Up and Around the Pole

"The staircase as I remember it was painted green and spiralled around a pole that propped up the ceiling. In the semi darkness behind massive doors that led into the closet at the base of the stairs who knew what ghosts lurked there? We ran up the stairs more in fear than enthusiasm, and held on to the spiralling handrail until our heads emerged at the top. The handrail was always bathed in light and dust of many years' neglect, bearing perhaps the footprints of bilals past."
- 'Up To The Drum Tower', GUiT, p.213

This is the winding staircase to the sky, looking frail for its years, but perhaps the handrail was never as stout as I latterly imagined it to be. I remember the treads with holes that we looked through to see the progress of laggard climbers, and then we looked up to the light at the end of the pole. We were going up to the rooftop of Masjid Abidin, to see the rooftops of Kuala Trengganu in the first soft light, subdued colours unintensified by the sun, stillness unbroken by the calls of cake sellers and bell-ringers among the day-break cyclists and trishaw pullers.

Up in the drum tower of the mosque, dry and dusty and cooled by the morning breeze coming in from the sea. Dolloh the muezzin's son showed us the stout cane that he used to beat the hide in a thump-thump-tee-thump beat that preceded the muezzin's call. We looked out above the henna tree of the masjid, to the stretch of road to Kampong Kolam, and turning left, we saw the downward slope to the sea, past Padang Malaya, past the shop of Mutthiah the apong seller; our house was a dot in the yonder, and Ladang was miles away. Kuala Trengganu was such a vast place to a little boy.

I am grateful to my friend Ajidol for taking a peek behind the doors that hid the spiralling stairs, and I am thankful that he had with him his camera that day. This is the green spiralling staircase as I remember it, give or take a few details that got lost in the years. This is memory going up in a whirl.

Thank you Ajidol. Long may your shutter-finger be snap happy!