In a few months she could outstrip any one in the class in tracing Arabic
characters on the sand-sprinkled floor, and she knew whole chapters in the
Koran.
So the days were passed in the little kampong under the gently swaying
cocoanuts, and the little Malayan girl grew up like her companions, free and
wild, with little thought beyond the morrow. That some day she was to be
married, she knew; for since her first birthday she had been engaged to Mamat,
the son of her father’s friend, the punghulo of Bander Bahru.
She had never seen Mamat, nor he her; for it was not proper that a Malay should
see his intended before marriage. She had heard that he was strong and lithe of
limb, and could beat all his fellows at the game called ragga. When the wicker
ball was in the air he never let it touch the ground; for he was as quick with his
head and feet, shoulders, hips, and breast, as with his hands. He could swim and
box, and had once gone with his father to the seaports on New Year’s Day at
Singapore, and his own prau had won the short-distance race.
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