Hang Nadim

The stories are mostly gone now. If you went up to Bukit Larangan, the Forbidden Hill, you might still find them quietly sleeping in shards of pottery broken too many lifetimes ago, or in tarnished coins dreaming of far-off kingdoms and dusty old kings.

But then there are the well-known stories, self-aware and hidden like a sneeze. Sometimes they're hidden under the cover of a name so familiar and yet so foreign, tripping lightly over your tongue, catching in your throat, a tickle of a memory barely remembered. And then it explodes.

This is a story about magic, greed, and death, but it is also a story about courage and love.

This is the tale of Bukit Merah.

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Many moons ago, after a prince had cast his crown overboard to calm a storm, and the land had been named for a half-glimpsed lion, there lived a young boy and his old mother.

In those days, the land was wild and raw with mystery. The ground you stood on was very likely to have once been an animal or a person. Which is not to say that you were merely standing on burial ground, but that you were really standing on, for example, a tortoise who had turned into an island. And the hills curving sweetly in the distance was once a young girl who lay down in sleep. That was the secret of the land. It was alive. It was tangled, heated, and overgrown; thrumming with the fierce beauty of strange elemental forces. And for a time, it seemed that there was barely a difference between the land or its people.

So it was that no one was prepared when the first traders came elegantly sailing in from Borobodur and China. The people stood gazing open-mouthed at the traders' ships and the wonders they brought with them: smooth porcelain bowls glazed the shifting green colours of a forest in mist; blood-red creatures shimmering on dark lacquered boxes; gleaming armbands whipped from burnished gold ... That day, the land was nothing more than dead earth. The people replaced their fierce, true hearts with the cold, lifeless jewels of distant lands, and still they wanted more.

But there once was a boy, and his name was Hang Nadim. He lived with his old mother in a small attap hut by the murmuring sea, and neither of them had forgotten that the land was alive.

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Hang Nadim was different. He was different because he was very good at being not-different. He was never the first to collect coconuts from the tall, graceful trees when the boys held a race to do so, but neither was he the last. Big-nosed Salim was always getting into fights and gentle Usman was a dreamer. But if you asked anyone in the village about what made Hang Nadim special, you would be hard pressed to get an answer.

After a thoughtful silence, old man Khan Bilal might say "Oh, that boy is clever" and the others would nod their heads, yes. "But," he might cackle, "not as clever as my Hira who can cook for my whole family, feed the chickens, and mend fishing nets." Then tired of hearing old Bilal's daily boast about his capable granddaughter, the others would shrug and go back to sipping coconut juice under the soft, bruised shade of their huts, dreaming of treasure.

The truth was, Hang Nadim behaved in a perfectly ordinary manner around people. Which is to say that he was ordinary, but also that he did it so perfectly that no one guessed that there was nothing ordinary about Hang Nadim. The least ordinary thing about him was that he had magic, but it was also the most ordinary thing because the others had magic from the land; only for the fact that they'd forgotten.

Hang Nadim's mother also had magic, and she was so old that sometimes he suspected that she wasn't his real mother. Mak, as he called her, had long white hair that fell to a thick waist, shrewd black eyes, and knobbly elbows. She was comfortably made of flesh and wrinkled myth, and he loved her with the fierce, strange love of a child who would have turned into an island to save his mother from drowning. And that love was another difference.

So it was that when the other mothers sent their children down to the river to play, Mak sent him to borrow River's mirror to catch the silver moon. And when the other children were picking fruit, he was asking Banana Tree for her comb made of sunlight. It was one day when he was coaxing a golden fish scale from Arowana that the whole trouble began.

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The trouble began with the death of a man. His name was Tun Jana Khateb and the Rajah had him killed.