The Kerengga Tree

The kerengga tree stood as tall as the house, its fingers grasping the sky. In the morning it trapped light that glistened on its broad leaves, and it made the kerenggas luminescent in their queue to their daily chore of examining jambus and exchanging gossip in the Besut language of the kerengga. As they did this, their antennae waved in search of encroaching enemies that they bit ferociously in the hands or in parts too delicate to tell.

Kerenggas (Oecophylla smaragdina ) lived in funnel-shaped leaves glued with kerengga glue. They feasted on the juice of the jambu and slept soundly in their nests even when the rain lashed onto this sleepy hollow of Kampung Raja. At the break of the next day's morn we did not see kerenggas strewn into the sodden grass but they were happily queueing up to go about their kerengga ways, carrying shreds of leaves, antennae waving and light shining through their translucent redness and their bird-like heads and dew-drop tummies that were bloating with the fermenting juice of the jambu.

The kerengga had always been there, in the tree with wood so mottled and marked by the feet of young climbers. The kerengga tree bore jambu or the water apple (S. aqueum) that was green or rose red in colour, the latter aptly named the jambu mawar, but in Besut they loved its rose red tint so much they called it the jambu penawar or the healing jambu. But our grandfather's kerengga tree bore the green jambu air, just pulp and water in a fruit whose shape would have described the classic Malay nose, had the Malays not preferred to compare theirs to the jasmine flower. On the jambu strutted the biting ants that bit and reeked of formic acid when crushed by an irate kerengga tree climber. We sometimes sat between the tree's branches on the stem that leant backwards, and pretended that we were driving a car. It was the kerengga tree that welcomed us when we arrived from a day's travel from Kuala Trengganu, in an uncle's car, or a taxi that Father hired in Jerteh after we'd disembarked from the Trengganu Bus Company. On many afternoons Father and his brothers and perhaps a distant uncle sat on the covered porch — the anjung — that unfurled above the steps, before the folding-door that opened to the main hall. The morning sun shone brightly through the leaves of the kerengga tree but conversazione time was in the shade on the anjung after asar; and in the nights, with the gentle breeze singing through the leaves when the moondrops painted a ghostly sheen on the jambus, the light and the wind lulled the kerengga to sleep as we formed a semi-circle around Ayöh Ngöh, who was Father's younger brother. The pressure lamp hissed brightly overhead and the Kampung Raja air was quiter in its night than in its day, so we welcomed Ayöh Ngöh's homespun story of his unlikely super hero named Pök Wè.

Pök Wè as he appeared to us in between the rustlings of the nocturnal leaves of the kerengga tree was a picaresque character, teeth reddened by years of siréh-chewing, a kain pelikat for his daily wear, with a Malay baju as his top armour and a ppiöh lembèk worn at a jaunty angle. On casual days I imagined him to be coiling his semutar cloth around his head as he rushed to his daily errands, or to chase after a straying buffalo. On Fridays he'd probably put on his baju kot made from khaki material, brass-buttoned, as worn by the peons in government offices during colonial days. Needless to say, Pök Wè lived by his wits and his wind, and the latter we celebrated with a loud cheer as Ayöh Ngöh spun it from the top of his head, with a merry glint in his eye, of how Pök Wè repelled one or several enemies with the blast of his ketok singgang, a resounding fart basted in some home-cooked brew.

I never figured out what Ayöh Ngöh did in his daily life, but I could have believed it if he was the real life Pök Wè. He turned up at Grandfather's (his father's) house daily, close to dusk, sometimes in his neat haji's turban and his crisply laundered baju and kain pelikat. A few times we saw him in the market in Jerteh, in the khaki uniform of the trading inspector; he read kitabs and the Utusan Melayu, and had a way of dismissing wayward men and their peccadilloes as if they were comic-strip characters in his daily paper.

And then the light would dim in the lamp above and Ayöh Ngöh would rise and lower its pressure even further to douse out the light completely, and the hall would fade into the semi-darkness of our sleeping hour. Well, I must go now, he'd say as he put Pök Wè to sleep, and then, impervious to our pleadings, he'd open one folding part of the door, and twirl his ppiöh a little on the anjong, and then he'd hem a little under the kerengga tree as he headed for the gate to cycle home to his house by the river.

With thanks:
1. The beautiful kerengga courtesy of A. San Juan, here
2. The kerengga tree photo courtesy of Möh.

Light by the Window

I am grateful to my second cousin Khairil Skymmar for the photo below, of the Besut house that I wrote about in GUiT ("Light By the Window", p.96). It is my grandfather's house in Kampong Raja, Besut, that is now still ringing with the cries and shouts of little children, and of my grandfather's voice leading the early morning prayer, of the murmur of adults sitting down to recite the zikr, and of Ayöh Ngöh telling us tales of Pok We. The house may be silent now, but there are noises still coming from afar.


