A Sword in the Stone

From the bend at the house of the Isaacs, whose pater familias founded the Grammar School, to the intersection of Tanjong, was a short, long road with many tales.

Kolam or Kolang as we knew it in the vernacular, is a body of water, but there was no pond (“kolam”) in the area as we knew it. It had gravestones, laid out over a vast stretch just yards from the road as it bent, and the old cemetery stretched all the way to the Sekolah Paya Bunga. This curve on the edge of this old cemetery was perhaps Kolam proper, where the road took an almost ninety degree turn to avoid the Istana, the late lamented residence of Sultan Sulaiman Badrul Alam Shah and the birthplace of the Trengganu gamelan and the joget gamelan Trengganu.

Walking away from this bend, going towards the visible minaret of Masjid Abidin, was probably the expanse of Kampung Patani, whose name may hold the key to the old cemetery of unknown people. This was perhaps the resting place of travellers from the place that gave the name to this village – when it was a village – and they were probably the henchman and women and the courtiers and the maids in train who came down with the would-be sultan Zainal Abidin the first, a Johorian, who answered the call of Trengganu when he was in the southern kingdom as the adopted son of its ruler, Phra Nang Chau Yang. Johor and Patani had interesting links in history as may be gleaned from the Syaer Dang Sirat.

But I am taking you now, some three hundred years later, to the magnificent tamarind tree in the bend near the istana, to look down the straight path of the Jalan Kolam towards the sea. I knew the tree very well as I used to walk in its shade most days, and there were goldsmiths' shops across the road, and a hair dresser, and the house of Cikgu Wè, brother of the young Döllöh who beat the geduk at the masjid; and there was the house of Mr Isaacs, of course, with his Jaguar in the car port, and in the night when the lights went dim, unseen hands rustled leaves and spirits and ghouls dangled with the boomerang fruits of the tree.

And I look forward now, to the house of Pök Lèh Kastang, a genial old man already long retired from his daily work in the Customs office when I used to see him bathe at the well right by his house as I sat in the trishaw of Pök Mat after he'd dropped my classmate Tay Huay Cheng in Kampung Aur after our afternoon school.

But no, says my friend Ajidul. Look right as you walk away from the tamarind tree (in the bright light of day, of course) and you'll see a strange old grave marked by a sword that also served as the Christian cross, on the edge of what was another old Muslim cemetery. And he has sent me a graphic representation of this mysterious place of repose to bring back a bit of old memory:I am afraid I cannot recall having seen such a place. If I did I would have stopped to look at the sword that was also a cross as it would indeed have been a major object of curiosity in this corner of Kolam/Kampung Patani.

It is no longer there, Ajidul now says. It was pulled down long ago. And as is typical of Trengganu demolition works, no one thought to keep the sword in the stone as a record that some foreign soul was once interred there in the earth of Trengganu. But who? And why was s/he there at all?

Perhaps someone out there will remember, I told Ajidul. Perhaps someone will come and tell us that s/he too saw the sword in the stone just yards from the tamarind tree. And to help jog other memories, my friend Ajidul has sketched a map here to show the house of Pök Lèh, and the cemetery and the haunted tree:

Music of Decay

Last night I dreamt I went back to the old tamarind tree in the bend of Jalan Kolam, and this is what I saw:
Broken bits of gamelan tunes blew in with occasional sweeps of the wind, sad lamentation of times past reaching out to the here and now, Pök Mat Nöbat in his younger days, stooping in his later years to re-beat the tunes on the gamelan Trengganu; it was there that the first notes of the Trengganu state anthem were sung before the Sultan Sulaiman, by students picked from the nearby Sekolah Paya Bunga; the scholar-saint Haji Abdul Rahman Limbong was summoned there when the peasants took up arms in the ulu (but it is not clear if the man did go); and here the gamelan instruments were lost and found, and then revived when Pök Mat was summoned from the side of his cauldron of nasi minyök in his shed and shop, with his coterie of ageing courtiers, to channel the music that was playing in their heads for so long once more, back into the gamelan glockenspiel. How this fine old istana went into neglect and disrepair remains a mystery.

Like the face of clocks, floppy, curled and clinging to the ledge and branch of a dead tree in Dali's Persistence of Time, melancholy hangs here in deep shadows and its movements watched by ghostly eyes peering through dusty panes of closed windows — at patches gone grey in the earth and grass untrimmed and gone to seed in the soil; distant leaves of the keladi fringing this sad, haunting decay. "What does it all mean?" someone asked of Magritte, of his paintings that were hard to fathom. "It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable," replied the old master.

This is the sad end-note to the Istana Kolam, one of the surviving istana of wood in Kuala Trengganu, in Kampung Kolam. I used to see its balai through a gap in the fence in the bend of the road when we walked from Kampung Tanjong to the Masjid Putih, past the huge, ghostly tamarind tree, past the house of Mr Isaacs of the Grammar School, past the quaint old-style house of Pak Long who made ma'ajun (a pastille of herbs and stuff for the weary male), and then the shop of a kindly man named Babu of the Paul family on the right side of the road, and a huge house stood across from there, at the junction of two roads, home of Che Mat Riau, another illustrious character of Kuala Trengganu.
Old Istana, better days... The balai was even then quite bereft of soul, the istana in sad neglect, and grass was growing wild and children were at play wherever children played when they were left to roam free. To my regret, I never ventured into its grounds, fearing ghosts past and peering eyes from dark corners. Behind the istana was a vast, old burial ground of unknown people.It is sadder still now, for even the above is no more. A friend once wrote to me to say that he saw bits and parts of the Istana Kolam laid out in a car boot sale. Now, another friend has sent me this picture of what appears to be the 'ceiling rose' [see picture, above] in the old istana. What light that shone from there is probably now dimmed out in some ghostly corner, snuggling with the spirits and the sounds of old Trengganu.

