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| Picture courtesy of movie " Stand by me# |
My mom and dad used to live in a village when they were young before their family moved to the city.
When I was in primary school, my parents would go back to my mom's hometown regularly on weeekends, school holidays , fasting month......We were joined by my mom's sister her husband and (at that time) her four children, my cousins.
I was fortunate enough to have a comfortable village (kampung) experience compared to mom when she was a child. Why I say comfortable , was because my mom and aunt would reminince on the good old times where there was no electricity and they used candles to study.
( Which is pretty impressive, we have electricity now and still we wear glasses. None of our grandparents or relatives wear glasses ).
Where there was no gas stoves and they had to go find firewood and cook the food on fire. How they would blow to make sure that the fire on the brick cooking place would not die down. Well lucky they did that in the good old days , nowadays it would have been known as child labour, asking a child to collect firewood pleaaaaaassssssssssssseeeeeeeeeee what if the child got eaten up by a wild boar!
We cringe at the thought of using the candles to go to the toilet.
What I remembered when I was eleven or twelve years old, my grandmother's house was made of wood. It was a two flooring house, the ground floor was the kitchen, a small bedroom, the bathroom and the dining area. Nowadays ,when you say bathroom it comes with a toilet, back before renovation then bathroom and toilet were seperated. The bathroom was inside the house and the toilet was outside. Just behind the house.
Imagine having to answer the call of nature in the middle of the night, having to go out of the house , holding a flaslight, going into the toilet which is slightly bigger than a telephone booth ......And its a squating toilet!
Now , my grandmother had a huge area, where she planted durian trees , mangoesteen,it was huge with bushes and all the creepy crawlies that come with it! There you are, squating on the toilet, listening to your surrounding sounds ( the orignal surround dound system, amazing how things can be magnified when your scared), cricket, frogs, owls, trees rustling , all alone in that dark toilet , trying very hard to push nature to take its course in super sonic speed.
You think being the one inside was scary, no it was actually being the body guard outside that was more terrifying. Being children, at that time there was no way we would show bravado by going to the toilet by ourselves. Definetely we would go in pairs. Our hyper imaginative mind would go on overdrive standing outside alone either holding a flashlight or a candle. All by ourselves out there, in the dark, with nobody else except for my cousin who was in the toilet.Shining my flashlight at any direction that had weird noises.
While the rest of my family members were at the first floor happily watching televisyen.
"ARE YOU DONE YET?"
"NOT YET"
"ARE YOU DONE YET?"
"NOT YET!!!!!!
CRASH !!!!! What was that ? I jumped.
Hantu!!hantu!!! (Ghost!ghost!)
I screamed and dashed up to the first floor startling everyone there.
WHAT HAPPEN?
Ghost ghost ghost , little me jumping around.
Where's your cousin?
I stopped "oh yeah....."
From the ground floor you can hear another scream.....MOMMMY
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