, pemuda2 akan membina bangsal yang dihiasi dengan lampu warna warni. Mereka akan adakan hiburan musik serta dengan nyanyian serta joget. Kita akan buat kereta dengan roda dari tin susu dan di control dengan tali guni yang diikat pada kedua2 hujung roda, serta dengan lampu yang dinyalakan dengan menggunakan minyak tanah dengan bersumbu kain burok, atau dengan damar yang dicari ditepi pantai, dibakar dalam ppurong."
"In the area near the shop of Awang Tahir, the young people would put up sheds that they'd decorate with multi-colured lights. They'd play music and sing songs and dance the joget too. We would make cars with milk can wheels, controlled by strings of jute tied to their rims. We also had paraffin lamps with wicks made from old rags, or powered by resin that we picked from the shore. We lit them up in coconut shells."

This was the atmosphere of Hari Raya, the feast of Eid, when all sadness descended for the passing of the fasting month and its rose syrup in clear glass bottles, deep red in hue and scented with pandan flavour, the abiding taste and smell of the fasting months of bulan puasa. We slurped it by the glassful, now that it has turned pink with the additioon of evaporated milk, and made cold with ice from the ice factory in Bukit Besar.

The ships appeared for the night of the tujuh likor, a landmark night for the fast of Ramadhan, for the likor is twenty in Malay reckoning that you add to the preceding number. So tujuh likor is the twenty-seventh of Ramadhan, a mere two or three days before Hari Raya, time for ships and flags and paper lanterns, and bamboo cannons startling old ladies into sudden jolts of hysteria, and for this one time in the month we were allowed to stay up and wander into the wee hours.
What I remember from this night long ago, when the kampong began to come aglow and the children came out to play was the gripping pain that gnawed in you when, after all the raucous laughter and the lights had dimmed from the sparklers and chinese lanterns and the cannons ceased their seasonal roar, was the sudden bereftness as I clambered the stairs up to our house, the yellow light flickering still at the end of the blackened wick, but the paraffin was going low, and the night was almost lost and little children were nearly all in bed after saying their last hurrah.

I didn't know if they were singing and dancing still in front of Awang Tahir's shop or if all those ships that sailed so brightly into the night on this prelude to the Hari Raya had dimmed their lights and reached ashore, but going up those stairs with those noises ringing still in your head while silence was taking hold everywhere, and Mother from behind the door peeking out and beckoning you to come in, her hands still fresh from mixing the flour, it was time for more than just a little melancholy.

Thank you Abang Péng for your wonderful ships and for that precious memory.

--------------------------
Pelita pics borrowed from saifulislam.com, with thanks.

Early Drums, Holy Month

2010-08-10T16:18:00.007Z
Ayöh Löh walked the short distance from his house, through the dim yellow light of the street lamp, round the corner fencing of our house and into the dirt lane that took him to the surau in this dark hour.

He took the the beater and beat the drum, and all at once the sound of clattering plates and the tinkling cups died and the spoons stopped stirring the tèh oh.

It was near the end of the night, but not yet the appointed time, but Ayöh Löh had supped and smoked and belched quite a few times and he was beating the first geduk sounds for the day.

We were sitting around our dining table then, fighting our sleepy eyes and forcing down the food of sahur. Sahur was breakfast time for the Ramadan months, the last meal before the fast that started with the dawn prayer. But this time the beat of the geduk made everyone stop and Pök Wè jumped down the stairs of his elevated house that was just by the surau.

Pök Wè was an amiable man as Ayöh Löh was a character, and in the ensuing exchanges that we heard coming amid cackles of laughter near the stairs - that of the surau and that of Pök Wè's house - Ayöh Löh had this to say: "Ingak ke döh suboh döh!"*

When I looked down from the window of our house that looked down to the surau I saw Ayöh Löh standing there scratching his bare back, and then he scratched his head underneath the semutar.

Prayer times were greeted by rolls of drums in our Tanjong, beaten out of the geduk of every surau. The geduk is the beduk in standardspeak, and it gives a deep mellow sound through the length of its body of hollowed out trunk that has a stretched out buffalo hide on the side of the beater. These drums are found in prayer houses throughout the peninsula and in East Malaysia too, and their beats are heard even in faraway Indonesia. It is the sound of the prayer call of the Nusantara, before the muezzin stands up to make his human call.

In Kuala Trengganu we had three sounds in bulan puasa, the prayer month. There was the sound of the geduk and then there was the clanging of the big bell - the genta - on the hill that were bracketed by the rumble of the cannon of Bukit Besar.

Puasa was a happy month and a dry one when most coffee shops were closed but those that did not shut their doors had curtains to hide the wayward people. There were gunny sacks unfurled by the roadside in front of Bhiku's cafe when the hands moved closer to four o'clock, when children trying to earn Raya money sold blocks of ice for fifteen cents to cool our sirap during bbuka. There was cendol, coloured green like the snot, and beleda kacang, off-white and quite pointless for its lack of taste, to the child.

Ramadan is for the children too even if it's adult country. We made cannons from hefty bamboo in Ramadan and delighted from their carbide fire, we fasted half the day - some of us - though in our house we fasted the day through. Mother cooked dishes and baked cakes that were not seen on ordinary days, nèkbak and the akök cooked in thick brass moulds and the chicken-centred buöh ulu, and the sirap water so blood-red and bubbling in a big cauldron to last this whole month, the scent of pandan and the sweetness of white sugar in the air.

There were new clothes to be ordered from the tailor - our bajus were made by Ku Su in the grounds of the istana, and new shoes most certainly from Bata. Oil lamps with wicks of jute strings in bodies of milk cans, and lanterns and sparklers to brighten up the night hour.

But that's towards the end of the fasting month; now it's time to tighten the belt and abstain ourselves in the daylight hours.

Marhaban ya Ramadan kareem, marhaban ya shahrun nuur!

---------------------------------
*"I thought it's time for the dawn prayer!"

Happy Repast

2010-08-02T15:43:00.015Z
Sunrise hands in the gok, the chicken coop beneath the house. All houses are on stilts, and for many uses: to raise the floor above the flood, room for the storage of chattels, and as space beneath the gaps in the floorboards for emergency relief in the night.
Shafts of light shinning through the bamboo slats fencing the house, as dusts fly and airborne feathers catch the light. A freshly laid egg is grasped in the hand, a brisk walk to Pök Löh's house of roti canai, or Bhiku's more elegantly laid out coffee shop. Roti canai is flat bread, fried on the griddle in a bath of ghee, but if you bring your own egg, Pök Löh's roti maker in chief will crack it in an enamelled iron mug, and whisk and whisk its yolk and white with a fork before pouring the gunge onto the dough, laid out flat now like a damp white cloth on the marble surface of the kneading table. He hums some Tamil tunes, the roti man, as he folds the sheet into a square, the egg mix smeared evenly now within the fold, and he lays it down on the hot plate while he tends to other matters.

Roti telor, the roti canai with the egg, turns golden yellow in the sizzler and the man tosses it now in the air, calculating precisely for it to land pale side down on the hot surface, the egg mix now seeping out and coagulating through cracks. Dabbed on sugar the roti will go well with hot Ovaltine or Milo.

Far into the pantai area folk are gathering around the nasi dagang stall of Mök Söng - a mountainous heap glistening white from the bath of coconut milk, poured in as the grains of rice are steaming hot - a mixture of the glutinous and the ordinary - flavoured with fenugreek and thin slices of ginger. In another enamelled basin, tuna heads are soaking up the mix, of coriander and fennel and lengkuas, and ginger and shallots, in a sunny melange held together by coconut milk, tempered by the tongue-tingling taste of chilli.

Mök Song - or Mök Nöh, or Mök Nab or Mök Pèr - and a host of other gallant ladies who wake up at the crack of dawn to make us rise to the whiff of nasi dagang in the air, and they will soon scoop a ladleful of rice into a banana leaf funnel, and pour into it the thick sauce of the gulai, coconuty and chunky with the meat of Trengganu tuna, cooked now into succulent layers. "Mitök kerapöh sikik Mök Söng," give me some kerapöh please, someone will say, for the kerapöh is the true art of the cognoscenti, softened cheek bones of the fish, or the bony structures from its head that have softened in the boil and wallowed in the juices and the spices and mellowed in the hotness of the chilli. Crunching the kerapöh gives the nasi dagang a special flavour, and then the residues are spat out again for the delectation of cats down below.

At home a fisherman stretching his legs out in the warm mat on the verandah peeks an eye out from his batik head cover, to see his wife already tinkering in the dapor (kitchen). "Buak gök lèpèng sikik!" - Make us some lèpèng, please! - he says, for lèpèng is stuff for the hungry seafarer, for today is Friday, the fisherman's stay-at-home day. There's lèpèng nyiur and lèpèng sagu - coconut and sago pancakes, and the ordinary lèpèng gandum shaped out from your ordinary flour. Lèpèng goes with anything that's available, shaved brown coconut sweet or the ordinary cane sugar; left over gulai from the previous night's meal, or just coconut shreds with a sprinkling of salt to lift the flavour.

From another kitchen drifts the aroma of garlic and the throat burning odour of belacan fried in chilli. There's left-over fish baked over the fire last night, there's enough left for another meal as the flesh is now being separated from the bones, and torn into little shreds, and thrown now into the hot mix in the kuali (wok). Soon the cold rice from the pot will join them too, and there'll be nasi goreng on the table.

In the market there's already a brisk trade in morning fare, pulut cawan, glutinous rice cooked and shaped in a cup and teased out to stand in a tray, then topped with brownish red serunding meat strands to make them look like volcanoes. There's pulut lepa too, rolled in banana leaf and cooked over the fire. I only know of lepa when it is used to describe lack of vigilance - the standardspeak alpa - when your quarry runs away with your goods, your shirt or your shopping bag or your gold, your wife or your precious daughter. Perhaps the lepa in the pulut is a reminder for you to be always on guard when it's steaming hot and ready, and its banana-leaf covering is charred in the edges and browned from the bake, and the pulut inside is waiting in its own steam, to be released by eager hands at the table. Perhaps it is like those foods with names that tell a tale, like the Turkish Imam Bayldi, which the Imam ate and collapsed under a surfeit of delight and shock in equal measure.

These are early morning foods, savoury and sweet and piping hot in the coffee shop or at your breakfast table, for it is breakfast time in the land, and even the hen that laid the egg is now scratching the earth for things to peck at the beginning of the day.

Photo: Se badang pape...From bottom, clockwise, jjala mah, hasidöh, and a puzzler. Any ideas?

A Miracle has happened....

2010-07-25T15:03:00.004Z
...some months ago I was agonising about the lost Comments from my older blogs. This happened when I changed to Blogger.com's new upgraded version. I tried all I could to bring them back as I value them very much, but nothing happened. Some of you suggested ways to bring them back, but none worked.

There was nothing more I could do. They were like old friends who were gone. Some commenters, like Long Ladang (whose comments I valued very much), are no longer with us. That we know for a fact. Others were avid commenters for a while, and then they disappeared. I was resigned to the fact that all those good friends were lost forever.

Then suddenly, last week, two regular commenters (GUiKP and Rindunya hati ini) pointed out that the old comments were back. I checked, and was delighted.

Welcome back old friends, you are part and parcel of the work.

A Prison in Tanjong

2010-07-17T17:42:00.008Z
Sultan Zainal Abidin III (1881-1918)was given the posthumous title of Marhum Haji. He was, by all accounts, a devout man whose policy of non-commitment whilst maintaining friendly relations kept both the British and the Siamese at arm's length. Sir Frank Swettenham found him to be "an extraordinarily reserved man, very silent".

Swettenham also noted that for a Sultan, he had little wealth, and he went on to tell a story that he had heard in Trengganu, that on the Sultan's second visit to Bangkok (Zainal Abidin visited Bangkok twice) where he was lavished with presents by the King of Siam –
"he had been told that the Siamese government would lend him $2,000,000 and that he could have $500,000 as advance. This was a large sum to a poor man and it is a credit to him that he declined it."
Things were different then.

In a way the Sultan's other-worldliness also disadvantaged his subjects. He left the affairs of state to trusted men, and although himself a just man, he was unaware of many things that were carried out in his name. The administration of justice was entrusted to one Tengku Musa, and in this he was assisted by Tuan Hitam, a Sayyid who also acted as the Sultan's treasurer, and Encik Abdul Rahim, the Sultan's trusted adviser.

Clifford reported that justice was rough, people were imprisoned on scant evidence, and fines were imposed to punish as well as to collect revenue for the court. On April 22nd, 1895, Clifford went to Kedai Tanjong, not to buy fruits or fish, but to visit Kuala Trengganu's penjara (prison). He was appalled by its condition.
"It consists of an enclosure, built in the very centre of the Kedai Tanjong - one of the most crowded positions of the town - surrounding the cages in which the prisoners were confined. The prison is built of heavy slabs of wood, some 3 inches thick, a feet broad and 10 feet high, which are fitted together so as to form a solid wall. Inside this fence, and at a distance of 30 inches from it, are two rows of cages placed back to back, which are made of heavy bars of wood with intervals of a couple of inches or so in every eight for the admission of light and air. These cages are raised about 6 inches from the ground, and measure some 6 feet in length, 2 feet in width, and 5 feet in height."
He reported that there were 20 cages in all and during his visit, the penjara was 'fairly full'.

Prisoners were not permitted to leave their cages and sanitary arrangements were non existent. "[T]he space between the floor and the ground, and the interval which separates the cells from the surrounding fence, is therefore a seething mess of excrement and maggots," Clifford wrote.

The closeness of the cells, poor ventilation, and the solid wooden walls all added up to something appalling. "To add to this misery," he added, "no bathing appliance of any kind are supplied to the prisoners, and the filthy persons of the inmates of these cells beggar all description."

Reference:
M. C. ff. Sheppard, "A Short History of Trengganu", JMBRAS Vol. XXii Part 3, June 1949.

The Game of Gömök

2010-07-16T11:30:00.002Z
My story of the buöh gömök has resurrected many ghosts and brought many memories to many people. I reproduce here (with translation) an email I received from my friend Mat Mbong of Kuala Trengganu.
"Mase kecik-kecik dulu adelah jugak mmain buöh gömök tu.

"Buoh ning ade jugok orang panggil buoh gandu atau buoh ipei. Name lain, tapi buoh tu lle je. Kalu nok mmain buoh ning ade macang-macang care.

"1. Lukis satu bulatang atah tanoh lebih kurang besor beseng, pah tu wat satu garisan lebih kurang 20 kai dari bulatang tu kemudian bbadi lepor (jangan plekong) biar die sserek (slide) masuk ddalang bulatang tu. Kalu dok masuk kire 'out'. Orang hok buoh die ade ddalang bulatang buleh ambik buoh dia (ikut giliranglah) dang gi lluar bulatang pah tu uting buoh sape die nok pakoh. Kalu duoh hok die pakoh tu klecat keluar orang tu 'out'lah dengan syarat buoh tukang pakoh tu dok keluar dari bulatang. Pah tu orang kedue pulok ambik giliran. Sut sut tinggal se je buah ipei ddalang bulatang. Hoh, orang tulah dikire benang.

"2. Budok-budok hok tinggal ttepi sungai, dia pilih buah gomok hok leper-leper kemudian die bbadi lacor ke atah permukaan air. Dok leh golek, kene lacor wi jadi dia nnopk cakting-cakting atah air. Kite bilanglah berape kali dia nnocat. sape banyok dia benang. Pah tu jerba ke dalang air brenang gi ambik buah gomok masing. Kalu byuoh gomok tu hanyuk jauh dok dang ambik, nasib tuang dielah. Kalu tuang die hanyut, nasib buöh gömök lah die takdok ttuang doh.

"3. Kadang-kadang budok-budok ning, nye cari buah gomok besar dan leper (flat) bukang kepek (dented) kemudian nye tebok lubang ttengah lebih kurang besar pitih lima seng, korek buang isi habis, masak timoh sampai cair (timoh boleh cokeh diwayar burok (zamang dulu die orang dok pakai casing, die pakai jalur timoh lebih kurang lebor ssuku inci dang dipaku kiri kanang wayar supaye wayar tu kemas. Hoh, timoh tu lah, ambik banyok-banyok, bile massok doh cair teruh tuang ke dalam buaoh gomok tu. Nok molek tanang buog gomok tu ddalang tanoh biar timoh derah sejok. Doh siap molek boleh mmain gambor. Sorang-sorang wat tubek 2 atau 3 keping gambor kemudia tanang gambor berdiri atah tanoh. Wat satu garisang lebih kurang 30 kaki dari gambor kemudian sserek(slide) buöh gömök tu ikut giliran. Kalu buöh gömök sape hok kene gambor tu danggambor-gambor tu kelecat hanyarkkubang, make semue gambor tu boleh ke dielah. Kalu dok kene, orang yang kedue pulok cube. Kalu nok wi panjang sikit mainang tu, cacang gambor macang pagor, hoh nok wi tebalik semue tu ppeluh lah.

"4. Care yang lebih popular lagi, tanang gambor macang tadi tapi wat urat atah tanoh lebih dekat, lebih kurang 15 kaki. Letok buöh gömök di belakang urat, berdiricre mengiring (misalnyya pandang ke kanang dang gambor berade sebelah kiri kite), kaki kirilangkoh satu langkoh kedepang (mase tu tubuh jadi ppewenglah), letak buöh gömök tepi kaki kanang dekak ibu kaki kemudian twis kaki kanang anti-clock wise supaye buöh gömök tu sserek ke aroh gambor. Mung tengoklah, kalu boleh buah same sedah, macang orang mmain golf hole in one lah. Boleh angkat tabek!"
I used to play with this buöh gömök when I was small.

This seed is also called buöh gandu or buöh ipé. Different names, but the same seed exactly. There are many ways of playing games with it.

1. Draw a cricle on the ground, approximately the size of a basin, then draw a straight line about 20 feet from the cricle. Then you compete with each other by tossing (not hurling) the seed in such a way that it will slide into the circle. If it fails to enter the circle, then you're out. The player whose buöh gömök is in the circle can now take it out of the circle (according to turn of course) and then take aim to hit whichever one he pleases. If the buöh gömök that he hits is pushed out of the circle, then the player whose seed is out leaves the game, the condition being that the seed that pushes it out comes to rest within the circle. And then the second player takes his turn and so on until only one buöh gömök remains in the circle. And that is the winner, of course.

2. Children who live on the riverbank select the buöh gömök that are flatter in shape. Then they compete by skimming the seeds on the surface of the water. You do not roll it on the water, but throw it in such a way that it will skim on the surface of the water. You count how many times the seed skims and jumps on the surface, the greatest number wins. And then we dove into the water to retrieve our buöh gömök. If the seed drifts far away and is irretrievable, tough luck. If the owner of the buöh gömök drifts away, then tough luck for the seed, now an orphaned buöh gömök.

3. Sometimes the children look for a buöh gömök that is big with a flat but not dented surface. A hole is made in the centre of the seed, approximately the size of a five cent colin, and through this hole the kernel of the seed is dug out. Molten lead is poured in through this hole (the lead can be taken from old wiring (in those days we did not use casings for electrical wiring, but wires were held in place by strips of lead of approximately a quarter of an inch wide). Yes, that's the one, taks as much as you need, heat them, and then, when they have melted, pour into the buöh gömök. To obtain the best result, bury the buöh gömök in the sand so that the lead will cool down quicker. When it is ready, you can play "Photo Cards". Each player produces 2 or 3 photo cards that they stick in the stand. Draw a line about 30 feet from those upright photo cards and then take turns to slide the buöh gömök in the sand to hit the cards. The player who hits the cards, throwing them helter-skelter all over the place takes them all. If a player misses, then the next player takes his turn. To lengthen the game, stand the cards upright like a fence. It will take some effort to topple them all in a throw.

4. A more popular way of playing this game: stick the cards into the sand as above but draw a line closer to the arrangement, about 15 feet away. Place the buöh gömök behind the line, then the player stands there, facing another side. For instance, the player stands looking to the right while the cards stand to his left hand side. Take a step forward with the left foot (your body will now be twisted), place the buöh gömök by your right foot, near your big toe, and then, twist your right foot anti-clockwise to send the buöh gömök sliding towards the cards. See if you can topple the cards in one shot, the way golfers do their hole in one. If so, Salute!

A Long Way From the Shore

2010-06-30T23:51:00.007Z

While walking in West London this morning something astonishing appeared in my footstep. I recognised it at once as the buöh gömök of Old Trengganu, as we used to collect from the shore of Ujong Tanjong among the debris brought down by the waters from upstream, and then washed ashore by the waves at the kuala.

I don't know how this buöh gömök came to West London, but looking at it closely I saw that an eyelet had been embedded into it to take a string or lanyard. In fact, if you look closely at the photo you'll see there a bit of string still, so I suspect that this seed has been swung around, served as a pendant, or has knocked many times against another in the manner of ye old British conkers. It may have been brought here by someone from the West Indies, or it could have dropped from the pocket of a passing East Coast Malaysian (Pak Zawi?), or someone who's been to a US department store.

The buöh gömök is what's called buöh beluru in Kelantan (as I was told by Pak Zawi), and in Trengganu I suspect that mighty gömök trees grew along the riverbanks, upstream in the ulu where nobody but woodcutters and the Sang Kelambai ventured to go. If you see woodcutters in the wild, do, by all means, say hello, but if an elderly woman crosses your path in the woods, never give her the time of day, as she may be the Sang Kelembai whose glare will petrify you. And there you shall be, under the gömök tree, immobilised and unrescued, for ever more.

