langkau fiction

I played tennis twice this week. I’m beginning to accept the fact that I will not be able to flatten my stomach to its natural shape no matter how many exercises I do in a week. From now onwards I will treat this beer belly of mine as a natural physical deformation. Last night, I only managed to play for an hour before exhaustion got the better of me. Either I’m getting old or I’ve been lacking regular exercises. I tire easily these days. Or could it possibly be due to the lack of sleep plus finishing a bottle of the Old No.7 the night before? I think so.

My niece bought me a 1ltr bottle of Jack Daniels from Labuan last weekend. I’ve not had that good ol’ whiskey for quite a while. On Tuesday, my demented kanid Dibid called to ask if I had already got the Old No.7 in my possession. I don’t know how he knows I have the Old No.7 but I told him that I was planning to empty the bottle that same evening. When I asked him if he was able to join me that evening to empty the bottle, he courteously informed me that he wouldn’t be able to make it, and wondered if we could consume the Old No.7 on Thursday evening instead? My mouth told him “yes” but I wasn’t sure if I could hold on to it for that long. Two days, man, two more days, I kept telling myself.

I failed though. For some reason, after work that Tuesday evening, I have this sudden urge to grill lamb chops. I instinctively went to buy the lamb chops from a nearby supermarket, and after that, drove back to my place. As if they possessed the ability to sniff the smell of raw lamb meat from a distant, two of my alcoholic friends asked if they could join me on this spontaneous BBQing activity that evening. I told them they are very welcome and that I’ve got the Old No.7 waiting to be released from its black box. They almost went berserk with joy upon hearing the news.

So, I did the grilling and serving of the good drink. It was a chill-out evening without any specific activity. It didn’t rain and the black sky was decorated with crooked star constellations. Perfect evening for a BBQ. One of my dogs even decided to tell stories but I think it was just an excuse to be as near to the food as possible.

By midnight, the bottle of Old No.7 contained more air than whiskey. I was thinking to myself “Should I save this bit for my kanid Dibid for our Thursday session?”, and after thinking about it for five long seconds I decided that it was only a righteous deed to just bulldoze through the alcohol content. And that we did. Effectively. Jack D was completely obliterated by 3am. Or thereabout.

If I were to compile a list of my favorite songs, and if I had to choose a top-five all time favorite, then it would be Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane”. I listened to this song in the 1980s when I was in my teens, and by that time I was already ketinggalan zaman (lit. ‘left behind by time’) in the music trend. “Hurricane” was released, I think, sometimes in the mid-70s. The song is about a middleweight boxer by the name of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter who was convicted for gunning down three white people in a New Jersey bar in the 1960s. Now, the story is not that simple. Popular beliefs, including Dylan’s song, reckoned that Hurricane Carter was the victim of racism and thus, wrongly convicted for murder. He was imprisoned for 20 years. This belief was further made popular in the 1999 movie starred by Denzel Washington, who played the character of – surprise, surprise – Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter. The movie was based on Rubin Carter’s prison autobiography in 1974 entitled The 16th Round: From Number 1 Contenter To Number 45472.

However, there have been disputes concerning the authenticity of this story, especially the movie. It was said that the movie (and also, maybe the song) made Rubin Carter the hero of civil rights movement against racism. Other myths said that Rubin Carter was actually guilty but not due to him being black but because he actually did gun down the three persons in the bar that night.

Whatever the ‘truth’ is, I don’t really know. But one thing for sure, I like Bob Dylan and I like this song. So, enjoy lah…

Oh, one more thing: the song isn’t that short. And if you ask me, I think the lady playing the violin looks creepy…

Hurricane by Bob Dylan

Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night
Enter patty valentine from the upper hall.
She sees the bartender in a pool of blood,
Cries out, my god, they killed them all!
Here comes the story of the hurricane,
The man the authorities came to blame
For somethin that he never done.
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.

Three bodies lyin there does patty see
And another man named bello, movin around mysteriously.
I didnt do it, he says, and he throws up his hands
I was only robbin the register, I hope you understand.
I saw them leavin, he says, and he stops
One of us had better call up the cops.
And so patty calls the cops
And they arrive on the scene with their red lights flashin
In the hot new jersey night.

