Selamat Hari Raya

How nasi himpit is made.

Come Raya morning, chaos rules. It is the same today in our household: time is flying fast and there is no sign of that button for the baju, and the shirt's unironed, oh woe is me.

And then I hear the genta, long clanging sounds from far away, atop the hill, and Raya resonates down to us down below, through closed shops and houses in Kuala Trengganu. Children half awake from a full night of weaving and running in the dark and looking at faces lit up in the yellow light of Chinese lanterns that fold up like bellows but are now stretched to their full length by the weight of candles.

There are ships among houses, no, not sailing ones, but close, too close to the stairs of the house of Pok Wè or Wang Semail, and other people who have money to take to the shops for crepe paper and glossy sheets in bright colours. Bamboos split into uprights and longer ones, joined together in horizontals, curved in the bow and papered over to be ship shape. We have seen them coming in, navigating the narrow neck of Ujung Tanjung and Seberang Takir across the water, the Hong Ho and the Rawang full of goods from Singapore. Now we have them made up from bright paper made bright by the lights of flickering kerosene lamps, in the front yard of some houses, trailing from mast to stern with twirled crepe of pastel colours, and perhaps a flag up there, no, not of Trengganu, but an unwashed kain lepas – a long sheet of workman's shoulder rag – to flutter into the winds the news that it is the night of Hari Raya.

We are tired now but the day's fresh as the dew, and hearken now to the sounds of Bilal Deramang and his companion Bilal Sa'id in two voices, one sonorous the other gruff, oh how beautiful and sad, the tugging in the heart sounds of the Takbir! And klaaang! and klaang! go the genta, an old bell on Bukit Puteri. The maidens living up there in the mist of legends must have been klaaanged from their slumber.

Now Father's looking smart with the apex of his handkerchief sticking out from the little pocket on the left breast of his baju, a place where the folded handkerchief with the bunga rampai potpourri sticks out in full aroma on wedding days, but Hari Raya isn't a potpourri day. Today it reeks of attar that came back with pilgrims from Makkah; his middle is wrapped in not quite the finest, but a good enough songket of Trengganu, bought from the shop of his friend Ustaz Su. And he wears his well-creased trousers to match the shirt, and that is the signal for us all. We are now ready to go.

Hari Raya is always a problem for me as I have trouble keeping the sampin tightly wrapped in the middle. It slides down the slippery trousers of some silky material, bought from the shop of our Tamil friend Abdul Hameed, and when the middle wrap starts to slide down, it needs to be readjusted and re-folded, and then twirled into a holding belt in the middle. It will be a great embarrassment if it comes down to rest on the floor around the shimmering trouser legs in the Masjid Abidin in the middle of prayers.

Around the Masjid, under the henna tree and the entrances towards Kampung Daik and another near the row of taps opposite the Lay Sing photo Studio are already teeming with people. Ku Haji Ambak and his sons in Middle Eastern garb, the paterfamilias with a round hat that seems to have been woven from some exotic straw, and their long robes brushing against other people in more familiar bajus tucked into the middle songkets glinting in the morning air. What a merry feast of Trengganu colours.

I always have my eyes at this time on the magnificent house that stands outside the mosque for that's our stop after prayers. There will be men handing out coins to children at the gate of the mosque and we'll be handed ten cents if we're lucky, but in the house of our uncle Ayah Pa and his wife Che Da (it's her family house actually) there'll be beleda with a crusty coat of sugar in the plate and ketupat to dip in peanut sauce and probably a cake laid out on a tray, made by a company called Big Sister, and there'll be buah ulu and laksam and maybe some nasi dagang too with the coconuty meat of the ikang aya (tuna).

The shops are closed but the mood is high. Adults exchange greetings and pleas for forgiveness for transgressions during the year, and the day's just about to start and it will end with us all bloated in the chair. There is a good view of the mosque from our uncle's upraised house, into the compound where the bilal will probably be seen in conversation with the imam, where people who are mosque regulars are still walking here and there. And there, outside the front mihrab tip of the mosque are the long stone pillars standing in rows, memorials to the royal family's deceased members.

The middle wrap of some fancy cloth is abandoned now and hands are dipping into the lower pockets of the Malay baju now jangling with coins and rustling perhaps with a dollar note or two. The lights are now fading into asar, time for the afternoon prayer, and we will soon be imbued in deep melancholy – of songs that endlessly sing the Hari Raya, of sounds that are gone but still droning from afar, lilting back and forth in memory, and lights and colours here and there.

As I sit here now thinking of that I see Mother now after her days of preparation in the kitchen, her face smiling, not basking in the joy of herself, but in vicarious pleasure from the enjoyment of seeing her children on Hari Raya.

Our beloved and departed family members, may Allah bless them all.

And I wish you all, my dear readers, a happy and blessed Eid ul Fitri.