This gömök seed is a native of the old world tropics that embrace parts of India, the Philippine islands and the Nusantara, as well as some parts of China. Botanically it is known as Entada phaseoloides, and it has cousins and brothers in Africa (where it is known as E. rheedei) and in the New World (E. gigas). The gigas variety is hard and shiny brown just like our gömök but is also intriguingly heart-shaped. The entada comes in seed pods, much like our petai (Parkia speciosa ), and the Entada gigas holds the record for having the world's longest pod, some stretching to six feet in length.

Entada seeds must be among the world's most resilient. The heart-shaped gigas, coming adrift from South America, are carried by the currents to shores as far away as Norway. The phaseoloides visited us in Tanjong after being knocked about in the spiralling waters in the monsoon months, and in the United States, phaseoloides and rheedi seeds are sold in department stores, for use as anchoring base for dry flower arrangements, and as playthings for young minds uncorrupted by computer games and the telly. In Trengganu we picked these seeds from the shore, we spat on them and polished them and filled them with lead, and we used them as our kör.

The kernel of the gömök is used for medicine in many cultures, and the African variety, the rheedei, is also known as the Dream Seed for the hallucinogenic inducing properties of its kernel. In Tanjong we used to bore a hole on the side of the E. phaseoloides with a gimlet (ggörèk) and we'd leave the seed out overnight for ants to feed on and probably get high to the eyeballs on the kernel. The empty shell is then filled with heavy metal, long before heavy metal became the anthem of the sozzled.

Kernel Note: Please don't try anything suggested in the last paragraph at home as the results may scare you more than the petrifying stare of Sang Kelembai.

Who Moved the Clock?

2010-06-20T10:42:00.012Z

Click on photo to enlarge
There's one Fiat chug-a-lug, two Morris Minors, a Volvo 122s (I think) and trishaws several. This is how the clock tower roundabout looked on a busy day - and it's five past eleven on the Kampung Daik side, but the time has fallen on the face that looks to the coffee shop that sold breakfast of toasts and satay. And there's a lone motorcyclist riding perhaps a Honda or Yamaha.

The clock tower has been moved to this new location to make way for the brave new Pasar kedai Payang that you can see behind the tree.

This photo was taken after the one we've seen below [Time for a Tower]. This was probably Kedai Payang in the sixties, with that tree that is sheltering all those cars that belonged probably to civil servants and teachers. And what's most amazing for me is this is my first glimpse, after a long time, of that row of old Kedai Payang shop houses - demolished long before the one across the road - that had the Duyung Ikhwan general trader, a batik and a kitab shop and a few more that I cannot now recall.

But who or what was STOPA?

I think the hanging frames on the end of the building showed that there was once there a hoarding, or they were probably preparing to put one up there now, to hide the STOPA forever behind some exhortations for us to drink more Tonic Cap Gajah, or to buy Dunlopillo for a good night's rest, or even to Go Superwell, Go Supershell.

I don't remember what the Chinese shop at the end of the row sold, can anyone read the Chinese characters on the signboard?

Photo Credit: Cik Qaleh, for whom a big thank you.

Looking Back to the Sea

2010-06-03T11:39:00.010Z

Now that the hot months are here, let's feel once again the rustling of winds in the coconut leaves and on the green waxed-paper umbrellas and on our skin as we walk to the beach to hear the roar of the mighty waves.

The monsoon's not as fierce as we used to know, but this photograph above was taken by my friend Ajidul in the blustery months of last year. There's not a boat in sight in the water, not a soul on the shore's golden sands. We were all curled up in bed, or on the veranda, sipping hot kopi-oh with boiled tapioca dipped in sugar or shreds of fresh coconut sprinkled with salt. That's salt that came in sacks woven from leaves by some dainty hands in Thailand, or Siam as we still called it, and brought in by the big boat under the charge of our neighbour Wang Mang. He brought in rice too, and roof tiles from Senggora, and some blonde seaweeds that must have got entangled in the nets of Thai fishermen, and when it came to us we soaked it in water and bathed it in vinegar mixed with chilli and sugar, and we called it kerabu sèrè. Kerabu sèrè was fine if you had a penchant for such things, but for us kids, we simply scopped out the sauce with the curl of the fried kerepok (fish crackers) and felt the sour and the hot and the sweet at the first crack of the cracker in our mouth, and we left the stringy, rubbery sèrè for the delectation of the adults.

Monsoon months came fast and furious, and debris and weeds and logs were swept down to our shore on the milky water from the ulu, and our pantai dropped in bits into the gushing surf, a mixture of the down-flowing river from our inland and the incoming waves from the churning sea. Hujung Tanjong was in danger of disappearing, and the huts along the shore looked very frail.

But soon the hot months will be here again, and the sea that looked intent on swallowing us will calm down as the fishermen hang their sarong wraps and move out once again to the sea.

Minyök Pök Ali

2010-05-13T13:18:00.010Z
This is the minyök that Pök Ali Yunang (Ali Zhang bin Idris) concocted in his shop, in a row of shophouses that is now demolished. The minyök was a popular remedy for aches, wind and the general under the weather conditions that visited folk in daily life. I obtained a bottle recently in Kuala Lumpur and am happy to report that the Pök Ali family are still making it for the market.

To read more about Pök Ali and how the Chinese Muslims arrived in Kuala Trengganu, read my earlier blog Snapshots of the Past and Hui Hui and Other People

The short stretch of road where Pök Ali kept his shop was known as Jalan Kampung Daik where now stands the Kuala Trengganu Fire Brigade and there is also a little musolla that we in our family referred to as "surau orang pasör", prayer house of the market people. Across the road from the Fire Brigade were Ah Chen, our family tailor [see Growing Up In Trengganu #197,325], and, just before the little bridge (known as the geretök) if you're coming from the White Mosque, was our shop of delights, the Keda BBunga (the flowered shop) where a Chinese man whom Mother called Awang sold oranges and lychees, Chinese pears and apples from colder climes. He also had glass jars of fruits, preserved in China, and they came in garish colours. And there was also something dried and squashed that had the feel of leather, and covered in white dust. We called it buöh ssemök which we took home and soaked in water for a few hours to bring it back to life. I later discovered that it was actually dried Japanese kaki fruit, or what we sometimes called pisang kaki in Malay.

I am grateful to alManar for giving us a wonderful account of life in this corner of town in the 1940s [see, Comments. to my blog Time for a Tower, below].

Geretök Note:
Whilst geretök is the accepted Trengganuspeak word for bridge, ttiang is the word used in everyday language. For instance, my mother used to refer to that spot where the Keda Bbunga stood as atah ttiang, meaning "on the bridge". Ttiang is no doubt from the standardspeak titian, a word that conjures a picture of someone balancing himself/herself on a dead tree trunk laid across a rivulet. Put a bundle of goods wrapped in a batik sarong on the head of a woman balancing herself on the ttiang, and you'll understand what mishap bored children prayed for on a dull day in the villlage. The bridge over the water in Jalan Kampung Daik was no mean bridge, but it was still tttiang for Trengganu folk. There was, I think, another ttiang in Banggol, known widely as Ttiang Banggol, and you can't fault them for that.

Time for a Tower

2010-05-05T14:12:00.019Z

They put up a clock tower in the sixties, during the reign of Sultan Ismail and the Menteri Besar was Ibrahim Fikri. And then they pulled it down again in later years, and broke the parts and filed the clockwork and its faces and hands under 'F' for Favre Leuba.

The clock tower wasn't of much use as a time-keeper as it showed a confusing array of times: one for the market people and another for the folk in Kedai Pök Löh Yunang and Mr Fernandez, who was himself a watch dealer. For the people in Kampung China it would have been three, while in Kampung Daik we were all hurrying out of Keda Bbunga as it was already nearly half past the hour of four.

In Ramadhan we relied not on the clock and its jumbled-up time, but on the bell - the Genta - on Bukit Puteri.

There's little that we knew of it, nor how much it cost, or if it was out-sourced to a private agent or chosen from a catalogue of towers and clocks by a civil servant sitting in the Pejabak Jang Besör. But it appeared one day in a spot cleared and levelled, at the intersection of Jalan Kedai Payang, Jalan Kampung Datuk and Jalan Kampung Daik that led to the white mosque with the drum in the loft amid tall towers.

People looking back from here now are sometimes confused between the Jang Besör (Jam Besar, the Big Clock) and the Pejabak Jang Besör (Pejabat Jam Besar, the Office With the Big Clock). The latter was a wooden construction of government offices, standing on stilts on loose sand in which nested the ant lion or our dear little Cik Ru. The office stood on the spot roughly in the back of the present day stadium in Jalan Paya Bunga. The Jang Besör was our clock tower, a latter day introduction, that sat in the commercial district - the clackety clack and the general hubub of the Kedai Payang market, and the more genteel atmosphere among the bookshelves of Pök Löh Yunang and the ticking hours in Fernandez shop and the glamour of the Redi Photo Studio in downtown Kuala Trengganu.

The Pejabak Jang Besör was shaded by casuarina trees and looked out in one direction to the vast expanse of an old cemetery with its rows and rows of round stones plucked out from the sea and half buried as grave markers in this sandy soil. One side was the Sekölöh Paya Bunga and the house of Tuan Haji (later Datuk) Salleh bin Awang (Misbaha) the historian of Trengganu, and then, looking towards Tanjong, there was the Istana Kolam of Sultan Sulaiman Badrul Alam Shah, the birthplace of the Trengganu gamelan and its joget that became known as the Joget Gamelan Trengganu.

These shadows from the past are probably dancing still to the ethereal, flashing timbres of the gamelan (as Robert Godet, Debussy's friend, once described it) on this piece of hallowed ground that is now filled with sounds of quotidian life and the buzz of its high rise people.

People are gathered in this picture on the day, perhaps, when the clock was launched, and it is hard to imagine it all now. This was before the fire station, yet to be built on the vast space where the people are standing (and Mat Sprong is among them if you look carefully). Avert your eyes to the left and you'll find them raised to the rooftops of the row of fine shophouses, now demolished. And I find it hard to believe that the clock tower started life in a space so vast when all I can remember is the clock on a little traffic isle, circumambulated by mini-lorries and trishaws and bicycles; people we watched as we sat at the coffee shop in the corner, eating breakfast of toasted roti bata and satay.

Photo Credit: Thank you Chorkedaggarik for the photo.

Read Also:
Light Over Trengganu.
Long March of the Cik Ru
Wind Over Troubled Water
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
Fruits and Needles

The Man Who Came In From the Sea

2010-05-01T16:35:00.006Z
From Sulawesi he came to us; he was probably caught in a mighty storm while out fishing at sea, and blown to Trengganu shore.

On land he married a local lady and fathered at least one child. He called himself Bachok, a common name among Bugis men. In Lembing Awang Pulang ke Dayang (Awang's spear returns to Dayang), a tragic tale of disappointment and love lost among the the Bugis (Sulawesi) community in Parit Raja, Muar, in the second half of the 18th century, a man called Awang came home from his travels to marry his love Dayang, but found her on the eve of her marriage, to another guy called Bachok.

Awang turned up at the wedding and stabbed Bachok with a spear that was given to him by the Raja of Bugis. In the throes of death Bachok in turn pierced his best man with it, and the latter passed it on to another, and that person to another and so on until the spear found 99 victims. The last to receive the spear in his body was Dayang's father, who died valiantly while protecting his daughter, and who resisted the spear's demonic will to be passed on to another. And so ended this killing orgy.
In our story in Kuala Trengganu, Bachok appeared from the sea and then married a local girl, and became a part of our community. In life he probably thought often of his native land when he looked out from Tanjong to the South China Sea, but he never once returned to it. According to my brother who went to school with his son, towards the end of his life Bachok expressed a desire to visit his village in Sulawesi once more, but he died soon after and was buried in Kuala Trengganu.

He lived close to the shore and often walked past our house on his way to the pasar (the Tanjong market). His attire was the trademark of our brawn brigade, men whose work deployed and developed their muscles. He wore khaki shorts, and wrapped a sarong over it that hung like a skirt above his knees. Then a cummerbund of another sarong around the waist, and a head-wrap that we in the East Coast knew as the semutar. He was shirtless on hot days, and wore a T-shirt in cool weather.

One day he stopped in front of our house with a sharp golokin his waistband. "Stand back!" he warned everybody, as he scaled a tall coconut tree right to the top, as effortlessly as if the trunk was lying horizontal. And then from the top would come down coconut leaves, the spear-like shoot, the soft heart of the palm, and coconuts began to bounce at the foot of the tree.

With his legs wrapped to the trunk, Bachok would chop off a section of the tree, and then he'd moved down and lop off another, and so on in his descent until he reached the ground and the coconut tree was no more. He'd put the golok back to his waist-band as he moved about to put all the bits and pieces of the former tree into a pile.

And that's what Bachok did for us, he was the feller of our ailing coconut tree.

Photo courtesy of Ajidoel.

Music in the Isle

2010-04-22T11:38:00.014Z
Time flies, water flows, the sun sets and the moon rises. But the music goes on.
This is an old picture, again from the family album of my friend Chorekdaggarik who also sent us that delightful picture of women cycling in Chendering that I blogged about in Les Bicyclettes de Chendering.

This photograph was taken in February 1956, on an island just off Pulau Duyung. It touches me in many ways, not least because one of the persons in this photograph, the man fiddling on the left, is Wan Muhammad Dato' Perba, the photographer who set up his photo studio above Pök's shop [see, Snaps and Studios, GUiT, p.50; "Nails, Ropes and Old Vinegar", p. 33], just a stone's throw from our house. I never threw stones at Pök's, I promise you, but we went there for odds and sods - nails, fishing hooks, bits of string and sometimes just for a chat. Pök was a genial man whose shop reeked of vinegar that he kept in clay pots in the back. He once sold my brother a hook and line and told him to go to the Sekölöh Paya Bunga (Paya Bunga School) for the rod. The school then had a hedge of thin bamboos.

We have many photographs in our family album taken at Wan Mohammad's photo studio with its cardboard Greek columns and the full moon backdrop.

The photograph also touches me in another way. In the back of the photo is this inscription:

It says, "Berkelah di Pulau Belakang Pulau Duyung pada 3/2/56 sekelian famili Dato' Perba dan Encik Omar, bèsangnya. Ahli-ahli muzik sahaja."

"Picnic on the island behind Pulau Duyung on 3/2/56, the entire family of Datuk Perba and Encik Omar, his bèsang. Musicians only."

Bèsang is the Trengganuspeak rendition of bèsan, a relationship that has no equivalent in English. He or she is the person whose child is married to one of yours.

Early mornings I used to look out from the windows of the front of our Tanjong house, to the activities in the market. Below us was a shop, run by a man named Haji Nik (we called him Ayöh Nik) and a very amusing and witty man we called Che Awang who could draw and tell jokes and do conjuring tricks. Che Awang was from the family of Dato' Amar (the Man of Oob in GUiT) and Ayöh Nik was one of the children of Encik Omar, but I doubt if he is in the photograph as he was a no-nonsense man not given to much music.

Thank you Chorekdaggarik for sharing with us this wonderful photograph.

Read Also:
Chainlink to Pok's Family

Duyung Across the Water II

2010-04-20T14:38:00.028Z
The history of Trengganu is in the hills.

A short walk from the old Kedai Binjai was Bukit Keledang, a dishevelled haunt of spooks and weird folk in my schoolboy days. It was now manicured and trimmed to shape, and there were steps leading to the top. I thought I'd give it a look.

After the Telanais ruled Trengganu, the first Sultan in the present lineage came down via Patani. His name was Zainal Abidin, son of Tun Habib Abdul Majid, the Bendahara of Johor. Zainal Abidin I ruled Trengganu, first from Tanjung Baru, in Kuala Berang, then travelling downstream through time until he was finally in Chabang Tiga and finally in an area now known as Kota Lama in Kuala Trengganu. Throughout, he was in the shadow of a man known as Tok Pulau Manis, Sheikh Abdul Malik bin Abdullah, born in Kampung Pauh in Hulu Trengganu in 1650 [d. 1736, at the age of 86].

Some say Abdul Malik was descended from Shariff Muhammad Baghdadi, whose tomb is in Kampung Jenagor, Kuala Berang, but there is some uncertainty about this. Muhammad in turn is said to have been a Shariff in Baghdad, a man who renounced his earthly trappings to embark on a spiritual journey that took him to Makkah, Hadramaut in Yemen, and finally to Trengganu. He is futher believed to be the man responsible for the Inscribed Stone (Batu Bersurat), the earliest manifestation of Islam in the Malay peninsula, carved into a granite block on the Gregorian day of 22nd February 1303.

The tomb of Sultan Zainal Abidin I [d.1723] is on Bukit Keledang, now an oasis amid the hubbub of Kuala Trengganu. The headstones on the Sultan's final resting place as I saw them were of recent design, but more interesting, as far as burial monuments are concerned, was a lone grave that lay just a few yards from there. The carved stones and their height above the ground showed that this was the burial place of someone of note: a member of the royal family perhaps, or some nobility. I was uncertain if this was a male person as the headstones were flat rather than round, for this person, whoever s/he was, lying there now, the stones disassembled by the hands of time. As I was pondering this, a man who had been watching me from a distance came forward to volunteer this information: that this was the tomb of Megat Panji Alam. How could this be?

I knew that the Megat was a Trengganu warrior, once betrothed to Tun Teja, who then found cause to take 4000 Trengganu men to attack Melaka. He was foiled en route by Hang Tuah and his intercepting party in Pahang, and was on his way to slap Hang Tuah before the Sultan for some slight when he was ambushed and killed by Jebat and Kasturi (so says the Hikayat Hang Tuah).

It was late in the afternoon and I was feeling a bit tizzy by these heady thoughts. I walked down the steps and turned right, walking past the Hotel Malaysia, past a huge gap where once was the Sultana flea pit, and then along the sunlit walkways towards Kedai Payang, the market, the hole in the ground where once stood a majestic row of shophouses, the Abdullah alYunani bookshop, kedai Yamada, Redi Photo Studio, the satay house in the corner that led into a narrow lane that took us to the house of our maternal grandmother.

Behind the ersatz Turkish Bazaar opposite the Kedai Payang market, on the ruins of the historic Kampung Datuk Amar, stood another hill, Bukit Puteri of the fortress, the tumult of battle in Sultan Omar's wars of succession still undiminished by moving time, and fairy Princesses looking longingly at this past haunt of theirs from a yet undiscovered corner of Redang isle out at sea, far away in place and long ago in time.

Duyung Across the Water

2010-04-14T16:01:00.023Z

On a hot day last February, after my walk from Pasar Kedai Payang to the heart of Kampung China in search of lost hopes, lost places and lost people, I saw a hotel that did and still does irk me more than just a little. It stood in what was once the taxi stand of Kedai Binjai, a place where you could immerse yourself in thought and watch the river flow.

And there was Duyung across the water.

I was annoyed because the planners of our town never felt that a good scenery should be shared by all, and that it should never, never be obliterated by an ugly man-made thing from where only a select few could see the river. Well, it has been done, and it is there now, a hotel that blocks a view of the Trengganu, built on the tumult and the people and the tyre-marks of an old taxi centre that took people from Kuala Trengganu to Besut and Tepoh and Wakaf Tapai. It is built on the shadows of hefty market women carrying on-head bundles of goods, on the silhouettes of kampung folk, their lips gripping thin cigarettes of rolled, dried leaves, and there on the ground, the shadows of their heads showed the outlines of their semutar.

There was dust on their shadows, but dust is the end of us all. There was a cool breeze that bore faint whiffs of the sweat and toil of the Duyung people; and Duyung, as Mother used to tell us, was a cool place. She used the word 'cool' (sejuk), to convey to us that it was special, a place of contemplation and much learning, and a blessed colony of boat-builders. She was quite right, I'm sure. Duyung gave us in Trengganu its sons as kadhis (judges) and muftis, and Tok Duyung was a well-known saint and scholar.

I decided to walk into the hotel at just after noon-time and found it quite empty. Deep into it, walking through the dining tables, I found an open annexe that looked out to the river. The few people I saw sipping their drinks chose not to sit there as it was cooled by overhead fans and lacked the air-conditioned comfort that is now the climate of built-up Malaysia. I sat there and ordered my pot of tea, and occasionally (I went to sit there more than once), a plate of mee. On the few occasions I was there the book that I was trying to read just closed itself; more alluring was the water.

I looked across, and my head and heart ached a little.

[To be continued...]

Photo Credit: Top photo of Ferry to Pulau Duyung courtesy of Backpacking Malaysia.

As Above, So Below

2010-04-13T12:32:00.012Z
I looked in the grass this morning and saw this beautiful formation. It reminds me of crop circles. Did a mini Martian land in last night to give this mini-message to Earth's people? Or could it have been etched by the sun that also painted the sky blue with its spectrum rays of varied colours, that shaped the dandelions too and planted dock leaves in the ground as it waits for the long summer?

Is this the prickly weed - a variety of thistle they tell me - blown in by the gardening hantus to make gardening such a chore? I am quite laid-back by nature, and true though as they say that a garden is not made by sitting in the shade and saying "Oh, what lovely flowers!", I give the weeds a little nod for someday, who knows, someone will say they are a cure for cancer or some minor ailments of the knee. A garden is beautiful to the eye, but the weeds, they are forever.

A prickly weed, a variety of thistle, perhaps someone will tell me; but this one looks like a mandala ( so I shall call it Nelson for the while).

I looked up and caught the acer springing its blooms that put the light in the sky and rid it of the burdensome grey that hung for most days of winter.

