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2002-04-14 - 3:01 a.m. The Five Senses 3 : Taste ------------------------- We had just finished dinner at a coffeeshop opposite the Substation. Razak lit his cigarette and started to gaze dreamily at the tendrils of smoke signing their cursives in the air. 'We used to 'mandi hujan' in the old village, literally ‘shower in the rain’, and I would open my mouth to the sky,’ he said. ‘I used to just allow my mouth to gape, without swallowing, and the rain would fill it up, with water that was cool, and sweet.’ I was struck by what Razak mentioned about the rain being 'sweet'. I asked him if it was just a figure of speech, but he insisted that he had used the exact adjective. 'You didn't swallow the rain. So how can you actually tell if it was sweet?' ‘That shows how old we’ve become, my friend,’ Razak answered, slyly, ‘That something has to be swallowed just for us to know that it’s sweet. We don’t trust the tips of our tongues anymore.’ The function of taste. Among most animals, taste is purely utilitarian, in fact, subject to a binary law--sweet things good, bitter things bad. But human taste buds are supposedly more delicate, being inextricable from gastronomic pleasures. A new game: Razak and I started listing things which left prints only on the tongue, not the gullet. 'Salt water. The breeze from the sea.' 'Chlorine from swimming pools.' 'The cold taste of keys. The spit-dampened wood of pencils. The poison of batteries.' 'Cigarette smoke. How could I miss that?' 'Rubber bands. Tissue paper, which gives the curious sensation of a moistureless palate.' 'The edges of pillows. Your own thumb. Rubber pacifiers. Teething toys.' 'Air. When you open your mouth, head out of the window, while your father is speeding down an expressway. Or when you're fasting and no food enters your mouth the entire day.' 'The frayed end of a sewing thread. Shirt sleeves.' 'The salty iron taste of blood, especially when you've got a bad tooth.' 'The crumpled hem of your sarong. Clenched in your mouth when you were being circumcised.' 'Directly: toothpaste. Indirectly: soap and shampoo.' 'Your sweat-soaked helmet strap in the army.' 'Mud. Gravel. Grass. Sand. Spat out the minute it is recognised.' 'Straws. Keropok plastic packaging, the kinds you have to tear open with your teeth.' In my desperation to come up with more examples, I brought the back of my hand to my mouth and bit my own knuckle. And it hit me then: taste, the most intimate of our senses. I could look at Razak, listen to him, smell him, even touch him, but to taste him required a level of intimacy that I believed neither he nor I desired. A kiss took on new meanings for me: to taste someone who is simultaneously tasting you, to be both the taster and the tasted, ah, foreplay to mutual cannibalism. Lost in erotic reverie, I could hardly pay attention to what Razak said next. 'Skin,' he said triumphantly. 'The human skin, public or private, callused or sensitive, sweaty or dry, hairy or smooth…' Who knows which of us had thought of it first, but it was strange, how he had found the very words that were at that very moment, poised at the tip of my tongue.
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