At evening, when the fierce sun went down behind the great banian tree that
nearly hid Mount Pulei, the kateeb would sound the call to prayer on a hollow
log that hung up before the little palm-thatched mosque. Then Busuk and her
playmates would fall on their faces, while the holy man sang in a soft,
monotonous voice the promises of the Koran, the men of the kampong
answering. “Allah il Allah,” he would sing, and “Mohammed is his prophet,”
they would answer.
Every night Busuk would lie down on a mat on the floor of the house with a
little wooden pillow under her neck, and when she dared she would peep down
through the open spaces in the bamboo floor into the darkness beneath. Once she
heard a low growl, and a great dark form stood right below her. She could see its
tail lashing its sides with short, whip-like movements. Then all the dogs in the
kampong began to bark, and the men rushed down their ladders screaming,
“Harimau! Harimau!” (A tiger! A tiger!) The next morning she found that her
pet dog, Fatima, named after herself, had been killed by one stroke of the great
beast’s paw. Once a monster python swung from a cocoanut tree through the
window of her home, and wound itself round and round the post of her mother’s
loom. It took a dozen men to tie a rope to the serpent’s tail, and pull it out.
Busuk went everywhere astride the punghulo’s broad shoulders as he collected
the taxes and settled the disputes in the little village. She went out into the straits
in the big prau that floated the star and crescent of Johore over its stern, to look
at the fishing-stakes, and was nearly wrecked by a great water-spout that burst
within a few feet of them.
Then she went twice to Johore, and gazed in open-eyed wonder at the palaces of
the Sultan and at the fort in which her uncle was an officer.
“Some day,” she thought, “I may see his Highness, and he may notice me and
smile.” For had not his Highness spoken twice to her father and called him a
good man? So whenever she went to Johore she put on her best sarong and
kabaya> and in her jetty black hair she put the pin her aunt had given her, with a
spray of sweet-smelling chumpaka flower.
When she was four years old she went to the penager to learn to read and write.