Our Good Ship Raya

They made ships, do you remember ships on the eve of Hari Raya?

I was reminded of them by my good friend Wang Ripéng ( who now resides in Kemamang). Wang Ripéng was a handsome besepctacled guy, a couple of years our senior at school, and he wielded a stout staff, for he was also a stalwart of the 1st Kuala Trengganu, a wanderer in this life of happy wandering, a tier of knots and a reader of Scouting for Boys, by Lord Baden Powell. How times have changed, if someone were to write a book called Scouting for Boys now he'd surely be taken away in a Police car.

Wang Ripéng wrote to me yesterday asking if I still remember the ships that were on shore, but for some reason I've completely forgotten about them now. Until, that is, I received his mail:

"Abg Pin teringat pada masa dahulu semasa warga Kg Tanjung menyambut Hari Raya. Tiap-tiap rumah yang ada laman, akan membina kapal dengan hiasan bendera serta lampu2."

"I remember those days, how we members of the Tanjong community celebrated Hari Raya. Every house with a compound would have a ship in it, decorated with flags and lights."

Why ships? Perhaps because we were coastal people, used to seeing those vessels coming in from Singapore - the Rawang and the Chusan and the Hong Ho - bobbing up and down in the water, all lit up and smoke churning out from their funnels as we looked at them from the sands of the Ujung Tanjong shore. These were vessels laden with our cargo of dreams, what waters had they been through? What surprises for us in store? They were normally rice for the shops and sugar for our tea, and a few other less mundane things like agar-agar from the Borneo waters and vanilla essence and oranges and fruit preserves from China.

We built our Raya dreams in a ship, constructed from bamboo frames and made over with glossy coloured paper from the Indian shops, and crepe paper streamers in pastel colours. There were coloured pieces in triangular shapes, all hanging in a row on a line that stretched from stern to funnel, and this was our good ship Hari Raya.

"Di kawasan dekat kedai Awang Tahir, pemuda2 akan membina bangsal yang dihiasi dengan lampu warna warni. Mereka akan adakan hiburan musik serta dengan nyanyian serta joget. Kita akan buat kereta dengan roda dari tin susu dan di control dengan tali guni yang diikat pada kedua2 hujung roda, serta dengan lampu yang dinyalakan dengan menggunakan minyak tanah dengan bersumbu kain burok, atau dengan damar yang dicari ditepi pantai, dibakar dalam ppurong."

"In the area near the shop of Awang Tahir, the young people would put up sheds that they'd decorate with multi-colured lights. They'd play music and sing songs and dance the joget too. We would make cars with milk can wheels, controlled by strings of jute tied to their rims. We also had paraffin lamps with wicks made from old rags, or powered by resin that we picked from the shore. We lit them up in coconut shells."

This was the atmosphere of Hari Raya, the feast of Eid, when all sadness descended for the passing of the fasting month and its rose syrup in clear glass bottles, deep red in hue and scented with pandan flavour, the abiding taste and smell of the fasting months of bulan puasa. We slurped it by the glassful, now that it has turned pink with the additioon of evaporated milk, and made cold with ice from the ice factory in Bukit Besar.

The ships appeared for the night of the tujuh likor, a landmark night for the fast of Ramadhan, for the likor is twenty in Malay reckoning that you add to the preceding number. So tujuh likor is the twenty-seventh of Ramadhan, a mere two or three days before Hari Raya, time for ships and flags and paper lanterns, and bamboo cannons startling old ladies into sudden jolts of hysteria, and for this one time in the month we were allowed to stay up and wander into the wee hours.
What I remember from this night long ago, when the kampong began to come aglow and the children came out to play was the gripping pain that gnawed in you when, after all the raucous laughter and the lights had dimmed from the sparklers and chinese lanterns and the cannons ceased their seasonal roar, was the sudden bereftness as I clambered the stairs up to our house, the yellow light flickering still at the end of the blackened wick, but the paraffin was going low, and the night was almost lost and little children were nearly all in bed after saying their last hurrah.

I didn't know if they were singing and dancing still in front of Awang Tahir's shop or if all those ships that sailed so brightly into the night on this prelude to the Hari Raya had dimmed their lights and reached ashore, but going up those stairs with those noises ringing still in your head while silence was taking hold everywhere, and Mother from behind the door peeking out and beckoning you to come in, her hands still fresh from mixing the flour, it was time for more than just a little melancholy.

Thank you Abang Péng for your wonderful ships and for that precious memory.

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Pelita pics borrowed from saifulislam.com, with thanks.

The Man Who Came In From the Sea

From Sulawesi he came to us; he was probably caught in a mighty storm while out fishing at sea, and blown to Trengganu shore.

