Fish With A Tale

The Wans of Trengganu, for reasons not known to fish or men, shun the ikang (fish) of the kkacang variety.

I did not know what the kkacang was until my friend Ajidol sent me this photograph of man and fish basking in the midday sun off the coast of Marang. The kkacang is of course the geminated Trengganuspeak version of the kacang-kacang from the family of Sphyraenidae which, in this variety, comes in two forms, the kacang merah, the red kkacang) and the kkacang putih, the white Sphyraena barracuda that Ajidol is now holding on his hook in the photo.

Stories about fish abound in riparian and littoral communities of Malaysia. A friend from Perak once told me that his family avoids the ikan tapah,the Wallago leerii, a carnivorous river catfish from the family Clupeidae that can be more than a metre long. These families of Wallago shunners are descendants of Pak Kadok from the Lambor Kiri and Lambor Kanan parts of the State. The tapah is a beast of a fish that snaps at monkeys, and little fish and probably the odd little boy in its travel along the river. Looking at the fish, with its nasal barbels and sheer body weight, I too would have run a mile while urging my family members to steer clear like Pak Kadok must have done some 300 years ago if it came biting at my toe.

There are family descendants of Pengiran Liga in Brunei and Sarawak that avoid the patin, another catfish of the Pangaslidae family, not because the fish is weird or scary, but because they believe they are descended from them. The patin now widely farmed in Malaysia, is a silvery fish with much fat in its belly, and it cooks well in asam and chilli.

There must be many more men (and women) who avoid particular types of fish (the Minang people of Sumatra, I hear, don’t touch the talang, the Queenfish Scomberoides lysan) but from my conversations with fish I am told that they in turn avoid types of men (and women) too, especially those that carry nets or hooks with them to the water.

My friend Ajidol in the photo above, has no such fishy taboo, but there may be things that he may want to look at again for here (below) is a picture of him before he caught the kkacang and ate it too: