Time for a Tower

They put up a clock tower in the sixties, during the reign of Sultan Ismail and the Menteri Besar was Ibrahim Fikri. And then they pulled it down again in later years, and broke the parts and filed the clockwork and its faces and hands under 'F' for Favre Leuba.

The clock tower wasn't of much use as a time-keeper as it showed a confusing array of times: one for the market people and another for the folk in Kedai Pök Löh Yunang and Mr Fernandez, who was himself a watch dealer. For the people in Kampung China it would have been three, while in Kampung Daik we were all hurrying out of Keda Bbunga as it was already nearly half past the hour of four.

In Ramadhan we relied not on the clock and its jumbled-up time, but on the bell - the Genta - on Bukit Puteri.

There's little that we knew of it, nor how much it cost, or if it was out-sourced to a private agent or chosen from a catalogue of towers and clocks by a civil servant sitting in the Pejabak Jang Besör. But it appeared one day in a spot cleared and levelled, at the intersection of Jalan Kedai Payang, Jalan Kampung Datuk and Jalan Kampung Daik that led to the white mosque with the drum in the loft amid tall towers.

People looking back from here now are sometimes confused between the Jang Besör (Jam Besar, the Big Clock) and the Pejabak Jang Besör (Pejabat Jam Besar, the Office With the Big Clock). The latter was a wooden construction of government offices, standing on stilts on loose sand in which nested the ant lion or our dear little Cik Ru. The office stood on the spot roughly in the back of the present day stadium in Jalan Paya Bunga. The Jang Besör was our clock tower, a latter day introduction, that sat in the commercial district - the clackety clack and the general hubub of the Kedai Payang market, and the more genteel atmosphere among the bookshelves of Pök Löh Yunang and the ticking hours in Fernandez shop and the glamour of the Redi Photo Studio in downtown Kuala Trengganu.

The Pejabak Jang Besör was shaded by casuarina trees and looked out in one direction to the vast expanse of an old cemetery with its rows and rows of round stones plucked out from the sea and half buried as grave markers in this sandy soil. One side was the Sekölöh Paya Bunga and the house of Tuan Haji (later Datuk) Salleh bin Awang (Misbaha) the historian of Trengganu, and then, looking towards Tanjong, there was the Istana Kolam of Sultan Sulaiman Badrul Alam Shah, the birthplace of the Trengganu gamelan and its joget that became known as the Joget Gamelan Trengganu.

These shadows from the past are probably dancing still to the ethereal, flashing timbres of the gamelan (as Robert Godet, Debussy's friend, once described it) on this piece of hallowed ground that is now filled with sounds of quotidian life and the buzz of its high rise people.

People are gathered in this picture on the day, perhaps, when the clock was launched, and it is hard to imagine it all now. This was before the fire station, yet to be built on the vast space where the people are standing (and Mat Sprong is among them if you look carefully). Avert your eyes to the left and you'll find them raised to the rooftops of the row of fine shophouses, now demolished. And I find it hard to believe that the clock tower started life in a space so vast when all I can remember is the clock on a little traffic isle, circumambulated by mini-lorries and trishaws and bicycles; people we watched as we sat at the coffee shop in the corner, eating breakfast of toasted roti bata and satay.

Photo Credit: Thank you Chorkedaggarik for the photo.

Read Also:
Light Over Trengganu.
Long March of the Cik Ru
Wind Over Troubled Water
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
Fruits and Needles

Fruits and Needles

When, in the early 1990s, the political administrators of Trengganu woke up with the stilted vision that perhaps people should be evacuated from town centres and despatched immediately to the darat and their homes replaced with roads and shops — a commercial rather than a civic community — one of the houses that got the demolition order within short notice was one that belonged to the family of my uncle’s wife, next door to the Masjid Abidin. This was the beginning of the end of the vibrant community of Kuala Trengganu: its spirit may have gone when the Tuan Putri left the Hill, now it was the turn of the people down below, they were being pushed out by men with moneybags, as hoteliers began to usurp their views.

Seventy-nine years ago, this month, a poem penned by a Trengganu lady named Hajah Wok Aisyah binti al-Haji Nik Idris, had these stanzas:

"Pada masa jalan dibuatnya besar
Datanglah notis pegawai bandar
Rumah yang terkena ke jalan besar
hendaklah segera pindah beredar

Manakala mendengar notisnya itu
banyaklah orang berhati mutu
Mulut berkata tiadalah tentu
'Inilah akal orang putih itu.'"

"When the roads to be made broader
A letter came from the Town officer
All houses that now stand in the way
Must be pulled down without delay

When word of the notice began to spread
Many people they became so sad
And then they began to natter
'That white man must be behind this matter.'"

Pulling down houses (and people) that stood in the way of progress isn’t something new: it was done during the time of the British Agent/Adviser J.L. Humphreys, the ‘Tuan Hampris’ of the Syair Tuan Hampris that I quote above. Now progress continues apace: Kuala Trengganu is a town with banks and hotels and tourism places and a Cup to catch the Monsoon air, but as with planning in most Malaysian towns nowadays, it isn’t planning for the local community.

Tuan Humphreys wasn’t at all a bad colonial officer: he spoke Malay fluently, played dam with the locals, and even made up for the lack of tact of the High Commissioner the pompous Sir Lawrence Guillemard (who went down to Kuala Trengganu in 1923 with a gong for the Sultan, the KCMG) by translating his high and mighty address into polite and proper court Malay.

This portrait of Humphreys [left] used to hang in the Government administrative offices with that famous clock tower (Jjabak Jang Besör in Trengganuspeak), standing serenely between the wide expanse of old graves of unknown Trengganuers and the padang and the police station of Paya Bunga and the sundial memorial to Humphreys. These offices stood amid clusters of casuarina trees that spread trunks and shed needles and mini spiked fruits on the tarmacked floor. Casuarinas also shielded another place connected with the Kuala Trengganu of J.L. Humphreys, the golf course along Pantai Batu Burok that he gave to the Kuala people.

We used to stop under in the shade of those Jam Besar trees to collect those strange looking mini fruits of the casuarina and to play tricks with their needles. We pulled them out of their joints and then restored them again into intact needles, such were the simple pleasures of childhood in Kuala Trengganu. And then we walked away towards home, leaving the casuarina trees and the clock tower and those government quarters filled with people from states bigger and richer than ours, to emerge in Kampung Kolam by the Istana.

Thinking of this reminds me always of these lines from "Our Casuarina Tree" by that remarkable but tragic 19th century Indian poetess Toru Dutt:

"But not because of its magnificence
Dear is the Casuarina to my soul:
Beneath it we have played; though years may roll,
O sweet companions, loved with love intense,
For your sakes, shall the tree be ever dear!
Blent with your images, it shall arise
In memory, till the hot tears blind mine eyes!
What is that dirge-like murmur that I hear
Like the sea breaking on a shingle-beach?
It is the tree's lament, an eerie speech,
That haply to the unknown land may reach."

See Also:
* Man of Oob
* Light Over Trengganu