Purple Berry & The Sweet Orange Coloured Fruit

We folded our big shirt’s front flap upward and tied both ends into a tight knot at our lower back. That was how we made a kangaroo pouch in which we throw wild kemunting berries harvested from its shrubs that sprawled nearby our wooden house. We were surrounded by ocean of tall grass blades – the metropolis of dreadful snakes and trolls and goblins alike which we never had encountered – whose colour had turned golden in the sweltering heat of Sura Tengoh summer. The creaks of coconut palm leaf that criquer far above our heads correlated with the fervour of South China Sea wind that blew landward from nearby beach. We picked kemunting berries and more kemunting berries a twig to another until our small palms turned purple, our pouch got bigger, and we looked like pregnant ladies craving for wild sweets.

Kemunting steals some of blackberry’s features – the shape, colour. In between my thumb and index finger where the freshly picked kemunting was pinched softly, my sweaty fingers left dark purple mark over its dry and dusty skin. Its slightly coarse surface reminded me of velvet that made up our school theatre’s stage drape.

We feel we have enough berries for today, ma'am and sir. Let’s go home! Be careful not to step on snakes, alright?

At home, by the main staircase that led us to the living room, we would kneel down on the floor and untie the knot. With that kemunting avalanche was triggered. They rolled downhill into a netted bucket stolen from Mother’s kitchen. After that, the berries were washed thoroughly with tap water to remove impurities. Underneath the purple velvet skin of the kemunting were tiny seeds the size of sesames coated with sweet purple jellies. This was the part of the berries that we sucked in the overcast Dungun evening.

Buoh ulat bulu was another type of wild fruit that added a lurid Dungun sunset image onto my memory canvas. Shaped like an almost perfect pumpkin, its resplendent orange skin stood out among its younger green siblings who came out to the world from a network of hairy liana plants that climbed up everything in reaching for the sun. It occupied our neighbour’s fence like a vineyard. The fruit’s skin surface was waxy like a betel leaf and soft like turtle eggs shell. To eat buoh ulat bulu, well, you can take this orange one. Now, carefully you tear open the skin. You see these jelly coated seeds? You see it? Remember how you ate kemunting together with me? Suck them all. Sluurrppp. M’schuh. Aaah. It is sweet, isn’t it? You want some more? Here. Don't worry, we still have more at Pok Cik Rohing’s fence.

The Suitable Suitor

Texted with Mother about finding a suitable suitor for me one morning. It broke my heart because she said I should not marry to anyone who lives so far away from our hometown. I have cancelled my plan to date a French lady.

The problem with interracial marriage is of course not the language barrier. It's about the cultural differences that matters. The morning croissant (pronounce "kerongsang") will never beat the erotic persuasion offered by the hotness of our nasi lemak sambal bilis. Laden with the pseudo-scientific long practiced tips in producing our very own culinary pheromone fortified air tangan, one Malaysian lady does not simply pass the love germs to her Anglo-Saxon husband especially when he is one hell of a microbiology expert.

Interracial marriage often produce handsome sons and beautiful daughters. And they are smart too. This has been my dream for a quite some time now. My muscular chest would puff whenever those motherly young ladies scream their heart out over the cuteness of my toddler when I bring her out for a walk at some random public park.

"Aawww... wotsyo nem cutie pie??" says one young lady smells of sweat and perfume, pinching softly my toddler's cheek, body stoops a little forward because I'm less tall than her, legs drumming the jogging lane perhaps a kind of action already programmed in her central nervous system in order to show how happy she is to meet such a cute toddler having her mother's nose.

"Moi neng is Siti Nour Susan Éléonore Sabrina binti..." I say, imitating a cheeky toddler's voice because my baby obviously cannot speak. What the hell is wrong with this woman? Where is her logic?

"Sabrinaaa... Sabrinaa..." rhythming my daughter's name with a face like she has found a Coach leather hand bag left by some anonymous gentleman by the door of her house.

This kind of positive genetic variation is always observed in big cities like Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding areas. A Malay man married to a Chinese woman, Chinese to Caucasian, Pakistani to ChIndian. All of them are filthy rich - bulgy bellied father, dried prune mother, sisters whose face makes me always forget my pick-up lines, fat brothers, fatter younger brothers.

In the East Coast, it is a completely different scenario. Interracial marriage is rare but we still produce a lot of beaux and belles every year when our teenagers hit puberty and I am no exception.

I understand why Mother wants me find someone who lives near our hometown. It is not the beauty that matters because you my dear readers need to refer to my previous two sentence. She doesn't want me neglect her when she's getting older since Father is here no more, no one will take care of her when she does. I am now technically the family head and you young filthy rich city bastards have no idea about being 'a man' of the family.

Pardor, sir? Sabah and Sarawak ladies? Please, they are not even humans. They are devils of love. Made out of fire, they are hot and hard to handle.

"So the meaning of life is work, family, children who will grow up and leave you, a wife or a husband who will become more like a friend than a real lover." - Paulo Coelho (The Zahir)

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Meanwhile, someone has accidentally sent me a text message regarding a broken relationship that was supposed to be sent to his/her desired receiver. Click here.

