A Book, A Beach & Memory

Whenever I talk to people who aspire to write I always tell them that most words come wrapped in emotion, with a story to tell; and they will have to learn to understand that if they want to be a serious scribbler. For a long time I was haunted by the word landai — and this does take me back to my single digit years — and the yellowish tinge of the shore, and perhaps a soft breeze blowing, and thin, long fronds of the coconut fingering the sky.

This need not have been Trengganu, though we did live by the shore; but this was Trengganu, and the yellow light of the naked bulb was shining weakly on the round marble top of a table. And there I was, with my two cousins Dah and Yöh (and my elder brother Mat too probably) looking into the first page of a school-book that now still sticks in memory as something very beautiful. ‘Beautiful’ here of course is an amorphous word: it is probably memory that makes it so, it could have been this picture and the words beneath it that I now find emotionally and aesthetically agreeable. But then again, the book could have been really wonderful.

This is the line from the book that, in my mind, I still find so hauntingly beautiful —
Ombak memukul di pantai landai.
That was probably early night, and the lamp was shedding light on the picture-book shore. There was much darkness around us. The big house we lived in was covered in much darkness at night, and I think I kept fit by rushing from one pocket of light to another — from the dining space lit by a single overhead bulb to the dimly lit apron area that served the master bedroom and another unlit room that led to an even bigger room that had the old bakelite radio and the inner guest area. This was where we were that night, but the fluorescent light that Father installed on one of the long cengal pillars wasn’t yet there, so we sat around a table lamp, not far from the soon-to-be settee under the glass skylight that brought in the moon’s glow where I slept most nights of my Trengganu childhood years.

It was only much later that I found out what landai meant. It is the shelf of the shore where the sand slopes into the sea. So the waves were lashing on this part of the sea; and don’t you hear a voice too when you read a book taken from the shelves of old, probably your own voice reading the line when you were then and there?

I can’t think of a Trengganuspeak word that is similar to landai, but the word lajök instantly comes to mind but this probably isn’t what we’re looking for.

As schoolchildren, we used to cycle down Jalan Banggol, and this was what it used to be when you cycled from the Paya Bunga end of the road, past the Bus Station on your left and the Kelinik Zakaria to your right in the new Bangunang Pejabak Ugama. The road sloped down to the river, and that experience to us was turun lajök, going downhill and taking the bend at great speed where the road turned into Jalan Kampong China where my friend’s father Yeo Yan Poh sold his Fiat cars.

Lajök is of course the Standardspeak lajak in Trengganu voice. It means going beyond what you intended to, exceeding your remit, a vehicle that has gone past its intended place. On our bicycles, if we went into extreme lajök, we would have landed in the laps of some haughty taxi drivers plying for trade on the bank of the river. But why do we call it lajök in Trengganu when lajök is not really the incline but the act of going too far? Perhaps some of you will be able to help me here.

I remember most of the school-books of my childhood years, the Kitab Kiliran Budi and the Bayan Budiman and the fascinating Old Lob in his Farm (where lived Mr Grunt the Goat, Mr Willy the Pig, Dobbins the horse and Percy the Bad Chick). And I remember another book (that was not part of the recommended text in our class), that had the “Kelentong Man”, the bell-ringing hawker.

The book that had the waves lashing on the pantai landai was about A4 sized, but I don’t remember the name that it went by. If you do have one at home or know where to get hold of one, could you please relieve this aching in my heart and let me know what else transpired on the shore in the lines of this haunting piece of poetry?