I was in Trengganu for the harshest part of last winter, but I shall do penance when the time comes for the acer to shed its leaves, and rake them all into a pile.
* * * * * * * * *
Tis May; and yet the March flower Dandelion
Is still in bloom among the emerald grass,
Shining like guineas with the sun's warm eye on--
We almost think they are gold as we pass,
Or fallen stars in a green sea of grass.
They shine in fields, or waste grounds near the town.
They closed like painter's brush when even was.
At length they turn to nothing else but down,
While the rude winds blow off each shadowy crown.
Poems Chiefly From Manuscript,
by John Clare

Well, A New Look [Almost]

2010-03-26T18:27:00.002Z
I am trying to salvage all the comments that have been put into this blog by you, right from day 1 by moving to this new template. But I'm sorry good people, all the Comments have gone to their place of repose in the sky. You can put in your new comments now at least: just click on Comments at the bottom of the blog and (I hope) a window will pop up.

We'll have to make do with this arrangement for the time being while I ponder if we should move to another place. Your views are always welcome and your comments are precious. We haven't lost everything though, I still have all your past comments copied to my email, and going through them is like trawling through history. There's the late lamented Long Ladang, and many, many more names that no longer stop here to garce us with their company. I thank them all, and I thank you for being here still.

Farewell Ruby Ahmad

2010-03-16T01:08:00.000Z
A light has been extinguished and a friend taken forever. I met Ruby Ahmad for the first time in December 2007 and that was to be the last. She was a lively, warm and kind person: a wonderful friend and a fellow blogger is no longer with us, and a good person is gone.

Ruby blogged about many things and through them she shared with us the warmth that was within her. It shocked me when I heard just minutes ago that she is gone. We came to this earth alone and we return to our Maker with our good deeds and the prayers of those who valued our brief presence on this earth. Rest in peace dear Ruby. Alfatihah.

Class of Old

2010-03-15T11:49:00.006Z
The photograph I published of two ladies cycling merrily in Chendering in the mists of time and of children palying alfresco tugged many hearts. My thanks to Chorekdaggarik for the photo. My friend Ajidul sent me this paean to nostalgia:
"Foto yg deme selit dalam artikel Les bicyclettes de Chendering itu amat menarik. Ia telah mengimbaukan satu zaman yg indah yg pernah ambe lalui sewaktu kanak2 dulu. Selalunya begitulah pada hari raya . Salah satu acara yg kami buat ialah pergi berkelah di pantai . Betullah gamoknye budak2 dalam foto tu sedang bermain to nnusuk ... Sunggoh seronok bermain-main begitu bercampur lelaki dan perempuan innoncently .... ah, those happy days. Dan pada hari raya beginilah kita berebut menyewa basikal di kedai China Lugal depan kedai Pok . Bayar 20 sen boleh 2 jam . Ambe selalu pilih basikal kechil chap singa yg berwarna biru. Ada tiga buah sahaja basikal kechil yg baru sampai pada masa itu."

"The photo you have inserted into your article Les Bicyclettes de Chendering is most attractive. It harks back to a wonderful time that I myself experienced as a child. That was how we spent our Hari Raya. Among the things that we did was to go for a picnic on the beach. I think you're right: the children in the photo are playing hide and seek...How wonderful it was for the boys and girls to be playing together so innocently...ah, those happy days. On such a day we would rush to the Chinese shop called Lugal in front of Pok's shop to hire a bicycle. For 20 sen we had a bicycle for 2 hours. I always chose the smaller, blue colour Lion brand bicycle. Only three bicycles of that size had arrived in the shop then."

Another photo has arrived from Chorekdaggarik. This time it if the Kuala Ibai Malay School, Class of 1948. The headmaster then was Encik Mohammad bin Ali and I presume he is the gentleman sitting on the left.
Another photo has arrived from Chorekdaggarik. This time it if the Kuala Ibai Malay School, Class of 1948. The headmaster then was Encik Mohammad bin Ali and I presume he is the gentleman sitting on the left.

Once again, thank you Chorekdaggarik, and my apologies as Comments is still dysfunctional. If you are in the photo or know anyone in there, or have any comments to make, do drop me an email.

Er, oops...

2010-03-11T01:39:00.007Z

Since my last posting I have discovered to my horror that all comments have disappeared from my blogs. I do not know how this has happened, or why. Is there a way of bringing them back? Can anyone help?
If you've tried to Comment but have found that the comments box (below) refuses to pop up, please send your comments to me directly at: awanggoneng[AT]yahoo.co.uk and I shall respond to them here.
Sorry there's nothing more I can do. Blogger.com has been no help...perhaps it's time to move on, like the man on the right.

Les Bicyclettes de Chendering

2010-03-11T00:14:00.006Z

This is a snapshot from the past, as if you haven't already noticed. It hasn't been retouched to show the effects of time on memory. But the smiles are still there, and the pervading happiness and is the young lad walking in the middle of the photo wearing a songkok? Could this have been Hari Raya day?

This was afternoon, judging from the shadows, in Chendering, near the house of Cikgu Zainon Mahmud. And I am grateful to someone who will only identify himself as Chorekdaggarik, for having sent me this fascinating photo of two carefree cycling ladies and happy children at play in a village on the Trengganu shore.

Chorekdaggarik tells me that the lady cycling ahead, the one with the fetching scarf tied around her neck, is his auntie. "My father was at this time a teacher at the Kuala Ibai school," he says, "and my auntie loved to cycle in the open space around my father's house."

There is some uncertainty about the year this photo was taken. Chorekdaggarik brackets it between 1943 and 1948, but could it have been taken much later, say in the late 1950s?

When GUiT was published and the location of the house in the cover photo was discussed, I had to admit that I hadn't a clue as it was taken from a photo library. And then someone I met in London came with valuable information. The house, in Marang, is no longer there as the sea has reclaimed the area. "I know this for sure as my wife's family lived in a neighbouring house," he said.

Perhaps someone will now come and tell me about Cikgu Zainon Mahmud, and where she taught, for 'cikgu' is a teacher as we all know. Perhaps the lad with the songkok will write us an email, and the little girl seen running into the picture in the rear will do that too. And what are the children doing around the coconut tree? It looks to me like they are playing the game of to.

Back In the Shop

2010-02-25T14:40:00.017Z
When a drake files across the ocean there comes back a quack-quack, so goes a German proverb.

In KL I had little access to the internet, which was blissful in a sense, and I texted more than I spoke on the mobile phone, which was useful for contacts with home. And for a complete novice who'd never had a mobile phone there were many trying moments, like where to look for the exclamation mark when the moment called for one, and how to switch off the wretched phone's busy-body 'dictionary'function that jumped to alarming conclusions with every letter that I typed. But I spoke to many people and re-united with many friends. I'd like to thank them all for their care and warmth.

We arrived smack in the middle of the wedding season, Kak Teh and I. So we attended many kenduri and functions. Not the least of which was that of our dear family member Azril who wedded his lovely lady Kamalia when we were in town. They exchanged vows at the Shah Alam Mosque and regrouped three times, guests and family members, in Putrajaya and in Bangi the serene, and then in a place somewhere in the back of the Zoo Negara where the tiger winked at passing family members. It must have been a greeting of sorts.

I am grateful to you too for continuing to comment in my last blog even when there were no updates.

I took the express bus to Kuala Trengganu and enjoyed the trip. It was sad though that the bus no longer stopped at Mentakab and Temerloh and Kuantan nor crossed bridges over rivers that swelled during the monsoon months. Pahang is blessed with many mighty rivers, and magnificent prawns in Mentakab and the buzz of Kuantan life. Father worked at the General Post Office in Kuantan as a telegraph operator for a short time in our early school years, and we became Kuantanites for all of six months. Many things about Kuantan are etched in my mind: Datuk Keramat, Tuan Gila the white settler and a shrine-like place in the middle of town where an urn containing cold tea was daily filled up by persons unknown. Two metal cups were chained to the block of stone where sat the urn, and above it, a notice in Chinese - which I couldn't read - and in Jawi that said 'Minum teh tidak kena wang' {"Drink tea for free."). I remember this distinctly as 'wang' (money} was spelt without the alif vowel for 'ah' which was unusual; but Jawi can cope quite well with its vowels dropped. I was then registered in the lower primary class at the Sekolah Melayu Segambut, fenced by sturdy oil palm trees to greet us each morning when we walked in to do some gardening as a prelude to our daily school work.

Travelling to Trengganu was a pleasure mixed with much sadness. Much of the forestry between Karak and Kuantan have been cleared, but the scenery can be breathtaking in many ways. I slept little and was looking out of the window throughout. I was thankful that I had chosen to journey by day for, as soon as we entered Trengganu, the heart leapt with joy from seeing villages and villagers, and school-children with fresh faces boarding the bus at various stops, probably to return to their boarding schools in or near the state capital. The long stretch of coastal road from Kemaman to Kuala Trengganu was an exhilarating sight, and you'll have noticed that I keep referring to Trengganu not Terengganu, for it was Trengganu that I was returning home to, full stop.Lost Soul in a Happy Crowd I
With students of the Sultan Sulaiman Secondary SchoolIn Kuala Trengganu I did mini writing workshops at two schools, the Chung Hwa Wei Sin, where I met two groups of very enthusiastic school children over two days; and at my beloved Sultan Sulaiman Secondary School where the students were no less enthusiastic and some, I am happy to note, are lovers of books. I am grateful to Mr Seah, Headmaster of the Chung Hwa and to Puan Zaiton, the Senior Assistant of the SSSS and to the teachers of both schools for being such wonderful hosts.Lost Soul in A Happy Crowd II
With Students of the Chung Hwa Wei SinIt was great to re-connect with family members in Kuala Trengganu. Abang Hasan of Almanar and Kak Mah tolerated me for two days in their beautiful seaside house in Pengkalan Maras, and my cousin Azmi and his wife Na took me on breakfast trips to Kuala Ibai (for the nasi dagang) and to places I cannot now locate on the map, and then they took me to Trengganu's famous ICT, Ikang Celup Tepong, fresh fish fried in batter, on a breezy coastal road near the airport.

One day as I was walking in Kampung China looking for old landmarks (they are all gone of course, the Sumbu ice kacang stall, the Capitol and the Sultana, and the old Chee Seek book-shop and Mök Mèk's ceranang shop in the back), I came across my old classmate Chua Chee Peng just leaving his place of work for his tea break. We sat under a big tree and sipped tea and talked and talked.

Three years ago, in happier times, Kak Teh and I flew in to Kuala Terengganu in December for the launch of GUiT. We called the event the Monsoon Cuppa, but sadly now the old venue is gone, the whole row of shop houses is now in fact a pile of broken bricks. No longer is there my schoolmate Kho Sheue Fei in the Redi photo shop, or my friend How Kok Kong next door to Pök Löh's bookshop. These are the shops that gave Kedai Payang its distinct character; and another row just across the road was demolished a long time ago, by mindless developers who think nothing of history and heritage for just a few hundred thousand bucks in their pockets. I am minded to curse them all, but they are all cursed already by a lack of heart and good taste and by greed.

I met also two other classmates Ajidol and Mat Mbong who accompanied me on a tour of the town and then to the talk at our alma mater in Kuala Ibai. Just a couple of days ago when I spoke on the phone to my friend Mat he said something that really touched my heart. "It was good to be able to tour the town with you in our carefree way," he said. "I felt like I was young again."

My trip back to Malaysia was arranged by another schoolmate at the SSSS, the wonderful lady To' Puan Rosita and her tireless son Tengku Zainal, for the launch of To' Puan's beautiful coffee table book, Kulit Manis. The book is all about Trengganu and Terengganu and her people and recipes. I salute them both for that, and to MAS for providing us the tickets.

The To' Puan invited us not once but twice to her house to taste her exquisite dishes - nasi dagang and nasi telur and many, many cakes of old Trengganu. At these joyful gatherings I met once again the lady who taught us English in Standard 4 at the Sultan Sulaiman Primary School, Mrs Diana Yeoh and her very talented artist husband Mr Yeoh Jin Leng. Mr Yeoh, a notable among Malaysian artists, also taught art at the SSSS, and he has in his collection still, many paintings of Kuala Trengganu in the fifties and sixties. I understand an exhibition is in the making for the latter part of this year and I wish them every success.I met also my good friend Pokku at these functions and then again at his favourite dining room, the Selero Nogori at the Amcorp Mall where he dines frequently with his amusing and talented musician friend Cikgu Razak. There was another Razak whose wife makes probably the best Trengganu bubur lambok in Kuala Lumpur while he himself is no mean painter at the canvas. I met him through our To' Puan who made sure that I met all the Sulaimanians in her address book.

And so to all of them, Sulaimanians or not, my deepest gratitude. To Mat Som, whose abiding interest in education warms my heart and whose help came quite freely even in the knowledge that I had no means to reciprocate, and to my brother Abdul Rahim Kamil who put up a special marquee in front of Father's old Gombak house to celebrate the Mawlid and for us to have a jolly breakfast in it in the morning after, and to my sister Asma who made sure that I was comforted by sweet memories of old Trengganu - hati sokma and jjala mas and akök and to all their wonderful children; and to my other family in Bangi, my wife's people, spirited eaters and joyful company. Many, many thanks. And to my friend the Pizzaman, Abdul Karim Omar and his delightful family, and to my former Tanjong neighbour Che Ali who met me on arrival at the bus terminus. God bless you all dear friends, mentioned here or no, till we meet again if the Almighty wills it so.

Earth-Trembling Barbarism

2010-01-15T04:51:00.009Z
Ignorance may be a misfortune, albeit a voluntary one, but vandals are a curse on the land no matter who they are or whatever their name. By their words and by their deeds they have blotted our landscape and despoiled our land, and now on a pile of rubble they are standing triumphant on the remains of what used to be a row of fine shop houses in Kedai Payang.This is the deed of people with no care nor love for the land. They are a product of generations that they do not love, their forefathers are buried in the sand, the glory of their past work now piled on them, but they in the present care not for history nor our precious inheritance.

We shall all now hang down our heads in shame.

We have raised voices for the sake of that historic lot on this sacred earth. The centre of Kuala Terengganu with its cloistered walkways and the old Abdullah Alyunani bookshop. The cafe that served sweet roti kaya and sold satay for breakfast (perhaps the first in the land), and the Kedai Fernandez, and the Redi Photo Studio (formerly known as Kedai Yamada), and the limbless Orang Timun (the Cucumber Man) who was placed on the five-footway on Friday and Saturday morns, begging for alms, and fierce Nepalese men selling their concoctions and semi precious stones and rude coils of animal genitalia with their implicit promises of flagging men reborn – they are now all gone.

Kampung China may have been the commercial centre but Kedai Payang was the hub of town. There was the Duyung Ikhwan, a shop where our Uncle Daud sold Pfaf sewing machines in a general store owned by his friend Wang Ngah of Duyung. In the back of this row of shop houses was the famous Pasar Kedai Payang (not Pasar Payang, the name given to it by people who do not know the town ), there were watermelons heaped in piles and durians encased in thorns, and rambutan on plastic sheets and people and noise and the blaring of cars, and the shrill sound of taxi horns.

In one fell swoop they are all gone.

We should not pretend to be surprised as this is not the first time the dastardly deed is done. In the last few years they have mown down the Masjid Chendering, a heritage building much loved by Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah, a gentle man who photographed with great skill his great inheritance in this land. In another swing of their beastly ball and chain they broke another Mosque in Bukit Besar, a rare heritage building that was unequalled in Darul Iman. And the broken bits and hearts and flowers and tendrils of work that witnessed the vicissitudes of our past, they left them to weep silently on the ground.

We hear that the rubble of the historic shophouses of Kedai Payang was sold to the highest bidder. It is left to them to take the broken bits as keepsakes and to wonder at the beauty of past times; they – the vandals - were too mean and cowardly even to let the local Terengganu museum keep and display them as mementoes of our barbarism.

Even as the earth was being broken by the weight of falling stones, our buried past emerged from the ground: coins and artefacts and narratives of olden times. Not surprising as on the land on which these shops were built was a thriving community of local sailors and traders who travelled to as far away as Sambas in the Nusantara, and to Senggora in the North. Our grandmother lived in a tumbledown house in the back of the shop and I remember seeing her sitting up in the dark, beneath intricate fretwork pieces and hefty pillars. The remains of that community whose past has been disturbed and unearthed with no ceremony nor respect. O the ghosts how they seek revenge!

Our children and we ourselves shall continue to curse those who did the deed, whoever they be whatever their name, and the filthy lucre in their hands.

A Book, A Table, and Thou

2009-12-13T01:51:00.009Z
Any book that takes a look at Terengganu (or Trengganu as it is still in my heart) is a reason for celebration. My friend and fellow Sulaimanian (i.e. of the Sultan Sulaiman School - primary and Secondary), To' Puan Rosita, has published a real compendium of joy, a book on Terengganu, its food and history. And To' Puan has a foot in each of Terengganu's two main communities: she was born into the Chinese community of Kampung China and is now married to a member of the Terengganu royalty. I remember her from school, and as luck would have it, when I went back to launch my book on Trengganu three Decembers ago now, she remembered me. So let us now all drink a little teh tarik to memory, to Terengganu, and to our To' Puan Rosita for she's a jolly good lady.

On the two occasions that I went to her house in Kuala Lumpur her dining table was heaving with baked and roasted and fried and banana-leaf wrapped Trengganu fare. And there I met again many, many old Trengganu friends, and I use 'old' here merely to denote that I have known them for a long time but they are all of course very young still.

By kind invitation, I shall be back for the launch of To' Puan Rosita's pride and joy, a coffee table book called Kulit Manis: A Taste of Terengganu's Heritage, whose cover I have stolen from my friend Pok Ku's blog and reproduce here):I quote now from the press release from the office of To' Puan Rosita:

"The launch, to be held at the Mayang Sari ballroom and foyer of the J W Marriott Kuala Lumpur will be attended by DYMM Tunku Ampuan Besar Negeri Sembilan Darul Khusus Tuanku Aishah Rohani,YMM Tengku Ampuan Bariah Terengganu, Minister of Information,Communication and Heritage,Dato Seri Utama Rais Yatim, Minister of Tourism Dato Sri Dr Ng Yen Yen and other dignitaries. Sales of the book will go to Yayasan Prihatin's Slow Learner Programme, which has to date, benefited many rural Terengganu students with learning disabilities. "

This will be on 20th June as you already know from the charity fundraiser ticket in your hand. If you're telling me now that you don't have a ticket for the lunch, then here's what you should do. Do contact the Kulit Manis people at kulitmanis@gmail.com very quickly.

And I quote once again from the Kulit Manis press release:

"The launch is also a fundraising drive in aid of Yayasan Prihatin. Tables will be sold at RM3,000 (silver), RM5,000 (Gold) and RM10,000(Platinum).Gold and Platinum diners will receive a hardcopy of Kulit Manis: A Taste of Terengganu’s Heritage; for Platinum corporate diners, in addition to the 10 books received, a weekend getaway for two at Tanjong Jara Resort will be offered (please refer to the invitation card for more details). Other diners will be receiving a specially designed Kulit Manis apron and or commemorative caps as a mark of appreciation. Luncheon is Terengganu fare from recipes featured in the book,its preparation and cooking personally supervised at the JW Marriott kitchen by To’ Puan Rosita A batik fashion show will be staged as well as entertainment."

And in all this I shall - God willing - be playing a very small role. Kak Teh and I shall I be there of course and I hope to see you all, if not at the table, then perhaps we'll bump into each other at the Bazaar in the Ballroom foyer (between 11 - 6.00pm). There'll be Terengganu food and craft there for you to buy and the book will be on sale at a promotional price of RM225.

And if you're up early on the morning of Thurdsay 17th, To' Puan and I shall be on NTV7 for their 8.30 morning show where the To' Puan shall be talking about the making of the book and I shall be sitting there fighting jetlag and the after-effects of a surfiet of Trengganu food from her table.

Later, when I'm more awake, I shall be conducting writing workshops in Terengganu, for the Yayayasan Prihatin sponsored students most certainly, and in a few other places too if time allows.

For More Kulit Manis, go to Pok Ku's blog HERE.

A Bend in the Road

2009-11-29T21:49:00.011Z
Our cousin Hassan opened a grocery store in a bend in the road to Jerteh, in an area called Sungai Tong. His shop front sat on the edge of the road, while the back area where his family lived and ate was propped up by stilts over a dip that gradullly levelled out into green agricultural land that saw other solitary houses spread out over this area of God knows how many men and women and their children eking out a living in the sticks.

Sungai Tong was always a welcome break to us in this long and lonely road that was flanked by thickets, some savannah type open spaces and some solitary women crossing the road to walk in the undulating space that led to the hilly and bushy spaces where they lived. Sometimes there were columns of smoke coming from the back of the belukar, and there were cows mulling quietly by the side of the road. As the sun began to set I feared for the people who might just get lost in the darkness of this lonesome part of earth.

We stopped at Cousin Hassan's shop on our way to Kampung Raja in Besut, or on our way back, often in rainy weather that gave the texture of wet velvet to the darkness of the night. Father would stop the car at the shop front, now shuttered with weak beams of light coming out through the cracks. Cousin Hassan would come out from the back, clad in his sarong pelikat and a white T-shirt. He was always smiling, a smile that was warm but did not directly connect to us as it looked like the culmination of some memories that were coming back to his mind in a reverie that we broke. But by that time Mother and Father would already have been talking to his wife Kak Nab, whose smile was like the moonbeam that lit our faces as the moon itself was a welcome sight.

In daytime Sungai Tong meant that we were probably just another couple of hours from Jerteh where the car would turn to the right into the road that passed through the roadside houses of well-to-do people and the padi fields of Besut district. Sungai Tong meant hot tea and refreshing conversation and sundries that we picked up and insisted on buying from the family shop. The name of the family was on the signboard above and on the side of the shop, Wan Hassan, written in Romanised Malay and in Jawi and in Chinese characters. Cousin Hassan spoke his native Trengganu Malay and Arabic and Japanese very fluently. He wrote in Arabic and Jawi of course, and Kanji and Katakana if you please.

