Diamonds & Paste

Akök in the akök mould that we called the acuang, bottles of sirap all in a row lined up for the month, red and sweet as the day was long. Dried dates in slabs, compacted for travel from the ports of Basra or Izmir or perhaps the desert parts of Hindustan; and the fluffy pastry of nekbat, bland and light and drenched in syrup of the strength to curl the toes even of the most sweet-toothed of the sugar-bingers — Ramadhan was the sweetest of months.

From beneath the stove, in a dark corner that had been quiet for many months, Mother pulled out her heavy brass pot for the ritual scrub with asam. A stirring time was there to come, and time to make the hasidöh, for Ramadhan without hasidöh would have lost the taste that made the month. Hasidöh as I described it once, was more paste than cake, a tooth clinging sweetmeat in the literal sense, rich and fat, laid flat or rolled up by little kids, or pinched with the special hasidöh pinchers that laid grooves into the putty mix for the nestling of shallot bits, fried to golden brown and crisp as the morning with singing birds and trees waving in the soft sun. Our cousin Mat once took hasidöh and kneaded it and threw it and beat it to a pulp, then he stuck the resulting paste on to the wall of our house. We forgave him as he was very, very young.

Unlike the air strop or the beleda kering that were shaped like cut diamonds — to name but two plots in the dreamwork of little children — hasidöh was an adult’s idea of fun. It was ghee that gave hasidöh its luscious richness, flour that glued all that mingled in the merry mix, and sugar of the sweetness that peek-a-booed with the fat and wheat gluten that made that teeth clinging, angst ridding, cloying taste to satisfy a host of ancient longings — and then, ah, the savouriness of the crisp bawang (shallots) to blunt the sickly and the sweet. I mentioned air strop because who remembers now this mix of yore? But somewhere in a Terengganu house, someone must now be stirring and stirring some hasidöh in the pot while humming the joys of Ramadhan.

As Mother rolled the sticky paste in the deep brass, we waited for the heat to rise and the hasidöh to land with a plop on the tray, and then, spoon in hand, we scraped the hasidöh crust that came off like wood shaving, crisp and brown, and better than fried egg-dipped bread.

These were trying moments, when children clung to every crawling minute and the clock seemed to have warped and turned laggard like the persistence of Dali’s time. It could have been five in the afternoon, when plates were laid out and the ice had come back in a block from the ice merchants on the tarmac in front of Bhiku’s coffee shop. Pök had closed his shop and had probably joined the iftar crowd still waiting beneath the henna tree of the masjid, and fish was going cheap on the slab of fishmongers dying for a fag.

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*.

-------------------
* Ants