Taste of Many Colours

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.

Selamat Hari Raya

Wishing all my readers a Blessed Eid.

من العاءدين الفاءزين المقبولين

The Bell and a Stick

The man with the white turban wrapped around his red hat was our Mufti Sheikh Yusuf al-Zawawi, Egyptian and engaging, a man who was at ease with everybody and was widely respected for his presence and learning, and he leant on his walking stick as he looked around in the Tanjong market.

I don't suppose the Mufti of Trengganu in the present day goes to town anymore with his driver by his side and his handbasket of fish and fruit, but Sheikh Yusuf with thobe flowing and driver in tow looked at the array of fish laid out on the mat on the floor in the market and pointed at it with his stick. The fish seller, unmindful of the office of the mufti and the prospective customer in the flowing robe, grabbed hold of the stick and cast it unceremoniously aside.

This was a story I was told by many an elderly folk to illustrate the gap between foreign practicalities and Trengganu's delicate form and etiquette. Even the man of religion was liable to make grave mistakes when it came to what we in Trengganu called jjuruh, and its cousins tertib terning and tamakninöh. The irony is tamakninöh came from the Arabic tuma'nina meaning composure or calmness as in prayer, but in Trengganuspeak it has taken on the extended meaning of 'being prim and proper'. Someone who's lacking in it, i.e. takdök tamakninöh goes about hurriedly and waves his stick about, though I hasten to add that our Mufti wasn't a man who was intentionally rude. He was just not totally immersed in our local ways.

"Biar gök tamakninöh sikik wok! Tertib terning gök sikik!" is a reproach from an elder to a very young person (wok) to be mindful and polite and right. Tertib is, as you've recognised, from another Arabic word, tartib, order. Tertib terning is what I've called in the past, a ding-dong word. [see, Friends in the Night, infra;Growing Up In Trengganu, supra]. A tertib person knows the order of things and has the savoir faire that's born of good breeding, so his opposite would be löklak, a word I've also heard used in Kedah. Mat Löklak burns the bread, trips on the cat, walks in front of elders without stooping down low and wears his songkok with the edges aligned with his shoulder blades.

Here's the ultimate disapprobation for someone whose form is totally bad and manners absolutely out: "Dök jjuruh haröh setabok harang!" In other words, a way beyond redemption sort of folk.

Now our Sheikh Yusuf al-Zawawi once shook his stick at the Bukit Putri and silenced the genta bell that'd been tolling for a good many years on the Hill of our Princess; and so it was that the bell was heard no more in the Ramadhan months and on the eve and morn of our Eids (Hari Raya) after that. His reason for silencing the bell-chimes that brightened our festive months was because it was un-Islamic he said (and he could well have been right). For years Kuala Trengganuers felt the loss and mourned the silence and the emptiness of our genta-less Eids; but happily for them they still had the sonorous voice of Bilal Sa'id and the thunderous tones of Bilal Deramang that came down from the minarets from dawn to dusk to fill the emptiness in their hearts.

The voices of Pak Sa'id and Pak Deramang (Abdul Rahman) have long gone into the ethers of Hari Rayas past, and the genta is now perhaps forever silenced by the al-Zawawi stick, but I wish my Muslim readers a happy Hari Raya nevertheless: may your day be as sweet as the call of the takbir on this blessed 'Eid.