Não dá pé, go fly a kite: بندر روساق

Hoje foi a vez do Muzium Rakyat. O Museu do Povo. Interestingly and perhaps unsurprisingly, the people were represented in the displays. As bearers of folk cultures, of course. It is the very first museum I come across in Melaka that actually displays some of the variety of Melakan society under a single roof instead of only imperial postcolonial historiographies of one kind or another. Even the Temui, an indigenous people in Melaka, were there.

The ground floor - entrance fee RM 1 - has an exhibit about the pião - namely, the gasing. The pião/gasing turns round and round at great speed. It is usually made of wood and is put to work through pulling on a thick string coiled around its head or simply by spinning it by hand. In Brasil it is used in children's play and the last time I remember having one in my hands I must have been around ten. Now in Melaka the pião is serious business: I saw photographs of adult competitors using it on floors with different spaces clearly demarcated by chalk lines. The exhibit also lets the viewer guess that the gasing is probably of Chinese origin or at any rate seems very popular with the local Chinese. One explanatory board said that there is a spiritual dimension to playing with the gasing. This explanation strikes me as slightly ridiculous. I doubt very much that, for instance, the Sufi brotherhoods used the gasing in their spiritual exercises. It sounds more like a justification for adults to enjoy playing with it. 

On the upper floor there is an exhibit on the layang - the papagaio, pipa or kite. I have never in my life seen any layang like that anywhere in Brasil or elsewhere. They seem fairly large to me and beautifully patterned. In fact, they look almost like mythical flying creatures. They also come alive in the skies. Brazilian kites often have tails. I myself used to fly a kite, on the beach in Praia Grande on the coast of São Paulo during the very long summer vacations. I even made kites once. But I never had or saw such elaborate layang as the ones on display. Melaka kites come alive in the air because they have a kind of helix that makes noise as the layang is flown. If all this is traditional, ur-Melakan culture, I thoroughly approve of it. Who needs a sultanate.

An interesting detail: a pioneer of kite-making and kite-flying in Melaka is none other than Munshi Abdullah himself. He also provides what is probably the first written evidence of the activity in Melaka in his well-known Hikayat Abdullah. Beyond him, the history of layang-layang in Melaka is actually obscure like much else in the city's long history. He made papagaios for other children as a means of getting pocket money in the early nineteenth century. I find the idea of the Munshi - the towering pioneer of modern Malay writing, a well-known savant, and one of the most famous sons of Melaka - as a papagaio-maker very appealing. It also brings him closer to myself as a small boy making and flying kites on Praia Grande in a past receding so fast that one day it will be lost forever.

Then comes an incredible photograph of two young women, both very Chinese-looking as far as I am concerned. One is dressed as a nyonya with the famous kebaya, the other as a stereotypical Portuguese woman in one of those outfits worn for folk dance performances in Macau, Melaka or Brasil. They preside over a table where nyonya and Portuguese dishes are on display. It occurs to me that probably few people in Brasil would want to be seen dead in either outfit, particularly the Portuguese one. It is intriguing however that this (so far) single apparition of Portuguese culture in Melaka in one of the city's musuems is related to cuisine. Also, local Portuguese culinary culture is presented side by side with nyonya cuisine. This is actually no surprise, as the two are related. In fact, they are probably even more closely related than Melaka Portuguese cuisine is to its metropolitan Portuguese counterpart. In reality, from the description next to the photograph I can tell at once that Melaka's Portuguese cuisine would probably not pass muster as such in Portugal: it is a highly creolized cuisine, full of spices and cabe. I find that in fact quite fortunate, as I am not really fond of Portuguese cuisine. At Carlos's in Macau I always had trouble choosing a dish I liked. Well, Carlos's is supposedly Macanese, not Portuguese cuisine as such. It is therefore also creolized cuisine. I always chose the prawn curry (it cost cento e trinta patacas, if I remember right). I don't know why, but I always suspect prawn curry is actually a Moçambican dish. Carlos - whose name is actually Henrique - was a very friendly and hospitable Macanese man and his restaurant has a fixed clientele, but his food was not really to my liking. But then I am not much of a meat eater.

The display says shallots are used in Portuguese cuisine. I go to the Malay version and see bawang merah. I am intrigued. Later I check the internet: chalotas. I had never heard the name before. The accompanying online photograph however shows a small reddish onion I recognize. No idea what it is called in Brasil. Well, onions are certainly part of Portuguese cuisine (and also Brazilian cuisine though to a lesser degree). I try to recollect what Joaze and I had at the Portuguese settlement for dinner weeks ago when we came down for a quick night visit after our conference on affirmative action ended in Kuala Lumpur. I remember having prawn on butter - camarão na manteiga. The dish did taste somehow Portuguese. I also remember that I ordered in Portuguese and was understood at once even though the girls were clearly not willing to speak the language. As they were young, they certainly understand it but prefer to speak English or Malay just as everybody else in their generation (Melaka Portuguese is therefore slowly falling into disuse). Joaze however, who is not fond of anything remotely spicy, ordered a fish - in his newly learned language, namely, English - that to his utter chagrin came covered in a red spicy red sauce. Most of Brazil does not like spicy food, and Joaze, being from Centro-Oeste (Brasília), is not fond of cabe or used to it. So much for the Portuguese culinary connection.

