Belawai: A Village Born of Longing (Travelogue Day 3)

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By Marlynda Meraw

DARO, Feb 20: There are places in this world that were born not of geography alone but of yearning. Of a particular ache that comes when a person looks back at a home that they know will never see again.

Belawai, a coastal village tucked within the Tanjung Manis district of Sarawak, is one such place. According to local telling, even its name carries an act of remembrance.

Pemanca Tanjung Manis Haji Morshidi Haji Moris is among the custodians of that memory, a man whose knowledge stretches across generations where written records fall silent.

The old village of Jerijeh, Morshidi explained, once sat at the estuary. Over time, people drifted to Belawai, drawn by the practicalities of the sea. Fishermen needed water that worked in their favour, and Belawai offered just that.

But there was another tale of migration that came from upriver. This was where the story, as Morshidi told it, took on something closer to myth. Evidence of the inland migration was scant but suggestive: an old tomb in which the departed was interred within a ‘tempayan’ (a large clay pot), as was the tradition of old pagan communities.

“Two names were found on the ‘tempayan’. Tum Betema. Tum was the husband, and Betema was the wife,” told Morshidi to the D’Drift team. A small well, ‘Telaga Tum’ (Tum’s well) nearby was named in tribute of him.

“We (villagers) are not entirely sure, as there are no written records or further evidence apart from the old grave. But in Kapit, there is also a village named Belawai,” he added.

The story Morshidi shared was that Tum had left Kapit and settled at the river’s edge, naming his new home after the one he had left behind.

In those times, migration was permanent. To leave was to leave forever. And so, in the absence of any return, Tum did what the human heart so often compels: he brought his old home into the new one, if only by name.

And the name is Belawai.

Today, Belawai’s population is predominantly Melanau, shaped through generations of intermarriage with Malay, Chinese, and other nearby communities. The village reflects this heritage openly, heard in the many languages spoken in daily life.

The women beyond the treeline

If Belawai was shaped by homesickness, then Kampung Jerijeh Baru carried a different kind of enchantment altogether: one that blurred the boundary between this world and whatever lay just beyond the treeline.

Haji Rosli Haji Mat, Penghulu of Kampung Jerijeh Baru and one of 11 village chiefs in the district, recounted local tales with an ease that suggested these were not legends to him but simply true.

Three men from Jerijeh Baru, he said, had taken wives among the ‘orang bunian’ (elves), the unseen people of the forest. One of them, a man named Hanis, had never gone missing as those taken by elves were said to do. Rosli recalled seeing him carrying fruits from the forest, gifts that were presumably from his other household. He came and went as a man might visit a second home and was always allowed to return.

Meanwhile, Rosli’s own uncle had not been so casual about it. He disappeared for 40 days after having followed an elf into the forest. A search was mounted, and the village waited. When he finally returned, he seemed unbothered. No great time had passed for him. Whatever world he had been in ran on a different clock.

Then there was a former brick loader from Tanjung Manis, whose story served as something of a warning. He had been involved with one of the unseen folks, and when he eventually moved to Sibu without marrying her, she followed him there and burnt his house down.

Love, in these stories, does not care for geography.

But the most arresting account was Rosli’s own, and he told it not with the detachment of a village chief recounting folklore but with the particular tenderness of a man revisiting something he had never quite stopped feeling.

It was by Bukit Kinyau where he first met her. He felt a pull at that meeting, but their relationship never blossomed. There were moments, even years later, when the longing would return without warning and Rosli would find himself weeping, drawn towards the forest without quite deciding to go. When the heartache finally subsided, Rosli would later come home.

He then shared with the D’Drift team that she appeared to him once more when he was a newlywed. Rosli was lounging at home when she came by, grabbed his arm and told him to come back.

“But I told her I was already married, so I cannot follow her back,” said Rosli, his expression solemn.

She no longer visited him after that. But he remembered her clearly: her beautiful face, her long black hair, how petite she was. As he described her, it was plain she had never quite left him.

Bujang Gila and the cost of war

Not all of the memories in Tanjung Manis district are tender. Some are scorched into the earth itself.

During the Japanese occupation, an airstrip in Belawai was constructed using forced local labour. Villagers were taken and made to work under harsh conditions. When British forces later moved to reclaim the region, they approached from the air and issued warnings before launching attacks.

“We used to call the fighter-bomber aircrafts ‘Bujang Gila’ (Mad Men),” said Rosli.

Morshidi recalled that the villagers were told to evacuate and wait until the sounds of war had stilled. When the smoke cleared, two large craters had been left behind.

“After the bombing, there were two big holes which I called ‘telaga bomb’ (the bomb well). Those holes no longer exist because they had since been filled,” said Morshidi.

During the bombings, one life was lost. A Chinese man who had been hanging his laundry did not heed the British warning to stay indoors as the aircraft flew overhead. A strafing run found him.

In the old Kampung Jerijeh, Rosli added, the village had served as a Japanese base. He still remembered the sight of Japanese warships, bombed and run aground in the waters near the old village, remaining there for years before they were eventually cleared.

“There were also unexploded ordnances along with the bombed Japanese warships,” said Rosli.

The locals were treated terribly during the occupation. Those from Jerijeh who were taken captive were made to eat soap and were tortured.

War does not arrive in a place and leave it unchanged. It settles into the soil, into the names people give to craters, into the stories grandchildren inherit long after the ships have been cleared and the holes have been filled.

The life along the waters

There is a reason that human settlements, across all of history, begin at the water’s edge. Water is life, and in the Tanjung Manis district, it was also road, clock and calendar. For Morshidi’s generation, the Rajang river was the natural infrastructure.

In the 1960s, when he was a schoolboy, there was only a primary school in the area. Secondary education meant a journey to Bintangor, Mukah, Sarikei or elsewhere. His elder brother went to Mukah; his own cohort went to Bintangor.

Getting to school required patience and the goodwill of fishermen. There were no express boats and no fixed schedules.

“We had to depend on the fishermen whenever they wanted to sell their fish to Sarikei. If the fishermen decided to send their catch on Thursday, we had to go on Thursday instead of Friday. That is truly survival,” said Morshidi.

Passenger boats eventually appeared and, with them, a schedule. Even a single daily timetable changed everything. While the river remained the same, the human relationship with it had shifted.

Rosli, having listened to all of this, offered a reflection that carried the particular dignity of those who endure hardship without dramatising it.

“But for us, it is normal. It is how life is. Now that we’re thinking back, it was indeed hard.”

An opening for tomorrow

The villages of the Tanjung Manis district: Belawai, Jerijeh, and Rajang were not planned in any conventional sense. They grew from migration and memory, from grief of those who left and could not return, and from the ingenuity of those who stayed and made do. They were shaped by wartime craters and forest spirits, by fishermen’s schedules and the slow accumulation of mixed marriages. They were in the truest sense; places built from longing.

And yet longing, as Morshidi noted with contentment, had given way to something steadier.

“Now, thank God, we have good roads and new bridges. It all helped us. Our current target is to increase eco-tourism,” he said.

Along the journey, the DayakDaily D’Drift team began their day at 7.30am and travelled onward to Kampung Rajang, arriving at 8.57am for a book handover ceremony held under DayakDaily’s annual corporate social responsibility initiative. Through the Bless Rural Children with Your Books programme, 1,000 books were donated to Perpustakaan Desa Kuala Rajang, Tanjung Manis, to be distributed to Belawai, Jerijeh and Rajang.

Our journey continued with another ferry crossing across Batang Paloh as we made our way to Daro. In the distance, construction of the Batang Paloh Bridge rose steadily above the water—a symbol of connection taking shape along the coastal road.