“Don’t you just hate it when you have to spend 10 minutes explaining a 10-second phone call?” fumed Jamal as he slammed down his riding gloves on the table. We all looked at him knowingly as we pushed aside our teh tariks out of a shared sense of commiseration. Despite his strapping six-foot-two frame and Rambo-style demeanour, Jamal was no playboy and was as likely to cheat on his wife as Melaka would receive six inches of snow tomorrow night. Everyone knew this; everyone, of course, except his wife.

Maybe it’s his 200-mile-per-hour Suzuki Hayabusa that’s parked under a nearby tree. Maybe it’s his softer-than-marshmallows heart. Maybe it’s his disarmingly intense smile. Maybe these are the things that are driving his wife to believe (erroneously) in horror scenarios of him copulating with every female in sight if given half a chance.

But maybe it’s not anything to do with him at all.

The rest of us are nothing like Jamal. We all drive beat-up old Protons that do 0-60 kph in about a week, look like Rodney Dangerfield after a horrific traffic accident and are about as suave as baboons at a ballroom dancing competition. Yet every single one of us switch our mobiles to silent-mode (or turn them off altogether) when we go home after work.

And why is this so?

No, it’s not because stray vixens in heat, smitten by our stunning good looks and overwhelmed by our sexual prowess are likely to call us during dinner. Get real, OK? Even if we had sexually-compliant, nubile nymphomaniacs stashed away at a luxury condo somewhere, we’d be smart enough to tell them not to call us at home, right?

No, the real reason we live such sad lives (risk missing calls no matter how important) is because we don’t want to go through what Jamal has had to go through: spend 10 minutes explaining a 10-second phone call. Yes, folks! It doesn’t get sadder than this. But for the sake of domestic peace – and keeping our sanity (what’s left of it) intact – this is what we have to do. Explaining to our bosses (or clients) why we didn’t answer his call is always much easier than explaining the conversation (had we answered the call) to she-who-must-be-obeyed. At least, our bosses (or clients) will have, at the most, maybe five questions!

A fellow blogger, a smooth operator known as Uncle Lee, maintains that women are to be loved, not understood. I subscribe to this whole-heartedly, too. But I’ll let you in on a secret: men need to be UNDERSTOOD. No, we are not so unreasonable as to demand to be understood in our totality. This is too much. All we need women to understand is that we cannot stomach having to face an inquisition for even the most minor of things.

As a friend of mine puts it, we have a tough enough time hunting mouse-deer and fighting sabre-toothed tigers. We have little patience with “Why are you home late today?” and its 25 or so supplementary questions. Maybe we should just bypass the questions and instead go straight to, “No, dear! I am not 30 minutes later than usual because I met this slut on the way home and decided to bonk her silly first. And how was your day, dear?”

My comrade-in-arms, Tommy Yewfigure, is partly right when he says that women ask too many damned questions. The damned questions are only part of it. Worse are the implications behind the questions. Somehow, they are not merely requests for further information, are they? The questions invariably assume that somehow, somewhere and at some time we’ve been up to no bloody good. And if we are sloppy in answering these questions, we’ll be rewarded with yet another barrage of questions (replete with their not-so-nice implications).

In case there’s any doubt, let me explain. We don’t really mind the questions (as long as you limit them to two or three); what really drive us up the walls are the loaded ones. Of course, saying this will not just stop them from asking loaded questions. Instead it will lead them to clam-up altogether and not to talk to us at all.

So, what are we to do? Of course, I suggested to my friends that we just grin, bear it and think of England. It was either that or become gay. To this Jamal quipped, “OK, if we do, the one who draws the shortest straw gets Bangkai!”

Note: This post was partly inspired by my friend Tommy Yew and also partly by fellow-MRSMer Oldstock (whose story appears here)

Here I am picking up on one of my favourite bloggers’ posts, Andrea Whatever, when she wrote about simple pleasures. No, I am not going to write about my simple pleasures. They are quite bland and excruciatingly dull. Just how interesting can boiling one’s guitar strings so that they will sound new be? Yeah, just about a notch or two higher than cataloguing the relative merits of blue-black inks from different manufacturers (which I thoroughly enjoy). Instead, I am going to write about the simple pleasures of a few people I know.

Case One: Ramli, a forty-something manager at a construction company, takes pleasure in staying back very late at the office even when there is nothing to do. This is how he puts it, “No, Bangkai. I am not a workaholic. You obviously don’t know my wife.”