Like most members of our family, he started his life learning Arabic, in a school where his brother, our Cousin Chén, excelled and was soon travelling on a ship to further his studies in Egypt. Cousin Hassan looked at the other side of the globe and became a star pupil in Japanese when the Japanese ruled us for that brief and terrible time, but something or other prevented him from going on to Japan to extend his pursuit.

In our old family album there was a photo of Cousin Hassan, with that same distant smile and in his eyes, a certain sadness. That was a photograph taken when he was detained by the British at a centre in Melaka for alleged activities that were detrimental to colonial life. He wasn't the first member of our family though to be detained by the Brits: one night when the old Sultan Sulaiman English School in Cherong Lanjut was going up in smoke, the colonial police looked up their list of political suspects and rounded up many men including our Uncle Daud. In the short interim between the Japanese surrender and the Brits coming back, a group of brigands called the Bintang Tiga came out of the jungles around Kuala Trengganu and rounded up all potential leaders among Terengganu's men and many of them, including one of Father's friends, were summarily executed. One man they were looking for was Ibrahim Fikri but it was Uncle Daud who bundled him out of Trengganu through a clandestine route that probably took them to Kuala Brang and saved him for Trengganu politics. He later became Trengganu's first elected Menteri Besar and had, among his opponents in another party, his erstwhile saviour and our Uncle Daud.

We are a motley breed of men and women in our family with Cousin Hassan and his brother Salleh in the bull-headed brand of politics (or cap ppala lembu, as the socialists were called in Trengganu), his brother Hussein threw in his lot with the PMIP, latterly known as PAS, while our uncle Daud became a strong supporter of Dato' Onn Jaafar and was for a very long time in Party Negara until the party fizzled out and Uncle Daud resurfaced with the Trengganu UMNO crowd. His sister Mariam (who was known to us simply as Wan) was a card-carrying UMNO lady, as was Ayöh Ngöh, another sibling, and Ayöh Long, their half-brother (and father to our Cousins Chén, and Salleh and Hassan), who all flew the UMNO flag. Here I can just see Father standing in the sideline, looking bemusedly at the goings on and nursing his distrust of politicians and politics, a trait that I have inherited from him with great and growing gratitude.

Cousin Hassan knew the two socialist stalwarts Ahmad Boestaman and Ishak "Pak Sako" Haji Muhammad, but on the whole I think he was very much a loner and an outsider who nursed his own private thoughts. His shop in Sungai Tong was a statement of his own belief that a man has to be self-sufficient and a believer in the dignity of work.

2. How to be...Jangök

2009-11-02T16:45:00.004Z
A sweet lad or lass is cömè llötè, but the well turned out is jangök.

Jangök is smart without going over the top; subtle, and not so very loud. You cannot be jangök with your sarong sweeping the carpet, or worse, in mud. You cannot be jangök if your semutar is tied in a loose fashion and is hanging gelöndèh across your forehead. And then, when you tie the sarong around the waist, it shouldn't half unravel and hang, semi-unfastened, gedèbè and ready to drop, like an over-ripe fruit.It is easy to spot someone who's jangök, and easier still to say what jangök is not. Your baju is well-ironed, not kkeduk if you're jangök, your footwear are not kkerök and all splattered with mud, and your hair is neat, not jerebèk. And you are not tebölah but well behaved. And then you walk, but not the walk of one who, when s/he treads on a semut (ant) the creature walks away undead. This is in the realm of the dainty, not the smart. Even Mamat Ppala Kerah could have been jangök had he wanted to, but he probably thought that it was too much work, so he just strutted around looking vaguely like Richard Widmark (who wasn't what you'd call jangök).

Few mad people are jangök and many sane ones are not. Dishevelled clothes do not a jangök make, but taking on too much to wear and smelling of roses in order to attract folk of the opposite sex is not jangök but galök.

For some reason jangök isn't used to describe a smartly dressed person in uniform. Service medals and streaming epaulettes do not constitute the elements of looking good, nor do nurses in their Omo white "Missi" hats and the regulation hospital frock. Jangök seems to be confined to civvy streets perhaps because civilians are scruffy by default.

To be jangök in old age is a sign of misspent youth, but youth in turn associates jangök-ness with the middle age spread, a physical state found among people who remember that Omo was a brand of soap.

A Sword in the Stone

2009-10-16T21:45:00.014Z
From the bend at the house of the Isaacs, whose pater familias founded the Grammar School, to the intersection of Tanjong, was a short, long road with many tales.

Kolam or Kolang as we knew it in the vernacular, is a body of water, but there was no pond (“kolam”) in the area as we knew it. It had gravestones, laid out over a vast stretch just yards from the road as it bent, and the old cemetery stretched all the way to the Sekolah Paya Bunga. This curve on the edge of this old cemetery was perhaps Kolam proper, where the road took an almost ninety degree turn to avoid the Istana, the late lamented residence of Sultan Sulaiman Badrul Alam Shah and the birthplace of the Trengganu gamelan and the joget gamelan Trengganu.

Walking away from this bend, going towards the visible minaret of Masjid Abidin, was probably the expanse of Kampung Patani, whose name may hold the key to the old cemetery of unknown people. This was perhaps the resting place of travellers from the place that gave the name to this village – when it was a village – and they were probably the henchman and women and the courtiers and the maids in train who came down with the would-be sultan Zainal Abidin the first, a Johorian, who answered the call of Trengganu when he was in the southern kingdom as the adopted son of its ruler, Phra Nang Chau Yang. Johor and Patani had interesting links in history as may be gleaned from the Syaer Dang Sirat.

But I am taking you now, some three hundred years later, to the magnificent tamarind tree in the bend near the istana, to look down the straight path of the Jalan Kolam towards the sea. I knew the tree very well as I used to walk in its shade most days, and there were goldsmiths' shops across the road, and a hair dresser, and the house of Cikgu Wè, brother of the young Döllöh who beat the geduk at the masjid; and there was the house of Mr Isaacs, of course, with his Jaguar in the car port, and in the night when the lights went dim, unseen hands rustled leaves and spirits and ghouls dangled with the boomerang fruits of the tree.

And I look forward now, to the house of Pök Lèh Kastang, a genial old man already long retired from his daily work in the Customs office when I used to see him bathe at the well right by his house as I sat in the trishaw of Pök Mat after he'd dropped my classmate Tay Huay Cheng in Kampung Aur after our afternoon school.

But no, says my friend Ajidul. Look right as you walk away from the tamarind tree (in the bright light of day, of course) and you'll see a strange old grave marked by a sword that also served as the Christian cross, on the edge of what was another old Muslim cemetery. And he has sent me a graphic representation of this mysterious place of repose to bring back a bit of old memory:I am afraid I cannot recall having seen such a place. If I did I would have stopped to look at the sword that was also a cross as it would indeed have been a major object of curiosity in this corner of Kolam/Kampung Patani.

It is no longer there, Ajidul now says. It was pulled down long ago. And as is typical of Trengganu demolition works, no one thought to keep the sword in the stone as a record that some foreign soul was once interred there in the earth of Trengganu. But who? And why was s/he there at all?

Perhaps someone out there will remember, I told Ajidul. Perhaps someone will come and tell us that s/he too saw the sword in the stone just yards from the tamarind tree. And to help jog other memories, my friend Ajidul has sketched a map here to show the house of Pök Lèh, and the cemetery and the haunted tree:

1. How to Be...Mmusang

2009-09-29T13:52:00.016Z
Beginning a new series...Number one, How to be...Mmusang

Whilst it is not always easy to keep a cool head under a hot songkok, and to keep yours (the head that is) when everyone around you is losing theirs, people who are mmusang keep a fox under their hat and it pops out to bite the head off anyone who asks.

There's disagreement extant if a mmusang person is made or born, is it nature or is it that pair of ill-fitting bras? This is a difficult one as the very person who ought to know is loath to answer the question and is himself/herself too busily engaged with the passing trade. “What is it that makes you so mmusang Mök Nöh?” Begorrah or I'll shove this södèk up your back!

Mmusang, is a funny word as it is supposedly born in the wild, from musang, the fox. This is a strange aetiology as the foxes that I know are mostly cunning and running, but never snarly or hot-tempered. To be mmusang is to be fox-like, perhaps because in old Trengganu foxes were like that, snarling and hissing at our forefathers when they met in the rök [bush] or beneath their houses where the musang would be looking with lip-smacking desire at the gok [the hen house].

To be really mmusang you'll need a face to match, not fox-like, with incisors sticking out of the corners of the mouth and assorted feathers dangling from the chin, but just the pained look of someone who's seen an unripe mango and taken an injudicious bite. A uniform is not necessary, but a pair of underpants that's two sizes too small might produce wonderful results (but is not recommended for newly-weds wishing to sire kids).

Once so predisposed, the world's your bad oyster and the country's your grudge. Some practise their art in a shop, mewling and puking behind bales of goods; some at the counters of post offices or in the park where they bite heads off passing lads.

An old curmudgeon that I knew passed his days in the little surau near our house where he once asked for some sheets of paper after a feast to wrap some unfinished food. An innocent bystander tore half a page from the newspaper he was reading, only to get a funny old look from the curmudgeon and this hasty riposte, “What' s this good for then, to wrap my p*ick?”

That degree of mmusang needs a life-time of cultivation, but if you persist and practise, you'll soon be there, manner and words, and you too will soon be wanting to wrap your own personal goods.

Seven Days After Raya

2009-09-24T11:40:00.012Z
Just as the last hurrah was fading and the day as dead as the dödöl bits carried by the procession of ants on the window sill, Father would invite his masjid mates to the house for Raya Nang.

Raya Nang took place seven days after Eid-ul-Fitri that ended the Ramadhan, on a bland and quite ordinary kind of day that would start for us with the usual trip to Pök Löh's coffee shop for the roti canai, and starched school uniform, and the homework stuffed into our school satchels, and a stepping into the freshly blancoed pair of shoes kind of day. And then Father would appear on the stairs, smiling, with friends trailing behind him, the usual list of suspects that included Pök Awang Dato' Balai, Pök Lèh Kastang, Pök Hamid Pelayang Masjid (the mosque steward), Che Ali Orang, and another called simply Che Da Baik, after his good manners and nature.

On occasions such as this Father brought home a motley crowd from the mosque, and its baffling train of cognomenclature. They were each tagged by family, trade, mien, or profession (past or present), a simple enough rule to follow, except perhaps, for Che Ali Orang, whose choice of personal pronoun, i.e. 'orang' for 'myself', became part of his name. They'd sit down in our surung, the forward part of our house that commanded a view of the Tanjong market, and they'd chat about trivial matters, or banter a bit under a portrait of Dato' Mata Mata that had been hanging there in front of our house for as long as I could remember.

Raya Nang was Hari Raya plus plus, for adults who added six days of extra fasting after the feast of the first of Shawwal that ended the puasa month. It was for Father, the last feast before moving back to the daily grind, of work at the Telegraphic Office and cycling back home for a short nap and lunch, and then back again to the teleprinter work till the yellowing light of late afternoon cast long shadows on the dusty ground of the Trengganu Bus terminus across the road. He'd come home and lean his bicycle against the pillar, a Raleigh Gentleman's with its hard Brook's saddle and Miller's dynamo that shone many a bright light on Kuala Trengganu's nooks and corners in the after hours.

Just as I was about to leave for school Mother would roll out the mengkuang mat in the inner room, and the white serving sheet. She'd lay on it a large tray of nasi ulam (rice with village herbs), and nasi dagang too, if the mood took her, with its accompanying dish of tuna in turmeric, chilli and coconut milk, and then the agar-agar and buah ulu and akok to mop up the bite of the chilli and the savoury aftertaste of the main meal.

Into the further reaches of the land where the kuala became the darat, Raya Nang was probably taken with greater fervour than in our house, but for us it was an austere adults only affair of thanksgiving with a tinge of sadness that another page was torn from the devotional calendar. Just as traffic on Jalan Pantai was building up and the early rays of the morning light were caught on the chrome handlebars of passing trishaws, when Mek Baldi the kapok and utensils dealer in front of our house was taking out her cylinders of fluff and enamelled utensils, the water-bowl would be passed around in our house, and then the hand towel. The visitors would rise with an Alhamdulillah!* and a burp, as Father bade them farewell at the door.

Soon Father would be pedalling to work, on his Raleigh Gentleman's bicycle. It was an ordinary working day, the seventh day mini-feast that we called Hari Raya Orang Tua, a day of celebration for the Elders.

*Praise be to God!

Selamat Hari Raya

2009-09-18T10:48:00.012Z

Maaf Zahir Bathin. Selamat Hari Raya Eid-ul-Fitri.
Selamat Hari Lebaran Ibu-Ibu dan Bapak-Bapak Sakalian.
From the family of Kècèk-Kècèk
& Mat Spröng (nök tupang rètèk)

Exotica In Replica

2009-09-16T11:51:00.006Z
Looking at his Brave New World Terengganu after reading my blog entry Folk Who Live on the Shore, Almanar, had this to say:

We may soon see miniatures of world famous bridges along your old Tanjong, strung up end to end all the way to Pulau Wan Man.
I took that very seriously even if, in jest, I did suggest a replica of the Brooklyn with a life-sized model of Mekyam on the walkway, in her NY gear. But in these heady days of Terengganu, life does imitate art imitating life, even if we do not know what Nature meeting Heritage means. But we cannot put anything past them. Just look at that array of replicas on the river if you need to shudder.

And then I got this interesting graphic Raya greeting card from my friend Azman Ramli. Shudder now all ye who enter here:
Thank you Pak Azman, and A blessed Hari Raya to you all!

Folk Who Live on the Shore

2009-09-08T18:10:00.013Z
The coastal edge of our part of town laid flat against the sea's edge, with strong winds blowing in our face for most of the hot season and then the long blasts of the monsoon gale during the end of year, that brought in lashes of spray and the roar of the sea in turmoil. Bukit Putri stood like a paperweight over the thin green of Padang Malaya, and distant coconut trees in Tanjong Mengabang waved and curled in the blowing wind, as the market of Kedai Payang became just a blur in the pouring rain, oblivious to the flashing beacon on the hilltop that winked to ships at sea.

Sometimes our tall house swayed a little in the incoming storm, when the nipah roof over our kitchen became entangled in the swoop of the wind to let in lightning flashes from the rumbling sky. We were all at the brink, a part known to us as Ujong Tanjong, the edge of land and the beginning of the sea. On calm days, folk stopped at the coffee shed of Köhéng and then later, Wang Ndok's, on the calm edge of the lagoon that stood between us and the shore. On calm days, Che Ngöh Buloh sank his feet in the brackish mud, to make rafts of sasök split bamboo that were widely used in Tanjong as fencing material. Bamboo and mud and heaps of dark grit left by mud skippers in this playground of the ikang ddukang [belukang to posh folk from Western shores], a fish with a sharp needle standing proud on its dorsal; fish and bamboo and skippers and mud all worked together to give this part a peculiar pong that became the stenchmark of these bamboo weavers.

We had many artisans in our Tanjong, but Wang Ndok was our artist who, one calm night just after Hari Raya, stood on the stage specially built on oil barrels on the shore and surprised us all with his performance of a modern homespun melodrama. Later in life, soon after Köhéng had put all his thick tea cups and saucers into a box and into storage, Wang Ndok surprised us all again by exorcising the thespian spirit from his body and filled into the gap a penchant for tèh. He sold tèh tarik and pulut lepa and beleda set in little glasses, and kopi-oh and Milo in a steaming mix of condensed milk and sugar in his shed of corrugated iron on the shore.

This was the back-end of Tanjong Pasar, which is no more, where our kinsman Kör played marathon matches of dam [draughts] with friends and complete strangers on the low veranda of his house and stopped only when the cockerels came out to crow and the fishermen were pushing their boats out into the red glow of dawn at sea. His younger brother Mat returned from there long before I became aware of anything, and then he was out there not as a fisherman but as a man of the merchant navy. Much later in life, when he was still gadding about in the khaki shorts of his maritime life, he came to live under the front stairs of our house, a corner that he shared with uncle Retnam, lime pickle-maker extraordinaire and retired linesman from Father's Telecoms Office near Jalan Banggol.

Che Ngöh and Kör and Mat and Retnam and Köhéng have long left us, and recently I heard that Wang Ndok too has been taken from this mortal coil. But bits of Tanjong are still there, flapping in the wind that is now blowing less fiercely, but still pinned to the earth, nevertheless, by the weight of Bukit Putri. A large chunk of Ujong Pasir had dropped into the sea aeons ago, and recently, when I was taken on a tour there by Cikgu Wan Chik, my school teacher from Sekoloh Ladang, I saw sad faces and derelict houses, and a society uncared for.

The Trengganu (now Terengganu) government that is flush with oil funds has no plans to improve their lot or keep them there and let them thrive where Wang Ndok once trod the boards, where Che Ngöh Buloh made his pagör sasök and Köhéng poured out cups and cups of tea. Where Mat the sailor came home to shore, where Pök kept his hardware shop, where Kör played dam till folk with goods came from the ulu.

They are even now awaiting the hour to pull down these houses and break down these folks on the shore and then move them all as far away as possible from the sea; and then let in Starbucks and megamalls and car parks and the rumble of 4WDs and tourists in their silly hats that will frighten away the ghouls that are still clinging to the ghostly roots of ancient trees.

See Also:
Jejak Awang Goneng 1 - 5, Start viewing from here.

Taste of Many Colours

2009-09-03T11:33:00.013Z
Wavy edged and a coat of crystallised sugar; water, scent and colour, and pandan flavour; glistening in the month before Raya.

In GUiT [p.17], I mentioned them dropping from the sky at noon-time, when the rumble of the mosque drum pushed them off the roof where they were drying out in the sun. Beleda of red and green, transluscent opal or the pure white of bleached agar-agar.The beleda is food from the sea, made from agar-agar, which is sea vegetable, that came to our Trengganu market in bunches of what looked like long stalks of discoloured plastic, bunched and rolled in a page of newspaper. It had the weight of insect's wings, so we did not go out to the shops to buy more than a few tahils of agar-agar. At home the stalks were thrown into a pot of boiling water, where they melted almost immediately. We thought it was a miracle that on a very hot day in between Borneo and some of those isles where the agar-agar is said to be native, the entire agar-agar crop does not melt en masse and turn the churning sea in to a huge blob of sea-coloured beleda.

Mother made her agar-agar early in the fasting month of Ramadhan. A huge brass pot was heaved out from her store, brushed of cobwebs and cleaned with the acid of tamarind paste, and then placed over a smoky wood fire. I used to watch this manufacturing process not for what was happening to the agar-agar, but for the froth that was coming out from the unburnt end of the firewood, pushed out by the fire beneath the pot.

The agar-agar, now melting and simmering in the water, was given the food colour and a half kati of sugar, maybe, for company. There may be a blade of pandan leaf too in the pot, and then a few drops of green that reminded me of the rust that was scrubbed out of the brass when the pot was taken out from its dark corner. The resulting thick liquid was then poured into a flat, rimmed tray, and then this process of agar-agar making was repeated, another pot of liquid agar-agar so thick that a fly could walk on it (once it had cooled down I must say), but now of a different colour. And then another one, to be poured into another tray, of blue, or pure white, or the blood-red agar-agar that stood out in the tray.

Once they were set in the trays, still moist but now solid in texture, the agar-agar was cut into small pieces with a serrated cutter. We were seeing now the beginnings of our beleda kering (dried beleda), arranged in circles on large round trays, to be taken out into the noon sun to dry.

There are always plates of beleda kering on our Eid or Hari Raya. Crystals of transluscent stone of many colours, laid out besides the nasi kapit (compressed rice) and the akök and roti jala. We children always went for the agar-agar as our hors d'oeuvre, as the beleda kering with its coat of crystallised sugar gave a a nice crunchy feel in the mouth as the teeth crushed it into a pulp of sweetness and perhaps more than a whiff of the aroma of the vanilla essence and the Hari Raya of yesteryear.

Recently, back from a short trip to Malaysia, my sister packed two plastic boxes of beleda kering for me and I have been munching on them in between iftar and the tarawih prayers, and the taste took me back to days of many moons ago and many colours.

Mabuk Kepayang

2009-08-13T04:36:00.010Z
The sad thing about Trengganu is that there are now more wreckers there than builders, and sadder still that these wreckers are actually children and grandchildren of chisellers, carvers, weavers and people who had worked hard to build our past.

They are the ones who are polluting Kuala Terengganu streets with their super-duper gas guzzling cars, travelling to old Europe and the Americas whenever money comes to hand (which is often) and sighing from the shades of their plush hotels, “Oh, what beautiful heritage in this Garden City of wonders!”

They act European for a while, or Spanish, or Dutch and eat from their Smörgåsbord of history and people. Then they come home to their own shore and wreck the first heritage building they see to give vent to their atavistic fervour.

I heard in disbelief recently when the present Menteri Besar of Terengganu say – with some exasperation – to a bemused audience in London's Malaysia Hall that their toughest task is to change the minda of the people. It's kinda cute isn't it that people who seem to be the least possessed of such minda are now ruining and burning our cities in Malaysia with the kitsch of their desires and telling us without the slightest hint of irony that they - they - are the saviours of our soul. And what is minda for them if not money?

The curse of Terengganu is that it has too much money and too little people. No, it is not underpopulated, but the people who govern us are dwarves, little people with big delusions of grandeur.

They have already destroyed most of our heritage; they have razed down Kampung Datuk Amar to build an ersatz Ottoman market, and they have pulled down two old mosques that were parts of our glorious history. All in the name of minda, I dare say.