Up and Around the Pole

"The staircase as I remember it was painted green and spiralled around a pole that propped up the ceiling. In the semi darkness behind massive doors that led into the closet at the base of the stairs who knew what ghosts lurked there? We ran up the stairs more in fear than enthusiasm, and held on to the spiralling handrail until our heads emerged at the top. The handrail was always bathed in light and dust of many years' neglect, bearing perhaps the footprints of bilals past."
- 'Up To The Drum Tower', GUiT, p.213

This is the winding staircase to the sky, looking frail for its years, but perhaps the handrail was never as stout as I latterly imagined it to be. I remember the treads with holes that we looked through to see the progress of laggard climbers, and then we looked up to the light at the end of the pole. We were going up to the rooftop of Masjid Abidin, to see the rooftops of Kuala Trengganu in the first soft light, subdued colours unintensified by the sun, stillness unbroken by the calls of cake sellers and bell-ringers among the day-break cyclists and trishaw pullers.

Up in the drum tower of the mosque, dry and dusty and cooled by the morning breeze coming in from the sea. Dolloh the muezzin's son showed us the stout cane that he used to beat the hide in a thump-thump-tee-thump beat that preceded the muezzin's call. We looked out above the henna tree of the masjid, to the stretch of road to Kampong Kolam, and turning left, we saw the downward slope to the sea, past Padang Malaya, past the shop of Mutthiah the apong seller; our house was a dot in the yonder, and Ladang was miles away. Kuala Trengganu was such a vast place to a little boy.

I am grateful to my friend Ajidol for taking a peek behind the doors that hid the spiralling stairs, and I am thankful that he had with him his camera that day. This is the green spiralling staircase as I remember it, give or take a few details that got lost in the years. This is memory going up in a whirl.

Thank you Ajidol. Long may your shutter-finger be snap happy!

Lost and Found

Now that GUiT has gone into its third print and looking perhaps at its fourth, I hope you will excuse my self-indulgence as I put on my reminiscing hat. GUiT has brought many good things to me and pleasures that I never thought would materialise simply from writing a book. The son of my second Qur’an teacher (Che Yi) wrote in to say hello, and the son of my first one, a very interesting man, emerged from behind his locked gate as I was looking with sad eyes at a derelict, hand-crafted old Trengganu Malay house where I read my first lines from the Book. I will not hesitate to say that that was the defining moment of my visit to Kuala Terengganu (as is) after nearly a score years.

I was then accompanied by Cik Gu Wan Chik, one of my first teachers at the Sekoloh Melayu Ladang, a jovial and fit man who you probably saw in the Jejak Awang Goneng series of shorts on RTM as the man who twirled a finger at his noggin when Kak Teh asked him about me (a gesture that — according to kak Teh — meant that I was a bit soft in the head). As we were talking, Pak Ibrahim the son of my first Qur’an teacher Pak Haji Ali, emerged and took me on a guided tour of the sad and empty house. And then my Cik Gu mentioned (in front of the camera) that he (Pak Ibrahim) was a distinguished musician, so I said in my half jocular tone, “Give us a song!”

“Wait,” answered Pak Ibrahim, “I must go get my violin.” So that was how we got that mournful, lilting tune that became the signature track of the Jejak.

We met many kindly people: some were old friends; many, complete strangers. Cik Gu Mat — another Cik Gu, bless them all — fed me beludas and gave me a book on the histroy of Trengganu written by the local historian Misbaha (whose son I met in a Trengganu delegation to a Tourism fair in London), and then he introduced me not only to one of the best little restaurants in Kuala Terengganu (The Singgang), but also to the lady who is still, in this age of clockwork electoral candidates and weapons of self destruction, sitting quietly in her house making the beluda with margarine, and condensed milk and stuffing self-raising Trengganu air into the bread.

There were many, many more people I met in our 3-month speaking and signing tour for GUiT. I hope I shall one day be able to incorporate them all into a book to celebrate Trengganu and Trengganuness. And I wish to thank them all again here for helping me make GUiT a success.

In my talks I often spoke of how each step we take informs on the next, or how present ones shed light on the past and vice versa, ad infinitum, in a series of interconnecting beats in life’s long sidewalk. And how again our paths interconnect with those of others, in ways that are often mundane, sometimes unexpected. In GUiT I wrote somewhat whimsically about the ‘strange object’ in the Masjid Abidin that sent incense smoke curling up to the ceiling at mid-day on Fridays, and then in Kuala Terengganu recently I met Pok Daud who gave me a thoroughly fascinating take on its origin. When I popped into the Masjid one afternoon I found that the object was no longer there, so imagine my delight when, a couple of days ago, this email came from New York:

"Dear Mr. Goneng:

"I write to you from Brooklyn, New York...but I learned of you during my travel in Borneo and western Malaysia. I came upon your book in Melaka (Mallacca, etc., similar to Terengganu or Trengganu), and read it through my travel from the south to the north, on the west coast of Malaysia. After reading your book, I left from Penang and right into Trengganu! I had to! I wanted to sense the life of your home town, I wanted to feel some moment that you felt, I wanted to bring your book alive and I was happy that I did. I met some beautiful people in K.T., such as, Regen, a Tamil, who rode me on his motorcycle around the town and its environs... your book has made its way to NYC and in the hand of a friend. Oh..... the “strange object in the Mosque chamber” (p,220), is now located in Kuala Lumpur. I came upon it at the Komplex Kuala Lumpur, Jalan Conlay (Kuala Seri Utama-Hari Kraf Center), in the main building, right, dead center. I have attached a photo of the same.

"All the best!
Louis Crespo
Brooklyn, New York"

[Reproduced with thanks, by kind permission]

See also:
Ornamental Wonder