Left Is Right

A friend, an expert in English phonetics who’d spent most of his life looking at English mores and verbs, pointed out to me the other day something that I’d never thought about. “You know,” he said, “in Malaysia, the left bank of the river is on the right.”

“How’s that?” I asked, brushing croissant crumbs from the left side of my shirt (that was his right).

“The Malays prefer to live upstream, so they look down the river to the Kuala and the English left is their right,” he said.

I thought of Kuala Trengganu and began to doubt his word, but no, the glory days of Trengganu were in Kuala Brang which was the trading centre where went Admiral Cheng Ho and many other notables, including the man who carved the inscribed stone, our Batu Bersurat. The present royal house of Trengganu, in fact, started in Kuala Brang after they came down from Johor via Patani.

But the Malays aren’t a culture best defined by this side or that (and I’m saying this as one who’s married to a lady who doesn’t know her left from right) preferring to use, in their speech references, to the direction of the sunrise or set (and latterly the qiblat), or the direction of the blowing wind. Occasionally, they refer to points of the compass, but even then they appear to be pretty jumbled up in spite of being children of a seafaring race. In Trengganu, for instance, Kelantan people are known as orang barat (western people) though they aren’t exactly there on the map, while the rest of the people from the peninsular’s other parts are simply known as ‘outsiders’ or orang luar. On their own patch, people were divided into two: orang kuala (people of the rivermouth) and orang darat (people of the interior, hinterland). To make it even more confusing, in the Tanjong where we lived (around the bay by the rivermouth, and looking out to the sea), folk from Kuala Ibai which was a mere four miles from us, were orang darat, as immortalised in this pejorative verse:

Orang darak Kuala Iba,
Mulut birak bibir teba.

The telling point is that Kuala Iba (standardspeak, Ibai) was (as is) on the shoreline of the South China Sea, and its folk could well have waved their batik lepas (rectangular piece of unsewn batik) at the fleet of Cheng Ho aka Zheng He even before we could see his gonfalons at the rivermouth.