Now they are planning to pull down a row of shophouses in Kedai Payang, buildings that are more than a hundred years old that are still fit for purpose and need, at most, a tender loving touch and a coat of colour. Thus our history can be saved.

But no, they are going to demolish the whole block, brick, stock and mortar. And on the empty ground will be built Terengganu's latest monuments to the madness of greed and money.

Please go HERE to read about it and cry.

And I also urge you to write, WRITE to just anybody and everybody you know to put a stop this madness now.

STOP THIS MADNESS IN KEDAI PAYANG, AND LET YOUR VOICES BE HEARD NOW!

A Word From the Sponsor

2009-08-01T04:39:00.000Z
I shall be away from base until the 15th August. Until then I shall blog only when I can, wherever I can. And that means very irregularly.

See you again soon, Insha Allah

Mat Spröng Ccari Jalang

2009-07-09T11:26:00.013Z
Tèh tarék ddalang supék, ikang gelepör ddalang beledi, örang ppuang ddalang ppala Mat Spröng.

Mat Spröng tèngök air berelök derah ddalang tali air ttepi sawöh, warna lumuk ija naik deratah cerming jernèh, napök èkör ikang ggedik licing mminyök, napök muka Mat Spröng deratah muka air, relik-relök. Karong Mat ada dua ikatang, tangang dia pegang mulok karong bbuka luah, bulat macang mulut menguap; dia rauk ddalang air, tarék ke aröh dia, pecöh bayang muka dia jjadi seribu jalor dddalang air, relik-relök, relik-relök. Ikang masok ddalang karong, terus dia tuang ddalang beledi, èkör jjetak galök.

Laing bbunyi suara Cik Kalèh bila kena anging sawöh, ggaong ddalang udara bbuka luah, bila matahari ceröh, suara belalang masok cceloh tiap-tiap perkataang bbunyi segör mölèk. Keruba ddeböh dari jauh, sinörang pagi kena tapis kelöpök bunga teratai naik cahaya biru butér setör. Sèkör ikang telepah dari tangang Mat Spröng bila dia ssètök.

“Sejök bila mung makang ikang lökang, Mak?”

“Ni parék, bukang lökang, Lèh. Ada beza kalu mung ahli ikang,” jawab Mat, tangang dia beleming kena minyök ikang keli, terus dia lèsèk kkaing baték hök dia paka atah seluör. Misa ikang keli itang kkelik ddalang cahaya; Mat ngèssök dari tepi tebing, dia tutop mulut beledi denge surak kabör.

“D.I.D,” kata Cik Kalèh. “Jabatang Tali Air, sebab dialah mung dapat makang ikang.”

Tangang Mat cepat-cepat gupa karong kaing hök dia guna wak raok ikang. Dia selit ccelöh kaki, warna bunga naik ceröh bbawöh seluör dia warna itang. Cik Kalèh senyung ssengèh bila dia napök bubu kaing Mat tu ada tali jeruk, ada pötöng sèröng tepak keluör kaki, luas pinggang macang sais örang ppuang ömör pak-pulohang.

“Mung ning dök jjuruh sunggoh Mak,” kata Cik Kalèh sambil dia jetik abok rökök. “Mung raok ikang denge seluör dalang bining mung, mung sipol macang karong.”

“Döh aku nök paka nnatang apa lagi, seluör kkatök aku kecik ccerèh dök padang denge ikang. Ning ikang keli, bukang sekila, Lèh.”

Mat Spröng tarék supék tèh, mulok dia hiruk setegök, muka dia hèrök, mata ttutop rapat. Tuuuuiiii! dia sembor air tèh atah batu kelikér. Cik Kalèh löpat, ngèllök.

“Teh sejok ssiak!” kata Mat sambil sapu mulok.

“Tèh sejok ke mung ketör, Mak?” Tanya Cik Kalèh, mata dia lekak ttangang Mat Spröng, dök kkelik.

Mat Spröng ngelloh panjang, tarék geröhök, terus ludöh ttepi parit. Ikang keli gelepör dik-dik ddalang bèsèng. Mat ngelloh teruh ppaling ke Cik Kalèh.

“Ppala aku sibok, Lèh.” Suara Mat köhör, tangang dia garu belakang keru-kerah macang keték nnyamök. Lalat pèng bberöng, lembu ddeböh, dari jaoh bbunyi budök-budök ssörök, daung nyör kkèbör macang ddèra ttepi langit . Tiba-tiba suasana ttepi tali air hidup, bising bbangör, bbunying gègèr macang ppasör Tanjong.

“Mung dök cukup tidor, Mak.”

Mat Spröng ngilling ppala, dia mula kacing baju dia macang sejok.

“Ppala aku bbunying suara orang ppuang, telinga aku bengang, kadang-kadang tangang aku ketör gelitik, Lèh.”

“Mung dök söh layang sangat benda-benda hök ngacca mung ddalang ppala tu Mak, tu bayang-bayang je bukang...”

Mat Spröng bikah bangung, kaing keliling pinggang dia telöröh ttanöh tapi dia lök, biar bèlèkör ttepi keting. “Aku napök bayang, aku napök bayang dia Lèh!”

“Aku napök bayang dia Lèh!” Mat kata lagi, tangang dia nnunjok ke aröh semök samung seberang bendang.

Cik Kalèh jjalang ke aröh Mat Spröng. Tangang dia tepok belakang Mat, suara dia rendöh.

"Mung nguccak, Mat," kata Cik Kalèh. "Nguccak bbaik."

Ssambong - To be Continued...

Hari Solstis, Jun 2009

2009-06-25T16:25:00.006Z
Daun rumput menghiris angin
mengomel sayu, meratap siang
dalam cahaya bunga kuning
bunyi ciak mendodoi petang
panjang rupamu dilukis bayang

Setahun rasanya sehari
Bila panjang rumput bawah teduhan daun
Menangis dan dalam tangisannya berbunyi
Mentari condong, langit mendung
Dan suka dan darah tumpah ke tanah
Kerana ini saja harinya bukan esok
Kerana esok petang sepanjang jalan

Bila tahun datang dan daun gugur
Dan rumput pudar dan bunga padam
Semusim hanya sehari dalam ingatan
Sekejap pudar sekelip hilang
Dan tahun esok hanya tahun ini
Dalam kenangan...

A Rumpled Note

2009-06-19T11:02:00.012Z
Long before Trengganu became Terengganu and when the idea of a coastal city was just a mote in the eye of some aspiring bureaucrats, there was the old Majlis Bandaran (Bandarang to us) – the Town Council - in an old building somewhere near Kampung Hangus and the road that led to Pök Ku's Paya Tok Bèr and Pök Awang Hitam's famous fried kerepok lèkör dipped in his special home-brewed chilli.

Next door to the Bandarang was a bicycle repair shop run by a genial man named Mr Chua, and in the compound, on most days, ran his less than genial son Chua Chee Peng. I knew Chee Peng very well as he was my classmate, and even in his young primary school days he must have been a weight lifter, or a lifter of weights, as he had a muscle-rippling body that my father used to call 'sando', a word borrowed, I later discovered, from the Victorian muscleman, Eugen Sandow.

I left Trengganu when Father rose up the Telecoms ladder to Kuala Lumpur, in the blustering sixties (the monsoon winds were very strong then), but Chee Peng (we sometimes called him Chin Peng), disappeared from view when we became adults and bade farewell to Mr Wee Biau Leng and the Sultan Sulaiman Primary School. Well, we thought we were adults then until we saw Wang Ndok in his topi and dog-terrifying ways and Cik Kalèh in his smart clothes and dazzling watch and the transistor radio dangling from his handlebar, doing things that we kids couldn't do. We realised then that the journey to adulthood was a long, long road.

In the bustle of exams and the removal vans that took us to Kuala Lumpur, I had forgotten about my friend Chee Peng. He was, in primary school, a tough guy, but what drove most other kids away from him became a matter of curiosity to me. He was, actually, an amiable guy with a winsome smile, and I found out earlier than most other folk that what came across as his tough guy stance was just the projection of his persona. Whenever I cycled past his house and bicycle shop next door to our Bandarang I'd always shout across the road, “Chee Peng!”. Chua senior would look up and throw back a smile, or, the young Chee Peng would sometimes emerge from the shades to shout back, "Hulaimee!"

In class Chee Peng was a bag of mischief and tough guy promises and he wasn't averse to chasing a kid or two around the block as a bit of fun during the interval. Just over a year ago, when I went back to KT after more than fifteen years, some of my old classmates were kind enough to hold a gathering at the house of our classmate Jöh (who is now Tok Puan Khadijah), and as I sat there in absolute delight and marvelling at all the years that had passed since we carried our High School English Grammar (a hefty tome, I tell you, and it gave me instant nausea) to school, the lady Toh Swee Choo pulled me aside to ask, "Do you remember him?"

And of course it was Chua Chee Peng, that tough guy in the schoolyard; and he was still beaming that unmistakable smile. We shook hands and hugged, and all I could think to say to him was, "Ini dulu samseng ni!" ("This man was a ruffian!"), which wasn't a very nice thing to say to someone you'd not seen for years, and he could've hit me quite hard as his body was still rippling with sandow muscles. But Chee Peng held on to my hand and laughed and laughed.

I was looking through things that I brought back then from Trengganu (sorry, Terengganu) this morning, and a heavy thump hit me in the chest area. For there, in my bag, was this rumpled note:It was the note stuck on an envelope that Chee Peng gave me as a farewell. And if I didn't thank you properly for the memento you handed me when we said goodbye, thank you once again dear friend, this is indeed a treasure!

So back to Terengganu, that self-proclaimed haven on the coast, how fares the City now? Well, the roof of a gleaming new stadium has just crashed to the ground, and a beautiful old mosque has just been flattened by the powers that be. And why am I haunted by the ghost of Annabel Lee whenever I think of this Kingdom by the Sea?
"But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

"For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea."
To read the whole of this beautiful poem by Edgar Allan Poe, go HERE. For Annabel Lee, read Terengganu.

All Our Yesterdays

2009-06-11T20:18:00.010Z
Long before we became Twittering Facebookers who Googled our way just about everywhere to look for things and stuff, long before Awang Goneng was born, there was MalaysiaNet.

MalaysiaNet was what used to be called a web site when Netscape was king in the red glow of dawn before the birth of Java or CSS and when we were all fairly decent people who occasionally read a book. In other words, when everything was simple and straight. I was sitting down one day feeling rather bored in front of my Viglen PC (my second; the first was an Apricot F1 if you don't count the even earlier Sinclair Spectrum), and then the idea came for me to gather some thoughts – my own, other people's – under one roof. And the roof came to be registered as MalaysiaNet (I remember the uploads being posited in a place called the MagicServer, in the States). I wasn't sure if I could fill the pages, but I had some very good friends, Rehman Rashid for one, and then a wonderful lady emerged from the States, and she became our resident poet, and another young lad became our cartoonist to whom I fed lines, and we became Hash & Hul and the Great Moments in Malaysian Cuisine was born, in which we introduced Maidin Ali Pitchay to the world, the inventor of our Malaysian fish head curry and stuff. And then there was Dr Kamal, a non-writing team member and a psychiatrist to boot, holding court in the Shah Motel somewhere in PJ, who gave us lots and lots of moral and immoral support.

Those were great days. MalaysiaNet prospered, and I learnt to design a web page by looking at how others made theirs work. I was ever looking up web design books in the bookshops, and Reh wrote some wicked column pieces, even as he was gadding about in the States. I didn't update the pages often, but when I did it gave me a bright glow of satisfaction, and it lasted all of three years.

And then we stopped, and MalaysiaNet went into desuetude until my ownership of the title lapsed, and – I believe – it was taken over by someone who sold Persian carpets.

Today, as I was looking up the Internet Archives, I decided to try their WayBack Machine, and entered the name MalaysiaNet. And voila, there were the pages, neatly, but not completely, archived. It was an emotional moment: I was reunited once again with my cherub. I remember sitting before the Viglen one afternoon, struggling with a very primitive illustration program to give him a songkok, and to put a mouse in his hand. And there once again, before me, the beloved masthead of our MalaysiaNet.

Unfortunately, Internet Archives has only kept our last few pages. Many, many more are now lost forever, gnarled up and shredded to bits by the teeth of time, and lost in that great void where web pages go to when they are frogotten or dead. Oh how I wish there was a repository of dead webs, like the one for dead books in Zafon's 'Shadow of the Wind'.

But it did bring those times back for me, days of innocence, the infant web, and all that. If you would like to see it for yourself, a sample of what we did, take a journey to THIS PLACE [the *asterisked pages contain updates] but do not go beyond Feb 1998. Between that and most of April the following year there is a void.

And the rest is just too sad.

MalaysiaNet, 25 May 1995 - April 1999

Old Mosque Bites the Dust II

2009-06-08T14:41:00.013Z
Another mosque bites the dust under orders from Terengganu's Heritage Demolition Department; a tree weeps in grief; and the wind sweeps away another piece of history...

The beautiful old Mosque of Bukit Besar

On Terengganu's earth another masjid falls,
Its bones broken and crunched in the claws
Of earth movers and metal diggers of the soil,
And men toiling on sweat and tears of the dead,
Who've been dead for many, many long years now.

Walls and window sills and the shades
That long sheltered your father and your father's father
And their father's father in their places of prayer,
Are planks now strewn and dead on this earth,
Taking dusts and rain and the passing roars of lorries,
And blinded by the gleaming tomorrow on the metal
of the Mercedes cars of those reps of the people.

We have been praying for you on the quiet,
In placid shades beneath the boughs,
O Kuala Terengganu in whose blanket earth we've lain,
Our names are forgotten and our woods are rotten,
But we we are the ghosts of your people.

The Mosque...Destroyed. Only the minaret still standing

Our bones are packed now to journey forth,
Our brothers and sisters dead to life anew,
To a sadder and already forgotten faraway place,
To a new grave in an unmourned corner,
'Neath the sodden earth of flattened hills.

We were blessed to hear the daily calls,
As we rested in the shades of blessed trees,
But that's all muted and dead for us now,
We are firewood, bones and craggy stones
The broken bricks of your ancient walls,
And nearby a tree inconsolably weeps,
For the bodies that you have trampled.

A Tree mourns the loss,
tears gushing down its trunk for it too shall soon fall.

We are ground and ground,
On which to build your grand ideas,
Lofty thought minarets of your masjids crystal,
For you to wipe your restless feet
On the doormats of our rubble.

We are in the dust and in the earth and wind,
In memories and in the cries of an infant child,
We are the future that was built into the past,
We are as we are now but then we are no more
We are now the dust in your unseeing eyes.
And dirt cheap beneath your fancy shoes.

Thank you Jabatan Tiada Hati Perut, Kuala Terengganu
Thank you Almasjid for the photos.

Lookback:
Old Mosque Bites the Dust I

25. How to...Leböng

2009-05-30T13:52:00.011Z
It is hard to say nowadays the word leböng without thinking of Yasmin the model wife of that popular singer from Duran Duran, even if in Trengganu Duran Duran isn't as big as our very own Adnang Osmang. That we are led into thinking of this duo's name is merely the result of a coincidence of sounds and nothing more than that beyond. But to the matter at hand: If I were to tell you that I was once a pop singer you will recognise immediately that I am telling porkies, for that is the basic ingredient of leböng, the wilful misplacement of your ontological predicates, as they used to say in books that looked pristine, gathering the dusts of time on shelves forlorn, unread by Yasmin LeBong or Adnang Osmang.

To leböng successfully you must be able to tell your quarry stuff that he isn’t capable of verifying himself. It is not a prudent thing for instance to tell him that you are the Blessed Bess, when you are right there in front of him looking more like Adnang Osmang than the Queeng of Englang. The second rule of leböng is that you must be able to make your listener want to believe in even the most incredible yarns that you’ve spun. An expensive suit helps, for instance, when you want to persuade someone that you deal in real estate in Pualu Duyong, but placing also a bow tie that looks vaguely like the Rajah Brooke under your chin will only make him want to think of our former minister for tourism.

People do leböng for different reasons. Some merely want to draw attention that he doesn’t get at home, while others want to draw money from your bank. A man we once knew, who was known simply as Pök Löh Böng, did it just for entertainment, a harmless enough pursuit as he and everyone knew that after all that he’d just be heading for home to help his wife in the making of belacang, a commodity for which Tanjong Ngabbang was then justifiably famous.

Psychologists are divided as to why people commit leböng outside the realm of just having fun, but the name Mat Jenèng comes to mind. Leböng shares many things with nnawök, which sometimes finds expression as bèwök (standardspeak, biawak, the forked tongue lizard) in the manner of rhyming slangs. Politicians are sometimes accused of being nnawök when they are economical with the truth, but to say that he or she is leböng is to say the same and rubbing it in.

An interesting point to note is that whilst leböng sounds like something that hits you in the face, nnawök is also sometimes expressed as pelawök which is the Trengganuspeak version of pelawak the jester of your everyday life. In other words, what he or she says may be taken in jest, but deep within may lie many a word of truth.

A Story in Cakes

2009-05-26T14:47:00.005Z
Cik Abah Demang, badang dia ppeloh lè'ik, dok ddalang gelak, paka lapu tepong pelita, löklik-löklik. Dia dok ddiang, takut anök-anök mari kaca kkölèh, ppala dia mmikir, “O kalulah ada akör kayu keramat buleh buak aku ba'ïk cepat.” Kadang-kadang dia rasa nyöcök ddalang hati sökma, rasa macang kena örang mari löpat tikang denge keris tamèng sari.

“O bilalah aku nök keböh ni, kerja-kerja wajik pong banyök aku dökleh wak!” dia belèbèr ssörang.

Perok dia rasa lèpèng, pah tu badang dia naik panah hangat, mula napök benda hök bukang-bukang. Ttepi telaga rumöh dia ada putri mandi. Pah tu dia napök di jalang bengkang bengkök ke rumah dia ada sörang ppuang, badang dia bulat buöh gömök, rambut serabè, kulit mèröh air nnisang.

Baru dia tahu ni bukang demang lèng, tapi demang benör. Hidong dia rasa ssumbat macang nök selsema. “Kalu dök léh jjalang habihlah nèkbak hidop,” kata Cik Abah, hidong dia makéng tupak.

Bbetolang pulök orang ppuang dia takdök derumöh, gi Kelatang rumöh mök-pök dia. Cik Abah kkenang masa dia gi di nung dulu, ada gok ttepi rumöh, ada banyök tahi iték. Petang-petang gi dok ttepi pata, dalang cahaya matahari örang tèbör pukat napök macang jjala mas.

“Kalu dème tau aku sakit ni dök payöh jjepuk, mesti balik selalu!” kata Cik Abah, ssörang diri.

Ddalang Cik Abah dok mmikir tu lalu sörang Tok Aji serebang biru gatéh basika gi semejid.

Hari döh lèwat petang; di Kelatang, jala ddalang cahaya ggarék döh mula napök macang pukat burok.

A Little Lane, A Big Lady

2009-05-15T11:28:00.008Z
Before our kids got their souls wrapped in Filet-o-Fish™, real fish was the mainstay of Trengganu. We fried it, grilled it, wrapped it in banana leaf and laid it in the wood fire on the shore as the good ships Rawang and Hong Ho trailed a smoke to the harbour.

And then there was Mök Téh Spréng, a woman with flab who beat her ikang panggang (grilled fish) to shreds before dumping it into her mix of vinegar and sugar and chilli. Mök Téh sat there on the lambor of her house in a little lane around the corner from Pök’s hardware store, and she scraped the flesh of green papaya into a little cane container, and as she did so, right hand wielding the metal scraper that moved back and forth on the crunchy papaya, her body bobbed up and down in a very liquid way. This was probably how she earned the nickname ‘spréng’ (spring), the device that gives bounce to a motorcar.

I was looking up the word lambor which Winstedt and Wilkinson (two stalwarts of the old-fashioned Malay dictionary) seem to have missed out. I know lambor to be the open apron of the Trengganu stilted house, where the occupants sat of an afternoon to watch the world go by. In Winstedt and Wilkinson I found another creature, another lambor, a jelly-fish, but I shall put that aside for now.

Looking up Haji Zainal Abidin Safarwan’s ‘Kamus Besar’ (UP&D) I find that lambur (also known as jambur) is the platform where the kitchen is placed in a Malay house. The kitchen is normally on a lower level from the main house, and then from there a few steps down to ground level would take the occupants to the well in the backyard where chicken and ducks roamed free. I have always been of the impression that the lambor is any open platform of a house on stilts.

Looking at Mök Téh Spréng always reminded me of a jelly-fish because of the fluid movement of her body. That’s why I find that other definition of lambor so amusing. Mök Téh sat on her lambor that looked out to the little lane, and there she opened her little röjök shop each afternoon, and that was how she made herself known to all and sundry.

Besides röjök beték Mök Téh also made röjök katéh, a cooked röjök that had parts of the foot of a cow in it. A röjök is generally a Malay salad with peanuts in it perhaps, and plenty of chilli, and vinegar most certainly, and its ingredients are mostly raw. So perhaps röjök katéh, isn’t really a röjök as its ingredients are cooked, and the cow’s foot has to remain for a long time over the fire.

