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.

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