The Sound of Heavy Metal

On the plates in the afternoon light, the akök took on a golden pallor. There were many colours of the day: green and opal and the transluscent yellow of sugar-encrusted beleda and the blood red stain of the sirap water. There’s sweetness in the air and the aroma of pandan and vanilla, and green shoots clinging to their limp over-cooked stalks in the brass pot of bubor lambok, in the off-white starch bed of the soft-boiled nasi (rice). It is hard to say what goes into this bubur from looking at this thick mixture; rice of course, and green shoots and do I see fish meat broken into pieces here and there? There’s salt, certainly, but go easy on the salt, they say, if budu is used for added flavour.

Our cousin Dah once felt nausea coming up just before the genta clanged on the hill and was quickly offered an antidote of akök from the plate, much to our envy. She took a bite and then thought better of it, and quickly spat half an akök into the sinking end of a Trengganu puasa day. We were full-day fasters in our house, not the half-day dodderers that we met at school.

We lived within hearing distance of the genta on the hill, which, given the spread of our town, meant practically the whole of the Kuala. Even on gloomy spray-filled days we could still see the hill from our front window. The genta was the big bell that clanged the key hours of a Ramadhan day. It clanged in the dark close to dawn, the time of day we Trengganuers called the göcang hour (fr. Standardspeak goncang, the ringing of the bell), and then it clanged and clanged as the sun sank into the sea, to mark the end of our fasting day. I once thought that the genta was made by our brassmakers in the brassmaking quarter of our Tanjong area, but recent enquiries showed that it was cast by Trengganu bellmakers in the earth of the Istana Maziah not far from where it still hangs today, at the peak of Bukit Puteri. Hefty men must have hoisted it to the hilltop once the brass had cooled and the moulding clay knocked off the skin of the bell, bearing its weight up the steep path until they finally reached the eastern side that overlooked the sea, huffing and puffing and lelöh bedöhö; but as they must’ve been urged on by one or all seven of the Tuan Puteri that lived on the hill, it was a mighty deed of the day.

Sometimes, when the sea wind blew the hill away from us, it took the genta sound with it too. Some days we heard the cannon roar from Bukit Besar; but along the stretch from the Kedai Payang to the Ladang of the turtle was a chain of prayer houses that carried the relay of the azan call from surau to surau, from the one in Kampong Datok to the one with the big fish in its water tank by the shore, and then onwards to the suraus of Haji Mat Kerinci to our very own Tok Sheikh Abdul Kadir until it reached the Surau Besar and then meandering shorewards, to the Surau Pasir and back again to the main road to the Surau of Haji Mat Litör opposite a place marked by the green public convenience in the neighbourhood called — unfortunately — Jambang Ija — the green lavatory.

In the fading light there were people hurrying home and the clanging of the genta, and the boom of the big gun on a distant hill as fishermen and market traders hurried to the coffee shops and Indian shopkeepers paused to pour out the cha from their metal kölèh. The day was ending in Kuala Trengganu and the muezzin made his call from the tower of the Masjid Abidin to the dusk chorus from the suraus. Someone, waiting by his glass of chilled sirap clinking with fractured ice in the stirred in sweetness of condensed milk and cane sugar, walked to the big drum in the rear of our own surau and pounded a rhythmic beat on its hide. And it marked the end of the fast, the time for our bbuka.

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.