Mang Friday

Pök Mang arrived on his bicycle on Friday afternoon, in the lull after Jumaat prayers, after the tumult of Bangsawan Di Udara had faded from the afternoon and the sea was blowing a soporiferous wind in the air. He snipped in his oldy worldy style, mouth babbling as if he was reciting a quiet mantra, a little crook stuck out from a finger grip of his scissors.

Sometimes, when he felt the need, he’d tell us about the virtue of keeping still because, he said, just the week before he’d accidentally snipped the edge of a little boy’s ear. When he did, he always admonished with a smile, perhaps because Father was there keeping watch on this whole affair. The blanket he wrapped around us smelt of old hair and dead talcum powder and some fragrant concoction that came in a blistery bottle. He had a little round tin from which he pulled a furry disk that dabbed a rose scented dust on the back of our neck before he applied the cut-throat razor that he’d stropped on a piece of leather.

Our front gate had two doors of corrugated iron in a timber frame that wore metal brackets on each side: into this each night Father inserted a timber bar to keep trespassers outside our doors. The bar was standing upright on the right side of the frame now, music lilting through the opening between the doors, the Friday afternoon qawalli sung by our Tamil shopkeeper Yahya, voice quivering as his fingers tickled out mournful tunes from the ivory of his harmonium, seasoned as it had been by the salt and spray from the sea air on the S.S.Rajula.. We sat in the shadow of the leaf-canopied pergola of the tikam seladang [stdspk. kesidang; Vallaris glabra] that gave occasional whiffs of their overpowering smell.

Pök Mang dusted our neck with fragrant powder as he pulled the sheet off our shoulders and shook out surplus hair. One by one he picked up his paraphernalia of work, his bottle of cologne, his plastic bottle that sprayed our neck and our hair with cold water, clipper and scissors and cut throat razor, and the leather strap that he packed into a battered leather bag that sat in the back of his bicycle.

When Pök Mang retired we never saw him again, but his son Cik Omar opened a barber’s shop across the road from the azan sounds of the Surau Besar and the banter and the billiard tables of Kelab Pantai. And the smell that came wafting into our nostrils wasn’t from the tikam seladang but from the home factory of Cik Muda, Kuala Trengganu’s famous satay maker.

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Bangsawan Di Udara - Radio opera performed then by the Tijah Din Bangsawan group.

O What A Lovely War!

The only link I have with mmaing karut is Pök Mang who lived outside the fence of the late lamented Istana Kolam beneath the great tamarind tree. Pök Mang travelled widely in his youth, sometimes to Pahang where, he said, he sometimes took part in a baffling ritual of make-believe war. Two teams assembled in an open field, the one opposite the other, and from what I understand, they wore a form of fancy dress which, a propos our grandfathers and their fathers I find hard to imagine, but probably a dastar on the head and a sash on one shoulder, and a loose Malay baju and the broad trousers with a layer of knee-length kain cindai wrapped around the waist and over the seluar.

This is how I imagine the gear for mmaing karut or nonsensical play would be that climaxed in those two groups rushing towards each other as if in war. I do not know if they were armed for this game of war, or what they did once they came to close quarters. Or, as I’m now inclined to believe, were they in a trance-like stupor? And if so, what was the purpose of it all?

And then I heard of bergayong ota-ota (ggayong ota-ota in Trengganuspeak) which involved a sword and a small shield and two grown-up men doing this danse macabre in some joyous ceremony, a wedding party perhaps or to amuse a visiting dignitary (these were days before the advent of VIPs and before their more elevated cousins the VVIPs came to the fore). I recently found a man doing the Ota-Ota in a nice looking neighbourhood in Trengganu (thanks to my informant Pak Cik Fazli), and here he is (the Ota-Ota man, I mean, not Pak Cik Fazli who is now too busy with their new-born child), from the book by Wavell [see A Distant Cry below]. What interests me, besides the tasselled sword, decorated shield and intense look on the Ota-Otaist is the cummerbund around his waist, a kaing lepas Barat no doubt, which is, nowadays, a rarity.