HAH! Just when I thought my life was limp and jaded … a light-bulb, a beam of light from the skies, new vision. Like a whole new pair of glasses for my ocular decline, I see afresh, thanks to Cik Munirah Bahari, vice-president of the Persatuan Kebangsaan Pelajar Islam Malaysia.

For this writer, bus-stops near schools at noon and in the evenings will never be the same boring tedium of waiting for the occasional bus to condescend to show up. Who would have thought? School uniforms. Mmmh. I never… well, Cik Munirah did, and a brave thing it was for her to make the revelation. Poor girl, what must her day be like, ever watchful against hordes of the dirtyminded checking against a forgetful wearing of white that will whip male hormones into a frenzy? (And, we must not forget red, blue, purple, yellow, the black that satanic baby-sacrificing rockers like; I have a hard spot for lime-green if you want to know). Where are the police when you need them? This girl obviously needs protection. She is being mentally ravished on a daily basis. If forensics were to open up her skull, bet you will find the few brain-cells cowering, quivering and whimpering in a corner, trying to blanket themselves with bloody ganglions and fragments of grey matter. Check her skin and I’m sure forensics will find the dark bruises inflicted by the salty, salacious stares of men. How you must suffer every day, when you log into your mailbox and it’s full of spam come-ons promising you pharmaceuticals that will increase the private joys in your life. And those television channels showing music videos. You must know they don’t sing about Love/Cinta anymore. It’s bling-bling and shake your booty, barely covered. Cik Munirah, did you have an uncle or father work for Immigration at the Subang Airport in the early 90s? I was coming back from a holiday in England, loaded as usual with a dozen videos of foreignlanguage films. I insisted they be viewed at the airport rather than have them taken for censorship, an administrative dark-hole from which I have never known any tapes to return. Poor man, he fast-forwarded through four, five films and didn’t see a single thing to titillate. If you know films like Herzog’s The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, you know they are films more likely to make you slit your wrists than have stirrings and ” ushings in your nether regions. And then… AHAfiWhat? Rewind. A preview of a French movie with a few-seconds scene of a bunch of kids, maybe seven or eight years old, playing truant, stripping off and jumping into a river. HahfiCaught a paedophile? On second thoughts, he realised how ridiculous he sounded, when I reminded him of my childhood in Brickfields and the Klang River and his childhood in whichever kampung and sungai. The scene, after all, was just a few seconds, and it had nothing to do with the main movie. He found out because we had to watch much of the movie, conscientious civil servant that he was, while my friend who had zipped through the green-lane waited, wondering what had happened to me. I also remember in the 80s, arguing with the editor then of this very newspaper, berating him for giving attention to a father who had taken his son to a screening at the British Council of Peter Brook’s film of Golding’s Lord of the Flies. A literature classic he had been told. Instead he had seen a bunch of ill-mannered kids, castaway on an island and — HORRORSfi— with no adult supervision, strip off to swim in the sea. He didn’t know what to say to his son, but he knew what to say to the Press about the exposure of kids’ bums. One righteous man — and the screenings at the British Council had to be suspended for a while till the heat died down. Your relative, Cik Munirah? What’s he doing now? Working on the sex education module for national service trainees? • Thor Kah Hoong blames his primary school teachers in the 1950s who wore tight lacy kebaya tops and cheongsams and midriffbaring sarees for his deviance.

Source: Malay Mail – May 27, 2008