Saints & Singing Birds

I have skimpy memories of birds and the twitterings in my head are either misplaced or misheard. In my recent blog, Conference of Birds I said that Grandfather in Kampung Raja, Besut, kept pigeons in elaborate cages, only to draw a swift and knuckle-rapping email from my brother, who said:

"Error. They weren't merpati but ketitir or merbok or Zebra Doves.

"To enhance the voices of the ketitirs, Tok Wan [Grandfather] would feed them with whole pickled cili padi. In fact not fed, but shoved down the throat of the birds. Done so, he would then tease them with ARKKK, ARKKKK...Then bathed them dengan menyembur air dari mulut dia."

So there you are, vivid imagery in your mind's eye and the distant play-back of the songbird, so haunting and so sweet — it is said &mdash and so plaintive a cry as to make grown men weep. Celestial sounds coaxed from the angelic voice boxes of little birds by bird's eye chilli, its heat drowned in vinegar and doused by a soothing spray from the pouted lips of Grandfather. Arkkk and the bird said Koooo!

And then came Bergen with fireworks up their throats. I was just recovering from this alarming thought, actually, when my mind was diverted by a comment by Atok, and mighty pleased I was at that, to an even more distant land of shamans and long-tailed birds dangling from clouds by the strength of colourful plumes.

I have never seen a Cenderawasih in my life though I spoke and sang about them when I wrote about some intriguing eggs in September last year. They were burak's eggs, we whispered in each other's ears when we were children, whenever anyone carried word of their alleged presence in the tomb of our local saint Tok Pelam. The funny thing is that we never bothered to go to take a peek into the tomb ourselves, even though it wasn't far from our Sekolah Melayu (Malay School) in Ladang.

It was only recently, while looking through a beautiful book of notes and etchings by Ilse Noor that I found that those eggs do really sit in the tomb house, cradled in net hammocks. It 'puzzled and troubled me', said Ilse Noor. I was completely astounded.

She was told by the custodian of the tomb that they were eggs of 'Cenderawasih', Birds of Paradise that still fly nowadays in East Malaysia, high in clouds of myths and facts as to strain the necks and minds of both shamans and fanciers. You will have to go to Eggs in A Net to read what I have said about the eggs and the man in the mausoleum.
I have actually been meaning to go back to Tok Pelam (real name Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz) so now that I've got the opportunity I shall take you there, not directly to him, but to another saint named Sheikh Ibrahim, a fellow Hadhrami (i.e. from Hadhramaut in Yemen) who, like him, arrived in Trengganu via Patani in the eighteenth century. Sheikh Ibrahim is a name that is as well-known in Kuala Trengganu as Tok Pelam as they both have cemeteries named after them, in proximity in death as in life, the two neighbouring kuburs of Tok Pelam and Sheikh Ibrahim.

Tok Sheikh Ibrahim is remembered in folk history as the man who single-handedly drove away ships that were shelling Kuala Trengganu by simply walking up and down the coast uttering prayers and supplications to Almighty God. The story goes that the enemies saw not him but hundreds and indeed thousands of men waiting to defend the shore, so they just went home.

William Skeat, who visited Kuala Trengganu in October 1899, said that the shelling was done by men of the Maharajah of Johor, but not so says historian J.M.Gullick in a short footnote to an extract from Skeat's report in his Traveller's Anthology, "They Came to Malaya"; it was the British that day who sent most Kuala Trengganu folk scrambling for the hills.

I have been to the Sheikh Ibrahim cemetery many times but was never made aware that the Tok Sheikh himself was laid to rest in this sprawling burial site, so I shall have to rely on Skeat to give us a description of his grave:

"The grave had five posts (batu nesan) at each end, making ten in all, instead of the usual single post; the superfluous ones had been added out of the funds provided by the saint's many devotees. To them also, presumably, was due the fact that it was protected by a triple mosquito curtain, and an atap roof-shelter was built over it."