FullReads

Mamat was three years older than Busuk, and they were to be married when she was fifteen.

At first she cried a little, for she was sad at the thought of giving up her playmates. But then the older women told her that she could chew betel when she was married, and her mother showed her a little set of betel-nut boxes, for which she had sent to Singapore. Each cup was of silver, and the box was cunningly inlaid with storks and cherry blossoms. It had cost her mother a month’s hard labor on the loom.

Then Mamat was not to take her back to his father’s bungalow. He had built a little one of his own, raised up on palm posts six feet from the ground, so that she need not fear tigers or snakes or white ants. Its sides were of plaited palm leaves, every other one colored differently, and its roof was of the choicest attap, each leaf bent carefully over a rod of rattan, and stitched so evenly that not a drop of rain could get through.

Inside there was a room especially for her, with its sides hung with sarongs, and by the window was a loom made of kamooning wood, finer than her mother’s. Outside, under the eaves, was a house of bent rattan for her ring-doves, and a shelf where her silver-haired monkey could sun himself.

So Busuk forgot her grief, and she watched with ill-concealed eagerness the coming of Mamat’s friends with presents of tobacco and rice and bone-tipped krises. Then for the first time she was permitted to open the camphor-wood chest and gaze upon all the beautiful things that she was to wear for the one great day.

Her mother and elder sisters had been married in them, and their children would, one after another, be married in them after her.

There was a sarong of silk, run with threads of gold and silver, that was large enough to go around her body twice and wide enough to hang from her waist to her ankles; a belt of silver, with a gold plate in front, to hold the sarong in place; a kabaya, or outer garment, that looked like a dressing-gown, and was fastened down the front with golden brooches of curious Malayan workmanship; a pair of red-tipped sandals; and a black lace scarf to wear about her black hair. There were earrings and a necklace of colored glass, and armlets, bangles, and gold pins. They all dazzled Busuk, and she could hardly wait to try them on.

A buffalo was sacrificed on the day of the ceremony. The animal was “without blemish or disease.” The men were careful not to break its fore or hind leg or its spine, after death, for such was the law. Its legs were bound and its head was fastened, and water was poured upon it while the kadi prayed. Then he divided its windpipe. When it was cooked, one half of it was given to the priests and the other half to the people.

All the guests, and there were many, brought offerings of cooked rice in the fresh green leaves of the plantain, and baskets of delicious mangosteens, and pink mangoes and great jack-fruits. A curry was made from the rice that had forty sambuls to mix with it. There were the pods of the moringa tree, chilies and capsicums, prawns and decayed fish, chutneys and onions, ducks’ eggs and fish roes, peppers and cucumbers and grated cocoanuts.

It was a wonderful curry, made by one of the Sultan’s own cooks; for the Punghulo Sahak spared no expense in the marriage of this, his last daughter, and a great feast is exceedingly honorable in the eyes of the guests.

Busuk’s long black hair had to be done up in a marvellous chignon on the top of her head. First, her maids washed it beautifully clean with the juice of the lime and the lather of the soap-nut; then it was combed and brushed until every hair glistened like ebony; next it was twisted up and stuck full of the quaint golden and tortoise-shell bodkins, with here and there a spray of jasmine and chumpaka.