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2002-04-07 - 12:07 p.m. Kempunan is a concept that many Malays are familiar with. Basically, someone afflicted by kempunan meets with some misfortune (often resulting in death) when denied food that has been longed for. To the ancient Malays, one’s appetite is not to be trifled with. Deny it, and one serves only to whet some other appetite: that of the grave.
I myself have been the recipient of its morbid grace. I remember how my mother once postponed sending me to the provision shop simply because I had mentioned how I wanted a taste of her fish curry that evening. She insisted I eat first, and while watching me chew my food she saw herself as giving me a safety charm against disaster. She was too familiar with the story of the girl who was knocked down by a car, or the boy who died in his sleep, simply because they had been refused their favourite foods. An extreme example of kempunan happens in the Malay folktale ‘Batu Belah Batu Bertangkup' (The Splitting Rock, the Closing Rock). In the story, a widow catches a tembakul fish after a hard day’s work of toiling in the fields. In the manner of those who know that delay and anticipation will sweeten the enjoyment of a trophy, she cooks the fish roe and sets aside three rations: two for each of her children, and one for herself. She goes out of the house to collect some fresh shoots. When she comes home, she finds out that her son had demanded and eaten her share of the roe. Something in her snaps. At night, she tosses and turns in her bed, and hears the call of the phantasmal rock, Batu Belah Batu Bertangkup, swallower of suicides. It tells her: ‘You never managed to eat your roe because as much as you desired it, it never desired to be eaten by you. This is the way of the world: what we desire to touch have no desire to be touched by us. But I am your death and I have longed for you since you were born. And now all I ask for is that you have the same longing for me.’ True enough, she runs off to answer the rock’s beckoning, with her children in desperate pursuit, but their pleading voices are drowned by the voice of the rock. She stops only once to leave behind a ration of breast milk for her son, in a funnel fashioned from a big leaf, and flees deep into the rock’s bosom (if the myth was Grecian she would have turned to stone, if it was Christian her penance would be performed in darkness, drawing sustenance from the teat of a stalactite. But in this Malay myth the only closure is the cave door of the rock drawing shut). It was irresponsible, even petty, for the mother to abandon her children. But where the story fails in imparting obvious moral lessons (other than the warning to all children to love their mothers more), it succeeds as an authentic psychological study of a character. This is a story of a mother whose life was filled with so much misery and hardship that she had whittled happiness down to the most fragile axis: the succulent, pungent flesh of fish eggs. Denied this slice of paradise on earth, she carried her pain into the hell of the rock’s interior. A final point to note: she had not chosen death over life; it was death that chose her. This wasn't melodrama, what some Malays would call 'over', but a narrative so subtle it's easy to overlook. Picture it: the woman had simply nodded absently as her name was pointed out on a list of unhappy candidates, convinced in one fatal moment that there was no tembakul roe left in the world for her.
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