I mentioned these röjöks of Mök Téh Spréng to my friend Ajidol recently, and this is what he had to say (with rivulets of tears probably streaming down his cheeks):
"Sebut pasal röjök MökTéh Spring tuu , rase telior pulök nök makang röjök betik cicang. Dulu kite rajing gi makang di atah selasör tepak diye jjual tu. Kite selalu kate," MökTéh, wi kite kuwoh masang-manih biyar mmbéng sikik, deh? Sebab kite nök nyichöh dengang kerepok keping dan iiruk kuwöh tu."
"Now that you’ve mentioned röjök Mök Téh, I am beginning to yearn for the one made from shreds of green papaya. I used to eat it on Mök Téh’s selasör where she sold it. I used to say to her, 'Oh Mök Téh, can you give me plenty of that sweet and sour sauce because I’d like to dip my kerepok in it and then drink it down later.' "

I think that’s the word I’m looking for in the context of a Trengganu house, selasör, and that’s where Mök Téh sat as we ate and sighed.

Thank you Ajidol!

Up and Around the Pole

2009-05-10T22:03:00.007Z
"The staircase as I remember it was painted green and spiralled around a pole that propped up the ceiling. In the semi darkness behind massive doors that led into the closet at the base of the stairs who knew what ghosts lurked there? We ran up the stairs more in fear than enthusiasm, and held on to the spiralling handrail until our heads emerged at the top. The handrail was always bathed in light and dust of many years' neglect, bearing perhaps the footprints of bilals past."
- 'Up To The Drum Tower', GUiT, p.213

This is the winding staircase to the sky, looking frail for its years, but perhaps the handrail was never as stout as I latterly imagined it to be. I remember the treads with holes that we looked through to see the progress of laggard climbers, and then we looked up to the light at the end of the pole. We were going up to the rooftop of Masjid Abidin, to see the rooftops of Kuala Trengganu in the first soft light, subdued colours unintensified by the sun, stillness unbroken by the calls of cake sellers and bell-ringers among the day-break cyclists and trishaw pullers.

Up in the drum tower of the mosque, dry and dusty and cooled by the morning breeze coming in from the sea. Dolloh the muezzin's son showed us the stout cane that he used to beat the hide in a thump-thump-tee-thump beat that preceded the muezzin's call. We looked out above the henna tree of the masjid, to the stretch of road to Kampong Kolam, and turning left, we saw the downward slope to the sea, past Padang Malaya, past the shop of Mutthiah the apong seller; our house was a dot in the yonder, and Ladang was miles away. Kuala Trengganu was such a vast place to a little boy.

I am grateful to my friend Ajidol for taking a peek behind the doors that hid the spiralling stairs, and I am thankful that he had with him his camera that day. This is the green spiralling staircase as I remember it, give or take a few details that got lost in the years. This is memory going up in a whirl.

Thank you Ajidol. Long may your shutter-finger be snap happy!

A Theory of Strings

2009-05-05T13:13:00.009Z
Someone sneaking into the kitchen to return with some paraffin from an oil lamp, someone punching a hole in the bottom of a pok susu*, someone cutting a piece of string.

The string was soaked in paraffin. This was tali guni, from the same material as the hessian sack, pulled dripping wet from the fluid, then knotted in one end and threaded from inside the can into the hole until it emerged outside the tin like a tadpole's tail, attached to a cylindrical head with its mouth opened wide.

“Woooooo,” it went when someone ran the index finger and thumb along the string, quite the most frightful noise on a quiet afternoon. “Wooo-woo-wook!” A wolf caught in a bear trap, a dog yelping out loud as to prick the ears of Wang Ndok, our local one-man voluntary dog catching squad.

String and tins (tèng, as we called them) were useful items. Sometimes, connected together with a length of metal clothes line, we spoke through the can as a friend held his to the ear at the other end. It was a complete waste of time as our voice was loud enough even without the tin-can contraption, but man had the urge to communicate as some wag had said, and Alexander Graham Bell notwithstanding, it was another ten years before the landline telephone became a regular item in our house.

In the meantime, tin-cans and strings were stuff of our daily life, raised as we were, on condensed milk. And Father used to regale us with tales of Che Mat Deli, a man who ate pisang (pisè, I suppose, in his native tongue) with condensed milk in the Besut where Father grew up. Che Mat would've hurled those banana-skins into the rök (bush) I have no doubt, but what did he do with those empty cans? Did he, like Abdul Wahid the drinks vendor outside our gate, fill them up with takeaway tèh or köpi-o to be carried away on strings, like steaming thuribles in rain or sun?

We had tali guni the jute string and tali kerecut that came from sedge. This one stood in a big bundle, looped and ready to be pulled out by the shopkeeper to keep the folds intact in his newspaper-wrapped sugar packets, or coriander seeds bought by the cupak, or shallots that came out of the hessian sacks into newspaper cones that were kept secure by the sedge. This straw-coloured string of long grass (all right, sedge isn't actually a grass) was quite useless for us kids and was rejected even by our goats.

Then came the latter day ersatz thing that was spun together from some petro-chemical stuff that pushed aside all our sedge strings and the jute.We had the rubber band even before that, but even the rubber band wasn't as decisive in the routing out of our old strings as this hideous tali pelastik. That was the beginning of our slide, when Nana Yusof and Alla Puchai our spice vendors began to roll out this garish plastic coloured non bio-degradable twine from a little ball that rolled about before him as the sun was setting on our tali guni and the tali kerecut from pseudo-grass.

Have you ever wondered how long is a piece of string and how long will the rubber-band stretch? Well, not long is the string in the face of those balled-up coloured plastic; but do soak a rubber band in some keresone and you'll be surprised with the result.

_________________
*Condensed milk can. The brands in the market were Milkmaid (Cap Junjung), Torch (Cap Api), Dutch Baby, and Coins (Cap Pitis).

Kamaruddin Maidin

2009-05-03T11:56:00.004Z
We were in our primary school when Kamaruddin Maidin wowed the country with his triple jumping skills. It was something that one could not just brush aside as a bit of news in the newspaper. Kuala Trengganu was a small town with fishing boats and snail-powered trishaws, and the smell of kerepok and belacan in the air on a breezy day. But that our own son was going to Rome to represent Malaysia in the 1960 Olympics was something out of the ordinary. He made us all proud that day.

Kamaruddin Maidin, our Kamarudéng Maidéng, son of an equally famous father, the flamboyant Trengganu court pleader Maidin Loyar, died at the Sultanah Nur Zahirah Hospital in Kuala Terengganu , aged 66, last Sunday April 19th.

We all spoke of Kamaruddin Maidin when he went to Rome for Trengganu, we read about him in the Asia Magazine and the national newspaper, and then we knew that we had lost him to the outside world. In Trengganu, anyone from outside were orang luar, outsiders, and our Kamaruddin had gone from the confines of the playing field of our Sultan Sulaiman School to the world beyond our borders. But we were proud that he had made the name Kuala Trengganu known to those folk in Kuala Lumpur, if not the world.

Kamaruddin was a handsome lad, the heart-throb of the senior wing of our Sultan Sulaiman School. He had hair that reminded us of a famous singer, and boy he made us famous as a nasi dagang-fed local lad who went to Rome to compete for the world title.

Rest in peace, Kamarudéng, you did us all proud at the Sultang Slemang Skol. Alfatihah.

Man of Röjök

2009-04-30T14:51:00.009Z
At the water's edge, by the long pathway of concrete that jutted into the harbour, was the kitchen of Pök Déh under a canopy of corrugated metal sheets. Pök Déh clanged on the metal kuali with his metal stirrer, and through the fire and smoke came the throat-tickling aroma of chilli in the air, and tiny cubes of meat basting in coconut oil and browning shallots.

Klang-klang-klang! Pök Déh would call the customers on his kuali, worn at the edges by his constant beats and coated with the flavours of dishes that came together in the heat, embedded in layers of oil in the kuali, of flavours fossilised from dishes past.

There was art in the kuali of Pök Déh; first a sweep of water over the greasy crust, then, as it vapourised over the charcoal heat, a dose of oil followed, just when the heat was right, by squid or meat and some concoction from a clay pot that raised the steam and – wait for it – the sizzling noise of the combined ingredients as they hissed their voices out in applause, the ddesèr of the kuali as we say it in Trengganuspeak.

There was little that I knew of the private life of Pök Déh or Abdul Kadir as he was named in his land of birth. He did not appear among the Tanjong Mappalaikuppam crowd, nor at the canteen for diaspora Tamils run by our Pök Kör (Abu Bakar) in their Tanjong hub, but Pök Déh appeared without fail when the noon-day sun rose above the head, to prop the shutters up around his röjök stall and dust the seats and klang his kuali to the delight of his discerning crowd.

He drew his customers from the General Post Office that stood at the foot of the hill, and from the Department of Customs and Excise, and the boatmen who rowed their boats into the water before letting them go on wind-power as their sails unfurled their full patchwork of flour bags. This same wind also blew Pök Déh's flavoursome smells into the nostrils of wayfarers and the passing trade who stopped, if only for the breathtakingly sweet tèh tarék.

Pök Déh was master of the flagship dish of his people, the Mee Mamak, of noodles fried in spices and seafood or meat to the accompaniment of much ritualistic clanging of the kuali to bring out the flavours that soon dispersed into a cloud that stung the eyes as to make adults weep. True Mee Mamak is only slightly moist, sometimes embellished with hints of tiny bits of nuts, and eaten in a ha-ha chorus, not in laughter but in an appreciative sigh because the chilli was very hot. In Trengganu we were both mee and röjök people, and the jurymen had decided that our Pök Déh was for us in Kuala Trengganu, Pök Déh Röjök.

Röjök was a delicate operation that Pök Déh executed with alacrity and no small measure of delight. This was basically a chopping operation (with his heavy cleaver) of pre-cooked ingredients of cow's lung and, tofu (fried) and cucumber and a root called sengkuang (jicama; yam bean; Pachyrhizus erosus ) that gave the röjök a crunchiness that was a change from the sponginess of the fried lung and the bready taste of the fried floury blobs. Dah-dah-dah-datt... went the woodpecker noise of Pok Deh's cleaver over the cutting slab, and then the heap, all sliced, is pushed into a plate before Pök Déh dunked a heap of noodles in a wire-mesh dunker into the cauldron of boiling water. When the noodles and the chopped up röjök articles laid in a promiscuous mix in a deep plate, Pök Déh pulled open the lid of another pot bubbling quietly over the fire; and with an artistic sweep he brought the kuöh (sauce) in a ladle onto the heap.

People who know will tell you that it was the kuöh that made Pök Déh's röjök, and there are many now walking about who will give up their favourite TV programmes to be able to go back to that shed where Pök Déh klanged into the night and made that delightful noise that woodpeckers made.

Notes From Elsewhere

2009-04-25T11:13:00.012Z
I am out in the sun in the Quaker's (yes, the people who gave us the Oats) Garden of Peace reading a book by Diana Athill and munching now and then on some short sticks called, inapproprately, Prawn Roll. In my backpack beside me on the Quaker bench are kuih bahulu filled with a smidgen of Blueberry; pineapple tarts; and a load of other things that have made my back creak with stuff and the weight of years.

The air is warm, there are lawn mowers whirring, and a bevy of policemen and women have just come out from the back of the garden to peek into particular spots, and the Quaker café in the building is serving Fairtrade tea. Are the fuzz on the scent of the dried prawns in my 'rolls' that smell to them like something exotic?

This is a fascinating part of London, but alas, I don't stop here very often. Not a mile from here is the British Library already seriously running out of storage space in its gleaming new building, and then there's the new Eurostar terminal over there, built, like most transport terminals nowadays, as a retailing outlet. Even closer to me is the Wellcome Museum which now has a display in its plateglass window a long message that begins: Only one in ten of the cells in our body is human. The rest are microbes and symbiotic organisms*. I don't know if I should be proud or alarmed, but it does remind me of an old joke in the Beano (or Dandy) about a bicycle so old and rusty that it is held together only by dirt.

Of special interest to me within a few hundred yards of this spot is the Parish Church of St Pancras, not for its Greek style columns, but for the four caryatids supporting the portico leading to the crypt. The four women in Greek robes do lack something in the area of deportment, and they all wear a rather pained look; but there's a reason for that. When they were made and brought to the church to take their supporting roles, the measurements were all wrong, so a section had to be taken from their abdomen to fit them into place. Poor women, they have been slouching for more than 200 years. People who have travelled with me in this part of Euston Road will remember this caryatid spot for its “Oh, no!” moment. “Oh, no, he's not going to tell us that caryatid story again!” (I'm sorry, but I do moonlight as a non-Blue-Badge** London tourist guide, so it's my duty to tell you these things.).

Back to the Garden of Peace now where I've stopped munching on the Prawn Roll and am deeply immersed in Athill's meditation on an elderly life and eventual death. I love Athill (who took to writing quite late in life) for her beautiful prose, effortless intelligence, and candour. She spent most of her working life as a publisher's editor with André Deutsch (she actually helped found André Deutsch), and now, at the age of 91, she has won the Costa Prize for biography with her book that I'm reading now, “Somewhere Towards the End”. I love her insights on famous writers who had come through Deutsch: Anthony Burgess, for instance, was so terrified of death that he refused to go to bed but merely allowed sleep to overcome him as he was sitting down or working till late. In her earlier book, “Stet” she had some uncomplimentary things to say about the Hungarian-British writer George Mikes.

But why am I now sitting in the afternoon sun in this quiet haven on the edge of this very busy road with a book of Athill's amid the traffic fumes and the smell of freshly mown grass and a load of kuih bahulu and prawn rolls and jam tarts? Well, they are from KL for this good lady, sent through this good person, and I am just the content-filching courier man.

------------------------------
*Quoted from memory.
** Can't afford the fee for the Blue Badge course; too steep.

24. How To...Tang

2009-04-23T10:03:00.006Z
Tang is a primeval word that is the stuff of gbh. Sometimes parents use it to warn a child, “Budok ning, aku tang, kang!” (“Don't let me smack you lad!”) and it is often so effective that the lad will soon be quiet, sitting in the corner listening in his head the sound of tang that resounds just like the English smack. So tang like many other basic words in our native tongue, is in the category of the onomatopoeic.

As it is now established that the tang is the sound that became the word, a wide choice is given to us as to the mode of its administration. You can tang with the hand as with a stick, with a stone hurled in the direction of your quarry, or with a blow in the face of an opponent; the last mentioned is especially prized by practitioners as the tang in cheek.

Unlike the tumbok a punch, or the debök, which is the landing of your fist or fingers bunched together into the shape of a bird's beak onto the back of your opponent at great speed, tang lays particular emphasis on the impact, like a stone thrown at an undesirable's house. Now this has a special place in the roll-call of Trengganu's combative arts, and tang of this quality is termed tagor, an act done normally in the quiet long after the sun has set to emphasise its special sound effect. The house is normally that of the orang bujang (unmarried folk), a kampong euphemism for those ladies who flitter about in the dark.

But lest you be mistaken and take tang to be the enforcement of moral values as a nocturnal act, there is no time requirement or place preference for tang, so by practise and common consensus it can be executed at any time of day or night. There are men, but very few women, who are skilled in the art of tang, and they are known variously as kaki tang (practitioners of tang), kaki puko (hitmen) or just simply ppala haliang (trouble makers). The height of their reign was known in Trengganu as jamang tang orang or an era when tang was supreme, the Trengganu version of the Tang Dynasty as prevailed in another land.

There are so many ways of doing the tang as there are practitioners of the art. One mode of operandi that is widely known involves one or several stones hurled in your direction. This is tang done by the petöng, and the recipient, once the stone has landed, say, on the face or some other part of the cranium, is said to be in a state of ddamör, which has no equivalent in the English tongue. Ddamör or bedamör is a mixture of being shocked and swollen and seeing stars and birds suddenly tweeting in the immediate vicinity of your noggin, the antidote for which is a poultice of wet and cold tamarind paste wrapped in a shred of old sarong.

Tang has recently been in the news when a balaclavad British riot policeman hit {tang) a home-going newsvendor with a truncheon, a stick known to us in Trengganu as the ggandeng. The man has since sadly died, and tang by this injudicious use, has acquired a bad name.

Some men are immune to tang, one such went by the name of Mamak Ppala Kerah (Hard Headed Muhammad), a recipient of so many tang that had little effect on him beyond making him look, in some light, like Richard Widmark. As we are not all so tang-proofed by birth and without the slightest aspiration to look like Jim Bowie in The Alamo, I'd urge you to be judicious with tang and not practise it in your or on other people's homes.

For a look-back at tagor, see:
Hurlers in the Night

Going By the Colour

2009-04-18T11:02:00.004Z
When two Syrians, Iraqis or Palestinians meet they inquire after colour. “Shlounak?” they’d ask of each other.

“Shlounak” is a how-are-you-word. But it means more than that because what the person is actually asking is, ‘how is your colour?’ In Algeria it is even more puzzling, “Ishrak?” How do I see you?

In Trengganu we use the polite apa kabör? when greeting people we respect. Apa kabör? What news? How are you, in other words.

And then there’s guana gamök?

Gamök (Standardspeak, gamak) on its own is ‘reckon’, ‘guess’, ‘estimate’; whilst the meaning of its mainstream derivative form, tergamak is ‘calculable’. So, tidak tergamak would be something that is incalculable, beyond reckoning (which some of you may have stashed in your bank accounts). Say tidak tergamak in Trengganuspeak, dök tegamök, the world shifts to another where correct forms and proper behaviour hold sway. The move now is towards social inhibition, anxiety, where a person expresses concern that what he desires to do may not be acceptable, cause him embarrassment or turn his cheeks to a crimson colour.

This is the colour of discomfort or embarrassment, not one of health as enquired about in the Arabic shlounak. Looking at the face, we would say, in Trengganu, mèröh mmerang. (bright red), and looking at the hands they are, as we say, ketör gelitik, trembling with fear, or desire, or both, and noticeably so to the wide world. These arise from feelings of acute inadequacy as to prevent one from making an approach to say hello. When meeting a VVIP (so V that it has to be repeated) for instance, or an intended paramour.

Now, guana gamök? is a many-faceted enquiry depending on tone, or situation or the expected repartee. If the second syllable of gamök is raised, it is probably a ‘How are you?’ If dropped slightly, it could be a ‘What do you think?’ And then there’s the red-rag guana gamök?, with the exaggerated final syllable rising higher than the coconut tree, often accompanied with (or following) a shove. You can tell from the chest surging forward, blood in the eyes (mèröh mmerang) and arms akimbo that this is a declaration of war.

This is where, after the event, someone wiser would say, “Sèdèr, tegamök nye buak tu!” Here there are meanings with varying intensity: “My, he’s got the cheek!”, “He’s got the gall!”, “How he does it, I don’t know!”

That last one is the gamök that we spoke about when you went slightly off colour at the thought of approaching your employer in the fish market to ask for a raise. Dök tegamök, so you abandon the idea.

One morning in the half refurbished surau, Wang Mamak (the surau chairman) asked Father (the treasurer), “Berapa bekah gamök-öh?”

This is how room space was measured in Trengganu, by the number of trays (bekah) it will accommodate on a feast day. “How many trays do you think will go in here?”

Reach for A Setar

2009-04-15T10:17:00.012Z

A sight as would please Mat Spröng. A watering hole next door to a monumental mason, or, as Mat would have said it, keda batu nesang.

This is straight out of Mat's noir world, a memento mori shop next door, and then a cup of kampong chic yuppiedom to take the weight off your weary mind at the modern Setarbak Kopi. "I've got this case to solve," says Mat. "But this kopi's so good I'll have a case of that too!"

Thanks to my correspondent Marina Emmanuel for this interesting pic. Er, is that Mat I see sitting down for a wee smoke in his best blue T-shirt?

Setarbak Note: This reminds me of the early days of the Body Shop in Brighton. It was right next door to the funeral director's.

Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak VII [Last]

2009-04-09T15:27:00.013Z
Cuaca jo’ong bbawöh payong awang makéng sarak ggipong atah daong pohong kerekuk, dari jaoh napök kapas langit ggulong gelak dari celöh dahang pohong setor. Daung nyör kkelik ddalang cahaya lampu jalang bila hujang turong ritik-ritik, anging nniup kecang dari jaoh ssinör jari kilat. Mat Spröng löpak lökang besör ttepi stèséng bah terus lari kejör asap löri kecik sarak denge barang setimbong bbawöh kaing kènbèh di belakang. Hujang making kasör, örang-örang jjaje pape mula tèbèng gerè denge kaing plastik biru, kuning, mèröh, ssèlök naik bila kena mbuh anging hök mari denge kilat: ceröh tanöh, bumbong rumoh, orang, serema kena mandi cahaya putéh pucat. Mat Spröng ngellik belakang löri sapöh bila gerudung bbunyi guroh.

Bila reda sikik Mat jemba terus, ngèllök tèksi, ngèllök basika budök-budök bbukuh baju hujang plastik. Kaki dia harong air ttakong ddalang lekök, selipar jepung lekat ddalang selok ddènèr, bila dia tarik kaki naik, selipar jepung kelecak barak nneting macang kör mainang géng budök-budök. Mata Mat tèngök ddepang, göbör ccapor gerang. Bila dapat sebelöh selipar ddalang tangang dia pelèköng terus kena benda bbönggök bulat bbawöh kènbèh.

“Adooh!” bbunyi suara serök, kkejuk. Dua belöh tangang keluör ggagar ddalang cahaya separoh napök, lidi kasör hujang turong bbunyi bberèk atah payong, orang lari basöh jjerok. Mat sèlök kènbèh, napök budök ggösök ppala ttepi timung cina ssusong setimbong.

“Mamak Ndok béng Awang!” Mat jereköh. “Aku nök repéh tekök mung macang ppala cölök!”

Mat Spröng mata-mata gelak Teganung ddiri ccegak ttepi pagör belakang löri Murtuja bin Mohamad Salim. Tangang dia senjöh tekök baju budök hök dok tengöh gelepör gelenyong, dada Mat ddebör dak-dak. Bila budök di belakang lori cuba nök naik, Mat sèkèh ppala dia sekali; tangang dia naik sekali lagi, turong jjadi sebutir debök

Pitu depang sebelöh penumpang löri bbuka, keluör budök ppuang kèlèk kaing ddalang bukusang batik.

