Long Blog Entry ALERT!!!
You have been sufficiently warned...proceed with caution. Author not responsible for boredom, dry eyes or dilated pupils....
Hi all!
Actually, I intended to split the story into 2 parts....but hell, i couldn't decided if splitting it up when i already wrote it was a good idea or not, so I just plunged the whole thingy down. When I say long hor...haiz....it took a week just to get all the memory down. Enjoy (or not). Ahem.:)
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I spent the better part of the morning one day reading the comments to 'Letter to My Tih-Kong' and ended up almost scolding everyone I know an egg becos they all pleaded guilty to asking for rain. Then I read jay’s comment....
Jay "Peek -a-Boo" Walk said...
I remembered last time you told me got this foreign worker climbed to your window grill and peeped into your room.
Maybe that was the Tai Yang Sen but you drove him away. Hence the gloomy mornings. :P
No prizes for guessing Jay is now top in my list for ‘Jidans- Re weather.’ Then Zhebin caught a whiff and wanted to know...
Zhe Bin said...
How come that foreign worker can 'climb' until your window grille one?!
Good question. Which is basically my whole train of thought that right now I should be writing another sense meme on ‘sight’.
This takes me back to my 3rd year of Uni. And of cos, a digression here on some things that you should know before I continue:
a. I was a nerd. Yup and still am. I’m proud to say that I can outread anyone, provided the prints are big enough and pictures are colourful. I am also one of the hateful KS students who always never ask questions during lesson, but will hang around and prevent the lecturer from having an early lunch. I’d go so far as to say I even sent emails full of questions to my professors to plague their weekend golf. Most of the time I wonder why they were so hard to find when I needed them and yet, they always seem to be surreptitiously standing behind pillars and potted plants wherever I go.
b. The length of my bed spanned my window. When I say I love the sun, I was worshipping its presence. I painted my room yellow because bright sunny colours inevitably makes me happy (scientifically, it also made pple eat more, which explains some things about me at least…). My bed was high enough to place me on the same level as my window. So when the morning sun rides in, my whole body is lighted ablaze in heat and I literally get baked awake. If you can’t imagine, then think about Snow White’s Glass Casket….That would be how I look like from the window…..
er….minus the 7 dwarves, minus the chio-ness and minus the Prince Charming…..although, even if Prince Charming had been there, he'd probably run away screaming. And the Dwarves welcome me as their brothers...
c. My bedroom is on the second floor. I live in a Goode Olde 5-rm Mansionette. I must reinforce this point so u guys can understand that I wasn’t intentionally trying to give anyone a show or grope by sleeping sooooo close to the window. Anyone just had to poke their fingers…poke only! And u would have touched me.
But you’ll either have to be 4m tall. Have 3m long arms. Or 2m long fingers. You choose.
d. I wasn’t anything to look at. Which made this peeping-Tom incident so utterly bewildering to me. Want to break the law? Should do it with more finesse, style and above all, good taste mah! Regardless the punishment shall be the same anyway, so just pick a good sultry, nubile target lah! Haiyah! Even I myself think it’s so wasted!
It all started close to the end of the semester. Not only am I a chao-kuan KS student, I’m also a 1st-class chao-mugger. 1st class not meaning that I score well. The essence of mugging, as this model chao mugger shall tell you now, is not reflected in the grades.
No, the essence of mugging is in spending the huge fricking amount of time to study one choujibloodydan module, night and day, no skiving, no resting and still end up with choujibloodydan results like the next guy who spent that same fricking amount of time playing soccer….
I have honed this mugger attitude right down to its very existence, its very being!Find me anyone who can mug like I do and still score like I did and I shall embrace him/her as my equal….
OK, back to 3rd year. The finals were fast approaching so I was executing the fine art of Chao-mugger-ness late into the night for the past few days.
