THE MEMOIRS OF MUSTAPHA HUSSAIN - Malaysia Today

52 Memoirs of Mustapha Hussain
all day and all night, time passed so slowly, like the hands of the wallclock,
especially in the afternoons. We were not even allowed to play
indoor games such as chongkak (a game played with an oval block of
wood with holes in it and cowries) and meadow-ant fights. As soon as
we were about to play, my aunt Mak Endak Mariam, who was a bit of a
busybody, would warn us, “Don’t. You will not heal quickly if you move
too much.”
Bored almost to tears, my eyes began to roam around the house,
looking for something more to read. I had already read my school textbooks
many times over during that convalescence. My brother’s favourite
books, about the exciting exploits of Buffalo Bill and Sexton Blake, were
too difficult for me, as I had just entered the first year of the Special
Malay Class.
My eyes fell on a rack that stored some of my father’s collection of
books which I had not inspected before. I hobbled to the rack, groaning
under books of various thickness, in the three languages my father spoke
– Malay, English and Arabic. Some were in tatters, but my father, who
loved books with all his heart, kept every single one of them. In those
days, books were so expensive that in most homes, there were no books
except a couple of textbooks. But my father believed that the value price
of a book lay in its content.
I chose a book that looked a little better than the rest of the lot on
the shelf. What a treasure!
After looking the book over, opening several pages and scanning its
content, I realised that it was about a king, called Raja Hondok. Its pages
were of rough paper, had been yellowed by age, and the script was Jawi
(Malay in Arabic script). The most noticeable difference between this
book and others I had seen before was the blank space running all the
way down the middle of every page. And stranger still, all the words at
the end of the lines rhymed perfectly.
I then discovered that this book was written in the Malay classical
style called syair – stories related in verse form using quatrains of a
rhyme. I recalled where I had heard this kind of book being read, i.e.
under the dilapidated shed by the Larut River. This shed was the ‘factory’
that produced the attaps sold in many places in the state of Perak. This
particular factory closed down some time after the advent of corrugated
zinc sheets and tiles.
In those days at the shed were a group of women weaving attap
thatched roofing from nipah palm leaves. Nipah had been used on all
traditional Malay houses before the advent of corrugated zinc sheets and
tiles. I remember listening avidly to the leader of the group, a man, reading