“Ayöh!”

Mat Spröng lembèk lutut, jatoh ccakong ttepi tayar celok löri. Mata dia basöh, hujang turong kena tiup anging kkibör macang kaing jjemör ggalöh; baru rasa kaki dia kècök bila ssepak batu tajang atah tanöh, baru tangang rasa nnelah bila jatoh ssèmbak tali guning dekat gerè Mök Nöh jjua paéh, baru dada rasa ddebör naik se’eh, baru dia ingak dunia ning bulat ggètèl, mmusing ligak.

Air ujang turong nnèlèh bbira mata Mat, tapi air ujang bukang rasa maséng, jernèh. Döh dekat lima tahong orang dök panggil dia Ayöh.

* * *
Pagi turong macang cahaya kertah perada di Kuala Teganung. Air kkelik di pelabohang, matahari ssinor lik-lik atah atap bata rumöh-rumöh tinggi, ssinör ceröh di atap zéng, nnari galök di cerming mata hitang Cik Kalèh. Di muka Kuala lepah semalamang hujang ribot udara rèngang segör turung, Tok nnambang mmusang pong napok manis sikik.

“Guane Mak, aku dengör mung debök belakang budök Ndok tu sapa kerlök batu dia.” Punggong Cik Kalèh ggèlèk atah sèla tèksi sambil dia pèro masok ddepang keda Baboo jjalang Kapong Ttani. Bibir dia senyung ssengèh, said baju dia tajang buléh buak hiris kertah.

“Mung ccakak bbaik ddepang anök ppuang aku ning, Lèh!” Mat beraléh atah kusyéng tèksi, dia èsök punggong rapat denge Munöh.

“Tapi mölèk sunggoh mung uting selipar jepung kena betol-betol ppala ötök budök darak tu,” Cik Kalèh ppaléng ke aröh penupang tèksi dia. Senyung dia lèbör buléh lalu sebuöh bah.

“Nasib baik aku dök paka capal malang tadi, Lèh, kalu tidök bicuk ttönjö ppala budök jjadöh tu!” Mat Spröng tèngök anök dia. Puah.

“Tapi,” kata Cik Kalèh, sambil muka dia ppaling ke timbong kayu dök jauh dari Masjid Abidéng. “Guane tiba-tiba mung tahu dia ada belakang löri Murtuja béng Mohamad Saléng?”

“Aku ingak kata Ustad Lèh,” jawab Mat, mata dia beraléh jauh ke Padang Malaya. “Dia kata dunia ning döh bbalék, kadang-kadang bila mung pusing baru mung dapat.”

Cik Kalèh garu ttiök, ccengang sejuruh dengör kata-kata Mat.

“Ggininglah,” Mat tamböh. “Bila mung gatéh ddepang stèséng bah tu aku dök tau nök tuju duana. Bila aku napök tulisang ‘LORI MURTUJA’ ddepang kita, aku ikut kata Ustad Lèh, aku susong balek tulisang tu, belakang ddepang, bbalik bbelöh, jjadi perkataang laing. Aku dapak, ‘Mari tuju lör…’

Cik Kaleh tengok ccengang. “Tu macang ilmu dari kitab Tajul Molok.”*

“Betol Lèh,” kata Mat. “Aku tau selalu tu alamak suroh aku ikot. Le ning banyök orang bbaca bok, Lèh, tapi jarang hök pahang isi ilmu kitab.”

Matahari pagi kerabak langit mmacör atah pasör. Dari jauh jarong jang besör Keda Payang tunjok kurang lima minit pukö pak.

“Tu lah aku terjung dari tèksi mung tu Lèh,” kata Mat. Aku dengör macang Ustad Lèh dok kata ‘Mari tuju löri…Mari tuju löri…’”

“Tapi Ayöh kena dia selalu bila dia keluör dari nnusuk bbawöh kènbèh…” sapok Munöh, ppala dia ttèlèng ke aröh Mat.

“Kalu mung ikut dia Mèk, abih lah mung, jahanang nye ambék di örang darak.” Ppala Mat ngilling sambil mata dia ttenung ke anök.

* * *
Ddalang keda köpi bbucu dèrèt gedöng batu ddepang bulatang raungèbauk Keda Payang. Dari belöh barak muka jang besör tunjok kurang ssuku puko nang. Cik Kalèh siyèk röti bakör ttangang dia, dia cicöh ddalang kuöh.

“Satu hari,” kata Mat Spröng, “serema orang Malaya akang tiru kita di Teganung, makang satay pagi-pagi denge röti bakör cicöh kuöh kacang.”

Cik Kalèh mamöh röti garing sambil mata tèngök Mat repéh nyöcök satay sapa patöh.

“Budök Ndok tu kalu dapat aku kerjöng, aku nök patöh tekök dia ggining,” kata Mat, mata ssinör gerang. “Nasib baik dia lari aku dök lèh kejör dia sebak dia cedah.”

Lengang Munöh berenti, dök jadi cicöh satay perok ayang ddalang kuöh.

“Mung jjupa dia sekali bbawöh kaing kènbèh mung döh tau dia buléh lari cedah!” Cik Kalèh tarék sapu tangang dari dalang köcèk.

Mat Spröng kerling ke Munöh. “Bila aku paka baju lèhèr bulat Hari Sukang Sekölöh Sultang Slemang hök Mok beri aku paka tu aku tau tu bukang baju mung Mèk. Baju tu hök örang lömba lari hari spök. Dök ssaböh mung paka, Mèk, sebak mung bukang saja dökléh lari, lipah kècök pong mung dök dang nök hambak.”

Cik Kalèh gerèhèng dua tiga kali, ppala dia ppaling tang ke laing. Mata Munöh tèngök ppinör ke aröh Ayöh dia.

“Sebak tulah aku gi tanya Budök Nama Ku Ali tu sebak dia sekauk, jaga kèmöh hari Spök, dia tahu sape lari, sape dök,” tamböh Mat.

Cik Kaleh akat jari, tapi suara Mat lebih kuat. “Bila bbunying nama Mat Ndok béng Awang, aku pahang selalu sebak apa Awang tudong lengang dia denge pinggang masa dia sapu mèja ddepang aku kkeda Bhiku ari tu.”

“Sape pulök?” Tanya Cik Kalèh, mata belalök.

“Mak Ndok béng Awang, Lèh.” Muka Mat naik mèröh. “Awang tukang cuci mèja kkeda Bhiku tu ada sipang batu putih kkelik bbawöh lengang baju dia, bila aku jjupa surak pajök ddalang töng sapöh aku tau selalu dia buat peranga dök mölèk.”

Pagi tu köpi ddalang cawang tebal rasa pahit ccapor kelat. Mat Spröng lupa buboh gula sebab ralék buka cerita. “Gelang geliga nyör Tok Nyang aku tu aku kena mmana-mana pong. Dia dapak di Pahang masa gi cari Tong Tèja denge Megak Panji Alang. Bila aku tanya Lijöh baru aku tau söhèh dia beri ke Munöh hari jadi baru ning...”

“Ayöh döh kat lima tahong Ayöh tingga rumöh, tingga Mök. Gelang tu Mak Ndok mitök pinjang sebab nök gi cari Ayöh dia kata ada di Kuala Berang masa jjupa Mèk kkeda. Dia kata bila kita jjupe Ayöh di nung kita buléh nniköh.”

“Dökkanglah Pök dia pong sama subhak,” Cik Kalèh ccelöh masok.

“Dua kali lima je,” jawab Mat. “Nök bawök anök aku gi ddarak, nök ajök nniköh pulök lepah gada gelang geliga ttuöh aku.”

“Mèk nyessa ayöh,” kata Munöh. “Mèk ingak dia budök baik.”

“Tapi marilah Ayöh balék dudok denge Mök, ssiang dia dok ambék upöh bbasoh kaing nök beli berah secupök.”

Mata Mat tundok bbawöh. Mulok dia berenti mamöh, jari dia urot lidi satay sapa patöh. “Gilah balék semula,” Cik Kalèh pong masok capor. “Dök baik bbalöh lama-lama. Ssiang Munöh. Ssiang Lijoh.”

Mat Spröng ingak balik pagi Jema'ak masa dia kkejuk napök Lijöh ddiri ccegak ddepang wakah.

“Kalu aku balek nati Lijöh pulök ssiang aku macang ikang,” kata Mat.

“Dök Ayöh,” Munöh jawak cepat. “Mök napök je bèkèng, tapi dia dok sebok sökmö nama Ayöh.”

Bila Cik Kaléh tingga Mat Spröng denge Munöh ttepi paya dekat Batas Baru, anök bbiri gguling bating belakang rök; burong ciök nnyaning lagu cèk-cèk, galök. Munöh lega dapak balék derumöh denge Ayöh dia nök jjupa Mök.

* * *
Cik Kalèh tengöh hiruk air kawe ddalang piring kkeda köpi Wang Wook bila talipong bbunyi ddering ddalang pöndök Talikong ddepang keda, tunggu örang jawak. Tok peraih ikang tengöh isak rökök ttepi pagör, dia masok terus akat. Pitu pöndök talipong bbuka sikik, ppala Tok Peraih jengök keluör tèngök kkeda Wang Wook.

“Lèh, ada örang nök ccakak denge mung!”

Cik Kalèh lari cepak jemerang jalang. “Halo,” bbunying suara köhör dari jauh. “Mung Lèh?”

“Mak, macang mana mung tau aku ada ssining?”

“Aku tahu pe'el mung Lèh. Mung mesti gi sölör Awang tu dari jaoh, tapi dia takdök döh, balék ddarak lesat patat,” kata Mat Spröng, suara dia naik sikik. “Aku di pöndök talipong ning, ddepang rumöh Mr Hamid belakang sekölöh rendöh Sultang Slèmang, dekat rumöh Lijöh. Rumöh akulah jugök, aku lupa sebab lama dök balik...”

“Mung bbaik semula döh? Bagoh Mak, ba'ape...”

“Lèh,” kata Mat, separoh bbisik. “Ma'ajong hök mung beri ke aku dulu tu, ada lagi? Aku nök mitok sikik.”

Cik Kalèh suka kah-kah sapa belöhök.

TAMAK - FINIS
----------------------------------------------------------------
* Kitab Tajul Mulk, an ancient manual of Tibb (medicine) and subtle forces.

Look-back:
The Return of Mat Spröng; Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak II; Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak III; Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak IV; Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak V; Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak VI.

Farewell to A Dear Friend

2009-04-02T22:35:00.014Z
My dear friend Faizal Abdul Aziz left us today, just hours after admission to hospital after he was taken ill while sitting for a paper that was to take him to the next rung of his career ladder. He was 45 years old.

I have known Faizal for many years and he was very much a member of our extended family here in London. He was a good man, generous to his friends, and loyal to his alma mater, the Malay College, of whose alumni association, MACOBA, he was an active member. Most Fridays we, our small communtiy here, would meet at the tahlil gathering in Malaysia Hall, and Faizal went on the night when he would have been there with his wife Nina and son Norman. He left us on the eve of a good day, called home to his Maker. May Allah rest his soul in peace and reward him with Jannah. Amin.

In life Faizal was an enthusiast of the Housing movement. After he left the Notting Hill Housing Association last year he was looking forward to the day when he and associates would be able to set one up for our community here, on shariah principles. But Faizal has been called before his ideas could bear fruit. We pray that his hopes shall be fulfilled by others who come after him.

When a friend dies a part of us is taken forever. We shall miss him and pray that his family be given strength and sabr in these trying times. Faizal is survived by his wife Nina and two children Norman and Farah. Alfatihah.

A Wave From Way Back

2009-03-31T11:51:00.006Z
It is a well-known fact that fish gets to parts other comestibles only aspire to reach. The brain, for instance, and what memories does the Omega 3 rake up and fish protein (kerepok) brings all manner of hidden things back to the top of your head.

No one has yet come up with a description or the title of the school-book that I mentioned in A Book, A Beach & Memory”, and then, Ajidul of Kampong Kolang sends me this note:

“Mase ambe dalam darjah dua di Sekölöh Melayu Paye Bunge dulu, ambe teringat ade membace buku yang dème sebut tu.” When I was in Class II of the Malay School Paya Bunga I remember reading the book that you spoke about.

And then he adds: “Dalam bok tu, ade terulis rangkapan pantun nasihat ....*”
Terang bulan bintang berseri
Ombak memukul ke pantai landai
Rajinlah belajar setiap hari
Supaya cepat menjadi pandai.

Terang bulan bintang berbanjar
Kapal belayar di laut Jawa
Masa budak wajib belajar
Bila besar tidak kecewa.
And there you see it, the line I was looking for, in the second line of the first stanza. As you may well imagine, I was a cock and a hoop with delight.

If you carry an old map of Kuala Trengganu in your head you’ll know that Kampong Kölang is but a stone’s throw from the Sekölöh Paya Bunga (shorter if you walked through the cemetery of the long dead). But as you can see from this gem that has cropped up, Tuang Ajidul was not one to throw stones at the Sekölöh; he did go there to improve his head (and it has now brought results). Thank you Tuang Ajidul, very much!

And then my thanks to all of you who have sent in comments (publicly or privately), and especially to Suhaili [see Comments, below]. She suggests that perhaps the Trengganuspeak word lajök is a noun derived from another word form, just as sounds are turned into onomatopoeias in speech. There may well be something there as verbs are sometimes transformed into nouns in a process known as nominalisation in linguistics; though the reverse (verbification) is what we are more used to nowadays.

Thanks Suhaili, much appreciated! PS I enjoyed meeting all of you at the USM (but forgive me for the boring talk).

Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak VI

2009-03-26T12:38:00.011Z
Habih hhanyar tepi lökang; tangang beleming dengang sapöh, apah nyör, perok ikang, daung tèh, serebok kawe belömör dalca masang hök tökè keda tohok buang ddalang lègè burok. Mat Spröng lèsèk tangang bbira pitu belakang Bhiku Coffee Shop, ppala dia mmusing pening ccapor löya, rasa macang nök jeluök.

“Kalu ggining aku kerja bandörang akok sapöh je baik,” Mat Spröng belèbèr ssörang. Kucing bapök kkejuk tidor belakang lègèr, lari celubu masok nnusuk belakang bawang ddalang jök. “Aku raung bandör Teganung rata cari sarong tangang getöh. Bilalah Teganung kita ning nök maju macang negeri örang putéh!”

Dia masok ddalang keda gi terus ke meja tökè dok tengöh nnuléh ddalang bok nota ada nombor ‘555’ atah kulit. Tökè napök mata Mat meröh ssinör, tangang dia seranggöh masa ccakak: dia tahu hari tu bukang hari Mat nök bayör hutang ddalang bok. Lepah Mat ccakak dia ngilling ppala, tangang dia tunjok ke sebelöh kanang, bukang ttepi keda, tapi satu tepak laing, jauh. Mat keluör jjalang dderah aröh tèksi Cik Kalèh dok tunggu ttepi gerè Pök Su nnèga pisang denge buöh paoh.

Cik Kalèh tengöh gösök perok, tundok sapa bökök, radio dia senyap ssunyi dok ggatong ddepang tèksi.

“Aku döh kata mung jangang makang pisang jela banyök sangak, tu lah senök perok,” kata Mat.

Cik Kalèh dök ccakak, badang dia bbau serbök — Minyök Cak Kapök — bila dia bangung nök gatéh téksi cepak-cepak, perasaang dia macang nök gi ssunga takut dök dang ök. Dia tahu ddalang bandör Teganung ada banyök sura kalu nök kena jembe keték-keték.

“Pasa apa hök putéh dia pegang, hök mèröh dia tohok?” kata Mat, mata dia kuyu dok tèngök ke lori kecik tengöh mmungöh bbira jalang. “Murtuja bin Mohammad Salim,” dia tuléh ddalang bok hök dia wak tubék bila siasatang dia jjadi hot. Hot, satu lagi perkataang hök keluör dari ppala dia dari jamang Sekölöh Sultang Selèmang bila ötök dia gelegök.

“Ado-o-o-h,” ngerrang Cik Kalèh, badang dia making bökök.

“Pasa apa hök putéh dia pegang...”

Cik Kaleh ppaling ke Mat. “Aku dok tengöh mmulah perok ning, mung dok ralék nök mmaing teka-teki pulök!” Muka dia masang ccatung, tèksi dia imba bbelöh kiri sikik lagi masok parék.

“Pisang jela ning bisa, Lèh, aku dok kata sökmö ke mung, mung ning babér ccapor tekök.”

Mata Cik Kalèh ssinör, macang api lak atah bukit.* “Ning bukang pisang ning; kemarèng aku makang dalca kkeda Bhiku tu, rasa macang pelèk sikik.”

Mat Sprong lèsèk tangang bbawöh punggong dia atah kusyéng teksi bila mata Cik Kalèh dok tèngök tang kelaéng; Mat ciung jari dia, masih bbau töng sapöh.

“Mari kita gi cari Budök Nama Ku Ali tu, ada aku nök tanye dia sikik pasa budök-budök,” tamböh Mat.

“Ado-o-o-h, Mök,” kata Cik Kalèh. “Kemarèng aku tèngök dia gi kkèmöh denge kupolang Sekaok ttepi jèrak tapi aku kena tingga mung ttepi Jalang Wailiéh mung gi cari sediri sebab tèksi dök léh masok.”

“Dökkang aku nök gi ssorang ssitu kak-kak ggarék ning, Lèh,” jawak Mat. Dia butang baju dia sapa ttekök. Sejok.

Cik Kalèh senyung ssörang, mata dia sila kena matahari tengöh jatoh belöh barak. “Ado-o-o-oh, Mak!,” kata dia sambil gösök perok.

Löri Murtuja pötöng tèksi Cik Kalèh ddepang Jél; dekak Panggong Rex örang dok tengöh berebuk nök beli tikèt cerita Bujang Lapok. Cik Kalèh nnyanying ‘Pok-pok-pok...” sambil dok gösök Minyök Kapök atah pusat.

“Mari tuju, lor...” kata Mat. “Mari tuju, lor...” dia kata lagi macang orang dok tengöh ratéb.

Tiba-tiba Mat Spröng löpak dari tèksi Cik Kalèh masa örang tengöh jemerang ddepang dia di sipang jalang. Mat akat seluör naik atah perok, buku catatang dia masok ddalang köcèk. “Lèh,” dia kata, ppaling ke kawang dia hök dok ngökkör atah tèksi. “Mung gi ita di stèsyéng bah, mung jangan gi sebelong aku balék.”

Mat Spröng jjalang teruh belong Cik Kaléh dapat jawak.

"Ado-o-oh, Mök! Ado-o-o-oh, Mak!" bbunyi Cik Kaléh ngerrang sakit.

---------------------------------------
* Api lak atah Bukit Tteri.

[Bahagiang Hök Suk Sekali Minggu Depang...Final Part Next Week]

Other Parts:
The Return of Mat Spröng; Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak II; Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak III; Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak IV; Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak V.

A Book, A Beach & Memory

2009-03-24T11:00:00.013Z
Whenever I talk to people who aspire to write I always tell them that most words come wrapped in emotion, with a story to tell; and they will have to learn to understand that if they want to be a serious scribbler. For a long time I was haunted by the word landai — and this does take me back to my single digit years — and the yellowish tinge of the shore, and perhaps a soft breeze blowing, and thin, long fronds of the coconut fingering the sky.

This need not have been Trengganu, though we did live by the shore; but this was Trengganu, and the yellow light of the naked bulb was shining weakly on the round marble top of a table. And there I was, with my two cousins Dah and Yöh (and my elder brother Mat too probably) looking into the first page of a school-book that now still sticks in memory as something very beautiful. ‘Beautiful’ here of course is an amorphous word: it is probably memory that makes it so, it could have been this picture and the words beneath it that I now find emotionally and aesthetically agreeable. But then again, the book could have been really wonderful.

This is the line from the book that, in my mind, I still find so hauntingly beautiful —
Ombak memukul di pantai landai.
That was probably early night, and the lamp was shedding light on the picture-book shore. There was much darkness around us. The big house we lived in was covered in much darkness at night, and I think I kept fit by rushing from one pocket of light to another — from the dining space lit by a single overhead bulb to the dimly lit apron area that served the master bedroom and another unlit room that led to an even bigger room that had the old bakelite radio and the inner guest area. This was where we were that night, but the fluorescent light that Father installed on one of the long cengal pillars wasn’t yet there, so we sat around a table lamp, not far from the soon-to-be settee under the glass skylight that brought in the moon’s glow where I slept most nights of my Trengganu childhood years.

It was only much later that I found out what landai meant. It is the shelf of the shore where the sand slopes into the sea. So the waves were lashing on this part of the sea; and don’t you hear a voice too when you read a book taken from the shelves of old, probably your own voice reading the line when you were then and there?

I can’t think of a Trengganuspeak word that is similar to landai, but the word lajök instantly comes to mind but this probably isn’t what we’re looking for.

As schoolchildren, we used to cycle down Jalan Banggol, and this was what it used to be when you cycled from the Paya Bunga end of the road, past the Bus Station on your left and the Kelinik Zakaria to your right in the new Bangunang Pejabak Ugama. The road sloped down to the river, and that experience to us was turun lajök, going downhill and taking the bend at great speed where the road turned into Jalan Kampong China where my friend’s father Yeo Yan Poh sold his Fiat cars.

