Crocks in the Well

If you’ve ever rested on Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ to view the rich seam of folklore in this world you’ll find that there’s a thread running through them all. A link however remote, however thin, to another, then another, until this tapestry of folktales becomes one collective note on the great unconscious of this world.

But even then I’m still surprised by what I find. Loreli, for instance, the singing lady who sings not just on the Rhine, but everywhere. The Malay nobat is the music of the spheres, heard by folks at sea then translated into the voices of strings and flutes and the reverberating noises of hard metal. After what I wrote about the Princess of the Bukit Putri I was surprised to hear a smiliar story from Atok [see Comments, below], about Kelantanese people borrowing crockery from Puteri Sa’adong for their bekwoh then dumped them into a well. Ah, that word bekwöh, defined in the Kamus Besar Utusan as kenduri arwah, feast for the remembrance of a departed soul. Is there a possibility that it started life as berkawöh (i.e. [cooking] in a caludron) then slowly morphing through word of mouth into bekawöh then bekwöh? And then, what happened to Putri Sa’adong? Did she too fly away? Why were the crockery thrown into the well?

Then a gender note: someone — a grammarian perhaps — wrote to comment on my use of the male honorific ‘Tuan’ for our princess, Tuan Putri. It is the way of Trengganuspeak, I’m afraid, for Trengganuspeak often makes no distinction between male and female in the award of titles. Even today there are still ladies in Trengganu (and in Kelantan too maybe) who carry the family title of Tuan; and big sister or brother in Trengganu is of course abang (‘elder brother’ in standardspeak), and kakök is both male and female in our Trengganu world. I believe this is also true in some parts of Indonesia.

But thanks Atok for taking us to your well of coincidental crockery. May your family blossom in their chosen paths and may there always be fish for your kerepok lekor.