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10 A Fatal Love Affair Melaka’s position as a port of call for the China-bound ships passing through the Straits made it a city sought after by a great flux of local people seeking means of livelihood in occupations associated with commerce. People from other parts of the Malay Peninsula as well as from the adjacent islands came to Melaka seeking fortune and adventure. Some of them prospered, but many more found themselves precariously balanced on the periphery of urban society. There were many Javanese, Malays and Chinese who eked out their daily bread and lived in the crowded semi-rural wilderness of poor housing that emerged beyond the river behind the respectable residential quarter. This area was known as Kampung Jawa, probably on account of its predominantly Javanese and Malay population whose life did not concern the city administration . And yet men and women from the lower echelons of society imposed themselves on the city administration because of breaking the law due to their impecunious circumstances. The annals of crimes involving people from the margin of urban society provide a glimpse of material life of the poor in the city: we rarely come across instances of the emotional upheavals of men and women caught up in the vortex of love, passion and jealousy. In July 1814, the court came to hear a case of murder involving a sad affair of the heart. A Javanese in Melaka, Wiruw, was found to have stabbed to death his lady love, Salima, apparently in anger because she refused to marry him despite the fact that she had lived with him for some time and had born him a child. Love at first sight Wiruw, a young Javanese working as a labourer, had been living in Melaka for several years. He managed to build his own humble dwelling in the maze of humble dwellings in Kampung Jawa, where he fell into the company of fellow 121 Foul (Murder) 1-33.qxd 2006/5/19 ⁄W⁄¨ 01:05 Page 119 Javanese like Jaya, who had been in Melaka for much longer and supported his compatriot new to the town. Wiruw found the city life distracting and was looking for an emotional centre of gravity to gain a secure foothold in this urban world. Jaya took him into his house, where Wiruw fell in love with Jaya’s comely wife, Salima.1 Wiruw apparently had no previous experience in love and women and found Salima not only attractive but also sympathetic. Jaya was a footloose man like most rural migrants who sought fortune and adventure in Melaka, where he had been for almost six years before suddenly deciding to go elsewhere, leaving behind Salima to fend for herself as best she could. Salima had previously been married to a man called Suru, possibly another Javanese, and had two children, a boy and a girl, from her first husband. Salima’s first husband was dead when she met Jaya, probably soon after he landed in Melaka, and married him.2 Wiruw said that he did not know whether Salima was married, but only that she was a widow with two children and her first husband was the father of the first child.3 Salima was somewhat unforthcoming with details of her life that might sully her reputation. She was circumspect in disclosing the intimate details of her life, particularly her relationship with Wiruw, lest his stabbing her might appear the result of a provocation on her part. It seems that Salima’s marital life was in a state of uncertainty. She may have been married only once and her second ‘marriage’ was perhaps an invention or contracted in accordance with the local customs but not solemnized in accordance with Islamic customs. There was something seemingly casual about the way Malay men and women fell in love and married in those days, when feelings for each other played a greater role than the formality of a marriage, as befitting people who cared more for their well-being than following a fixed code of conduct fashioned by Islam. Melaka was an eclectic society where pre-Islamic practices and values competed with Islamic practices. Although Islam had eventually come to be accepted widely, the traditional customs remained equally respected by local people before religious Puritanism became the norm.4 122 1 Salima claimed that she came to know Wiruw through her second husband, which means that Wiruw came to her house while Jaya was still around, but Wiruw...

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