Meanwhile, far away in another part of town
Rubin carter and a couple of friends are drivin around.
Number one contender for the middleweight crown
Had no idea what kinda shit was about to go down
When a cop pulled him over to the side of the road
Just like the time before and the time before that.
In paterson thats just the way things go.
If youre black you might as well not show up on the street
less you wanna draw the heat.

Alfred bello had a partner and he had a rap for the cops.
Him and arthur dexter bradley were just out prowlin around
He said, I saw two men runnin out, they looked like middleweights
They jumped into a white car with out-of-state plates.
And miss patty valentine just nodded her head.
Cop said, wait a minute, boys, this ones not dead
So they took him to the infirmary
And though this man could hardly see
They told him that he could identify the guilty men.

Four in the mornin and they haul rubin in,
Take him to the hospital and they bring him upstairs.
The wounded man looks up through his one dyin eye
Says, whad you bring him in here for? he aint the guy!
Yes, heres the story of the hurricane,
The man the authorities came to blame
For somethin that he never done.
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.

Four months later, the ghettos are in flame,
Rubins in south america, fightin for his name
While arthur dexter bradleys still in the robbery game
And the cops are puttin the screws to him, lookin for somebody to blame.
Remember that murder that happened in a bar?
Remember you said you saw the getaway car?
You think youd like to play ball with the law?
Think it might-a been that fighter that you saw runnin that night?
Dont forget that you are white.

Arthur dexter bradley said, Im really not sure.
Cops said, a poor boy like you could use a break
We got you for the motel job and were talkin to your friend bello
Now you dont wanta have to go back to jail, be a nice fellow.
Youll be doin society a favor.
That sonofabitch is brave and gettin braver.
We want to put his ass in stir
We want to pin this triple murder on him
He aint no gentleman jim.

Rubin could take a man out with just one punch
But he never did like to talk about it all that much.
Its my work, hed say, and I do it for pay
And when its over Id just as soon go on my way
Up to some paradise
Where the trout streams flow and the air is nice
And ride a horse along a trail.
But then they took him to the jailhouse
Where they try to turn a man into a mouse.

All of rubins cards were marked in advance
The trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance.
The judge made rubins witnesses drunkards from the slums
To the white folks who watched he was a revolutionary bum
And to the black folks he was just a crazy nigger.
No one doubted that he pulled the trigger.
And though they could not produce the gun,
The d.a. said he was the one who did the deed
And the all-white jury agreed.

Rubin carter was falsely tried.
The crime was murder one, guess who testified?
Bello and bradley and they both baldly lied
And the newspapers, they all went along for the ride.
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fools hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldnt help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game.

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While rubin sits like buddha in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell.
Thats the story of the hurricane,
But it wont be over till they clear his name
And give him back the time hes done.
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.

I came across Nshima & Curry a couple of months back and thought this guy is funny. A few days ago, he wrote another article that made me laugh. It’s something about the types of romantic text messages people send (and receive) on their phone these days. There was one, from Sudan, that reads “My love for you is like a diarrhea, it flows like a river” and another from London, “u r the only mosquito in my net”. Now, I wonder if I could pick up a girl with that come on line…hhm..

Sakit perut, meleleh air mata…

Life has reached a stagnant point for me. I think it’s been like that for the past year, since I’ve got this feeling deep down in my balls heart that I do not know what to do in life and where to go from ‘here’. And even if I do know the answers to these questions, I feel too demotivated to pursue it. I’m drained out, and for the life of me and my imaginary platypus, I do not know the reasons for this. I am lazy. I need to see a psychiatrist to figure out what’s wrong with me. No, counselors do not work on me. It’s like attempting to kill Lex Luthor with a kryptonite, thinking that he’s Superman. The only thing that can kill Lex Luthor is the little brown poodle that used to hang on J.R. Ewing’s left leg in Dallas in the 1980s. They never showed that poodle on that drama series because it was not qualified to be an actor then. Besides, the poodle belonged to Peewee Herman.

