Cat Takes Nap (Holds Page)

In 'The Haji's Book of Nursery Rhymes', a book I last saw, many years ago, in the window of a second-hand bookshop in Charing Cross Road, London, there is a nursery rhyme that translates as

"Dang, dang kong,
Kucing dalam tong...

It's a translation of that familiar nursery rhyme of course, Ding dong bell, Pussy in the well...

I can't recall many nursery rhymes from Trengganu that are spun around cats but there are many feline-centred local beliefs. Bathe a cat for instance, and it will rain; and the hantu kucing wakes up early in the morning from the para, the grate. We did not know what the ghostly cat did, nor why it spent the night sleeping in a bed of ash. But we knew that our cats had knotted tails because an ancestor of theirs once annoyed a tiger, and the tiger tied its tail in a knot and the knot got caught in the genes and that was how it worked to our present day cats. Cats bury their poo in the ground to hide their work from the tiger who'd probably be very annoyed if he trod on some. Wise cats.

There were many cats around us in the fish market, Kucing Koreng, Kucing Belang, Kucing Cicök. There were cats around the kerepok factories around the well of our local surau (prayer house) talking incessantly in cat language to Mök Som and Mök Nab, asking them to throw some fishy scraps, perhaps a freshly severed kembong head.

Köreng was your scruffy cat, with much mileage on the clock, and an epithet adults used for little children with faces tarnished by heat and dust; belang was the striped one, not quite the tiger's coat, but streaks in a prominent colour against a usually darker coat; and then the cicök that's your Tabby that got its name from a textile pattern from Baghdad. But with all those cats in our midst I can't think of a word in Trengganuspeak (or for that matter, Standardspeak) to describe the sound of a purring cat. Perhaps it's because we don't pay them much heed when they are contented cats, but we have the phrase kucing kkarak in Trengganuspeak to describe the dialogue that cats have with other cats before they lock themselves in vicious embrace in the ground or mud. This is the ggömö that's done sometimes by their human counterparts.

Kucing jatuh anök was a phrase Mother used quite often to describe the restless pacing here and there of someone struck by a real or imagined anxiety attack — like a Mother Cat whose kittens have dropped from a higher nesting place, say the top of a cupboard. When the Mother Cat picks up the kitten with her mouth, that's gömbeng which is gentler than the kereköh that we sometimes had to do when the buffalo meat was especially tough in the pot' dök pok (standardspeak, tak empok, not tender). Then of course there's the kucing kurap which is a mangy cat if you're a cat, but a term of abuse if you're not.

And finally, a word of thanks to Tabby (photo, above) who held my book open this morning when I was doing some work (while he caught up with his sleep).