The Birth of the Nightjar
In an era when the boundary between the waking world and the spirit realm was as thin as a single thread of silk, there lived a weaver named Dara Bungai Malam. She lived in a longhouse where the air was thick with the scent of fermenting tuak and the constant, rhythmic thump-clack of the backstrap looms.
Dara Bungai Malam was no ordinary weaver. While others meticulously copied the ancient patterns of the spider or the ginger flower, she sought to weave the unseen. She wanted to capture the sound of wind through the nipah palms and the shimmer of a Nabau’s scale.
One evening, as the sun dipped behind the jagged ridges of the Kapuas, a stranger entered the longhouse. She was draped in cloth that shifted colour like the iridescent neck of a pigeon, her movements as fluid as the river. This was Kumang, goddess of Panggau Libau, walking among mortals. She approached Dara Bungai Malam’s loom and whispered, “Why weave what is already dead? Weave the heartbeat of the forest, and the pua kumbu will come alive.”
Inspired by the divine visitor, Dara Bungai Malam began a pua kumbu that broke every sacred taboo of the elders. She used dyes made from roots no one dared touch, including the deep, bruising purples of the forest floor and the searing crimsons of the sunset sky.
She wove a pattern she called the Nabau, the Great Water Serpent, and gave it eyes that seemed to follow you across the gallery. For seven days and seven nights, she did not eat and she did not sleep. She became a ghost at her own loom, her fingers bleeding as she pulled the warp and weft in a trance of creation.
As the cloth grew, the longhouse changed. Dogs howled at empty corners. Children spoke of figures walking on the river who left no ripples. Shadows against the leafwalls moved with a life of their own. The elders gathered at the edge of her mat, their voices trembling like dry leaves in a storm.
“Dara,” they warned, “you are pulling the thread of the spirit world too tight. You are weaving a bridge where there should be a wall. If the cloth is finished, the curtain between us and the spirit world will tear, and the shadows will feast upon the living.”
On the final night, as she tied the last knot, a thunderclap shook the Tiang Laju mountain. The pua kumbu did not just finish; it tore the very air. The Nabau on the cloth began to coil and hiss. Enraged at the audacity of the loom, the serpent’s spirit sent a whirlwind through the longhouse.
In that moment of chaos, Dara Bungai Malam looked at the terrified faces of her kin and understood what her pride had cost. To save her people from the storm she had summoned, she did something no mortal had ever dared. She wrapped the living, sacred cloth around herself, binding the serpent to her own skin, and leaped from the longhouse veranda into the abyss of the night.
She did not hit the ground. As she fell, the heavy, patterned cloth transformed into wings of mottled brown and grey, the colours of earth and shadow. Her cry of defiance became a haunting, rhythmic call: tuk, tuk, tuk. Dara Bungai Malam had become the first Nightjar: the Burong Tuk-Tuk.
When the sun sets over Sarawak and the invisible world begins to stir, you will hear her. She is the guardian of the twilight, perched at the boundary between the physical and the spiritual. Her call is the sound of Dara Bungai Malam’s loom, still clicking, still weaving its protection around our homes.
When we see the Nightjar’s feathers, patterned exactly like a master weaver’s pua kumbu, we are reminded of what pride costs, and what tradition preserves. We are a people of the loom and the sword, living in a landscape where a bird is never just a bird and a story is never just a story.
I can still see the face of my late grandmother sitting by the oil lamp, her voice low and steady as she told me the story. She taught me that some threads are meant to be woven, while others are meant to be respected from afar.
The Nightjar’s call still echoes in the dark. In it, I hear her.
Roslee Bahar is a 32-year-old healthcare professional who hails from Sibu, Sarawak. An avid history enthusiast, he spends his leisure hours journeying into the past through the eyes of historical writers while letting his wandering mind explore new horizons.
