A Little Lane, A Big Lady

Before our kids got their souls wrapped in Filet-o-Fish™, real fish was the mainstay of Trengganu. We fried it, grilled it, wrapped it in banana leaf and laid it in the wood fire on the shore as the good ships Rawang and Hong Ho trailed a smoke to the harbour.

And then there was Mök Téh Spréng, a woman with flab who beat her ikang panggang (grilled fish) to shreds before dumping it into her mix of vinegar and sugar and chilli. Mök Téh sat there on the lambor of her house in a little lane around the corner from Pök’s hardware store, and she scraped the flesh of green papaya into a little cane container, and as she did so, right hand wielding the metal scraper that moved back and forth on the crunchy papaya, her body bobbed up and down in a very liquid way. This was probably how she earned the nickname ‘spréng’ (spring), the device that gives bounce to a motorcar.

I was looking up the word lambor which Winstedt and Wilkinson (two stalwarts of the old-fashioned Malay dictionary) seem to have missed out. I know lambor to be the open apron of the Trengganu stilted house, where the occupants sat of an afternoon to watch the world go by. In Winstedt and Wilkinson I found another creature, another lambor, a jelly-fish, but I shall put that aside for now.

Looking up Haji Zainal Abidin Safarwan’s ‘Kamus Besar’ (UP&D) I find that lambur (also known as jambur) is the platform where the kitchen is placed in a Malay house. The kitchen is normally on a lower level from the main house, and then from there a few steps down to ground level would take the occupants to the well in the backyard where chicken and ducks roamed free. I have always been of the impression that the lambor is any open platform of a house on stilts.

Looking at Mök Téh Spréng always reminded me of a jelly-fish because of the fluid movement of her body. That’s why I find that other definition of lambor so amusing. Mök Téh sat on her lambor that looked out to the little lane, and there she opened her little röjök shop each afternoon, and that was how she made herself known to all and sundry.

Besides röjök beték Mök Téh also made röjök katéh, a cooked röjök that had parts of the foot of a cow in it. A röjök is generally a Malay salad with peanuts in it perhaps, and plenty of chilli, and vinegar most certainly, and its ingredients are mostly raw. So perhaps röjök katéh, isn’t really a röjök as its ingredients are cooked, and the cow’s foot has to remain for a long time over the fire.

I mentioned these röjöks of Mök Téh Spréng to my friend Ajidol recently, and this is what he had to say (with rivulets of tears probably streaming down his cheeks):

"Sebut pasal röjök MökTéh Spring tuu , rase telior pulök nök makang röjök betik cicang. Dulu kite rajing gi makang di atah selasör tepak diye jjual tu. Kite selalu kate," MökTéh, wi kite kuwoh masang-manih biyar mmbéng sikik, deh? Sebab kite nök nyichöh dengang kerepok keping dan iiruk kuwöh tu."

"Now that you’ve mentioned röjök Mök Téh, I am beginning to yearn for the one made from shreds of green papaya. I used to eat it on Mök Téh’s selasör where she sold it. I used to say to her, 'Oh Mök Téh, can you give me plenty of that sweet and sour sauce because I’d like to dip my kerepok in it and then drink it down later.' "

I think that’s the word I’m looking for in the context of a Trengganu house, selasör, and that’s where Mök Téh sat as we ate and sighed.

Thank you Ajidol!

Springtime in Little Lane

Opposite the lamp-post where Haji Chik the Unhinged posted his daily diatribes in little hand-written Jawi notes in front of Pök Löh’s coffee shop, was a small lane that cut a swath between a little shack and Pök’s hardware shop. The shack was a closed-door place, with shabby unpainted wooden panels exposed to heat and rain and through its roof of atap came, on cauldron days, the smoke and heat from Pök Löh’s kitchen, smoke billowing from the wood fire and the aroma of dhall stewing in salt and turmeric, and bits of meat bubbling in a sea of murky sauce.

At the signal from the chef, a minion of Pök Löh would cross the road and pirouette his way back with a huge cauldron of bubbly liquid that held dhall or meat, hands insulated from the hot pot by a wrap of long cloth that had seen better days as a coil on someone’s head. Kitchen to shop would have taken three minutes, but dodging the traffic was the art: a couple of trishaws peddling punters to the market, maybe, or a middleman from the fish trade, trundling on his heavy ‘gentleman’s’ bicycle to the afternoon session under the casuarina trees in Ladang, or the odd motor car that bore the ‘T’ of the Trengganu (and Kelantan) number plate.

Pök Löh beside his roti griddle, gave his dark look across the road, praying that his roti dip would not spill onto the road, or the many slips ‘twixt pot and lip would not take place and spray into the passing traffic the many micro-organisms that made the flavour and the deep secret of his primeval sauce that had lain in the bottom of the pot since time began, and topped up and topped up each day as the level sank to the shallow depths. I am happy to record that no such mishaps occurred in my days in Tanjong, or in the days after that.

Back then to the other side of the road, past Pök Löh’s shack, and into the long lane that led — I think — to Kampung Laut. My brother said recently that he learnt to tie the line to the fish-hook from Pök in his hardware shop, and then, for the rod, Pök would say to him, “Mung gi ambék dari pagör sekölöh Paya Bunga.”* Well, this would have been one of the routes to that.

There, some ten yards from the planks that covered the depth of drain that marked the T-junction of the lorong (lane) and Jalan Pantai (now Jalan Sultan Zainal Abidin) of Pök’s and Pök Löh’s shops, was a house on low stilts that, like many kampung houses then, had its front part exposed as a verandah for occupants to sit and watch the passers-by, or as a reception area for guests who had just washed their feet and are now climbing the ladder-like stairs of the house.

In this apron of the house in the lane of no name was a woman who could not have risen easily from where she sat. She was called — out of her hearing distance — Mök Téh Spréng, and you may have guessed that spréng is Trengganuspeak for ‘spring’, the coil and cushion that takes motion and translates it into a continuously bobbing up and down beat. Mök Téh sat there, flesh and person, most afternoons, and worked halves of green papaya with her scraper that produced thin strands of papaya thread. The big woman Mök Téh, flabby arms and heavywight, sitting on an isle of flesh, moving and scraping and bobbing up and down before a pile of papaya shreds. It made many grown up men drool and weep.

Mök Téh’s was the house of Tanjong’s famous röjök beték, green papaya in a vinegary sauce of fish and chilli, and salt and sugar added to taste. It was eaten with fingers, but not quite, for beside her was a glass jar of kerepok, fish crackers dried in the Trengganu sun and fried till they curled – to scoop out the papaya and the fish pounded into the sauce that was at once sweet and hot, in the bowl served in the home-front shop. Mök Téh was a woman of constant movement and few words. She sat there and scraped and looked at the passing trade, and then she’d stir the sauce so the chilli would rise with an extra kick. For that and for fifteen sen and a bit more for the kerepok, grown men sighed and young boys wept.

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* "You go and take it from the (bamboo) hedge of the Paya Bunga School."