Now they are planning to re-build the Istana Kolam in another place, in Duyung probably. Duyung is a farway place across the water with its own niche and history, but it is here that the old istana should be rebuilt as a heritage centre. The authorities should reclaim this land, and rebuild it here, and return the Istana Kolam to its own soil.

See also:
Singing for the Sultan
Music in the Rubble
Man at the Istana

GUiT News GUiT at the Singapore Writers FestivalGUiT will be launched by Monsoon Books at the Singapore Book Publishers Association Book Launch at the Writers Festival, 7th December, 6 pm, in the Earshot Café/Bookshop on the ground floor of The Arts House. I hope to be there to read a few lines from GUiT and sign a few copies. See you there! Read reviews of GUiT by Tunku Halim, Lydia Teh, Elviza, Tengku Ali Bustaman (Pok Ku). If you are in London, Growing Up in Trengganu is now available from Stanfords, the travel bookshop in Long Acre, Covent Garden and from Probsthain's @ Great Russell St., WC1 (opp. the British Museum; see picture, left) and at their branch in the Brunei Gallery, SOAS (London University). Latest News: In Kuala Terengganu GUiT is now available @ the shop formerly known as Keda Pök Löh Yunang (now Alam Akademik, 12 Jalan Bandar, Kuala Terengganu). In Kuala Lumpur: Kinokuniya, Times bookshops, and MPH. Elsewhere: You may place your order on-line from Kinokuniya or MPH "A beautiful book, very well written and with its vignettes of life it tells so much about the Malays - far more than one can get from academic studies." — Frederick Lees, author, Fool's Gold; The Arthuriad; The Rape of Rye; etc.

Music in the Rubble

Late one afternoon in Jugra, in the soft light of fading memory, we walked to the skeletal remains of a house that hid behind a bank of trees. It was no ordinary place; its bones were the decaying remains of the istana of Sultan Abdul Samad, a colourful figure in the royal Bugis lineage of Selangor.

Time had been harsh on this historic pile, columns wrapped in the descending gloom and tiles and wood carvings that had seen better days, now exposed to the elements and worse. In the shadows were hands that were plucking and hacking at bits and parts of the past: we caught two men in the act of stealing Selangor’s history.

I wrote about that incident and connected it to a shadow in my own past in Kuala Trengganu [see Dah Nak Wak Guane] the Istana Kolam that sat in an area of some ambiguity, between Kampung Kolam and Kampung Petani. It too was an old istana, grander than the old ‘palace’ of Jugra, but wrapped likewise in sad decay and the hazy light of melancholy.

A friend recently wrote to say that he once saw bits of the Istana Kolam laid out in a car boot sale.

The Istana Kolam in its prime was at the heart of Trengganu’s history. It was there that the Trengganu gamelan was born and reborn, and there the Trengganu dissident-scholar Haji Abdul Rahman Limbong was called to meet the Sultan for a rebellion that he was allegedly fomenting in the Ulu. When a rabble-rouser named Garieb Rauf came to revive the Parti Negara after the death of Datuk Onn Jaafar, it was at this Istana that he first hung his shirt, before coming to live in our midst in Tanjong Pasar. He made much of his being in the Istana of course, but he was no Onn Jaafar, so the Istana Kolam outlived him and soon saw him fade away.

Unknown to me then the Istana had a hidden aspect, a wide living quarter under a roof of Senggora tiles, with porte-cochère, and raised on stilts. All I could see from the gap in the wall between the bend in the road and the old tamarind tree each time I walked past that way was the Balai Besar where many royal ceremonies would have taken place in the Istana’s heyday, where Cikgu Muhammad Hashim bin Abu Bakar, a teacher from the nearby Sekolah Paya Bunga stood with a group of school children from the Boy Scouts group of Kuala Trengganu to sing a song that he’d composed for Sultan Sulaiman’s birthday in 1927. The song later became the state anthem of Trengganu.

Istana Kolam became the centre of gamelan music in Trengganu during the reign of Sultan Sulaiman, but as to how the gamelan came to Trengganu is a contentious area. One version has it that like the older nobat, it came to Trengganu from Riau — in 1813 says one version of the story — before it moved on to the istana of Pahang. What can be said with certainty is that the gamelan as palace music flourished in Trengganu under the reign of Sultan Sulaiman Badrul Alam Syah, after his marriage to Tengku Ampuan Mariam, daughter of Sultan Ahmad of Pahang. The Tengku Ampuan, helped by her mother Che Zubedah, developed dances for the first time to be accompanied by the gamelan. It is said that it was Sultan Sulaiman who turned the Joget Pahang into the Joget Gamelan Trengganu (Trengganu Gamelan Dance).

After Sultan Sulaiman’s death in 1942, the Trengganu gamelan moved completely from the ceremonial Istana Maziah to Istana Kolam, the official residence of Tengku Ampuan Mariam. There it stayed until the music faded completely away with the passing of the Tengku Ampuan and the decline of the Istana.

One sad day in Trengganu the municipal workers came with their lorries and their sturdy workers, and without as much as a passing thought for the glory of better days, they pulled down the Istana.