Abang Tapai

Tapai is a marvellous Malay dessert which doesn’t necessarily have to be taken only as a dish after the main meal – like any other sweet pulut (rice cakes) eat it whenever you feel like having it.

It's made from glutinous rice added with yeast, and allowed to slightly ferment. The dish is not unique to Malay cuisine but exists in other ethnic food cultures in East and South-East Asia, but I love the Malay version.

One day I organized a dinner for two families, very close friends of my uncles. They were Malay and Mamak respectively so the food has to be halal (kosher) of course. The dietary requirement was easily taken care of by another family friend, a Malay caterer.

Being the person who was footing the bill - one of my uncles insisted that I should begin my contribution to family responsibilities with this dinner :( - I had the prerogative of determining what dishes were to be prepared.

I decided that while we were to have halal Malay dishes they would be served a la western style, starting off with a hors d'oeuvre, followed by soup, and then the main meal, after which was to be the dessert, and then rounding up the meal with coffee/tea. I intended to dazzle my uncles – gosh, they still treated me like a kid so I was out to show them I was then a ‘man of the world’.

The dinner menu was as follows:

Hors d’oeuvre – grilled otak otak - fish in curry custard-like paste & daun kaduk or wild pepper leaf (piper sarmentosum), a herbal vine-like leaf, with the lot wrapped in banana leaf and then grilled.

daun kaduk

I personally preferred the Penang style of steamed otak otak but the caterer advised me that the southern Malaysian grilled version was better. Mana adalah? How could any food style be possibly better than Penang cuisine but anyway, I deferred to him.

otak-otak - photo from Madam Kwong.com

Soup – I mulled over a few options until the contractor persuaded me that tom yam was a perfectly authentic Malay dish, well, at least in Kelantan – and since one of the pak ciks (uncles, or peers in age to one's own father) was a Kelantanese, this dish would be gnam gnam (perfect fit) for him.

Le Plat Principal (just showing off one of the very few French words I know wakakaka) – the main course was to be de-boned briyani chicken plus plus (all the accompaniments).

Dessert – you guess it, tapai. This was more for kaytee’s personal taste rather than my guests' or uncles'. The contractor was taken aback for a while before he smiled and nodded in approval.

Needless to say, the dinner was a success and my uncles beamed their pleasure that the ‘kid’ in the house could throw a party - at last, long overdue acknowledgement!

During the dessert, the Malay pak cik looked at me with a grin and joked: “kaytee my boy, we Muslims would usually be taking a walk on the edge of sin whenever we have tapai because just that extra iota of percentage proof would tilt us over into haram* land”.

* not kosher

Then, he not only polished off his dish but asked for a second helping – his missus rolled her eyes and gave me a Mona Lisa smile.

Now, talking about tapai, I recall in my kiddy days a Malay hawker whom we call Abang Tapai or more often than not, Tapai Koe. At that time when I was around 7 or 8 years old, he was in his late 20’s or very early 30’s. Too young to be addressed as pak cik, and without ever revealing his name to us, he automatically became known Tapai Ah Koe or shortened to Tapai Koe (Tapai elder Bro) or Abang Tapai.

Penangites had a common habit of addressing their hawkers, tradesmen and vendors by their wares, eg. Too Bah Chek (Uncle Pork Seller), Koay Teow Peh (Elder Uncle Koay Teow), Laksa* Ee (Auntie Laksa) so Tapai Koe was a natural moniker for the abang.

* when Penangites refer to laksa they mean the real original laksa, not the curried imposter that southerners brazenly and blasphemously believe as laksa

People in my village were mainly Chinese with some Indians and a couple of Malay families, but only the Chinese were his customers.

However, to us he was more than just a hawker selling tapai – more of this later.

He peddled his wares on a bicycle which has a tradesman type carrier and stand; these two bicycle accessories usually come together for obvious reason. I had described the former briefly in a previous post Lustful Fantasies as big and broad and could carry either two 30 kg bags of rice or, if kaytee had his ‘rathers’, two sweeties at the same time, though in my unfortunate case, the latter didn’t ever occur [sob].

The tradesman type stand allows the bicycle to stand erect to ensure heavy loads do not topple over due to their displaced centres of gravity, which would occur if the bicycle rested on a leaning stand. It also enabled hawkers to prepare their food stuff, especially those including liquid form, without spilling any.

But for youngsters it didn’t look ‘cool’ especially when together with the tradesman type carrier it would look exactly like what it was/is, a tradesman bicycle, daggy adult stuff.

Thus most 'cool' youngsters in my days would rather be dead than be seen on such an adult type of bike, and worse, an adult tradesman bicycle, but [sob] poor kaytee didn’t have any choice as I was required to cycle one to school all the way from Ayer Itam market to the Methodist Boys’ School and then at 1:30 pm, all the way back home, this time with the road challenging me with a rising gradient.

In the blazing post-noon sun it was really hard work. But on rainy days, though there were increased dangers from buses and trucks, the drizzle or downpour (depending on your luck) provided cooler temperatures to make pedalling back home less of an ordeal.

Mind you, at times I did wonder whether the bus and truck drivers were sadists, hitting puddles at tremendous speed exactly at the point when they barrelled past me, virtually drowning me in ‘recycled’ water. Surprisingly my el cheapo plastic raincoat provided formidable protection for me though my face, hands and canvas shoes and grotty socks would be as drenched as Noah’s neighbours.