The window that my grandfather sat at is in the middle, but it is closed now. There were birds chanting songs from a cage outside the window (see GUiT, p.297, but also p.59) that broke the stillness in the air of Besut, but the birds have all flown now.

And I thank young Khairil for the picture.

Ramadhan Village

Ramadhan was always a cold month and the belly-aching pink mixture of sirap and condensed milk and crushed ice in a jug streaming with condensation beads. We sat and drank glasses of that to push down the nekbat or akök and sometimes both of them together, and then there was nasi ulam with herbs and leaves cut into fine shreds and mixed in rice with dollops of sambal and budu in discreet drops. Slabs of dates, from folk in Izmir, perhaps after they'd sat on them till they became compacted and ready to be wrapped and sent to be piled high in the front seat of Nana Yusof's Ramadhan shop. There were dates in bags as big as the rice guni, woven from leaves of exotic palms and filled with fruits unstoned and stalks steeped in the nectar of over-ripe fruit. Portions of agar-agar wrapped in newspapers, light as a maiden's touch, to be taken home and dropped in pots of boiling water, coloured and flavoured with pandan leaves and then set aside in moulds till they gelled in the colours of Eid.

Saws rasping on blocks of ice that came on the pedicabs, smaller blocks wrapped in newspapers lined with sawdust and rushed home for the iftar table to douse the heat of the day-long wait, and the chill it gave was the belly-aching feel of buka puasa, the breaking of fast. Puasa wasn't puasa without the kiddie entrepreneurs selling ice blocks from their roadside stalls. Stalls was perhaps a fancy Ramadhan word for children standing over mats of guni sacks lying on the tarmac's edge that had five and maybe a couple more blocks of ice sweating quietly in their coats of sawdust in the afternoon light.

Iftar started long before the actual time when the genta chimed and the cannon roared from distant hills. We sat — us under-aged fasters — in what must have been the longest half hour in the history of time around the low table in our dining room that looked out to the green leaves of the supple mminjas of Pök Wè and our local surau that punctuated the rhythm of our daily lives with the beats of the geduk. Our neighbour Ayöh Löh once woke up in his early Ramadhan morning stupor to beat the beats when dawn herself was still asleep and people were still at their sahur mats to eat their last meal before daybreak. When we looked out of the window we saw a comic tableau enacted in the half light of the surau steps: our Pök Wè with arms rolling back and forth in friendly banter and Ayöh Löh, scratching his tufted crown and mumbling something apologetic.

Even though children were exempted from the fast or allowed to do only a half day's worth, we were early fasters in our house and I remember tummy rumbling days in primary school and waiting hours in the playground shade thinking rocks of floating ice in a pink sea of condensed milk and sirap. We made our own sirap concentrate in our house, in a thin aluminium pot that Mother pulled out of the cupboard on Ramadhan's eve; and we watched as she poured sugar into boiling water, and red from out of a small bottle and then something called air èséng that gave us a whiff of other worlds and distant parts. In the blood-red sirap that was set aside to cool was always a coil of pandan leaf, heat-shrivelled and dead.

Èséng is 'essence' in Trengganuspeak, and it was of vanilla that Mother would have poured into her pot. And then, when all her work was done, she'd sit and pour the concoction into recycled Del Monte ketchup bottles, and stand them in a tray of water like palisades against the marauding semut*.

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* Ants

Growing up in Trengganu #373,123

In the space between our house and Pök Wè’s and the surau is the tall green belinjau tree that is speckled red in the fruiting months when it no longer swayed in the monsoon’s blow. The front, or the surung of our house looked down on the wide span of the market but in the back it gave us a different view, of houses huddled in the kampung style: the surau’s roof was an arm’s length from our window, and on humid days when I looked beyond the shade of the belinjau to the exposed part of Pök Wè’s house I’d see him sitting on the floor, stretching out from the waist till his head rested on hands that reached out on the open deck that we in Trengganu called the lambor. In this prostrate position Pök Wè found relief from his frequent attacks of asthma.

Pök Wè’s was the old Trengganu house of chiselled bas-relief and cut-through panels that shaped the sunlight filtering through into curly patterns on the floor, cengal and hard wood now left to grey and crack into rivulets as woods do from long exposure to the exterior and the salt spray that blew in from the shore. The serambi gantung, the hanging verandah, was just the floor now exposed to the air, with pillars and lintels now like a mini Stonehenge of timber, supporting the air where once — if it did — it would have borne the weight of the roof of singora tiles. In the self-built way of Trengganu houses, things could suddenly come to a halt, and the project put on hold until the money flowed again, but often work carried on to the next generation as in the case of Pök Wè who lived with his family in the completed main part of the house then spent his time under the sky in the other half, reeling crippled by a bad attack of asthma.

