One of the most difficult things that I had to get used to, when I first came up to boarding school in Melaka, was the cussing. It was not just that it was casual – friends would greet each other by the side of the road with “Woi, sial! Lama tak nampak!”, faces beaming – but that it was constant and unthinking. Everyday, everywhere, all at once, you could hear a chorus of Babi and Lahanat and Celaka in a hundred parallel conversations at any given moment.
Cussing was a big part of the culture – the price of admission to be part of the tribe.
I remember one afternoon, a couple of us played a stupid parlour game to see who can let out the longest unbroken stream of expletives, like a string of polished pearls of excrement – gleeful wannabe rappers with a bad case of Tourette’s, going babikaulahanatcelakapukimakpantatlancaucibaimakkau! at the utmost top of our voices.
Swearing as an art form: we were incorrigible.
Not long after boarding school, when I went overseas for A-Levels, I became the unfortunate existential trial that God inflicted on my pious, budak-sekolah-agama housemate. He would wince at every profanity that came out of my foul mouth. Certainly he was too polite to tell me off, so I had to find out from someone else that he was seriously considering moving to another house to get away from my baleful influence. Of course, I found this mortifying – I thought of myself as a good boy, and my housemate was such a gentle soul that the very thought of him moving out, because of my cussing, was a painful thought.
I cleaned up my act, and my potty mouth, pretty quickly.