We didn’t know what the day had in store for us and besides, it was a funny day to be out fishin’, in a fishing town that was trying its darndest to be a city on the waterside. Even my publisher thought it mad and politely turned down my invite to be out there with a rod. Well, a pen to be exact.
As it turned out, more than 300 books were sold and I signed the lot, with a personal message for every purchaser and I got a smile in return and that made it well worth the effort. When the shadows lengthened, when the shop owner was ready to pull down the shutters, my head was throbbing and my writing hand was numb. The inner man was rumbling from a missed lunch and all the food they were eating in the back as I was roller-balling the title page for the crowd.
“Why are you buying this book?” I asked one man who made me think of my mother. She would have described him as orang kelaut, a Trengganu sobriquet for people who went out to sea when the sky was red in the horizon and came back with the long shadows, at about the time when my pen was about to be recapped. The book was written in English and I think the man knew “good morning” and “thank you” but little more in the language.
“Oh,” he said. “I want to keep it for my children.”
Why would a fisherman want to keep a book written in a language that sounded no more to him than susurations and guttural voice? Well, for a start, the place where I was signing the book was mere yards from the place where he would have seen his work, all laid out on a slab, packed in ice that would be weeping in the heat. Visitors called it Pasar Payang, but to true blue Trengganuians it was Pasar Kedai Payang, a place that gave the name to the area, Kedai Payang, and it had been so for as long as folk remembered.
Well, I must say that the shop that hosted my book-signing was also part of the works, an old bookshop that had, deep within it, many roads. An old photograph I saw had folks all lined up in the back for a wedding — so far they travelled, so close the family members, and the patriarchs had sailed the seas and landed in Singapore in the south and came up to Kuala Terengganu to sell hardware and stuff until finally they specialised and became sellers of kitab, comic books and newspapers. They called themselves Al-Yunani, to distinguish themselves from their cousins from the same land who gathered in Kampung China further down the road. I called them “Hui-Hui and Other People” in my book.
That was the Terengganu (or Trengganu in my book) that the “fisherman” wanted to preserve in the hearts of his folks. The reason I asked him that question was to know why he was spending such a large amount of money on something he himself could not read: and the answer that I got was more than I expected.
The row of shop houses where Abdullah Al-Yunani opened his shop, a fine example of old Terengganu mortar and bricks is now no more, demolished in one fell swoop to make way for a new, thrusting image of the town that someone is even now, drawing out.
Another bit of our history was demolished in the wake of many more that had been swept into the wayside.
Now more of that blueprint has been unravelled as they speak of a five star rise in the face of folk who will have only books to remind them of their past. The “fisherman” clutching the work signed with my best wishes will now clutch it even tighter for he and the place for his goods will soon be consigned to the past, the memory of the town turned to just words. In the place where Pasar Kedai Payang once stood will be an intercontinental gee-whizz, with a star-studded cast of tourists looking out from a vantage point where once everyday folks of Kedai Payang bought fish and stood and gazed at the river that is the soul of their life.
We deprive ourselves in favour of other folk because we think of tourists until they become more important than us. But wait, isn’t tourism the fulfillment of a curiosity about another place and other people and how they live? Shouldn’t we then preserve what we cherish that is our future and our past and keep them for our grandchildren and theirs and for tourists who come down to see us?
The man clutching the book will think a thousand reasons to save Pasar Kedai Payang from the planners, because, at the very least, it is the history of us.
**** The article written by Wan A Hulaimi, an author of the bestseller ’A Map of Trengganu’
