The Unbearable Lightness of Udang Baring

At any time of day as you took the bend in the road in Tanjong Ngabbang (stdspeak. ‘Mengabang’), you’d have been overcome by a pong of something dead, something rotten. This experience brought a smile on the trishaw puller’s face, made the housewife pull her sarong head-cover over her nose, and made schoolchildren look at each other accusingly, like someone was concealing a fart in his pristine white school shorts.

It was the unmistakable smell of belacang of Tanjong Nggabang.

Tanjong Ngabbang was the land that time forgot, between Tanjong Batu Satu and Ladang of the buöh ppisang. I shall have to describe buöh ppisang as it is now an extinct fruit, as it deflected the sunlight from its yellow, velvety skin, as it dangled from the tall branches, among the broad green leaves of the pohong ppisang (the ppisang tree). Some African tribes, I am told, have thirty or so words to describe the colour green, but for this one, in Trengganuspeak we have only one, ija kkilat, leaves gelaming in the sunlight, with glossier green than when they are hanging in the shade, in the quiet of an afternoon around the Sekölöh Arab (Arabic School).I know the pong of Ngabbang and the sweetness of the buöh ppisang because I arrived on my kid’s bicycle in the compound of the school most afternoons, my white long trousers and matching shirt, and mangled songkok hat still reeking of the dead udang baring that was the veil of odour in the road that I had to cycle through in Ngabbang. It was the smell of the dead udang baring of Ngabbang. Udang baring was probably krill, little shrimps that were almost transparent in the water, hauled up by the ton and mixed with salt, vast quantities of coarse crystals from the sea, and then pounded and pounded and pounded to make belacang. Then the paste was scooped out and shaped into flat cakes, and dried in the sun of the Trengganu noontime. For belacang to be mature and ripe you needed not just any sun, but the red hot head-cracking sun that was the Trengganu panah ddering when fishermen who were ashore had repaired to the shade, and housewives were out to hang their dripping wet batik sarongs and their husband’s baju melayu top and their kaing ssahang on the line.

Commercial belacang was made like wine, the raw krills dumped into a mengkuang-lined hole in the ground, sea-salt and well-water added to the right consistency. And then a hefty man (the husband or the heaviest man in the village) jumped into the mush and then — footlose and fancy free — he did his foot-pounding dance with the udang. I think Mother had issues with this mode of production and ordered our belacang only from a man called Pök Löh Böng whose wife, a follower of the Schumacher school even before Schumacher was born, took small to be beautiful and pounded her belacang only in her mortar stone.

I write this with a lump in my throat, but that is probably my memory of the stone of the buöh ppisang that had to be swallowed whole once it was bitten out of its soft, velvety skin that was a-gleaming in the sun. My classes at the Sekoloh Arab ended at around 5 o’clock, and then, when all was quiet excpet for the occasional yelps from the nearby hostel of the Arabs, my friend and I would climb into the tall tree to the branches nearest to its dangling fruits. Buöh ppisang was about the length of an adult finger, its girth probably no more than two fingers laid side by side, and you could see its inner stones bulging out on the surface of the skin, two or three in an average fruit.

We ate until it was nearly dark, and then I’d cycle home, belly full of stones, and hurrying past the gloaming that was coming down in the bend at Tanjong Ngabbang, with its aroma wafting through the coconut trees that were waving frantically in the coastal wind, and the udang baring, away from the sea and among the salt, and rotting in the water of the wells of our Mengabang.