The rest of the museum contained rooms on local dignataries who were totally unknown to me. I found the displays on them quite forgetable. Then in a separate building there was an additional room. It turned out to be full of dioramas and paintings of the highlights of Melaka's history, including films in Malay: Melaka before Melaka (just a fishing kampung by the sea);  the founding of the sultanate (a forest landscape with animals and a couple of dignataries is shown - I assume this is the spot where Parameswara saw a wondrous deer under a melaka tree and decided this auspicious apparition called for the founding of a new settlement); the Portuguese attack and eventual takeover; the Dutch attacks and eventual takeover; the handing over of the city to the English; and then the dioramas and pictures end with the destruction of Melaka's commerce through its displacement to both Penang and Singapore. The diorama accordingly shows an empty townscape with oldish buildings and the phrase: Sleepy Hollow/Bandar Mati. Bandar Mati is in fact dead port or city. Bandar is Persian for port and also Indonesian, though in Malay it usually means town or city. Anyway, Malay towns were traditionally always by the water and very close to the sea. Interior urban centres such as Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh are colonial era creations. I like the word bandar: there are bandar-named harbours and towns all the way from Somalia to Indonesia configuring an Indian Ocean that was not only well-connected since ancient times, but also probably shared a common partly Persian seafaring and trade tradition. 

The opposing wall has the photographs displaying the process leading to independence. This last was preceded by the declaration in Banda Hilir of the independence day by Tunku Abdul Rahman in 1956 (Melaka has in fact an entire musuem devoted to that declaration). The independence was therefore declared from the cradle of the nation-to-be. From sleepy fishing village to sultanate to sleepy hollow and then to cradle of Malaysian independence. As I go out into the glare of the afternoon sun and am almost run over by a colourful trishaw Melaka is anything but a bandar mati. Pelo contrário, é um lugar cheio de vida. It is too lively, in fact (I am tired of being among so many tourists). I cross into the mall right next door to eat something. I am starved by all the museum-ogling: the Stamp Museum, the Islamic Museum of Melaka, the Museum of Islam and the Malay World, the UMNO Museum (well, this last was closed).

The mall is the result of someone's business plan. It starts right at the foot of the old Portuguese fort whose foundations are still visible. It is not good to have a mall - in fact, two large malls separated by a padang with a third one just across the street - right next to a historic site. I can only speculate what archaeological relics lie buried forever under the foundations of the mall. As the site of the Portuguese fort - later turned Dutch fort before being dismantled by the Scottish founder of Singapore lest the Dutch use it against the English when they returned - was in fact built on the site of the pre-colonial fort and sultan's palace, there are many layers and several centuries of history lost forever. Just as with historic towns in Brasil, I have no doubt that Melaka survived somewhat intact for such a long time exactly because it became a sleepy hollow. Had progress caught up with it earlier, it would no doubt be now a kind of miniature Singapore and just as nondescript, or a half-destroyed heritage city as Penang. It is not so much bandar mati as it is now bandar rusak, a broken city.

In this sense, the colonial heritage based on destroying what there is in order to build things anew for a profit, piously followed by the Portuguese, Dutch, and British, has been given a new lease of life in the postcolony. I remember walking along the Melaka river and reading a sign pointing to the Dutch bricks and mentioning how the British stopped making them when they took over. I am sure the Dutch also did not like the Portuguese bricks, as they destroyed and modified so much of the Portuguese town which in turn had been built on the ruins of the Malay town. The Portuguese also made use of the materials left over from the destruction of the sultan's palace and fort as well as the mosques: and bricks must have been part of it too, even though there is a strange tradition that says that the Portuguese were the first to bring bricks to Melaka. Salma Nasution in Penang has appropriately pointed out to me that Ayutthaya in Siam still has plenty of bricks and was never a colonial town (in fact, it was built well before the Portuguese ever came to Asia). But then Siamese history is not kosher in Malaysia. Siam might as well have been next to the Inca Empire for all that Malaysians care.

The well built for Cheng Ho also comes to my mind: the upper part of the well had Portuguese bricks, probably because the Portuguese didn't like what was there before.

Besides, the life of the historic centre has been more or less evacuated to the sprawling periphery often built on reclaimed land, and the inhabitants of Melaka in the evening are increasingly tourists rather than locals. No wonder the city centre seems dead in the evening. Rather than opening a food court with cheap restaurants serving only local food, the guys with the business plans open instead expensive tourist venues serving fancy food which are guaranteed to remain empty when tourists are not in town (and often also when they are as I have discovered). Penang in this sense has perhaps kept a better sense of community life in its historic centre than Melaka, in spite of all its many problems. To be fond of a bandar rusak must be akin to loving a husband so full of shortcomings that you eventually start wondering why you married him in the first place. And just as with some husbands, the mystique of Melaka gets you all the same when you least expect.

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