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.