Growing up in Trengganu #373,123

In the space between our house and Pök Wè’s and the surau is the tall green belinjau tree that is speckled red in the fruiting months when it no longer swayed in the monsoon’s blow. The front, or the surung of our house looked down on the wide span of the market but in the back it gave us a different view, of houses huddled in the kampung style: the surau’s roof was an arm’s length from our window, and on humid days when I looked beyond the shade of the belinjau to the exposed part of Pök Wè’s house I’d see him sitting on the floor, stretching out from the waist till his head rested on hands that reached out on the open deck that we in Trengganu called the lambor. In this prostrate position Pök Wè found relief from his frequent attacks of asthma.

Pök Wè’s was the old Trengganu house of chiselled bas-relief and cut-through panels that shaped the sunlight filtering through into curly patterns on the floor, cengal and hard wood now left to grey and crack into rivulets as woods do from long exposure to the exterior and the salt spray that blew in from the shore. The serambi gantung, the hanging verandah, was just the floor now exposed to the air, with pillars and lintels now like a mini Stonehenge of timber, supporting the air where once — if it did — it would have borne the weight of the roof of singora tiles. In the self-built way of Trengganu houses, things could suddenly come to a halt, and the project put on hold until the money flowed again, but often work carried on to the next generation as in the case of Pök Wè who lived with his family in the completed main part of the house then spent his time under the sky in the other half, reeling crippled by a bad attack of asthma.

On good days he’d be atop the stairs in the front anjung that extruded into the communal hub, to exchange banter with the regulars before the time came for noonday or late afternoon prayers at the surau. The daily life of the village was there before his eyes, the brass workers and women cleaning fish by the drain that carried waste water from the well and discarded remnants from the shed of kerepok makers. Pök Wè had varicose veins the size of rhinoceros beetles, and rib bones that stood through his slender flesh and made ridges in his thin white Pagoda shirt. ”Wak ape Pök Wè!” we’d call out from our window, “What are you doing Pök Wè?”

”Ya!” he’d say in stock reply.

I was of wök age then; we played wök in the space beneath the sea-facing windows of Pök Wè’s main house, the rumah ibu.There were broad rectangular racks out there, woven from bamboo strips and placed on tall stilts to dry sliced kerepok lekor. The taller of us would reach up to pick and feed, normally on the end-bits that were thicker than the regular slices before they became dried and dead and then made to fluff out again when thrown into hot oil. This was the kerepok keping the fish crackers that served as edible spoons for scooping out mee goreng from the plate, or dipped in a concoction of pounded chilli and natural vinegar from the coconut nira, and dollops of gula pasir (lit. ‘sand sugar’) to give a satisfying taste of fat and fish in an ambience of the sweet and sour, and then all overwhelmed again by the bite of the hot chilli that was described not simply as pedas (hot) but as pedas nnaha that took your breath away.

I looked up sometimes to Pök Wè’s windows that were rarely open, and imagined the sheltered coolness within that living quarter behind the greying panels and weather-beaten frames under the great canopy of singora. There were probably antique sarongs there in old chests that brooded quietly in a dark corner, and mengkuang mats that curled in the edges with criss-crossed patterns of vegetable colours made aglow in the fretworked sunlight patterns that came through the ventilation panels above the windows; and a thick pad of calendar on the wall from which the days were ripped out daily. It was an old house with unsettled matters, a corner box was in there too perhaps with ancient tools laid to rest when the last dowel (for the time being) was driven home years ago.

One day as I was walking in the shade of the belinjau, Pök Wè was standing there spade in hand, his eyes looking deep into a hole. It was filled with old papers, burning now in one edge and grey and blue smoke billowing around his varicose veins and reaching out to parts in Pök Wè’s sarong pelikat with hem rolled up to the knees.

“Wak apa Pök Wè?” I asked as he lifted another pile.

“Oh, I’m just burning some paper,” he said

I looked and recognised the cursive flow of handwritten Jawi, some with diacritical marks in the style that I was familiar with from the Qur’an class. “Oh nobody will walk here,” Pök Wè said quickly when I pointed out that some of those words spelt “Allah”.

Old writing on old paper, that really fascinated me. “Can I have them?” I asked.

The pile that I took home were copied out from old kitabs, Father said, and some were just bits of family history. They were written in kemkoma Father said, and kemkoma was from the Sanskrit kumkuma, saffron, and hence its reddish-brownish colour. Pök Wè was clearing out his past, smoking out the silverfish and the termites from his family history.

God knows now what has has happened to that pile of old paper. I kept them in a locker with some school books and memorabilia, and then our family moved to Kuala Lumpur, and I myself even further. I never saw the inside of that unfinished house and Pök Wè’s asthma got worse with each monsoon weather. But after that smoky day I think I saw not just ghosts of old men, workers who have not quite downed tools, scribes and men in skullcaps stained yellow at the rims that stuck to their brows by the sweat of toil, hunched they were over paper sheets, drawing letters from left to right with bamboo nibs dipped in kumkuma

AFTERWORD:
After I uploaded the words above, my brother sent me an email with the following message:

"The drying rack for the kerepok is called the rang. And if I’m not mistaken, the rectangular racks are called acak.

"Coming back to Pök Wè, May Allah rest his soul, I have with me bits of old kitabs of his that I took from our house in Tanjong. One is a page from a handwritten book of berzanji that has been part-eaten by termites, and two pages from a book on the nature of birds. If I am not mistaken, these kitabs were left to him [Pök Wè] by his mother. They were wrapped in cloth and kept in the serambi [verandah] of his house. When repair works were done to the serambi after Pök Wè’s mother passed away it was found that the kitabs had suffered from a bad attack of termites. And that’s how [your story above] started."

I reproduce them above: the Kitab Perihal Burung ['A Book of Birds'], top, and the Kitab Berzanji ['The Book of Barzanji'], bottom, with thanks to my brother for the additional information and the images. [Added: 22nd April, 2007]