My niece called me from Labuan this evening. She went there for her brother’s graduation do. So, she asked me “Uncle, what kind of arak do you want from Labuan?” Arak means alcohol. No, no, it means liquor. “Alcohol” in this context wouldn’t be the right definition. I mean, that mouthwash thing, Listerine, has some kind of alcohol in it and no one would consider it liquor, right? Yeah, anyways, she asked what kind of liqour do I want from Labuan, the duty-free island. I told her that I’m not too sure, why? “Because I want to buy you one, that’s why. So, what do you want? My phone is running low on credit, can you just decide?”, she asked. I told her if she could get me a Jack Daniels, that’d be much appreciated. “Ok, good!”, and she hung up.

Then I was wondering – and this isn’t the first time – about my friends who have given me this…this…’thing’, as a sign of appreciation. Just two weeks ago, a colleague of mine gave me to huge bottles of tuak (rice wine) as a sign of appreciation for looking after her dog when she was away. Last month, another colleague gave me six cans of Tiger beers to exhibit her appreciating my effort in helping her out with some translations. It’s like my personality – in the mind of ‘the other’ – is bonded to this alcohol thing…I help, I get alcoholic beverages as a reward. It’s like giving dogs some tidbits for their good deeds. Do you really think that dogs love the biscuits? Well, I’m not really complaining. I’m just puzzled. But I think I’d prefer if those who give me those alcoholic presents would also drink with me. Otherwise, it’d just pile up in my kitchen cabinet.

I was driving on my way to work this morning when, on the radio (can’t remember which channel), the deejays were discussing why young kids today don’t read as much. Callers would call in – of course – to voice their theories about their children, or the society’s children in general, and how they would prefer to play computers rather than reading these days. And as if to conclude, they’re basically saying that if you don’t read much these days, especially the young kids, it’s something that is perceived as..er..morally undesirable. If that is the case, then I grew up in an environment that inculcates my morally undesirable character. I’ve never read much as a kid because books then were so damn expensive. Even today it’s expensive. As a kid, I would listen to my classmates of the middle-class tribe discussing the characters in Famous Five, Secret Seven or the Hercule Poirot’s detective series, and wondered which TV program channel were they referring to. To my dismay, I discovered – almost 10 years later – that it wasn’t a TV program!

But I don’t think I’ve missed out on the fun. I mean, as a kid I think I was given a lot of freedom and space to move around. I would come back from school, chucked by bag on the floor, changed my symbol of oppression school uniform and put on my shorts (we were usually topless at the time), and then go to the nearby stream to check out on our bubu (fish trap) that was set up early in the morning before going to school. I would make slingshots and kill birds with it, and by the end of the day, there is this sense of achievement that I brought something back home. Not that my parents would want to eat my catch for the day: ikan keli (cat-fish), eels, frogs and kukur (wild pigeon) but it’s the feeling of success (kid’s world standard lah) that mattered then.

Well, anyways, I could just go on and on and on but I’ve to pick up a friend from the airport. This guy is from Spain who works in Kulumpo but loves Sarawak a lot, for some reasons. A couple of weeks ago he told me that he was planning to come over to Kuching for the last time (well, he won’t be back for a very long time at least..) and need that final dose of langkau. What to do lah…

When I was in primary school many, many years ago, I had to take this brain-numbing subject called “Ilmu Hisab”, which literally translates into the “knowledge of calculating” in the Malay language. *ahem* I bet you didn’t know that hisab means calculate, right? Of course, if it was spelt hisap, that would mean another thing altogether: ‘to suck’, so ilmu hisap would translate as “knowledge in sucking”? hhm…that does not sound good.