Sometimes I even cycled all the way to the Penang Public Library but alas, never ever to Light Street Convent – for the sole reason that even kaytee would prefer to die than be seen by the Convent sweeties pedalling such a horrible beast to their school. Don’t know why MBS blokes like me and my best pal Michael preferred sweethearts from Convent Light Street rather than MGS? Were we traitors to the Methodist Church for desiring Catholic babes, wakakaka!

Ooops, as usual I digress.

So … Abang Tapai would make his rounds in our village, visiting each lane and corner of the kampung (village) once a week or sometimes only in a fortnight. As Ayer Itam at one time was reputed to be the largest village in Malaysia, it took a cycling hawker some considerable time to go around all the traps. Like all tradesmen of those days, he announced his arrival with calls of his particular ware, ‘tapai, tapai’, to the delight of kids like me.

Sometimes I would have to sit out his offer with a glum face when I was p’okkai (broke), but when I did have some money (earned it by running errant for a gambling den near my house) I too joined in the rush to buy his marvellous tapai.

Each child would carry a bowl of sorts with a hope that Abang Tapai would give that extra tapai ‘juice’ which tasted like nectar. We would appeal “Ah Koe, th’ng* hor kar chnay” (Elder bro, more of the juice) – yes, like most Penangites, Tapai Koe spoke perfect Penang Hokkien.

* Penang Hokkien note: th’ng can mean either ‘soup’ or ‘sugar’ (or in that tapai context, its ‘syrupy juice’), depending on the tone. The 1st tone is ‘soup’, while the 2nd is ‘sugar’, and to confuse you mainlanders (except Kedahans and those as far south as Taiping) the 3rd tone means ‘to scald’ wakakaka

His bicycle carried a huge bamboo basket with a cone-shape lid on the tradesman type carrier. The cone-shape lid is similar to the one we Malaysians used to cover dishes of food on the table to protect them from flies. But when he inverted and rested it on the space between the bicycle handlebars and seat, the overturned lid revealed in it two fixed short planks which together represented his work table.

He would then serve each of the customers – he delved into the basket and produced the tapai pulut, each semi-cylindrically shaped and approximately 8 cm by 2 cm in size, nicely wrapped in a banana-leaf cutting. He then removed at one end of the wrapping a lidi* (twig made from the rib of a coconut frond), thus unlocking the tapai pulut inside, and allowing it to slide out (with the help of gravity) into the customer’s bowl.

* usually (mis)pronounced by Chinese Penangites as 'lili'

Then from one of several bottles secured to the internal side of the basket he would add the tapai ‘nectar’ to the pulut.

Now I've come to the other aspect of Abang Tapai (recall I mentioned earlier that he was more than just a tapai hawker to us kids)

While he was serving us kids (but never when an adult was around) he would say in his beautiful Hokkien “Kar lu ay mama korng, ki mare snar gor lark jee ay k’ee t'au pio” (tell your mum the 1st prize for tonight’s 4-D lottery draw will be 3562*).

* his forecast 4 digits would naturally change from week to week

We kids would then jeer and, totally without any diplomacy, accuse him of being a police spy. Mind you, there was no malice in our naughty responses, nor did Abang Tapai take any offence for he would smile and continue to offer his free-but-unwanted forecast of the 4-D numbers each and every week.

It didn't help that Abang Tapai was known to have an elder brother who was a policeman with the local station. Hence Tapai Koe automatically became a police spy regardless of whether that was a fact or just popular suspicion. Naturally the rumours had it that he was laying traps for any overly enthusiastic kid who might rush off to inform mum of Abang Tapai’s 4-D forecast, and for his elder brother to subsequently nab.

In those years as we were growing up the village kids enjoyed both the tapai and the friendly bantering we had with the kindly Ah Koe. There was never an unkind word from him nor any malicious ones from us.

But one day, just immediately after I completed my final school year, Abang Tapai didn’t turn up on his usual schedule – one week went by without any sight of him, then two weeks, four weeks, 2 months etc, but we never saw him ever again. By then I was about to migrate to Kuala Lumpur to seek a new life, as a working man.

Years later when I returned to my kampung I would ask about him but no one knew what had happened to Ah Koe. We all missed his marvellous tapai and his cheeky but cheerful weekly 4-D forecast. Had he passed away, perhaps as a victim of a road accident, or from some drastic illness? At that time of his non-appearance he would have been only around 40-ish.

Of course as an adult I came to realize (or at least believe strongly) that Abang Tapai was teasing us kids with his 4-D forecast and even enjoyed his undeserved notoriety as a police spy.

Abang Tapai was one of those unforgettable features in the landscape of our youthful psyche, and naturally we wish him well. Thus I like to imagine that perhaps he was the eventual beneficiary of his own 4-D forecast and amply rewarded, retired unannounced to a wonderful life style on some lovely kampung beach front in Penang, where the only tapai he had to make would be for his family and himself.

Wherever he had gone to, I wish Abang Tapai:

Whenever there is happiness
Hope you'll be there too,
Wherever there are friendly smiles
Hope they'll smile on you,
Whenever there is sunshine,
Hope it shine especially for you to make each day
for you as bright as it can be.

(extracted from an Irish blessing)

Related: The Lost Breed