On land he married a local lady and fathered at least one child. He called himself Bachok, a common name among Bugis men. In Lembing Awang Pulang ke Dayang (Awang's spear returns to Dayang), a tragic tale of disappointment and love lost among the the Bugis (Sulawesi) community in Parit Raja, Muar, in the second half of the 18th century, a man called Awang came home from his travels to marry his love Dayang, but found her on the eve of her marriage, to another guy called Bachok.

Awang turned up at the wedding and stabbed Bachok with a spear that was given to him by the Raja of Bugis. In the throes of death Bachok in turn pierced his best man with it, and the latter passed it on to another, and that person to another and so on until the spear found 99 victims. The last to receive the spear in his body was Dayang's father, who died valiantly while protecting his daughter, and who resisted the spear's demonic will to be passed on to another. And so ended this killing orgy.

In our story in Kuala Trengganu, Bachok appeared from the sea and then married a local girl, and became a part of our community. In life he probably thought often of his native land when he looked out from Tanjong to the South China Sea, but he never once returned to it. According to my brother who went to school with his son, towards the end of his life Bachok expressed a desire to visit his village in Sulawesi once more, but he died soon after and was buried in Kuala Trengganu.

He lived close to the shore and often walked past our house on his way to the pasar (the Tanjong market). His attire was the trademark of our brawn brigade, men whose work deployed and developed their muscles. He wore khaki shorts, and wrapped a sarong over it that hung like a skirt above his knees. Then a cummerbund of another sarong around the waist, and a head-wrap that we in the East Coast knew as the semutar. He was shirtless on hot days, and wore a T-shirt in cool weather.

One day he stopped in front of our house with a sharp golokin his waistband. "Stand back!" he warned everybody, as he scaled a tall coconut tree right to the top, as effortlessly as if the trunk was lying horizontal. And then from the top would come down coconut leaves, the spear-like shoot, the soft heart of the palm, and coconuts began to bounce at the foot of the tree.

With his legs wrapped to the trunk, Bachok would chop off a section of the tree, and then he'd moved down and lop off another, and so on in his descent until he reached the ground and the coconut tree was no more. He'd put the golok back to his waist-band as he moved about to put all the bits and pieces of the former tree into a pile.

And that's what Bachok did for us, he was the feller of our ailing coconut tree.

Photo courtesy of Ajidoel.

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.

14. How to...Ndér pöténg

In this day of our age, ndér pöténg could result from sunspot activity or an extreme condition that knocks men senseless and sans navigation via satellite. The combination of sounds in this phrase gives it adequate description, forward and backwards and confined in area but moving straight up and sideways. But ndér pöténg is truly a biped activity, a pedestrian's rather than a motorised excursion. No ndér can be said to be genuinely pöténg if the actor is driving a souped up Jeep.

It’s anyone’s guess how the beginnings of ndér pöténg came about or when it turned into what it is now, i.e. an art. In the 19th century when Abdullah the Munshi came to Kuala Trengganu and looked in at Kampung Laut that was a stone’s throw from our Kampung Tanjong, he poked in his Singapura nose and sniffed at the men who were walking from one end of the market place and then turning back again once they got to the other side. These were days when stones were plentiful and men were not averse to throwing some in self-expression; and if context has to be placed in Dollah’s sniff it must be said that his derision was aimed at a rowdy band who were armed, well, to the teeth.

With covered drains and shopping malls there’s no better time than now to ndér pöténg. In urban streets you’ll have to be well prepared: with strong legs perhaps and proper shoes, and a strong voice to cuss the motorcyclists and urban authorities for not providing proper pavements for you to walk. In Trengganu you’d probably be able to get away with it in your kaing ssahang which is an all purpose rag that keeps your parts protected and out of the purview of the crowd. In the streets of Kuala Trengganu there were many ndér pöténgers so apparelled, going up and down the streets with no intent or purpose, moving hither and thither into lanes and crowds, and they were nearly all completely out of their heads. Which brings us to the first rule for the serious practitioners of the ndér pöténg art, and that is: it helps if you’re slightly mad.

The other is that you cannot have a purpose and ndér pöténg, and this applies to civilians as to the uniformed crowd. A man going round and round in an errand for his wife is not, for instance, a doer, nor is a policeman in plainclothes or in uniform if his movements are in the course of work, say to catch someone ndér pöténging in a prohibited place. And this raises a technical point: if, on arrest, a person is charged with doing it for a purpose, i.e. he is accused of loitering, say, with intent, then it could not later be argued in court that he or she was doing the ndér pöténg act. It is a rule well enshrined in — I think — the Trengganu Stone that whomsoever goes out for a walk whilst knowing where he was going to in the first place i.e. having an a priori aim, then his walk cannot be so construed as being in the nature of the act.