Anyways, I miraculously passed this subject and proceeded to the next level of schooling. That was already a laborious process in itself. By then, the name “Ilmu Hisab” was replaced by the more sophisticated-sounding “Matematik Moden”, which is the bastardized translation of ‘modern mathematics’. At that young age when English was a strange tongue to me, this newly named subject was rather daunting. First, I thought it was bad enough that I disliked “Ilmu Hisab” because it had too many numbers and abnormal shapes that looked like distorted crucifixes and fish hooks. I swore that subject was the devil’s spawn aiming to screw my brain. If I had my way, numbers should not exist to complicate one’s young innocent mind. Second, this newly named subject sounded daunting because I couldn’t properly pronounce English words that contain more than two syllables. And this word has four syllables! Needless to say, I failed this “Matematik Moden” subject at my Tingkatan 5 exam, and I’ve been terrible at it ever since…

…but it’s nice to know that I’m not the only one. Let me tell you this, the art of counting or “knowledge of calculating” is more than counting. Little did I know that these numbers have values. It’s even more gratifying when one discovers its values, especially when these values are interpreted to make sense to a normal human being like me. In other words, there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ numbers to indicate whether ‘the thing’ that’s numbered actually has a value. Okay, before I go any further, there’s this phrase that characters in the movies usually say, especially in action-packed Seagalish movies: “Don’t let the [insert type of dangerous weapons here] get into the wrong hands or we’ll be in deep shit!” Well, today I discovered that we can also be in deep shit if our ilmu hisab gets into the wrong hands, and in this case, if it gets interpreted wrongly by a certain group of who’swho, commonly known as politicians.

Allow me to briefly illustrate: I was reading the NST a couple of days ago and had the misfortune to bump into this article entitled “Jabu tells DAP, PKR not to deny progress for Sarawak villagers“. For those of you who are not familiar with Sarawak’s who’swho, Jabu is the second (or third, depends on the way you see it) most important tribal chief of Sarawak. He is also the minisister minister of rural development and also, the minister of…er…yes, he’s a big shot here. Okay, in this article, he was reported presenting the dividend of RM757,748.00 from a joint-venture project to the 864 landowners whose NCR lands were taken away from them surrendered to the company to be developed with oil palm plantation. This wise political leader said that this joint-venture development of NCR land is a good thing and that “such projects were the best way to lift rural people out of poverty”.

Well, looking at that figure of RM757,748, I certainly cannot say it’s not a huge sum. I think Jabu is right, as usual by our political standards, by saying that DAP and PKR (and other instigating creatures) should not deny progress to the people. This joint-venture project indeed sounds good…

…but that is only if you screwed your ilmu hisab big time in Darjah 3. Y’see, it took me a while to discover that the abnormal UFO-like object “÷” actually means ‘to divide’ or ‘divided by’. So, when I put this strange-looking object between “757,748″ and “864″ and then put that sandwich-like object “=” at the end of it, it turned out that this highly complex mathematical equation almost fried my brain! RM757,748 ÷ 864 landowners turned out to be = RM877.02, which means each landowner on average would have received RM877.02, that is, if all of them have more or less the same size of land where the oil palm was planted. Also, the article did not mention the duration that the landowners had to wait before receiving this exorbitant amount of money. It would have been fun playing around with the equation. Oh, wait…

…actually, at the bottom of the article it said that the joint-venture company “had paid RM1.39 million in dividends to all the 1,369 participating landowners since the start of the project 12 years ago”. Wow! Million of ringgits lah, beb! Now, THAT is a lot of money! Okay, okay, let’s do the ilmu hisab thing again: 1,390,000 ÷ 1,369 = 1,015.33, which means (for those of you who screwed your ilmu hisab in Darjah 3 lah), each landowner would have received RM1,015.33 since the project started…er…12 years ago. Oh shit! My brain is feeling that sudden gush of ilmu hisabs flooding my cerebral compartment…ooh, ooh…so, that means for that whole 12 years, each landowner would have received on average, say, about RM84.61 per year, no? RM84.61 per year per landowner? Would that also mean each landowner would have, on average, received an equivalent of RM7.05 per month in dividend?

Please calculate this and tell me I’m wrong. If I calculated this correctly — and that is a fuckin’ big IF — how can this kind of project be the “best way to lift rural people out of poverty”? If the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) poverty-line income is anything to go by, then based on the 1997 poverty assessment, a family of 4.8 in Sarawak should earn more than RM543 per month to be excluded from that hardcore poverty bracket. So, what does an ilmu hisab of RM7.05 per month per landowner mean?

Of course, like I said earlier, I screwed up in my Matematik Moden in Tingkatan 5.