Eve of The Passing Year

The first blossom of plum flower is the harbinger of spring. Ice melts, river is flowing, birds are singing, festival is coming. Like the colour of grass shoots coming out of the bank by the flowing river, the end of winter marks a new beginning of everything after a mirthless long cessation of the world. This is the point where farmers in the mainland China would start sowing their fertile land, plant their crops, in hoping for better life quality, longevity, happiness. 

After the eve of the passing year passed and the clatters of greasy dishes washed by their women heard in the kitchen, in next morning the clouds vamoose in the sky like a time-lapse movie.

I, Sir Pok Deng, would like wish my Chinese readers, Gong Xi Fa Chai!

Dreams

Dreams were vivid and technicolour during my morning sleep. They were beautiful dreams: levitating a few feet above the soft ripples of a crystal clear, turquoise water surrounding the spectacular view of an isolated island,  flying across a vast tulip garden, conversing fluently with people in foreign language, wet dreams.

Dreams were monochrome an hour or two before nightfall. That was the time at which the stories were complicated, sometimes sober, many times filled with hatred and anger. Weird — swinging a clenched fist half circle to a man's face in a dream was like doing the same motion underwater — fighting against the force of strong current, once hit, satisfaction was a word with no definition. They were not lucid; I did not know that I was in a dream, then waking up confused.

When the moon was so bright and suns at a billion light years afar twinkle in the sky, dreams were sometimes lengthy, which  led me into a very weak and tired morning. Memories gathered from dreams were disjointed, confusing plots. I wonder how some people jot down their dreams in their dream logs and manage to convince others that every single thing written in there is true.

The strange feeling, to think of a certain situation had occurred before but not sure when it did and ah! it did happen in that dream. This is deja vu. Funny how some people who say it did happen in that dream actually can't really sure which dream they are talking about. Science peoples tried their best feeding logic to my timid brain. In return, I gave them more question marks.

They say a dream is a journey of our roh, which is the spirit that manifests life to our raga, our body. They say our roh was created long long long time ago before we were born. Our fate, the path of our life, death, were maktoob (written), on a leaf of Luh Mahfuz, the book of destiny. Deja vu is indeed a forgotten memory.

Some say each human has seven fragments of roh. Dreaming and dreaming lose a fragment, while the remainders help keep the person alive. One who is in a state of comma is technically having many fragments of his/her roh journeying too far from  its complementary raga. When it finds its way back and currently stands near the raga, the synchronized vision of the roh with the raga's captures every detail they see — the familiar body, the face, the hair, the sleeping position. It looks like me, it's me, it's really me. This is Out of Body Experience (OBE) that I had experienced myself once.

Poseidon's Wrath

Pantai Teluk Lipat (Teluk Lipat Beach), Dungun, Terengganu. December 26, 2011.

Cassava Philosophy

I hate cliché but this is indeed Terengganu winter. Cold breeze. Sea waves that are constantly lashing our beach roar like angry lion in the distance. Many times cats and dogs loomed from cumulonimbus that blotted daylight, followed by fine rain that filled the gap between the chases. Earth is cold, chilling the neighbourhood's underground pipelines, laziness goes down our spine.

Almost like an annual ritual, when monsoon struck our shore, we ate boiled tapioca with grated coconut sprinkled with salt and sugar to taste. Coffee now steams in its porcelain cup at north. At the east are my two cats munching their new starchy carbohydrate fortified diet. They like it as we do. This is our monsoon comfort meal.

The science behind tapioca farming revealed. The old lady who sold the tapiocas told us a reason why our home grown tapioca had a slight bitter aftertaste, the same phenomenon when eating wrongly chosen durian. It's because of the weeds, she told us. Bitter tapiocas were grown near weeds (Imperata cylindrinca). I remember two old Malay proverbs that circle around underground tubers (forgive me if I'm wrong, tapiocas, I believe, is also a tuber).

"Diam-diam ubi berisi." (silently, silently the tapioca/potato fills out).

"Jangan jadi seperti lalang yang melintuk sana sini mengikut haluan angin." (don't be like tall grass blades, whose direction parallel to the words of the wind).

Bitter tapiocas were grown near weeds.

I don't know how to use the word "irony", but for now, I can say those two proverbs correlate between in each other provided the subjects co-exist in a particular niche in which the mentioned symbiosis would reflect humans' social life. The italicised phrase is trying to convey something.

Hold That Pose

I love reading Khaled Hosseini because of the vivid yet beautiful descriptions of the world he came out with. A children playground is a children playground to you, but Khaled Hosseini loves explaining everything in there in good depth. I don't know about the works of other prominent writers like Hemmingway or Wally Lamb because I never read any of their materials.

For a very long time I was searching for young blog writers like me who are Malaysian, young (of course), and most importantly write in English with very beautiful proses so that I can learn many things from them. Yep, thanks to Uncle Bangkai, I found one. He is Arief Hamizan, the boy behind "Hold That Pose", a new gem of blogosphere. A very good writer, he is.