Memories of Grandfather

Grandfather (Tok Wan) had singing birds, a hand-rolled leaf cigarette between his lips and wisps of thin blue smoke rising in curls around his ears; in his head he probably held more stories of his life than there was news in his daily Utusan Melayu.

We had Tok Wan standing in an unidentified place in a huge portrait on our Tanjong wall — a black and white portrait under a patina of dust of many years. In the Besut of his base, there was another Tok Wan up on the wall, standing in a clearing that backed up to some lush undergrowth, expressionless as he was in our Tanjong portrait, but there were hints here that at some point in time someone had tried to colour the shrubs in green and yellow and the red of the Besut kesumba. In his white dress uniform of the Trengganu civil service he stood more aloof than the character that we knew, but his expressionless face must have concealed many stories from an itinerant past, and events that must have shaped many distinct pictures in his mind's eye.

Tok Wan had been a travelling man, as I've come to know, and unsurprisingly, a peripatetic scholar who had accumulated many kitabs in his bookcases, and in the drawers of his table. This trait he must have passed on to Father, whose cartloads of kitab my family members recently rescued from the anai-anai of Kuala Terengganu. In his lifetime Tok Wan had followed a zigzagging student's path from Besut to Kota Baru to Kuala Trengganu, then to the Patani of his ancestors, and then to Kota Baru and then back to Patani and then back again to Kota Baru. On Sunday 15th Nov 1908, nine days after Id ul Fitr, he hung his songkok and opted for a more sedentary life as clerk to the Shari'ah court in Kota Baru. It was the beginning of his long and chequered career.

His dress uniform was no doubt worn in the service of Trengganu. He was Registrar of the district court in Besut in 1915 and rose to become magistrate in Kuala Trengganu before moving on to the acting magistrate's post in Kemaman in 1929 (three years before Winstedt went there). From 1931 his career took a different turn — he became District Officer of Batu Rakit and Merang — and it was from there, I think, that he cut a different dash, the gleaming white suit and the fancy hat that we saw in the portraits on the family wall of the family house in Besut, and in his other house in Tanjong, Kuala Trengganu. He became DO of two other Trengganu districts, Kuala Brang and Marang & Mercang, before finally withdrawing from public life in 1937.

In this picture [above]that a family member has sent me from an old newspaper, he takes on a different turn, he is seen with a dress sword, which — I hope — he never drew in anger. We never saw him in this full regalia of dress uniform and embroidered hat, and official collar whenever we visited him in Besut. Tok Wan was, to me, a stern man with a wry humour, with his haji's turban and the Malay baju over his sarung pelikat, and his face and grey moustache became luminous when he sat in the light coming in from the window, as he read his kitab or the Utusan Melayu.