The mist of time has built a haze over the origins of this almost onomatopoeic phrase. Some say that the standardspeak mundar mandir [“Go up and down stream, move to and fro” — Winstedt’s Malay-English] may have been contracted in the first word ndér, and then pöténg does sound suspiciously like the standardspeak ponteng, to be AWOL.

Philology would have been better served if the Munshi had approached the band of Kampung Laut men to ascertain if this was the case, but they were all grinning oh so intently at him, and then there was also this matter of those arms that were stuck in their teeth...

Growing Up In Trengganu #793, 616

Sometimes, late afternoon, we’d walk to the water's edge — ujong tanjong — and watch the dots in the horizon or the payangs coming in with the catch. There were barges bobbing up and down in the busy waters, the rivermouth that put the kuala in Kuala Trengganu. And Cik Jusoh the beachcomber walked past us with twigs and sticks in his hands, picked as they were washed on to the shore.

Cik Soh as we called him, was in mufti which was unlike the clothes that he wore to the mosque. In the former he had a coil of rag on his head and a tattered sarong around the waist, the kaing ssahang that Trengganu males hung on the nail stuck in the wall, or on the wire stretched taut across the verandah as an all-purpose clothes hanger. The ssahang was casual wear for days when we couldn’t be bothered with the sarong and shirt and the songkok at a jaunty angle. It was a one piece item of apparel that covered your parts from the navel down to just below the knee. The head piece was another rag, rolled like a snake of faded batik that coiled placidly over the brow.

In his foraging work Cik Soh struck an interesting pose, his trunk bent slightly forward, and his hands crossed at the wrists behind his back. In this manner he held two driftwoods or three in his hands that were kept away from his body or clothes because Cik Soh, in his eccentricity, had a clinical dread of the unclean parts of his body, like his feet, or the dust of common people. He kept himself to himself and parts of himself from himself, and rarely spoke to other people for fear of being touched. Standing now against the setting sun, with his hands pulled to his back, he was a big, dark praying-mantis silhouette figure.

The day’s end pushed our Tanjong people to the water, to earn their keep from the incoming payang boats or to sit and enjoy the buzz of work. Driftwood provided fuel for domestic fires and children threw sticks and dug holes and chased crabs that waved then bolted to their tiny holes as the waves came back, sending the kids back to the sandy mounds, zig-zagging between adults on their haunches, their sarongs loosened at the waist then pulled to the top. “Jjalang mmolek bila gi ppata,” they used to warn the freewheeling novitiates, “Tread carefully when you’re on the beach” for those burqaed squatting men (and sometimes women) were using the beach as one big toilet in the open air.

We’d find a safe place to sit when the light began to fade and sometimes we spoke to a woman who waved a hurricane lamp to a dot of light at sea. As if by magic the beam of light would twinkle back, and she’d wave again with a contented chuckle. Her husband was pilot on the ship that was coming into the kuala with trade from the godowns of Singapore. We had many men in Trengganu who wore their job descriptions with their names, one such that I can still remember is Pak Ali Pailét, but in this instance I’m not sure if it was he.

The beach was a blessing to us and a fear. On some nights when the moon pulled in the tides, our Tamil shopkeepers pulled their sarongs up to a decent level for them to wade in and rescue merchandise from the water. In his youth, Father said, he used to squeeze lime juice on his freshly shorn head to get the extra head-chilling oomph from the sea breeze blowing on-shore. We had heaps of twigs and the buah rengas coming in when the sea was rough, as the waves lapped in with a mighty roar. There were dead cows and lengths of rope and the gömök seed that we used for kör in children’s games, and long tendrils called rumput jjulok that had a pulpy core that we dipped in ink before shaping into pretty flowers. A crowd gathered one day in the back corner of the market to leer at a dead body that was washed into the teluk. And then a boat came adrift one day, blown by the monsoon winds from the distant shores of Sulawesi. With it came a mighty man we called Bachök who liked us and stayed to father a son called Mat who went to school with my brother. When, in his old age, Bachök expressed a wish to go back to the shore from where he blew into our midst, the hold of Kampung Tanjong was already so firm on him that he stayed on to be laid finally to rest in the earth of Kuala Trengganu.

The shore that Bachök came to is no more, washed out in bits and drabs into the sea by the changing flows and pulls of the water. Ujung Tanjong as we knew it is now submerged like some lost kingdoms under the sea, and sometimes I even wonder if people still do the squat on the sandy dunes of our pantai.