A Little Lane, A Big Lady

Before our kids got their souls wrapped in Filet-o-Fish™, real fish was the mainstay of Trengganu. We fried it, grilled it, wrapped it in banana leaf and laid it in the wood fire on the shore as the good ships Rawang and Hong Ho trailed a smoke to the harbour.

And then there was Mök Téh Spréng, a woman with flab who beat her ikang panggang (grilled fish) to shreds before dumping it into her mix of vinegar and sugar and chilli. Mök Téh sat there on the lambor of her house in a little lane around the corner from Pök’s hardware store, and she scraped the flesh of green papaya into a little cane container, and as she did so, right hand wielding the metal scraper that moved back and forth on the crunchy papaya, her body bobbed up and down in a very liquid way. This was probably how she earned the nickname ‘spréng’ (spring), the device that gives bounce to a motorcar.

I was looking up the word lambor which Winstedt and Wilkinson (two stalwarts of the old-fashioned Malay dictionary) seem to have missed out. I know lambor to be the open apron of the Trengganu stilted house, where the occupants sat of an afternoon to watch the world go by. In Winstedt and Wilkinson I found another creature, another lambor, a jelly-fish, but I shall put that aside for now.

Looking up Haji Zainal Abidin Safarwan’s ‘Kamus Besar’ (UP&D) I find that lambur (also known as jambur) is the platform where the kitchen is placed in a Malay house. The kitchen is normally on a lower level from the main house, and then from there a few steps down to ground level would take the occupants to the well in the backyard where chicken and ducks roamed free. I have always been of the impression that the lambor is any open platform of a house on stilts.

Looking at Mök Téh Spréng always reminded me of a jelly-fish because of the fluid movement of her body. That’s why I find that other definition of lambor so amusing. Mök Téh sat on her lambor that looked out to the little lane, and there she opened her little röjök shop each afternoon, and that was how she made herself known to all and sundry.

Besides röjök beték Mök Téh also made röjök katéh, a cooked röjök that had parts of the foot of a cow in it. A röjök is generally a Malay salad with peanuts in it perhaps, and plenty of chilli, and vinegar most certainly, and its ingredients are mostly raw. So perhaps röjök katéh, isn’t really a röjök as its ingredients are cooked, and the cow’s foot has to remain for a long time over the fire.

I mentioned these röjöks of Mök Téh Spréng to my friend Ajidol recently, and this is what he had to say (with rivulets of tears probably streaming down his cheeks):

"Sebut pasal röjök MökTéh Spring tuu , rase telior pulök nök makang röjök betik cicang. Dulu kite rajing gi makang di atah selasör tepak diye jjual tu. Kite selalu kate," MökTéh, wi kite kuwoh masang-manih biyar mmbéng sikik, deh? Sebab kite nök nyichöh dengang kerepok keping dan iiruk kuwöh tu."

"Now that you’ve mentioned röjök Mök Téh, I am beginning to yearn for the one made from shreds of green papaya. I used to eat it on Mök Téh’s selasör where she sold it. I used to say to her, 'Oh Mök Téh, can you give me plenty of that sweet and sour sauce because I’d like to dip my kerepok in it and then drink it down later.' "

I think that’s the word I’m looking for in the context of a Trengganu house, selasör, and that’s where Mök Téh sat as we ate and sighed.

Thank you Ajidol!