The tepak sireh

A tepak sireh is a container for everything needed to prepare and chew sirih: the betel leaf, the areca nut, the lime paste, the gambier, and usually tobacco. The common form is a rectangular lidded box, roughly twelve inches long, seven wide at the base and six high, with a metal tray that lifts out so the leaves can be kept underneath.

The shape carries its own name. A rectangular one is a tepak; a rounded or oval one is a puan, and hexagonal ones turn up occasionally and are rare. The same object appears in Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, which is why the spelling moves between tepak sireh and tepak sirih depending on who is writing it.

Betel chewing is old in this part of the world, older than any of the customs built on top of it. What is specifically Malay is not the chewing. It is what the box came to mean once it was carried into somebody else’s house.

Lift the lid and there is a tray, and on one side of the tray sit small round lidded cups called cembul, about two inches high. Four is the usual count. The first holds thin slices of pinang, the areca nut. The second holds kapur, the lime paste that is smeared down the leaf. The third holds gambir. The fourth holds shredded tembakau.

Alongside them lies the kacip, a hinged cutter for slicing the areca nut. Look at it closely. It is the one part of the set that breaks the rules the rest of it follows. The box is decorated almost entirely in flowers and leaves; the kacip is often shaped as a bird or a mythical horse. The animal tells you whether it is a male or a female kacip.

A study of seventeen tepak sirih held in Malaysian museums found the sets are commonly divided into five compartments. The number of cembul varies. Most of those examined carried four or five.

In Malay custom the tepak sireh goes first and words go second. It was offered to a guest as a sign of welcome before any serious conversation began: a gesture made with an object rather than a sentence. In a peminangan it comes before everything else in the room. That is why it is called the head of the custom.

The stages are the familiar ones. Merisik is the quiet enquiry, when the man’s family visits to ask, carefully, whether the woman is still free to be asked. Meminang is the proposal itself. Bertunang is the engagement that follows.

The tepak sireh is present through all of it, and at a good deal else besides: a wedding, booking a midwife, melenggang perut, even starting a house.

The meaning is not decorative. Malaysia once gave a tepak sireh to the United Nations. The gift was described as a symbol of communication, cooperation and hospitality, and Kofi Annan accepted it as a symbol of harmony in diversity. That is a fair summary of what the object has always done in a much smaller room.

The two are often confused because they arrive at the same ceremony. The tepak sireh is carried by the man’s side when they come to ask. The sirih junjung, an arrangement of betel leaves folded and built up into a peak and dressed with flowers, is the woman’s side’s answer. Between them they are the kepala hantaran: the gifts that lead all the other gifts.

There is a rule about height, and it is the one most people get wrong. The man’s side stands taller; the woman’s answering arrangement is kept below it rather than level with it. It is read as deference in the exchange, and it is the reason a pair of these gifts is never made the same size.

There is a second rule, about the leaves. The sirih sent to the woman is folded closed, for dignity. The sirih sent to the man is left open, for fortune and abundance.

Malays hold the betel leaf to be sacred, and words spoken over it to be good and true. That is a lot of weight for a leaf to carry. It is also exactly why it goes on the table first.

Modern families increasingly present the sirih junjung in a decorated rattan basket, a silver tray or a glass vase rather than the old way. The form travels. The order of the exchange does not.

Of seventeen tepak sirih examined across Muzium Negara, the Islamic Arts Museum, Muzium Tekstil Negara and others, eight were copper, five wood, three silver and one brass. The material was not a matter of taste. It signalled the rank of the house the set belonged to, with copper the common material and silver the one that announced something.

Eight of those seventeen came from royal families and are held as state property, among them the tepak sirih of Sultan Abdul Samad and sets belonging to royal relatives in Kelantan, Perak, Malacca and Negeri Sembilan. In the older order the set was an object of the palace and the nobility before it was anybody else’s, and the craftsmanship was commissioned to match.

Eleven of the seventeen were rectangular, four round, two hexagonal. If you have only ever seen the rectangular kind, that is why.

The cut-out and low-relief work on a tepak sirih is not filler. Malay carvers classify motifs into five kinds: cosmic, flora, fauna, geometric and calligraphy. Flora dominates, because depicting living creatures is avoided under Islam, and the animal motifs that survive sit mostly on the kacip. The most common pattern of all is awan larat, a run of coiling leaves and branches repeating end to end.

The carving itself follows conventions that read as manners once you know them. A new branch must emerge from behind or below the original branch, because elders come first. Where two leaves meet, the sharp end must not touch the other leaf, because you do not cause hardship to the person beside you. A design must not be too elaborate or too lavish. It must not be stiff; the softness of the carver’s hand should show. And a small branch should end in a fold, as a reminder that this life is not the whole of it.

So a tepak sireh is a set of instructions about how to behave, cut into the walls of a box that exists to be handed to somebody you are about to ask a large question.

Because the tepak sireh is the one gift at a Malay engagement that everybody in the room looks at. And because nothing on a hantaran dulang is harder to make memorable than the thing that arrives first.

Everything on ours is chocolate. The awan larat walls are cut by hand and gilded. The cembul are moulded with stamped lids. The sirih leaves are veined while the chocolate is still warm, and the kacip is sculpted and laid across the top.

The cartouche on the front is left blank, because it is not ours to fill. You tell us the two names, in Rumi or in Jawi, and we engrave them before the piece is boxed.

It is chocolate, so it gets broken up and eaten. That part is not a compromise. A tepak sireh was never an ornament either.