JULY 29 — Everyone retreated to their respective units (pintu) of the longhouse and then in minutes the horn was sounded, just as we finished laying out the treats on the mat.
It’s Gawai Night in Rumah Juna, a little after Bintulu on the way to Miri. If seen from miles away on the dark roads which connect the towns between which longhouses like this stand, the unobservant witness would not see more than lights powered by numerous generators. Inside, the gaiety matched any carnival.
The seven days and six nights I spent in five longhouse along the Miri-Bintulu-Sibu stretch in Sarawak culminated that evening as the Iban community welcomed me in their midst as a friend rather than a guest.
That it has taken me two months to put it down in words is not a testament to anything or a lack of material. But rather my own need to understand what I did experience and share the heart of the matter rather than just the touristy bits. I’ll concede this will only tell a minute part of a proud people who deserve far more.
The trip’s entirety I will retell in a broader log, but here I want to relate moments from the trip. Not a trailer, just a feeling.
I said I had none. Actually being raised in a very traditional Tamil home, and then growing up with Muslims plus a personal paranoia of squids in Gestapo uniforms bursting into my bedroom one day to drag me to the bottom of Sungai Congkak, I had plenty of hang ups about food.
But like silly writers worldwide, I lied. So my test came in many forms. Pork ribs, pork stew, roasted beef, barbecued bits, other bits lying on other bits with a rich crispy layer and lots more. My personal favourite happened after Eddie carted me over to the corner pintu in Rumah Jamil, where the host asked me to eat the river fish whole. He said that was the best way to do it. So I did. I’d never eaten a whole fish that size before.
I said I was OK with everything because I did not want to make my hosts adjust for me, or feel their hospitality was not good enough for me. Because they do what almost everyone in the country, especially mothers, do; ask you if you need a feed.
People want to feed other people because they care. And on my trip a whole lot of people who did not know me wanted to feed me.
The bulk of our stay was in Rumah Juna, and the remaining nights in Rumah Jamil and it was from the latter we made a trip to a wedding up road through dirt tracks to another longhouse. But we were plastered so they sent us back to Rumah Jamil.
Only Tom and I were up or back — everyone had gone for the wedding, having passed the sobriety test.
The typical longhouse will have a ruai, a lengthy common living space like a porch. So all families have the privacy of their home but equally have an unimpeded common space.
But that night only Tom and the dogs were around. Our other companion, the Italian, had long gone into tuak-induced coma hours ago. So we talked. Tom is a Kelabit-Iban chieftain’s son from somewhere beyond Sungai Baram where you have to pitch tent twice to get home (three days’ travel) on foot. His military escapades as an enlisted man led him all over the peninsula, a marriage which moved him to being a Muslim, retiring from the armed forces as a captain and now running a security team.
He was strong as an ox, broke my glasses accidentally to accidentally prove that point and talked about Gawai in his family’s longhouse in a way it seemed he was not only talking about the distance that kept him away from it — but that time had come between him and home.
Everything in Tom’s village was more intense, so he said. The traditions, the food, the drinking and yes, even the girls. He was getting all excited and sad at the same time.
The next night was Gawai Night. Whatever pressure I felt to consume tuak (home-made rice wine) in the preceding days will be nothing I was warned. Of course, I was silly enough to think they were just trying to rile me up.
We stayed in Sli’s house in Rumah Juna, which was three doors away from the tuai’s pintu (chieftain’s home). That put us dead smack where the action happens.
We arrived late afternoon just as the miring ceremony was starting. The ceremony for the ancestors went along the ruai from pintu to pintu. At every stop, as rituals are completed, we’d chug down tuak from the pintu, and this continued for every stop — something like 50 pintu.
I felt I had crossed a marathon line after it ended. But I was told to my consternation it was an Ironman triathlon — two more tours remain.
I had no time to consider that prospect as the one-man sound system was up and running in the main ruai area and the music pumping.
And a little farther down the ruai a dude with competing speakers was playing something familiar. I had to strain a bit more and it was unmistakable — “Brother Louie” was playing. Modern Talking had arrived for this Gawai.
Night had fallen, and speeches and other niceties had to be completed as members from the Sarawak state government and other political parties had arrived to make good with the Ibans — they are after all the majority for now in Sarawak.
Jenny, Sli’s wife, got me to accompany her son when he went up to receive his sports prize. The community had competitions leading to Gawai and the longhouse claimed to have a winning football team. Every winner had to gulp down a full glass of tuak, except for children where their parent would do the honours.
And in the case of Sli’s son, I was the nominee, and gulp I did knowing two-thirds of the Ironman remained.
Which brings me back to the ruai in the opening paragraph with the horns blaring — food and tuak lined up through the 60 pintu of the longhouse.
Eddie said let’s go and led me through a longhouse bonding ritual as you sample food and drink from all pintu in turn. We kept running into the state employees and the politicos. Eddie would ask loudly for the pork dishes — when the outsiders were within earshot — which the Ibans hid from the civil servants. He said Gawai is Iban and pork is a cultural dish. So why should the Iban hide the dish in his own home? Fair comment. They should not eat the pork, but neither should they encourage the Iban to hide his traditional dishes. Or does the law of gravity operate differently in Malaysia?
We finished our rounds by 2am, my best guess, but the dancing and merriment never ended. I collapsed in a heap a few hours later.
I was woken up in the morning to drink some more. And then there was the “drinking train” coming to complete the triathlon. The chieftain’s wife, may my alien spaceship bless her, nudged me to sleep in their living room before I fell into the arms of the mob.
By dinner time things had slowed down. I had made it through the main storm.
The home of Sli, who like many Ibans worked in the oil and gas industry or shipping, was like the many working-class/squatter homes. It got water from the adjacent hills of the longhouse and had a small generator. He spent RM200 a month on fuel and repairs on the average. That is the electricity bill for a double-storey link home with all kinds of electronic gadgets, and this Iban home only operates the generator half the day.
The high tension cables, a stone’s throw away from their longhouse by the main trunk road, begged the question of what’s stopping the state of Sarawak with the good people of Tenaga from giving them fixed electric lines.
As the days drew closer to our departure and further from the heights of Gawai, the conversations were more reflective, more circumspect.
And on the final night, we sat on an almost empty ruai with the longhouse secretary, a younger chap who lives and works in town, and drives his family back for weekends. He quizzed my political thoughts, and asked me if we across the South China Seas think of them as gullible.
I said many do, the way they surrender — the Ibans especially — power to a manipulative and absolute regime. He said that it is fine to think they are in support of a side, but it is foolhardy to think that they are not thinking through their vote.
He postulated that those yearning for change will come to them and offer all they deserve. Those in power gave them a tenth of what they deserved, but they gave. Should he, he asked, risk that which he does get for the outside chance of an idealist’s all? There are buses to school, bridges to better lives and machines to better incomes no man who lives in the present can say no to.
I wasn’t about to reduce a difficult proposition with theoretical righteousness, so we continued eating our Maggi mee. Sli heard me say in a moment of weakness that Maggi mee would do so well on nights like that and he trotted off to the store at the other end of the ruai to get a large pack.
No answers that night, but it was about the seven of us coming from a pot of Malaysia sitting down and savouring our Maggi mee. It was that good. Our common love for two-minute noodles that says Malaysia better than any slogan gave me great confidence about the future.
The next day, Eddie, Tom, the Italian and I headed back to Miri.
* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.