Lajök is of course the Standardspeak lajak in Trengganu voice. It means going beyond what you intended to, exceeding your remit, a vehicle that has gone past its intended place. On our bicycles, if we went into extreme lajök, we would have landed in the laps of some haughty taxi drivers plying for trade on the bank of the river. But why do we call it lajök in Trengganu when lajök is not really the incline but the act of going too far? Perhaps some of you will be able to help me here.

I remember most of the school-books of my childhood years, the Kitab Kiliran Budi and the Bayan Budiman and the fascinating Old Lob in his Farm (where lived Mr Grunt the Goat, Mr Willy the Pig, Dobbins the horse and Percy the Bad Chick). And I remember another book (that was not part of the recommended text in our class), that had the “Kelentong Man”, the bell-ringing hawker.

The book that had the waves lashing on the pantai landai was about A4 sized, but I don’t remember the name that it went by. If you do have one at home or know where to get hold of one, could you please relieve this aching in my heart and let me know what else transpired on the shore in the lines of this haunting piece of poetry?

Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak V

2009-03-19T17:41:00.011Z
Bètèng ddepang kuala napök panjang bila tèngök dari tengöh Padang Malaya . Mat Spröng tarék cölök dua tiga batang dari ddalang kötök, Cap Lada, buatang kilang Kemaf, Kelatang Match Factory. Bila tökang masok sebuöh ke tepak tedoh dari ömbök bbalék bètèng, ddalang pelabohang kawasang Syöhbandör, dia letök seputong cölök atah bedél ddepang Istana Maziöh. Dari jauh perahu besör Wang Mang masok dok tengöh pèro mmuka kuala, menuju ke Pata Telok. Mat Spröng letök sebatang macis lagi atah bedil.

Burong mura ccakak bising bbangor sama mura laing ccelöh daung pohong pinang gata atah ppala Mat, telinga dia masih dok bengang lagi masok air hök Lijöh simböh ttepi telaga hari tu. “Siok!” Mat kata, cuba nök hala burong, tapi bunyi mura making galök. “Siok!” kata Mat lagi, suara dia tinggi sikik, tapi burong-burong wak dök je ke dia.

Mat senyung ssörang, tangang dia tunjuk ke batang cölök, lepah se, se.

“Nasib baik aku,” suara dia keluör macang dia ccakak denge örang laing, tapi örang laing takdök ssörang masa tu, cuma Pök Löh Tuk, dok mmusing ttepi bangunang Posöpéh* dekak jalang besör; Pök Löh Tuk pulök dök léh wak lawang ccakak sebab dia kurang sèhak di bahagiang ppala dia. Sambil ngilling Mat akat sebatang cölök dari bedil. “Out,” dia kata. Dia ccakak orang putih sekali sekala bila siasatang dia napök macang nök jjaya.

“Munöh bukang kena susuk di hantu,” Mat kata, suara dia kerah, tegah. Ccelöh jari dia dia repéh batang cölök nömbör satu. Pök Löh Tuk mmusing making ligak ttengöh jalang ke aröh Tanjong Pasör.

“Nömbör dua, out jugök!” Mat kata. Jari dia repéh batang cölök atah bedil hök nömbör dua.

“Susuk di hantu pong dök, jjadi pelayang keda pong dök,” kata Mat. “Kalu dia kena paksa jjadi pelayang keda köpi tetu Cik Kalèh tau sebab takdök pelayang hök dia dök kenal.”

“Mung jangang ccakak pasa pelayang-pelayang keda köpi pagi-pagi Jema’ak ning, Mak,” keluör suara dari belakang bucu pagör istana. Ppala Ustaz Lèh napök dulu, paka semuta kaing ssahang burok, kaki dia paka selipa Jepung warna dök sama. Bila badang dia keluör, dada dia hitang llegang sebab lama ddö’öh dok kena bakör panah matahari. Pakaiang dia macang biasa, sehela sepinggang, kaing pelèkat cak Gajöh hök orang beri ke dia barangkali masa jamang Pök Mat dök ngammök lagi.

“Mung jangan buak aku kkejuk ggitu Ustaz Lèh, aku dok tengöh mmikir ni,” kata Mat sambil dia selok köcèk, kötök cölök dia letök ddalang seluör.

“Mung dök jjua öbak hari ning?” dia tanya bila dia napök Ustaz Lèh dök bawök akör kayu.

“Aku keluör petang sikik ari Jema’ak ning, pah örang semayang asör.” Mata Ustaz Lèh tenung Mat dök kkelik; pah tu dia tanya, “Guana budök Munöh mung tu, dök ttemung lagi?”

Mat ssedök air lior, batok köh-köh dua tiga kali.

“Macang mana mung tau pasa Munöh tu, Ustaz Lèh?”

“Kuala Teganung ning Mak, pagör buléh ccakak, anging macang surak kabör, bedil buléh beranök, burong mura bawök cerita,” kata Ustaz Lèh sambil dia tarék senyung bbira bibir.

“Kalu ggitu buléh aku tanya mung sikik: di mana gök kalu kita nök tau ha kegiatang budök-budök kita le ning?” Mata Mat tengök jauh aröh pata.

“Maksud mung kalu ada sape-sape napök Munöh?” jawab Ustaz Lèh. Cepat.

Mat anggok, mata dia tundok ke tanöh selok kerah Padang Malaya.

“Kalu ggitu mung gi tanya budök hök nama Ku Ali lepah Jema’ak hari ni, dia ada di semejid sökmö, dekat orang timbong kayu tu. Jjuruh budök nye, buléh mung wak nnatu. Lagi pong dia sekauk**, dok kkèmöh sökmö ngatta tepak, banyök dia tau ha ha luör,” kata Ustaz Lèh lagi.

Mat tarék kaing batik lepah dari bahu, dia apör atah tanöh. “Aku nök jerèngèng sebetör, pah tu aku gi,” dia kata, mata dia napök kuyu.

* * *
Sörang budök muda ddiri ccegak ttepi kayu setimbong, di bucu jalang ddepang Mansor Press, keda cètak bok hök besör sekali di Kuala Teganung. Rambut dia luruh kkilak denge minyök Brekering***, mata dia ceröh belakang cerming mata putéh bbika hitang.

“Tu dia Budök Nama Ku Ali,” kata örang dari semejid hök bawök Mat Spröng ssitu.

Masa Mat gi ddepang dia Budök Nama Ku Ali akat ppala dari bok hök dia dok baca. “Scouting for Boys,” Mat Spröng baca dalang Bahasa Inggeris pèlak Teganung. Tangang dia pegang bahu Budök Nama Ku Ali.

“Rasa macang pernöh tengök ning, kkeda kerepok Awang Hitang Ppaya Tok Bèr,” kata Budök Nama Ku Ali.

Mat Spröng anggok selalu, “Benör tu, Pök Mak selalu gi ssitu. Ning Pök Mak ada ha sikik nök tanye mung.”

“Ba’pe yang dahi Pök Mak tu napök macang bicuk sikik?” Tanya Budök Nama Ku Ali, belong apa-apa.

Mat Spröng kisör kaing hök dia paka atah seluör dia dua tiga kali. Mulok dia ssengèh antara kkejuk denge malu.

“Ning takdi Pök Mak jenera bbawöh pohong pinang gata Ppadang Malaya. Ada dua tiga èkör mura dok ggalöak cceloh daung, jatoh pelepöh kering ddamör ddahi Pök Mak. Tèngök jang döh puko dua, Pök Mak mari jembe selalu nök buak Jema’ak tapi dök dang setabok, takdök satu sa döh, pisang pong döh habih takdök ssutér.”

Budök Nama Ku Ali selok köcèk wak keluör tikèt mèröh Teganung Bah Kömpeni. Dia selik tikèt ccelöh muka surak, dia tutop bok, masok ddalang köcèk baju Melayu.

“Ada ha apa Pök Mak?” tanya Budök Nama Ku Ali bila bang waktu asör keluör dari serömböng di pucök nnara.

[Ssambong lagi...To be Continued]

-------------------
* Post Office
** Scout (Boy Scout), also known as ngakkak.
*** Brylcreem™

Fish With A Tale

2009-03-14T16:27:00.016Z
The Wans of Trengganu, for reasons not known to fish or men, shun the ikang (fish) of the kkacang variety.

I did not know what the kkacang was until my friend Ajidol sent me this photograph of man and fish basking in the midday sun off the coast of Marang. The kkacang is of course the geminated Trengganuspeak version of the kacang-kacang from the family of Sphyraenidae which, in this variety, comes in two forms, the kacang merah, the red kkacang) and the kkacang putih, the white Sphyraena barracuda that Ajidol is now holding on his hook in the photo.

Stories about fish abound in riparian and littoral communities of Malaysia. A friend from Perak once told me that his family avoids the ikan tapah,the Wallago leerii, a carnivorous river catfish from the family Clupeidae that can be more than a metre long. These families of Wallago shunners are descendants of Pak Kadok from the Lambor Kiri and Lambor Kanan parts of the State. The tapah is a beast of a fish that snaps at monkeys, and little fish and probably the odd little boy in its travel along the river. Looking at the fish, with its nasal barbels and sheer body weight, I too would have run a mile while urging my family members to steer clear like Pak Kadok must have done some 300 years ago if it came biting at my toe.

There are family descendants of Pengiran Liga in Brunei and Sarawak that avoid the patin, another catfish of the Pangaslidae family, not because the fish is weird or scary, but because they believe they are descended from them. The patin now widely farmed in Malaysia, is a silvery fish with much fat in its belly, and it cooks well in asam and chilli.

There must be many more men (and women) who avoid particular types of fish (the Minang people of Sumatra, I hear, don’t touch the talang, the Queenfish Scomberoides lysan) but from my conversations with fish I am told that they in turn avoid types of men (and women) too, especially those that carry nets or hooks with them to the water.

My friend Ajidol in the photo above, has no such fishy taboo, but there may be things that he may want to look at again for here (below) is a picture of him before he caught the kkacang and ate it too:

Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak IV

2009-03-12T15:50:00.010Z
“Ddalang kerja aku ning Awang, mung kena ada dua jenih panda,” kata Mat Spröng sambil dia junga ambék kertas halus panjang dari dalang tèng rökök atas meja batu bulat kkeda Bhiku. Bila dia cöcöh kertas tu masok ddalang cimni kaca, ke ujong api pelita, hujung jari kertas nnyala ceröh, dia bawök naik ke rökök daung hök dok ggatong bbibir dia.

Mata dia sipik bila dia mmbuh asap keluör, bila naik ke atas kena kipah anging, asap mmusör atah ppala. Mata Awang dök kkelik dok tengök kelakuang Mat, tapi tangang dia masih dok wak kerja. Dia masok jari telunjok ddalang telinga dua butir cawang kosong, pingggang-pinggang kösöng dia tindang mmolèk, buboh atah lengang, bira pinggang dia kepit ccelöh siku.

“Mung kena panda nnusuk, mung kena panda bang dengör,” kata Mat lagi sambil asap keluör kkebok dari mulut. “Satu lagi, mung kena panda tèngök. Mung buak macang mung dök tèngök, padaha mata mung dok keléh bbeto.”

“Mana aku tahu Mak, aku ning tukang angkat pinggang je,” kata Awang sambil tangang kiri dia lak meja.

“Dök lah, aku nök cerita ke mung je,” kata Mat.

“Tengök mata kita ning,” kata Mat lagi. “Kadang-kadang kita tengök benda ceröh kita naik ppinör mata, tapi bila kita buak mata kita sipik sikik, baru napök betol.”

Awang berhenti kerja sebetör, tèngök Mat sipik mata ke aröh pagör pasör. Suara R.Azmi keluör dari serömböng radio atah keda Bhiku, lagu ‘Itang Manih’: Pandang tak jemu-u, panda-a-ng tak je-e-mu...

“Ggitu jugök bila aku gi keléh tengök satu-satu ha, aku paka ppiöh lembèk sebak orang ingak hök paka ppioh tu jenih tok leba, bukang hök jenih dok ngitta.” Mat jjalang keluör dari keda, belènggang punggong dia bila suara R.Azmi keluör bberè dari permintaang petang Radio Malaya, Si hitam manis, ya-a-ng hitam manis
...pandang tak jemu-u, panda-ang tak je-e-mu.

Dia teringat pada jamang-jamang dulu masa Cik Kalèh bawök dia gi tengök orang darak mmaing pata.

* * *
Ibu ayang kibah sayap keluör dari tepak ngerrang telör, kketök bising bbangör. Lijöh balik dinding papang jarang hayong timba dengang kuat sekali lagi, air telaga hök dia simböh tu masok ccelöh papang sapa ke luör. Mata dia pandang bulat ccelöh dinding jarang, nök pasti orang ke kambing dok ggerök di luör. Dia selit puce kaing kemah-kemah, takut telöröh sebab kaing ssahang döh mula lönggör bila dia hayong timba habis rèng ke aröh bayang hök ggerök di balik pagör kayu sama tinggi denge dia, di antara telaga denge rök di luör. Dia töhök timba ddalang telaga sekali lagi, sapa nök nnelah tangang bila dia kara balik cepak-cepak, sebak hari ning dia paka tali timba baru.

Dia jjalang derah dari tepi telaga, teröpöh kayu mmukol bising atah batu bata hök ssusong ddalang pasir, dua belöh tangang dia naik ke belakang nök hayong timba sekali lagi, warna timba meröh nnyala macang api ddalang ppala dia. Bila dia naik bèkèng mulok Lijöh bböbèk dengang kata-kata dök bbutér, di antara belèbèr denge mmaki, susöh nök kata sebab bila ötök dia gelegök, mulok dia bbölök, mata dia ssinör macang lapu kerèta. Lijöh berenti hayöng timba dengang tiba-tiba.

Ttepi pohong kedudok ddiri Mat Spröng, baju dia basöh jjerok, ppiöh lembèk atah ppala döh mula nök keruk jjadi kecik.

“Rupanya mung! Ba’ape yang mung gata sangak dok ita aku mandi? Nasib baik aku dök röcöh mata mung Mak!” kata Lijöh sambil dia puèk air dari mulok ke tepi pagör. Dari mulok dia keluör lumut hök turong dari dalang timba masa dia jiruh air ke badang dia takdi.

Mat Spröng ddiri bökök, dia cabuk ppiöh lembèk dari ppala, tangang dia ketör bila dia peröh air.

“Bukang aku takut kat mung Lijöh, aku baru keböh demang, idong aku dok ddepè lagi,” kata Mat sambil dia tarik baju basöh dok lekak ddada dia. “Ba’pe yang mung dök tanye dulu?”

“Mung ning dök abih lagi tebèak lama, Mak, dok ita anök dara,” kata Lijöh sambil ngilling ppala.

Mat rasa lega bila tengök Lijöh jiruh air timba ke kaki dia.

“Kalu nök kata mung ning anök dara tu ddo’oh lah sikik,” kata Mat sambil mulok dia senyung; tangang dia ura tali kasut supaya senang dia nök curöh air keluör dari dalang Bata warna putih dia.

Mat dudok atah gerè ddepang rumoh Lijöh. Dia rasa pelèk bila paka kaing batik hök Lijöh beri. Seluör panjang denge baju kemèja dia ggatong di dawa jemo kaing, ppiöh dia nnonèng lembèk macang ddèra putéh di penyepit baju atah wayar; badang dia mula rasa panah, tapi tangang dia ketör bila dia jamöh kemèja-T hök Lijöh beri dia paka. Tangang Mat ketör bila dia rasa tulisang ddada baju tu:

Hari Sukan
Sekolah Menengah Sultan Sulaiman
Dia tahu dia paka baju sapa.

Lijöh keluör denge air kawe ddalang cawang, kuih ggènang ddalang piring, rupa masang di muka.

“Aku nök tanya mung sikik, Jöh,” Mat kata bila dada dia berenti ddebör.

[Ssambong lagi...To be continued]

Mat Spröng Kelecak Barak III

2009-03-05T15:26:00.010Z
Bila lenggök ke langik napök awang kkupo macang kapah, macang kayu keramat, macang jjeput pisang pong ada jugök. Mat Sprong ssètök terus angkat ppala dari hood tèksi hök Cik Kalèh buka sebab hari tu ceröh mölèk.

“Aku mmipi ke aku napök beto ning, Lèh?” tanya Mat.

Dia lenggök lagi ke langik, awang tu ada lagi macang muka Lijöh – masang ccatung, mmusang takdök aröh.

Cik Kalèh berenti göhék tèksi, masok ttepak tedoh bbawöh pohong asang gelugor dekat könar rumöh Èzèk, ccelöh löröng kecik masok ke sebelöh Istana Kolang. Dia pasang gelang tali hök dia buak untok pegang berék dök beri tèksi ggerök. Radio National hök dia beli kkeda Tokèh Ubang ada ggatong ddepang, dekat lapu tèksi, dok bbunyi wa-wa lagu permintaang suri rumöh-tangga, buat Mat serabuk perok.

“Mung napök Lijöh duane?” Cik Kalèh tanye bila tengök Mat dok lenggök ke langik, mata dia dök kkelik.

“Tu, muka Lijöh lah di awang tu, muka dia lèk-lèk. Dok cerlöng kat aku,” jawab Mat.

Cik Kalèh aléh mata ke kereta Jaguar Èzèk baru keluör dari setar, dia sebok denge suara köhör: “Aku bukang nök ccapor ha mung, Mak, tapi baru takdi aku jjupe Lijöh dia tanye mung duana sebab dia dok cari mung rata cerök.”

“Dulu kalu aku ngajji bbeto di Gramma Seko tu gamök öh aku döh jjadi D.O. le ning.” Mat nnengung sebetör, dok tenung tapök tangang. Hidong dia ddepè sikik, tapi badang dia gagöh döh lepah makang makjong hök Cik Kalèh sipang ccelöh tepak dudok tèksi, ddalang kötök.

Cik Kalèh ngelloh panjang.

“Aku pong kalu ngajji bbeto dulu aku döh jjadi ustad le ning Mak, tapi nök wak guane dulu aku ralék dok gi tèngök orang mmaing rödak. Dunia ning ggitulah, serema orang ada hök masing-masing, memang ada ttuléh ddalang kitab. Kalu serema örang jjadi D.O., sape nök göhék tèksi, Mak, sape nök akot tahi, sape nök wak kerepok? Mung ning aku megöh denge mung, dulu mana ada di Teganung ning örang jjadi mata gelak?”

“Tapi aku nök kata sikik, Mak, mung jangang maröh.” Mata Cik Kalèh pandang jauh. “Takdi Lijöh tanye aku mung duane. Gi lah tèngök dia sikik, tulong pujok sebab Munöh tu döh tiga hari dök balik. Aku kata döh kat dia mung dok usaha cari, tapi dia asyik nök jjebèk je, nök nnangis selalu bila aku sebok.”

“Aku bukang dök cakne, Lèh. Aku pong rusing, tapi aku tak dök aröh nök buak döh. Mung örang ngajji, tetu mung tahu. Mung ingak Munöh tu kena susuk?”

Cik Kaleh tutop radio transistor di basika tèksi dia. Mata dia sila sebab kena cahaya mata hari hök ssinör dari aröh Sekölöh Paya Bunga, atah kubor Kapong Ttani.

Cik Kalèh kacing butang atas baju dia; jang dia kkelik ddalang cahaya ceröh.

“Kadang-kadang aku ambék budök Dol tu dari sekölöh, Mak. Dia dudok ssitu, dekat kubor lama tu, jadi aku kena sangaklah kawasang ning. Satu malang aku bawök sörang ppuang muda kèndöng anök ddalang kaing atah bau dia, dia nök balék rumöh dia ssitu...” Suara Cik Kalèh berenti sekejak.

Mat bikah bangung, turong dari tèksi teruh gi ssandör di pohong asang jawa. “Dökkanglah Munöh tu beranök pulök, lari dari Lijöh sebab takot. Ada apa-apa hök mung dök cerita kat aku, Lèh?” Mat buat macang nök sèng hingus, tapi dia telang teruh, ddegök.

“Bukang ggitu Mak, aku nök cerita pasa hök mung kata tu takdi. Orang ppuang hök aku ambék tu kata rumöh dia ssitu, kat rumöh budök Dol sekölöh SS tu, bila aku gatéh sapa ssitu aku tèngök dia senyung ssengèh, pah tu dia ngilla kah-kah!”

“Nasib baiklah aku ingak hök aku belajör dulu, aku baca sebutir dua ayak, aku tembör lari teruh, esökkang baru aku gi ambék teksi.” Tamböh Cik Kalèh.

“Di Teganung ning banyök kejadiang ggitu le ning,” kata Cik Kalèh lagi bila dia tengök mata Mat Sprong dok cerlöng bulak. “Bila aku gi ambék teksi aku èsök tu ada batu nèsang sutér ttepak dudok; tulah anök hök dia bawök.”

“Aku pernöh döh siasak kéh macang ning. Budök ppuang jugök, hilang lepah mmaing cökök. Mung tau Lèh, pah dua hari aku jjupe budök tu atah dahang pohong kerekuk dok makang mee görèng ddalang pinggang.” Mat Spröng apör dua tapök tangang ddepang Cik Kalèh.

“Pah tu?”

“Hök dia dok makang tu bukang mee, Leh, tapi cacing sepinggang,” kata Mat.

Kambing ddembèk dari jauh, daung asang jawa luroh atah ppale Mat. Dia geliak dua tiga kali, napök gelisöh.

“Eh, Lèh, makjong hök mung beri kat aku ning utok apa? Aku rasa pelèk sikik.”

Cik Kalèh ppaling ke rumöh guru besör Gramma Sko, Mister Èzèk, mulok dia senyung, napök gigi mah kkilak.

Cerita ning adalah karangang rèkaang semata-mata dang takdök kena mengena denge ssapa pong sama ada masih hidop, sudöh mati atau pong dok tengöh berasa dök rök.