I’m sure you all have heard and tried this style before, but I bet you guys don’t know its name. For shame! It is the 1-Ton-Textbook-on-Bed-Soft-Like-Lotus-Petals Technique. This ancient technique is practised by every able-bodied mugger, but beware! Practise it too much and it shall ruin your Life! Because most often than not, practitioners of this style become highly addicted to it and slowly lose their focus (tak-chekiness).
In fact, many who tried too much and too hard, have fallen to the dark side (or-or-koon) because they are not skilled enough to handle its mesmeric power. Many highest level Chao Muggers have fallen in its trap, dreaming that they are studying in their sleep.
All along, I’ve been studying in school (1-Ton-Textbook-on-Hard-Bench-Like-Nails). So the introduction of the new Mug-Fu gave my aching body a much needed reprieve. But as you can guess, being a novice of this new dlang, I started going home earlier and earlier. My textbooks and notes begin a revolution on my bed. I wake up suddenly at curious hours in the night with the light on, with no recollection of having studied and yet, my face adorned with backward print. Yes, I was going the sieh-tao.
One fine night, I was alone and about to execute it again the door bell rang. A strange uncle with long straggly hair, singlet and shorts, greeted me beyond my grilles.
He spake thusly, ‘Someone’s watching you.’
And I said, ‘Who?’
And he said, ‘I dunno.’
I was about to ram my big wooden door on his fingers and run screaming for the phone when he blurted out.
‘He looks at you when you sleep. From the window, he looks at you.’
My hand released itself from the door and calmly amid rising gore, I said,
‘Uncle, tell me all.’
And he told me.
For the past few nights that I have been practising 1-TTOBLSLP, someone had been climbing the water-pipes to the second floor of my home and peeped in on me. Mr Ravi stayed at an opposite block level with mine and had been catching Late-Night Soccer on his TV which was placed under his window. So for the past 3 nights, he had seen this black shadow standing on the small parapet outside my corridor.
I was scared out of my wits.
‘Uncle, did you see what he did?’
‘Yes, he did nothing, just look. Hands on the grille.’
‘How long?’
’10 minutes.’
I was aghast.
‘Uncle, why you never call Police?’
Mr Ravi shrugged.
‘I thought he your secret boyfriend. Like Romeo and Juliet.’
I felt faint.....
‘Then why now you telling me?’
‘Because yesterday, he climbed up another window after he climbed yours.’
Good Grief…..
To make matters somehow worse, I went upstairs to check on my belongings and truly, as Mr Ravi said, he did not take anything, even my HP, which was held in a hanging basket right beside the window in plain view. When I unlock the grille and stepped out to check the water-pipe, I found blackened footprints all over it….
Why didn’t anyone see it? I was feeling real scared by then….
Our block has an Official Peeping Tom. Who had nothing to do and was peeping at me! ME!!! Why is he still walking the Earth? Why is he still alive?! At the very least, how come he's not blind yet?!
So the police were called, and Mr Ravi puffed up his chest Big-big to tell the police everything he knew and saw, then had to be put under Suspicion and Interrogated because the police was wondering why he did not make a report earlier. By then, I was thinking really hard the past few night wondering if I had been groped, molested or stroked anywhere across my body. No leh, I tell myself, but I was dead to the world siah, like how to know?
I was acting slightly hysterical liao, so I was following a hansem policeman around, asking him to take his notes properly, tried to do the policing for him, correcting his spelling etc. and showing him the prints left along the parapet.
‘Sir, look at them, they are quite small, so he must be quite short.’
*scribble scribble* ‘OK.’
‘Erm, is that all you are going to do?’
*looks at me* ‘Yes?’
‘Well?! That's it? Aren’t you going to do something about it?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, u know, brush it and lift it? Make a copy of it??’
‘No, Ma’am. We don’t do that.’
‘Why not? Then u can match it to the criminal wat!’
‘Because Ma’am, we only have a database for fingerprints, not footprints.’ I see his mouth twitching already. He must be imagining the process of asking those hard-living criminals to step on a wad of ink, then stomp over a canvas like Hollywood stars.
