Oh What a Carry On (2009)

  AUG 8 — And what a carry on it has been over the past week. It has been a salacious week, a downright dirty, rumbustious, saucy, libidinous week worthy of the great Rabelais, Peter Rogers or Benny Hill. It was a protesting week, a week of revelations and apologies, an up and down week, an in and out week all in the name of fornication and not so discrete gender politics, and other, more obscene, Acts. For many the good time period was well and truly over as they stood or ran, doused by spurting water cannon — in the least erotic way — or were gassed into tears they were already shedding for their increasingly punitive nation, mourning the continued absence of any whiff of habeas corpus. Others, more closely wrapped in their fame, were laid to rest amidst a shroud of controversy and grief, bringing a still greater attention to the body of their work with their demise than they ever had attracted whilst still extant. Mourners, inflamed by grief, sought restitution from those they feared were defaming their idol, slipping notionally past denial into the second of the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief — anger. Maybe it is because we are living in lands equatorial that we feel the weight of the sultry, torrid warmth, the exotic, erotic, languid heat which fuels passions and causes emotions to run high, coming, at times, to boiling point crescendos. As Henry Valentine Miller acknowledged, between the tropics has become a haven of overt sauciness, rampant libidos and runaway licentiousness, fit for the most intricate and outlandish Freudian analysis. In other lands Sigmund Schlomo Freud, neurosurgeon, discoverer of the Freudian slip (parapraxis) and darling of the Viennese middle-class set, had his “Rat Man” and his “Wolf Man”, but in Langkawi, so we are informed, and with apologies both to Bob Kane and Christian Bale, we have the Batman, or should that be fruit-bat man. So with many a slip twixt cup and lip, the fruity fruit-bat man was discovered by snooping khalwat officers limply hanging behind the door in his beloved’s bathroom. Having wrapped his sarong about him, the young man had intended to hide from the intrusive morality police by hanging discretely behind his girl friend’s bathroom door. He was obviously unaware that meticulously probing religious officers would look behind said door, espy his bat-like impersonations and simply not be fooled by the squeak, squeak, squeak and earnest, hungrily longing looks at flying moths. Further south, in Kuala Lumpur, men have become so arduous that their wives can no longer attend to their husband’s desires, so in place of reasoning with them two wives decided to divorce their husbands instead. One wife claimed that she was suspicious of her husband’s enduring ardour and followed him to the bathroom, only to see another man, just like her husband, standing there beside him. No thoughts were given of twins, mirrors, double vision or tricks of the light — no, it was obviously black magic at play. The second wife claimed that she had to endure her husband’s attentions more than 10 times a night — this too was obviously black magic. It couldn’t be down to an overly active libidinal drive or the fact that this husband really, really liked his wife, had taken tongkat ali or Viagra to prolong his passions — obviously not. So, in league with a religious department which is obviously too busy busting down the doors of innocent lovers to investigate incidents of over amorous husbands properly, both women were granted endings of their marriages by the Syariah Court. It makes one wonder just how the wives offered proof of the number of times their husbands were amorous with them — secret cameras, diaries signed by both parties or perhaps witnessed by a third party in the room — decidedly curious. No claim of metrosexuality here. Not far from the main city of Kuala Lumpur, a Klang seafood restaurant has become famed for not only serving up delicious food, but now also delicious women. Recently 15 Chinese ladies of the night were arrested in the bushes, around the restaurant, and it is believed that they were not nightly bird watchers, nor simply feeling “bushed” after a hard evening waitressing. Obviously the 10 wooden huts and private rooms, constructed around the restaurant, were full to capacity with lecherous males seeking other forms of satiation, so full that even the bushes outside had to be used. Heading out of KL in the other direction, along the North-South Expressway, in Rawang, a man kept a friend’s wife a sex slave for four months. Having made amorous advances to his friend’s wife and been rejected, he offered her marriage, which she also rejected as she loved her husband. So the obsessed male grabbed his friend’s wife, incarcerated her in a flat and used the woman as his personal prostitute. She was eventually rescued after a neighbour lodged a police complaint. Is it me, or do you also wonder what the woman’s husband was doing for the four months she was locked up by his friend. Continuing along the highway into Perak and eventually to Teluk Intan, a young 14-year-old girl has finally been able to tell of her father’s sexual abuse towards her, then across the country, in Dungun, Terengganu, a physical education teacher has finally been caught after abusing early teen boys. Also in Terengganu a 50-year-old man has been accused of sexually abusing his friend’s 13-year-old daughter — he is currently in hiding. And so it has been a full week of crazed individuals wantonly slating their most carnal desires up and down this heat-racked country, seeking personal gratification over another’s will and desire. Is it the effects of latent oppressive heat and rampant lustiness, or a predilection for all things amorous and carnal which drives people, here between the tropics, to commit abusive crimes, or is it black magic and a belief in djinn and tonics – oh what a carry on.