Like A Knife Through The Heart

I remembered when I was in primary school, we used to have this class they called "Tulisan", meaning "Writing" so I guess you can call it Writing Class. Basically how it is conducted is you have to copy some text from somewhere (as you can see, we are trained to be plagiarists and pirates from young) on this specially printed exercise book which has space allocated for illustrations. Usually the teacher wouldn't mind if we cut out some pictures from somewhere and paste it there. But me, being the budding fag that I was would take great pains to hand draw the illustrations. Trust me, I was one of the best... then.

Anyway, we had an assignment one day to copy the legend of Mahsuri for that particular class. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the legend of Mahsuri, unless you're not Malaysian, you should put a gun to your head. Make sure it's not Malaysian lead because it's too good for you. ANYWAY... just for the benefit of those who genuinely knows not of this virtuous woman of Langkawi Island, Mahsuri was supposedly a beautiful maiden who was wrongfully accused of adultery during her husband's absence in war. For her supposed crime, she was sentenced to death. When they stabbed her, the blood that flowed out was supposedly white, proving her purity and innocence. In a separate version of the legend had her pregnant and craving for jackfruit that was meant for the village headman. The headman not believing her condemned her to death on trumped up charges. Another story had it that he was actually her father-in-law and that he was lusting after her. So, if you take bits and pieces of the both stories and put them together, it could have been possible they stabbed her on the boobs and she was lactating...

ANYWAY... before she died she cursed Langkawi Island with seven generations of misfortune, a curse which apparently either died out or was broken by former prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman when he opened up Langkawi. This brings us back to Writing Class, so for the illustration part, I don't know what got into me. Of so many scenes I could have chose from the legend, I decided on the execution scene. The exact moment, when the executioner (for some reason I drew this as the headman) plunge the keris into her breast and white blood explodes out in all its gore and morbidity. Every other kid were drawing their version of how pretty Mahsuri was though I wondered how pretty can stick ladies be. Now when I think back on it, I am kind of horrified at what I drew. I wonder now what the teacher would have thought of my masterpiece. Whatever it was that went through her head, I still got an 'A' for my efforts, gore or no gore. Wish I still kept that exercise book, would be interesting to have a shrink psycho-analyse that work of art.

'Mahsuri' dying as tourists cheer on