Arms and the Men (and the working women)

Grandfather had badiks galore and one or two krises, though I never saw him wear any of them beneath the fold in his sarong or carry one or several in his hands when he went out to the shops. In his official photographs as the magistrate of Marang or Kemaman or Batu Rakit he wore a ceremonial sword with his dress uniform, though I was more fearful of the stern look on his face than the weapon in his belt. I never saw the sword in his house though, so it must have been taken, on a short lease, from our local version of the Moss Bros.

Father had a long sword that was his gölök panjang that he never spoke about, and I never saw him wave it in anger or in jest. It was hidden under his four poster bed, and on it were inscriptions in the Jawi script, written in dots, and I think it just said Kuala Trengganu, plus a date. Sometimes he wrapped it in a piece of rag, but when we were moving house, he wrapped it in many pages of a newspaper and sent it (together with our other belongings) to the Pahang Mail Transport Company to be sent to the faraway town of Kuantan where we stayed for a brief period. My late elder brother came home one afternoon when our things were all packed and cleared to say that he’d seen the workers hurling our family gölök like a javelin in the Pahang Mail compound. True to his word, when we saw the gölök again in Kuantan its pointed end had broken off in the form that we in Trengganu would call sumbéng.

When Abdullah Munshi arrived in Kuala Trengganu 170 years ago (in March 1838), he saw men who were not just carrying a mere short knife or the casual kris, but armed to the teeth as they were gadding about in the pasar area of Kampung Laut. "Each man,” said Abdullah, “carrying four or five throwing instruments, and a keris and a long sword; and that's all they do, walking up and down the street carrying their weapons."I thought Abdullah had just strayed into a rough spot of town and thought no more of that especially as it happened to be the market place. Mother used to call these rough elements our budök pasör, the street urchins who lived in our Tanjong market, but even then I never saw them carry a knife or even a stick. The only weapons wielded then in the pasar were by fierce looking men called the orang daging (“meat people”, i.e. butchers) and their instrument of choice was the short straight blade that we called the badik, that they pulled from a wooden scabbard kept beneath their waist band — always in the back, close to their spine — to cut the meat.

And then, while looking through my recently acquired copy (which is, alas, in poor shape) of Howard Malcolm’s “Travels in Hindustan, Malaya, Siam and China”, I found this passage about his visit to the town of Tringano :

” The population is about 40,000. The principal product is tin, of which they gather annually about 600,000 pounds. The men not only wear a krees, like other Malays, but often two, and sometimes a sword also; quarrelling much, and working little. Their women do most of the business, and Chinese work the mines.”

Howard was a missionary do-gooder who went out from his native America in 1835 in search of fresh fields to conquer and fresh natives to convert. He arrived in Calcutta and Hindoostan in September 1836, and in Tringano (which he described as “a champaign country, of low hills, producing a great variety of delicious fruits”) soon after that, just three years before Abdullah.

Who were these men on the wildside, walking with the clanking of metal in their footsteps and scaring the little kids of men and goats? Were they local vigilantes in the employ of the Sultan to keep the peace?

Photo: Armed men in Bali.

14. How to...Ndér pöténg

In this day of our age, ndér pöténg could result from sunspot activity or an extreme condition that knocks men senseless and sans navigation via satellite. The combination of sounds in this phrase gives it adequate description, forward and backwards and confined in area but moving straight up and sideways. But ndér pöténg is truly a biped activity, a pedestrian's rather than a motorised excursion. No ndér can be said to be genuinely pöténg if the actor is driving a souped up Jeep.

It’s anyone’s guess how the beginnings of ndér pöténg came about or when it turned into what it is now, i.e. an art. In the 19th century when Abdullah the Munshi came to Kuala Trengganu and looked in at Kampung Laut that was a stone’s throw from our Kampung Tanjong, he poked in his Singapura nose and sniffed at the men who were walking from one end of the market place and then turning back again once they got to the other side. These were days when stones were plentiful and men were not averse to throwing some in self-expression; and if context has to be placed in Dollah’s sniff it must be said that his derision was aimed at a rowdy band who were armed, well, to the teeth.

With covered drains and shopping malls there’s no better time than now to ndér pöténg. In urban streets you’ll have to be well prepared: with strong legs perhaps and proper shoes, and a strong voice to cuss the motorcyclists and urban authorities for not providing proper pavements for you to walk. In Trengganu you’d probably be able to get away with it in your kaing ssahang which is an all purpose rag that keeps your parts protected and out of the purview of the crowd. In the streets of Kuala Trengganu there were many ndér pöténgers so apparelled, going up and down the streets with no intent or purpose, moving hither and thither into lanes and crowds, and they were nearly all completely out of their heads. Which brings us to the first rule for the serious practitioners of the ndér pöténg art, and that is: it helps if you’re slightly mad.

The other is that you cannot have a purpose and ndér pöténg, and this applies to civilians as to the uniformed crowd. A man going round and round in an errand for his wife is not, for instance, a doer, nor is a policeman in plainclothes or in uniform if his movements are in the course of work, say to catch someone ndér pöténging in a prohibited place. And this raises a technical point: if, on arrest, a person is charged with doing it for a purpose, i.e. he is accused of loitering, say, with intent, then it could not later be argued in court that he or she was doing the ndér pöténg act. It is a rule well enshrined in — I think — the Trengganu Stone that whomsoever goes out for a walk whilst knowing where he was going to in the first place i.e. having an a priori aim, then his walk cannot be so construed as being in the nature of the act.

The mist of time has built a haze over the origins of this almost onomatopoeic phrase. Some say that the standardspeak mundar mandir [“Go up and down stream, move to and fro” — Winstedt’s Malay-English] may have been contracted in the first word ndér, and then pöténg does sound suspiciously like the standardspeak ponteng, to be AWOL.

Philology would have been better served if the Munshi had approached the band of Kampung Laut men to ascertain if this was the case, but they were all grinning oh so intently at him, and then there was also this matter of those arms that were stuck in their teeth...