Early Drums, Holy Month

Ayöh Löh walked the short distance from his house, through the dim yellow light of the street lamp, round the corner fencing of our house and into the dirt lane that took him to the surau in this dark hour.

He took the the beater and beat the drum, and all at once the sound of clattering plates and the tinkling cups died and the spoons stopped stirring the tèh oh.

It was near the end of the night, but not yet the appointed time, but Ayöh Löh had supped and smoked and belched quite a few times and he was beating the first geduk sounds for the day.

We were sitting around our dining table then, fighting our sleepy eyes and forcing down the food of sahur. Sahur was breakfast time for the Ramadan months, the last meal before the fast that started with the dawn prayer. But this time the beat of the geduk made everyone stop and Pök Wè jumped down the stairs of his elevated house that was just by the surau.

Pök Wè was an amiable man as Ayöh Löh was a character, and in the ensuing exchanges that we heard coming amid cackles of laughter near the stairs - that of the surau and that of Pök Wè's house - Ayöh Löh had this to say: "Ingak ke döh suboh döh!"*

When I looked down from the window of our house that looked down to the surau I saw Ayöh Löh standing there scratching his bare back, and then he scratched his head underneath the semutar.

Prayer times were greeted by rolls of drums in our Tanjong, beaten out of the geduk of every surau. The geduk is the beduk in standardspeak, and it gives a deep mellow sound through the length of its body of hollowed out trunk that has a stretched out buffalo hide on the side of the beater. These drums are found in prayer houses throughout the peninsula and in East Malaysia too, and their beats are heard even in faraway Indonesia. It is the sound of the prayer call of the Nusantara, before the muezzin stands up to make his human call.

In Kuala Trengganu we had three sounds in bulan puasa, the prayer month. There was the sound of the geduk and then there was the clanging of the big bell - the genta - on the hill that were bracketed by the rumble of the cannon of Bukit Besar.

Puasa was a happy month and a dry one when most coffee shops were closed but those that did not shut their doors had curtains to hide the wayward people. There were gunny sacks unfurled by the roadside in front of Bhiku's cafe when the hands moved closer to four o'clock, when children trying to earn Raya money sold blocks of ice for fifteen cents to cool our sirap during bbuka. There was cendol, coloured green like the snot, and beleda kacang, off-white and quite pointless for its lack of taste, to the child.

Ramadan is for the children too even if it's adult country. We made cannons from hefty bamboo in Ramadan and delighted from their carbide fire, we fasted half the day - some of us - though in our house we fasted the day through. Mother cooked dishes and baked cakes that were not seen on ordinary days, nèkbak and the akök cooked in thick brass moulds and the chicken-centred buöh ulu, and the sirap water so blood-red and bubbling in a big cauldron to last this whole month, the scent of pandan and the sweetness of white sugar in the air.

There were new clothes to be ordered from the tailor - our bajus were made by Ku Su in the grounds of the istana, and new shoes most certainly from Bata. Oil lamps with wicks of jute strings in bodies of milk cans, and lanterns and sparklers to brighten up the night hour.

But that's towards the end of the fasting month; now it's time to tighten the belt and abstain ourselves in the daylight hours.

Marhaban ya Ramadan kareem, marhaban ya shahrun nuur!

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*"I thought it's time for the dawn prayer!"

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