In the midst of the interview, Mr Incompetent asked,
‘Mr Ravi said the guy peeped in at 2am in the morning. He also mentioned that your night-light was on.’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘So what were you doing at that point in time?’
‘I was streaking for him studying on the bed….ahem.’
*perplexed* ‘And u did not see him?’
‘erm…mostly I was sleeping….’
‘but your light is on?’
I looked him at fully in the face, obviously Mr Incompetent-but-Hansem is not a Chao Mugger versed in the art of the 1-Ton-Textbook-on-Bed-Soft-Like-Lotus-Petals.
‘Sir, I tried to study in bed with my light on, but I fell asleep instead.’
‘And you were wearing?’
I closed my eyes. ‘Nothing My textbooks My pyjamas.’
‘Facedown?’
Choujidan…..’Facedown.’
Mr Incompetent-but-oh-so-Hansem screwed his face and tried to imagine why anybody might be interested to climb up a water pipe just to peep in on someone covered from head-to-toe in breathable cotton, lying facedown on a tome with her hands by her sides, with her face and all her interesting bits hidden between her whale-like back and the bed for 3 consecutive days….
The dead have been known to look more alive and naked with better poses.
At the end of the interview, my parents have arrived home and were sincerely concerned. Mr Ravi puffed up his chest again to recount the tale of the shadow-man and his not-so-involved involvement in it.
That very same night, the police laid an ambush for the Shadow-Monkey. But we didn’t care about the police anymore. You see, our own family had a plan. Obviously the guy who peeped on me doesn’t have much taste in women. So we decided that Dad should sleep in my bed that night. To the worker’s thinking (and mine), it might even be an improvement in aesthetics.
And if he were to peep in again, Crouching-Tiger-Hidden-Dragon-Pah shall be ready to take out his eye(!) through our window grill with one of our bamboo pole whose previous role was to sun clothes. This will upset the guy’s precarious balance and hopefully, if my dad pokes him hard enough and far enough (said pole is 2m long), not only will he fall off the second floor of my home, he’ll fall right off the parapet and thus off the entire HDB flat.
It was a cruel trick, I admit, but the whole thing had turned into a Comedy version of Crime-Watch and I wasn’t about to let my dad run away from his daughter-protecting duties. In any case, it was terribly amusing to see my big beefy Dad snuggle under my own covers pretending to be me. We even got him a pair of pyjamas that looked like mine.
Oh, oh, and of cos it was also a cruel trick to want to push the criminal down 8 storeys of thin air. It's gonna really hurt. *cough* BTW, it was pink…my PJs....
It was all terribly exciting. I couldn’t sleep that night because dad was snoring too loudly. My mum and I had fashioned a rough weapon from tying the screwdriver to a short pole, which I slept with at-the-ready leaning against the wall machiam like a soldier. Suddenly we hear a slight scruffling sound and my heart leaped into my throat. I was ready with my screwdriver at the window, prepared to plunge it through no matter who was on the other side. My blurry Dad was having difficulty poking his own pole through cos it was too long.
And then there was a big shout, ‘There! There! He went there!’ It was Mr Ravi, keeping a virgil from the opposite block, with his own arm out frantically waving at the direction of the fleeing peeping Tom. There was a huge burst of sirens from the carpark downstairs and a lot of shouting as plain clothes policemen sprung from both ends of the flat to bear down on the tasteless Pai-lang.
We watched from the window as a skinny Indian man was handcuffed and dragged into 1 of 3 police cars downstairs. The sirens then blared just once and drove away. It was all over in 10 minutes flat.
I have since moved my bed away from the window and added a double-lock and curtains. I never saw Mr Not-that-Incompetent-but-still-very-Hansem anymore. On the other hand, I often see Mr Ravi peering into my room from his whenever the curtains aren't down and waving cheerfully whenever he sees me.
I have a different sort of Peeping Tom now...
Out!
AKK :)
