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2003-05-12 - 8:51 p.m. A Toyol Story ------------- It began one day when Fadly's father stood at the doorway to his bedroom to ask if he had seen his pair of spectacles. Fadly glanced at his father, replied that he had not, and went back to reading his comics. A moment later, he suddenly recalled that he had seen his father wearing them, and walked out into the living room. His father had overturned cushions, created a haphazard footpath from magazines, and was sweeping an oar-like hand across the limbo of dust balls, oxidised coins and beetle husks under the sofa. Red-faced from exertion, he looked up at Fadly and declared, 'I think there's a toyol in our house.' His spectacles, in mock gold, were sitting mockingly on his nose. Malay superstition has it that a toyol is a kind of changeling, a stillborn foetus brought back to life by black magic, and condemned to do the bidding of its master in return for its unfortunate resurrection. Its primary occupation is mischief: petty theft, random rearrangement of private property, relentless harassment of one's peace of mind. The most effective way to use a toyol on your enemy is through psychological warfare, the desired target being the victim's sense of reality. Let the victim's mind be under pressure from the combined burden of minute enigmas, a kind of Japanese water torture where a single drop of water, directed repeatedly at a precise point on the forehead, produced the most excruciating migraine. Drip: the unsolved mystery of the missing thimble. Drip: the drawer that gobbled up pen caps. Drip: the self-unlocking front door. In the next few weeks, Fadly's father would complain of various vanishings: a particular segment of the newspaper, his favourite comb, as well as a pair of bathroom slippers. Hiding a growing sense of dread under a frosty icing of impatience, Fadly would explain how the Classifieds section had been used as a makeshift plate for the cat's dinner, that the comb had been left in the bathroom when his father was dyeing his hair black, and that the slippers had been thrown away a week ago, since the soles had been exhausted to the smoothness of fish-bellies. His tense replies, however, could not shake his father's belief that there was indeed some sorcery at work, in the form of an invisible, elfish intruder, whose operations were more stealthy than electricity. Inwardly, Fadly felt that his name was going to be called up soon from the register of filial sons. It was a summons as inescapable as being called up for National Service or vaccination. Fadly considered himself to be a reasonably respectful child, yet at the same time he feared the kinds of emotionally-draining adjustments he had to make in the light of his father's inverse puberty. He waited, in agitation, for the definitive sign that his father's increasing absentmindedness had spilled over into irrevocable senility. He knew that if that day were to arrive, his response would be a mixture of horror, fatalism and terrible loneliness--that between the two of them, only Fadly would be able to recognise the father's mental decline. In the meantime, he started entertaining his father's theories that there was indeed, a toyol in the house. 'Yes,' he replied to his father's laments, 'someone out there is doing this to us.' Fadly somehow believed that having faith in his father's system of delusions could delay his confrontation with the inevitable. 'Yes,' he would say sadly, watching the old man swear for the umpteenth time the last location of the remote control, 'this house is being disturbed.' Fadly's father, encouraged by his son's reluctant support, started laying snares for the toyol. He bought a set of mousetraps, which he placed around the house; anywhere he figured where the hands of a kleptomaniac imp might wander. And thus it happened one day, while reading comics (although this time with an almost desperate absorption), that Fadly heard a cry from the kitchen. He rushed out of his bedroom to find his father sitting cross-legged on the floor and prying open a mousetrap that had clamped over his left big toe. Fadly's father was sobbing, a look of bewildered hurt on his face. In a voice peevish and shrunken, he asked Fadly, 'Who put this damned thing here?' Fadly knelt beside his father, put a hand on his shoulder, and said firmly, 'Your toyol did, pak.' He had meant it as his habitual lie, but Fadly could have not been more struck by the truth in his words. A Hantu Kumkum Story -------------------- Razali was a bodybuilder. Unlike some other bodybuilders he knew, the body was not so much a lump of clay to be moulded into its ideal shape, but something that was by nature wild and rebellious. Any drop in vigilance, and there would be an adipose uprising--gathering around his abdominal area as a procession of love handles, or demonstrating solidarity by organising a sit-in at his chin area. For Razali, his body was not the product of an artist's dialogue between skill and material, but the subject to a monarch's absolute edicts. The decision to tame his body was made one day while he was in his secondary school's uniformed group. While practising marching drills, he was humiliated in front of his friends when the drill sergeant barked at him, 'I said stomach in, chest out, not the other way round!' For the rest of the day, he was sucking in his stomach, only too self-conscious that each time he relaxed, his viscera would push out his abdominal wall, a submarine crew that used his navel as a periscope to view the outside world. So he found a solution in body fortification. Strips of muscle could be toned to the point where the hidden body would no longer be able to exercise its design plans on the visible one. Flesh could be turned into brace, corset and girdle. He started on a regime of supplements, attended the gym at his community centre four times a week, and within three years became a qualified fitness trainer. He started wearing T-shirts with ripped sleeves (their edges were deliberately jagged to suggest that they had been ripped apart by the force of rampaging biceps), viewed egg yolks and chicken skin with nausea, and got married to a regular patron he would often sign in for free while working as a part-time bouncer at a club. It was only in the last month or so when Razali started intensifying his workout routines. He had recently joined a new gymnasium located in the city area, and he found himself surrounded by a new batch of veterans who had tuned their bodybuilding pursuits into surgical obsessions. As the mirrors in the gym replicated their tortured grimaces, it also seemed to make their exchanges profuse and repetitious: they talked about nothing else but extra inches to the chest, or the side-effects of creatine monohydrate. Razali’s wife could not help but notice her husband’s restlessness. Not without incredulity, she served him banquets, wondering to herself whether the most desperately religious made such offerings to their gods. In bed, he often complained about his colleagues. The giant Zachariah, whose feats at the bench press were a boy’s pranks against gravity. And how could he even hope to compare his puny self to the twin brothers, Murad and Maidin, who, blessed with the gift of perfect resemblance, could spur themselves through the completely unforced act of sibling rivalry? After sending her husband off to work one day, Razali’s wife opened her refrigerator. Quilts of mist could not hide the obscene largesse she had stocked for her insatiable husband. She started thinking about the Hantu Kumkum, the ghost who terrorised homes with its hunger for the blood of virgins. The Kumkum was once a woman who consulted a bomoh for a beauty treatment. The bomoh made her consume an elixir, with one condition: that she not look at the mirror for a period of 30 days. However, tormented by curiosity (provoked each time the woman touched the increasingly-smooth contours of her face), the woman sneaked a peek at her reflection on the 29th day. The mirror cracked; and so did the woman’s face—she had been scarred by her own impatience. To regain some human semblance, she had to feed on the blood of young women, a task that would send her from door-to-door, draped in a headscarf that masked her abominable countenance. Nobody knows, not even the Kumkum herself, the quota of blood she would have to partake of before complete restoration is possible, which would make her assignment both everlasting, and futile. A sudden knock on the door brought Razali’s wife back to reality, or perhaps yet further into unreality. Superstitiously, she peered into the viewfinder, half-expecting a veiled woman to be brooding at her doorstep. Instead, it was her husband, directing impatient glares at the convex eyehole. Razali’s wife noticed how dwarfish he looked, the sides of the corridor like a pair of parentheses that framed him. The only cure for vanity was a curse—their depleted savings, his eroded libido—that would reveal its unappeasable nature. It was not her husband’s body that needed repair, but the evil conspiracy of his own eyes.
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