Fleet Footed Sashimi

Mother was at the well when this happened, perhaps the highest leap she’d made in her short career. She was about to have a bath (perhaps a shower is more apt, considering that she was about to throw water on her person with the aid of a timba) when a Japanese soldier appeared in our fenced compound, sword in hand and eyes determinedly set on a fleet-footed fowl.

This would have been in the early forties, when Yamada-San was a trader in Kedai Payang and Father was working in the Post Office on Padang Malaya, under a Japanese Postmaster.

Our house in Tanjong was fenced by what we called the pagör sasök, woven from pieces of split bamboo, into rafts measuring roughly five feet square. I say ‘rafts’ advisedly as these sasök were made — well, during my time at least — by Wang Mang, in one corner of Pantai Telok that abutted with the back end of the Pasar Tanjong, the Tanjong market. Wang Mang would have had bamboo brought to him from God knows where, and he’d soak them in the brackish water of the Teluk, the bay area, for a couple of weeks maybe. The smell that emanated from the water-logged bamboo, and the mud of the Teluk and the mounds of droppings of waving crabs and the nasty ddukang fish and all that skimmed in that murky plain and its body of water was something rotten and sour and — to me — quite bambooey.

When the bamboo was fully pickled and matured, according to the judgment of Wang Mang (or his predecessor in those wartime days), he’d split each stem into three or four parts and then weave the parts from maybe ten or so bamboos into a broad raft that he’d stand against a wall or a tree nearby until it is ready and dry. Our compound must have been fenced in by probably twenty of those bamboo rafts, and on the wooden door frame in front of our house that faced the back of the spice vendors’ shops hung two doors of corrugated metal.

Mother was berkemban (Trengganuspeak, kkembang), which was the bathing suit of Trengganu women when they were at the well. To berkemban was to be attired in just one piece of sarong, pulled up and tied at armpit level to cover the main body but with shoulders and arms exposed. I do not know if she’d already started to pour water down herself when the Japanese chicken hunter appeared, sword in hand, but it didn’t take long for her to find herself on the other side of the fence, among the community of people at another well, that of the Surau Tok Sheikh Abdul Kadir. The climb from one side to the other was more than five feet high, and for mother in her kkembang it must have been a feat worthy of the sherpas.

I got this story from her many years later, and also from the people on the other side of the fence, around the surau. And I was thinking of this when I read about those armed-to-the-teeth Trengganu men who were walking around with throwing instruments and krises and spears pointing at all and sundry. [see, Arms and the Men (and the Working Women), below]. A sharp instrument pointing in such a menacing way is, in Trengganuspeak, ccadöng. Imagine a brave neighbour, say, asking of one of those men as he stepped out into the air, dressed to the nines and armed to the teeth — a kris or two in the waistband and knife and spear in hand, “Nök gi duane pisa ccadöng, lembing seranggöh tu!”

Now, seranggöh is another thing: it is protruding and dangling but not necessarily menacing, much like the baubles and branches of a Christmas tree.