Case Two: Rudin, a thirty-something bank-teller, has a trunk full of X-men and Ultraman figurines – and he is intent on buying more. Rudin buys them for his son (who simply adores them). Earlier on, Rudin couldn’t afford to buy these toys for him. Now that he can, he can’t see his son anymore: his son is now somewhere in America with his ex-wife. His son won’t even talk to him on the phone because he has been poisoned into thinking that his dad is a useless-good-for-nothing-bum.

Case Three: Minah, now some twenty years after-the-fact, occasionally takes out the letters (tied with a blue ribbon) that her ex-husband wrote to her while he was studying abroad and reads them to herself. Her ex-  is now married to a domineering, borderline psychotic control-freak and his step-children treat him with utter contempt. However, Minah says that there is nothing wrong with still being in love with the person he used to be.

Case Four: Bidin, a retired journalist, when having dinner at home, never fails to lay out an extra setting at his dinner table. It is for his wife who passed on over thirty years ago. He has never re-married because he feels that a new wife would object to this practice.

Case Five: Edna and Steve maintain a secret private blog. They use the blog to write long, passionate love letters to each other. This is their only form of contact. They can’t ever meet or call one another. These are things their spouses would violently object to.

And before anybody says it, I’ll say it first. Yes! I have some very sad friends

In an embarrassingly public row between a husband and a wife (what’s new?) I overheard the man – obviously battle-scarred and shell-shocked from years of hen-pecking – say (or was it plead?), “It’s not that I have no control over my money; it’s the unexpected things that come up and take it all away that I have no control over!”

Whoa! This guy probably summed-up my life’s story in one mad-scramble-for-the-life-raft of a sentence. My heart bled for him.

With high-energy death rays pouring out of her eyes, she shot out a gavel-pounding, “Then you should have been smart enough to plan for the unexpected!”

Hmmm! But how exactly does one plan for the unexpected? Isn’t the unexpected something we never anticipated, and therefore, never had the chance to plan for in the first place? I guess it’s easy, in retrospect, to say you should have thought of this or you should have thought of that; things are always clearer with the benefit of hindsight. But before-the-fact, just how much foresight can one be reasonably be expected to have? Come on! We all know crystal balls don’t work.

What’s worse, the money we have at our disposal at any given time is finite. Unfortunately, the number of things that can go wrong isn’t! Sometimes the cost of the unexpected is within the limits of the budget item we term ‘contingencies’. Sometimes they are not. After all, life is not obliged to comply with the plans we have made – no matter how painstakingly these plans have been formulated.

Then it grabbed me by the short and curlies. The poor sod that was having the embarrassing public row with his wife was NOT being carpet-bombed, napalmed and then bayoneted for his lack of planning ability. Think about it: no one can be reasonably expected to be able to plan for every contingency. Instead, the assault was as a result of his inability to earn enough money. It is as simple as this.

As she grabbed him by the ear and led him to their car for failing in one of his husbandly duties, I wondered if she – in her sanctimonious righteousness – has never failed in her duties as a wife. Life must be wonderful for her. I mean, isn’t it great to have someone to blame – someone who morphs into a punching bag – for when things go wrong?

Really? Did she lead him off into the sunset by his ear? Not really. That was what I imagined she would do if she thought there were no policemen around.

Note to men: Money is a great equaliser i.e. the mother of all ‘shut-up’ tools. Unfortunately, for some, it is not so easy to come by.

Wrestling the morning rush-hour traffic at Jalan Semantan, I tuned in to Light and Easy FM hoping to acquire some measure of relief from the stress having to do battle with well-heeled but selfish half-wits driving big, fancy cars – people to whom queue-jumping is a badge of honour. But what came over the speakers was equally (if not more) stressful: a female radio personality was taking calls as to whether it is reasonable to expect a man to change after marriage.

This should be amusing.

As I listened to a female caller droning on about how selfish men are by not wanting to change, I had an “Aha!’ moment. Women, it would seem, are not really mad about men not being able to change. No, men change all the time; all living things change. But what’s really getting all these women’s knickers into a twist is that their men do seem not change in the way that they want them to. It’s that simple!

Somehow, women (or at least the caller) just can’t seem to tell the difference between us not being able to change and us not changing in the specific way that you want us to. This is how the logic goes: you don’t want to change (in the way that I want you to). Therefore, you are selfish. And by extension, since you are a man (who doesn’t want to change in the way I want you to), all men are selfish.

Huh? Who is really the selfish one here?