On good days he’d be atop the stairs in the front anjung that extruded into the communal hub, to exchange banter with the regulars before the time came for noonday or late afternoon prayers at the surau. The daily life of the village was there before his eyes, the brass workers and women cleaning fish by the drain that carried waste water from the well and discarded remnants from the shed of kerepok makers. Pök Wè had varicose veins the size of rhinoceros beetles, and rib bones that stood through his slender flesh and made ridges in his thin white Pagoda shirt. ”Wak ape Pök Wè!” we’d call out from our window, “What are you doing Pök Wè?”

”Ya!” he’d say in stock reply.

I was of wök age then; we played wök in the space beneath the sea-facing windows of Pök Wè’s main house, the rumah ibu.There were broad rectangular racks out there, woven from bamboo strips and placed on tall stilts to dry sliced kerepok lekor. The taller of us would reach up to pick and feed, normally on the end-bits that were thicker than the regular slices before they became dried and dead and then made to fluff out again when thrown into hot oil. This was the kerepok keping the fish crackers that served as edible spoons for scooping out mee goreng from the plate, or dipped in a concoction of pounded chilli and natural vinegar from the coconut nira, and dollops of gula pasir (lit. ‘sand sugar’) to give a satisfying taste of fat and fish in an ambience of the sweet and sour, and then all overwhelmed again by the bite of the hot chilli that was described not simply as pedas (hot) but as pedas nnaha that took your breath away.

I looked up sometimes to Pök Wè’s windows that were rarely open, and imagined the sheltered coolness within that living quarter behind the greying panels and weather-beaten frames under the great canopy of singora. There were probably antique sarongs there in old chests that brooded quietly in a dark corner, and mengkuang mats that curled in the edges with criss-crossed patterns of vegetable colours made aglow in the fretworked sunlight patterns that came through the ventilation panels above the windows; and a thick pad of calendar on the wall from which the days were ripped out daily. It was an old house with unsettled matters, a corner box was in there too perhaps with ancient tools laid to rest when the last dowel (for the time being) was driven home years ago.

One day as I was walking in the shade of the belinjau, Pök Wè was standing there spade in hand, his eyes looking deep into a hole. It was filled with old papers, burning now in one edge and grey and blue smoke billowing around his varicose veins and reaching out to parts in Pök Wè’s sarong pelikat with hem rolled up to the knees.

“Wak apa Pök Wè?” I asked as he lifted another pile.

“Oh, I’m just burning some paper,” he said

I looked and recognised the cursive flow of handwritten Jawi, some with diacritical marks in the style that I was familiar with from the Qur’an class. “Oh nobody will walk here,” Pök Wè said quickly when I pointed out that some of those words spelt “Allah”.

Old writing on old paper, that really fascinated me. “Can I have them?” I asked.

The pile that I took home were copied out from old kitabs, Father said, and some were just bits of family history. They were written in kemkoma Father said, and kemkoma was from the Sanskrit kumkuma, saffron, and hence its reddish-brownish colour. Pök Wè was clearing out his past, smoking out the silverfish and the termites from his family history.

God knows now what has has happened to that pile of old paper. I kept them in a locker with some school books and memorabilia, and then our family moved to Kuala Lumpur, and I myself even further. I never saw the inside of that unfinished house and Pök Wè’s asthma got worse with each monsoon weather. But after that smoky day I think I saw not just ghosts of old men, workers who have not quite downed tools, scribes and men in skullcaps stained yellow at the rims that stuck to their brows by the sweat of toil, hunched they were over paper sheets, drawing letters from left to right with bamboo nibs dipped in kumkuma

AFTERWORD:
After I uploaded the words above, my brother sent me an email with the following message:

"The drying rack for the kerepok is called the rang. And if I’m not mistaken, the rectangular racks are called acak.

"Coming back to Pök Wè, May Allah rest his soul, I have with me bits of old kitabs of his that I took from our house in Tanjong. One is a page from a handwritten book of berzanji that has been part-eaten by termites, and two pages from a book on the nature of birds. If I am not mistaken, these kitabs were left to him [Pök Wè] by his mother. They were wrapped in cloth and kept in the serambi [verandah] of his house. When repair works were done to the serambi after Pök Wè’s mother passed away it was found that the kitabs had suffered from a bad attack of termites. And that’s how [your story above] started."

I reproduce them above: the Kitab Perihal Burung ['A Book of Birds'], top, and the Kitab Berzanji ['The Book of Barzanji'], bottom, with thanks to my brother for the additional information and the images. [Added: 22nd April, 2007]