Kelantan

The state of (or "Islamic Republic of", my family and I tend to affectionately/derisively call it) Kelantan is a northern state on the treacherous East coast of Peninsular Malaysia, equal parts derided for being "primitive" and a "hick state" as well as admired for being "deeply religious" and "true to heart".

It's agrarian territory, with Siamese influences everywhere, though never topping the omnipresent influence that the Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) has, having ruled over the state for the last nineteen years. Generally reckoned as the most socially conservative of the Malay states, Kelantan can be an extremely daunting travel prospect. Why go there, when a little further is the other north-east state of Terengganu, with lush islands aplenty? Yet despite this, each year — most years, at least — the Ruslan family makes at least one trip to Kelantan.

My father is from Kelantan. More accurately, he is from the village of Pulai Chondong in Kelantan, near the town of Machang, a minor town and province of little over 82,000 people. The Kelantanese are a proud people, and sometimes this is very literally so: they have a fierce pride in their identity, which has somehow manifested into an almost separate, parallel Malay persona. Consider the Kelantanese "dialect", which is more like a completely separate language, given its utter separation from what anybody else would consider "Bahasa Malaysia".

This time, for Eid al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, or Hari Raya Haji, the Ruslans made a rare trip to Kelantan. The urbanite has learned to shelve Raya Haji: it is nowhere as significant as the earlier Raya Puasa (Eid al-Fitr, Aidil Fitri, marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan); in Kuala Lumpur, the extent of a typical Raya Haji would be a lunch with my grandparents and the extended family on my mother's side. In Kelantan, though, Raya Haji is a big deal. This up to Kelantan took us — sans Roslyn — for two nights in Machang, being with my father's family ((A very long story, too. Long story short, tl;dr, with five or six exceptions I do not know any names and can't remember faces to all the Kelantanese on my father's very, very large family. This personal failure is something that's always saddened me.)). The drive to Kelantan itself was pleasant, taking no more than a surprisingly short six hours. The drive back too was just as nice, even when we had expected heavy traffic.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="604" caption="Eating: a national pastime of any Malaysian, but taken to new heights in Kelantan. All you do here is eat, eat, and eat."][/caption]

In Kelantan we sat and talked and ate, ate, and ate: the sort of good Kelantanese behavior that was encouraged. Raya Haji as a festival is marked with a lot of meat-eating, especially beef. In fact, if you weren't a beef-eater, or God forbid, a vegetarian, you were in for an extremely hard time. The sacrifice of cows is a ritual reenacted every year on Raya Haji, performed worldwide for the meat to be shared; and here in Kelantan we even saw cows being sacrificed in suburban streets, outside of homes.

I wussied out of much of this. My parents and my youngest sister on our second day in Kelantan went to a slaughterhouse to place an order for a cow, and got to stay and see the slaughter; I am far too squeamish to do so, I'll admit freely. Even if it were for a divinely-mandated higher purpose, I just couldn't bear to see pain in animals. My parents took photos: I have not seen them yet, either. The cow, once slaughtered, was literally gutted there and then. The meat was removed, as well as bones, and edible organs. It was a rare chance to see where the meat you ate came from, of course, but I just couldn't dare.

That said, eating it I have no problem with.

Kelantan is always interesting: it feels like a mini-journey out of Malaysia, almost as much as one would argue the same of Sabah or Sarawak. This trip, we stuck almost completely to Machang and Pulai Chondong, with the exception of a wedding on Saturday night and the wedding feast — delicious, delicious rice with (what else?) beef. Back in KL, I'm thankful to be once more in civilization with fast food and wi-fi and 24-hour mamak stalls, but where I used to hate the trips to Kelantan as a younger boy, I now come to treat these journeys with open arms. They're occasionally personal moments of contemplation. Time spent with a side of the family I don't usually consider. A fundamental part of the backstory behind who I am, via thirty years of history in my father. I wouldn't mind doing Kelantan again for the next Raya Haji.

Just, please, don't force me to see cows die for God.