This is the tragedy that most women conveniently overlook; a tragedy that men simply cannot be bothered to point out. What I can’t, for the life of me, understand is why women make it their mission in life to change their men after marriage? If he were defective ab initio, why did you marry him in the first place? If he were a compulsive wife-beater, a serial rapist, an incorrigible drunkard or gambler, I can understand. Change (or castrate him) him all you want. But when he’s the ordinary Joe who is none of the things, why insist on changing him into someone else?

I can hear cries of “But all we want to change them so that they will be better.” Bollocks! You knew he was a work-in-progress in the first place. Why didn’t you just marry a finished product instead? Surely there must be plenty of men out there who are finished products, i.e. ones that do not need to be improved. Oh? What’s that I hear you say? There’s no such thing as the perfect man? Well then, why is it that you keep insisting that your man live up to such impossible standards – and squander precious emotional capital (both yours and his) in your efforts to change him?

Sometimes, I doubt if women marry for love; or even that they marry for money, for that matter. It would seem that they marry the poor sod so that they can change him, and in the process, satisfying some perverse ego-trip instigated by that latent control-freak deep within the female psyche.

And this is the bit that hurts: how can you say you truly love someone when all you want is for him to change?

But let me set the scales right. Men are equally guilty of a similar delusion. While women make the mistake of thinking that their men will change after marriage, men, too, commit a similar blunder: they somehow think that their women will remain the same even after they are married.

This, I believe, is what they call a double-whammy.

OK, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I’m no expert in Bahasa Melayu (Malaysia?). But I think I have sense enough to know that the word “PERMASALAHAN” should not even exist. It does, though – as can be seen by the number of people using the word nowadays. It is increasing at a rate that is almost as fast as the the increase in the population of illegal Indonesian immigrants in Malaysia.

Just think about it (and take the ‘I-must-use-big-words-to-impress-people’ hat off for a minute). What job does ‘PERMASALAHAN’ do that the good old ‘MASALAH’ cannot? I thought so! You can easily replace ‘PERMASALAHAN’ with ‘MASALAH’ and your meaning will not change in manner whatsoever. This goes to show that just because TV3 uses a word repeatedly doesn’t mean that it it should be mindlessly adopted.

Now, let’s try to find an approximate to ‘PERMASALAHAN’ in English. The closest contender I can think of is the very inelegant (if not grotesque) ‘PROBLEMATION’. Yeah, anybody who even utters this word (‘PROBLEMATION’) in the English-speaking world will probably get shot (maybe even twice!). By extension, I believe users of the word ‘PERMASALAHAN’ deserve the same fate.

OK, I concede that it has the dubious quality of sounding better than ‘MASALAH’. But apart from that, how does it add to good old, time-honoured ‘MASALAH’? Maybe we should just hand over the people who use ‘PERMASALAHAN’ to the sharpened bamboo stake wielding members of BENDERA and be done with it.

It was the Hari Raya holidays and I was half asleep on my recliner – busily digesting about a ton of lemang – when my five year old son come up to me and asked, “Ayah, cuba ayah jawab teka-teki ni!” Frankly, I was in no mood for riddles. But the enthusiasm in his eyes was simply too much to throw a wet blanket over. So I turned to him and said, “OK, sayang. Mari Ayah jawab.”

Not being a very cerebral kind of guy, riddles just stump me even on the best of days. But I was not about to disappoint a very excited 5-year old – especially when he was my son. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t (normally) eat babies for breakfast. So I cranked-up my brain, heard the sputtering as it struggled to come to life and put my feeble mental faculties into gear. I was ready. Or so I thought!

Cool as a cucumber, he asked “Ayah, apa benda mula-mula kita jilat, lepas tu kita jolok?”

What?! Where did that come from?

I must have jumped three feet into the air upon hearing such words come out of a 5-year old’s mouth. This was too much for a 5-year old – even if he is MY son! I know apples don’t fall too far from the tree but it was ridiculous. Where did he learn these things?!

I took a deep breath and asked him to repeat the riddle. He did. I heard it right the first time. I was about ready to give his brother a hiding of his life for teaching such a young child these things. Then it occurred to me that I had better find out what my 5-year old thought the answer was.

“OK, Mubin. Ayah tak tau. Apa bendanya yang kita mula-mula jilat lepas tu kita jolok?” I asked, as calmly as I could.

He giggled and blurted out, “BENANG!” as he mimicked his mother licking a thread and passing it through the eye of a needle.

Phew!

