Short Story

Tangkuban Perahu

Long time ago in the West Java, lived a women named Dayang Sumbi. She lived alone and she was thirsting for a husband or a live-friend. One day when quilting, her quilt fell off from her house. Then she prayed to gods “If a man picks up my quilt, he will be my husband. If a women, she will be my sister.” Then, a male dog picked it up. So Dayang Sumbi got married to the dog, and called him Tumang.

Dayang Sumbi gave a birth to a baby, named him Sangkuriang, but never tell him who is his father. One day, sangkuriang was hunting with Tumang in the forest, and he found nothing. He blamed Tumang for the failure and killed Tumang. When Dayang Sumbi knew that, she hit Sangkuriang’s head with a big spoon and expelled him.

Many years later, the wandering Sangkuriang found a house in the forest, and an old beautiful woman was in the house. The woman, Dayang Sumbi recognized the adventurer as Sangkuriang. Sangkuriang forced her to marry him and she told that Sangkuriang had to build a vast boat for their honeymoon, just in one night. In the night, Sangkuriang called his friends, ghosts and forest fairies to help him.

Feared the boat to complete, Dayang Sumbi  asked another woman in the nearby forest to help her. So the women punched the grains with grains puncher to make noise which disturbed the ghosts and the fairies ran away, leaving Sangkuriang.

Enraged, Sangkuriang kicked away the boat to the downside, and it turned into a mountain, called Tangkuban Perahu, which stood in the north of my city Bandung, until now.