A Well Worn Tale

Around Christmastime maybe eight years ago, an aristocratic German man from one of the state education authorities told a group of us, while waving at the river Rhine behind him, of the enchanting lady Lorelei, the sad maiden who sat on the riverbank “just behind me”, he said, whose haunting calls sent many a fishing boat and many a fisherfolk down to their grave in the deep water.

As a Trengganu man I wasn’t in the least surprised by this siren call, for in Kuala Trengganu we too had one residing on Bukit Putri, a lady with one foot in the spirit and another in the corporeal world, and to whose door on the hill Trengganu folk beat a well-trodden path to — believe it or not — borrow her crockery. It was a very satisfactory and very Trengganu way of Trengganu flesh meeting the spirit world: we kept her at a higher plane and we borrowed from her cups for tea.

This was the tale told us by our mothers at bedtime or by elderly folk with rheumy eyes turned towards Bukit Putri. Some quiet nights when I looked out of the window from the front part of our house I saw a light winking from the hilltop, guiding ships coming into the Kuala, not misleading them like the lady Lorelei. And I thought of the Tuan Putri wandering there like a demented soul trying to make sense of the unsatisfactory audit of some missing items in her household.

Both the Lady Lorelei and our Tuan Putri were pushed out of my mind for a while by those petty businesses of this workaday world until the last Christmas break, when, swept to a quiet corner at a friend’s wedding anniversary do, I met again a friend who’d in the past been telling me fascinating stories about his corner of Losong in Kuala Trengganu. Now Losong is a part of town about which I know very little though I was told once that the word actually means ‘an escape route’, i.e. a bolt hole for one or the other of those parties that were intermittently engaged in their little wars. And so what did we talk — this Losong man and I — after we’d exchanged our guana gamök and dok ggitu lah sokmo?

Well, we exchanged notes about Trengganu wells.

There was a well near his house, my Trengganu man told me, that was square-shafted and held together not by the standard Trengganu round kerek or by brickwork as in our own well in Tanjong Pasar, but its sides were boarded with ancient lumber. Wells, as you know if you’ve stood there pouring water on yourself with a timba, need to be cleaned once in a while to clear them of mosses and lichens and old timba that had cut loose from their worn out ropes of woven coconut fibre. This was the ritual known as ranya telaga, when a man in his kain ssahang goes down into the well to rid it of all its debris before going up again and then, if it’s a family well, enlist the help of all able-bodied family members to bail out all the dirt to let fresh water trickle again into the well.

It was during one such ritual in his kampung that they found crockery hidden at the bottom of the well, said my friend. And this links us back to Bukit Putri because, as we so often heard at bedtime, the Tuan Putri fled the hill, never to be seen again, after some parties defaulted on their promise to return her pieces of china.

Folk in my kampung said that those were the pieces of crockery that belonged to the Tuan Putri, my friend said.

“Well, let’s go back and take another look at that old well then,” I said.

“No that’s no use,” my Trengganu friend said. “There’s a house now standing on that well."
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I have been scouring many picture files for that pintu gerbang, that old gateway into the Istana Maziah at the foot of Bukit Putri where, as I wrote last year, the hantu kekeng stretched his (its?) legs at the chime of the genta at the midnight hour.

I am happy to say that I have found one half of it — the gerbang I mean — in this photograph that my brother took out of our old family album. Here Father and his friend Soon (probably from the Post Office nearby) are seen standing by one those cannons that were placed in Padang Malaya (now Padang Maziah) under the pinang gatal tree. You can see some of its early shoots on the left hand of the picture. And there it is, that old pintu gerbang of the Istana Maziah in the background, looking tired and well-mottled even in 1947 when this photograph was taken. I hope the hantu kekeng has found a suitable place for it to haunt now that they’ve dismantled this pintu gerbang, and I hope too that the road there is broad enough for it to bring its midnight stretch to its full potential.