I was editing a string of badly written stories for a local paper yesterday – thinking (hoping?) that the world would end in the next ten minutes – when I heard a guitar being played like I’ve not heard it being played for a very, very long time. I mean, it was like someone had learnt to cut through all the fluff and set about to play the damned instrument like it was meant to be played.

It could have been an asthma attack (or a heart attack) but I had trouble breathing just listening to how she played the guitar. Pardon my sexist inclinations, but how could a girl learn to play like that! No, her playing isn’t the million-notes-per-second virtuosity of Satriani, or the technical elegance of Di Meola, or the experimental brilliance of McLaughlin – it was nothing like that. It was more like – how shall I say this? – a warm, down-to-earth, coolness of an old soul who have been mending fractured hearts with her playing for a million years. She is that good!

A quick google told me that the guitar player in question was a young Malay girl who goes by the name of Yuna. And guess what! She sings in English, too. I mean, she really sings in English – not some half-assed attempts at it, mind you. This girl obviously speaks English at home and I wouldn’t be surprised if she spoke English before she could speak Malay. Her diction is just brilliant – no put-on American accent here, that’s for sure.

And I am at a loss for words to describe her music. It’s like listening to lyrics that are melodic and melodies that are lyrical. Musically, she is like sophisticated-but-understated-busker meets unpretentious-jazz-virtuoso; a cross perhaps between James Taylor and Wes Montgomery. It just blew me away! And of course, there’s her guitar playing: way too mature for her seemingly tender years. However, this singer-songwriter-guitar-player isn’t just about the tune, or just the lyrics, or just the playing – this girl is about the total package.

As you can see, Bangkai is obviously smitten (by her music, of course). This Yuna girl is like a breath of fresh air! She made me want to reach out for my Telecaster and start paying seriously again. And if I listen to her for long enough, I think I probably will. And as I stare at this photo of her I nicked off the Internet, I can’t help but drool as I ogle her curvy, white  Gretsch (that’s her semi-acoustic guitar, folks). Now, that is a thing of beauty. No, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on her Gretsch any day – even if only for a few minutes. But alas…

Listening to her work her guitar, I wonder what her version of ‘Rosie’ would be like. On second thoughts I’d better not know for fear of never getting enough of it. Girl, where were you when I was working the busking pitches at Tottenham Court Road and Marble Arch? I would have given my right arm to be able to jam for a few minutes with you.

Duh! You probably weren’t even born then…

Give this girl a listen, folks!

When I used to flog life insurance for a living, we used to break our fast at the office. Firstly, being bachelors, there was nothing and nobody waiting for us at home. Secondly, the office WAS the closest thing we had to a home.

Like always, we waited for the break of fast by ribbing each other to death. The telly in the training room would soon broadcast the ‘Azan’ signalling that it was time gorge on whatever it was we had bought from the Bazaar Ramadan nearby.

On that day, my dear friend A had decided to plant himself in front of the telly in the training room to wait for the Azan. The rest of us, as usual, preferred to goof-off outside on the agency floor. So, off A went to the training room with his bagful of donuts and a Big Gulp he had bought from the local 7-Eleven.

About ten minutes later, while I was busy trying to land my (flight simulator) F-16 , A burst out of the training room urgently shouting “Berbuka! Berbuka!” Like Pavlov’s dogs hearing the bell, I began salivating. I promptly crashed my F-16 into a hangar full of other F-16s and rushed off to the training room with my ‘tapau-ed’ nasi goreng.

Something was wrong. None of us could hear the Azan. However, there was a still EON Bank advert on the telly’s screen showing a man in baju Melayu, complete with songkok, enjoying a cold glass of sirap bandung. Across the advert were the words, “Selamat Berbuka Puasa”

“You klutz, A! Its not time yet!” Zul scolded.

“Don’t be an idiot! Its time! And I’ll prove it.” declared A as he took a massive bite out of his double choc doughnut.

Before he could swallow, the still advert disappeared, giving way to a clock showing the countdown to the Azan – breaking of fast was 20 seconds away. It was indeed not time yet. A’s eyes looked as if they were about to pop out of their sockets as he struggled to decide what to do with his mouthful of double choc doughnut.

To our horror, he wrapped his huge pianists’ fingers around his neck and began strangling himself in an attempt to stop the food from going down his gullet and nullifying his hard day’s fast. The rest of us stood transfixed watching the spectacle. Would the azan come soon enough, or would our friend strangle himself to death first? It was anybody’s guess.

Just about when A was about to expire from self-induced asphyxiation, the second hand of the clock reached 12 and the Azan came on air. Phew! No, A didn’t die that day. Otherwise, we would have had a tough time explaining to the police how come we had a dead body with strangulation marks on its neck in our training room.

