A Theory of Strings

Someone sneaking into the kitchen to return with some paraffin from an oil lamp, someone punching a hole in the bottom of a pok susu*, someone cutting a piece of string.

The string was soaked in paraffin. This was tali guni, from the same material as the hessian sack, pulled dripping wet from the fluid, then knotted in one end and threaded from inside the can into the hole until it emerged outside the tin like a tadpole's tail, attached to a cylindrical head with its mouth opened wide.

“Woooooo,” it went when someone ran the index finger and thumb along the string, quite the most frightful noise on a quiet afternoon. “Wooo-woo-wook!” A wolf caught in a bear trap, a dog yelping out loud as to prick the ears of Wang Ndok, our local one-man voluntary dog catching squad.

String and tins (tèng, as we called them) were useful items. Sometimes, connected together with a length of metal clothes line, we spoke through the can as a friend held his to the ear at the other end. It was a complete waste of time as our voice was loud enough even without the tin-can contraption, but man had the urge to communicate as some wag had said, and Alexander Graham Bell notwithstanding, it was another ten years before the landline telephone became a regular item in our house.

In the meantime, tin-cans and strings were stuff of our daily life, raised as we were, on condensed milk. And Father used to regale us with tales of Che Mat Deli, a man who ate pisang (pisè, I suppose, in his native tongue) with condensed milk in the Besut where Father grew up. Che Mat would've hurled those banana-skins into the rök (bush) I have no doubt, but what did he do with those empty cans? Did he, like Abdul Wahid the drinks vendor outside our gate, fill them up with takeaway tèh or köpi-o to be carried away on strings, like steaming thuribles in rain or sun?

We had tali guni the jute string and tali kerecut that came from sedge. This one stood in a big bundle, looped and ready to be pulled out by the shopkeeper to keep the folds intact in his newspaper-wrapped sugar packets, or coriander seeds bought by the cupak, or shallots that came out of the hessian sacks into newspaper cones that were kept secure by the sedge. This straw-coloured string of long grass (all right, sedge isn't actually a grass) was quite useless for us kids and was rejected even by our goats.

Then came the latter day ersatz thing that was spun together from some petro-chemical stuff that pushed aside all our sedge strings and the jute.We had the rubber band even before that, but even the rubber band wasn't as decisive in the routing out of our old strings as this hideous tali pelastik. That was the beginning of our slide, when Nana Yusof and Alla Puchai our spice vendors began to roll out this garish plastic coloured non bio-degradable twine from a little ball that rolled about before him as the sun was setting on our tali guni and the tali kerecut from pseudo-grass.

Have you ever wondered how long is a piece of string and how long will the rubber-band stretch? Well, not long is the string in the face of those balled-up coloured plastic; but do soak a rubber band in some keresone and you'll be surprised with the result.

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*Condensed milk can. The brands in the market were Milkmaid (Cap Junjung), Torch (Cap Api), Dutch Baby, and Coins (Cap Pitis).