When I was certain that A was not going to die any time soon, I began giving him a tough time for making me crash a perfectly good F-16 on my landing-run.

People tell me there’s always light at the end of the tunnel. Of course there is! In my case, this light is usually a runaway train intent on splattering me all over the walls of the tunnel.

When this happens – and it’s been happening a lot lately – I hanker for a time when things had been very much simpler. It was a time when I had precious little to call my own: no money, no women – but best of all, no worries. All I needed were my guitar, a quiet busking pitch near Tottenham Court Road tube station and a gaggle of buxom Italian tourists who, for some reason, were always quite happy to throw money (and a few other things as well) my way.

And if the coppers didn’t come around to chase you away too soon, you could easily pocket maybe fifteen quid for an hour’s worth of busking – just about enough for a few pints of lager, a packet of Old Holborn and maybe a bag of fish and chips (instead of some Moroccan hashish).

It was a time when a smile wasn’t there to hide the pain and hunger wasn’t something a few beers couldn’t cure. If push came to shove – if you got really hungry at 2.00 am – you could always sneak down to the kitchen at Malaysia Hall, pry open the door and cook yourself a mean nasi goreng. Of course, if you cleaned up afterwards, nobody would know, or notice – or even care.

There is something to be said for Malaysia Hall. With rental at only 89 pence a night (back in 1980), it was a Godsend to government sponsored students who were living on a meagre subsistence allowance of 164 quid a month. And the meals were just 50 pence a pop! So what if you had the occasional nail sticking out of the floorboard and that the central heating seldom worked? I took all the warmth and comfort I needed from an old army surplus M65 field jacket –  one with a bullet-hole over the left breast pocket (Tut! Tut! No, you weren’t allowed to take busty Italian tourists up to your room).

And you’d meet the most interesting people at the Hall. There were law students with dreams of becoming a Menteri Besar someday, accounting students who were intent on earning obscene incomes when they graduate and engineering students who seriously believed that they were the only ones with a brain anywhere within a 50 mile radius.

Then there were the ageing flower-power folks (throwbacks from the 60s) who could think of nothing else except recreating Woodstock (preferably in KL), Malaysia Hall staffers pulling every string in the known universe so that they could dodge (for the umpteenth time) out of being posted back to Malaysia and a dazed-looking, pony-tailed law student (wearing an M65 army field jacket with a bullet-hole over his left breast pocket) who absolutely had no idea of what was going on – much less of who he was or what he wanted to be.

Did I ever get lonely? Sure, but not very often.

When I did, I’d just pop into Midi’s room to listen to Jackson Browne’s ‘Rosie’ for a few hundred times. This would cause me to forget how the word lonely was even spelt – and also drive the elderly, cantankerous git next door (who was doing his Bar Finals) up the walls. The last I heard they sent him to jail. I think he’s out now.

And if the weather was good, J and I would take a walk to Regent’s Park, plonk ourselves down on a blue bench and talk for hours (we just talked, OK? What did you think?) A packet or two of Gauloises later, I’d walk her back to her swanky Baker Street apartment and I’d make my way back to Malaysia Hall, all the while wondering what just happened.

In fact, I am still wondering what happened. How did I get from all that to where I am now? I grew up, I guess. Pah! It’s a shame this is an irreversible process.

Hang on! I think I see a light at the end of this tunnel. Quick! Let’s make a run for it – chances are it’s going to be a train.

See you at Bryanston Square, folks – if Malaysia Hall is still there.

A conversation at the Bangkai household during breakfast yesterday:

Wife: Did you know you talk in your sleep?

Bangkai: (Gasp! I could be in a lot of trouble here. I’ll go on buttering my toast and pretend I didn’t hear her.)

Wife: Didn’t you hear what I said? You’ve been talking in your sleep.

Bangkai: Er… really? (Surreptitiously searching for an emergency exit)

Wife: Yes, really!

Bangkai: I’ve been talking in my sleep? (Think fast, man! Think fast!)

Wife: That’s what I said.

Bangkai: I’m sure it was nothing – just the subconscious playing malicious tricks (Good! There are no sharp objects in sight).

Wife: It was nothing, my foot! You were bloody singing ‘God Save the Queen’!

Bangkai: (Phew!) Oh, really? I think we’ve run out of thick-cut marmalade, dear…

I know I think I was once a WWII RAF fighter pilot. But singing ‘God Save the Queen’ in my sleep? I must be one very confused Malay.