13. How to...lök

Some things are best left alone. Lök is the crystallisation of that mood: that things shouldn’t be fixed if they ain’t broke.

Centuries of practise has attested to lök’s results. You lök a scratch and it heals pretty quick, and if you can bear the flies buzzing around your wound for a bit, you’ll wake up one morning to find that it’s healed. So if nature cures, why heal with foul poultice? There is a whole school of thought behind this: vis medicatrix naturae say wise men since when men got their first scratch, why heal when nature will come to your aid? Lök je, dök payöh dok usek, let it be and it’ll be all right.

When lök touches other areas of life the result can be deep and dark. In days when fish was kept in salt for rainy days and procrastination was a way of obtaining results, lök could, if left too long, result in the hasudöh! Hasudöh! the lady of the house would say — “O dearie me, o my goodness!” — looking into the potted layers of fish and salt that have all turned into mush and stuff. And that was how the first budu was made.

It is said that lök and dök are running mates, but as dök is often expressed as wak dök, ‘to do the dök, it has in it an element of the deliberate act, i.e. to studiously ignore your subject. You wak dök if you’re a lady and the construction workers are giving you the wolf whistle, but if he follows you and slips on the muddy patch into the monsoon drain, you’d probably want to ratchet up your schadenfreude thing and just let him lay there as you lök.

It may be cool to lök but at other times, say when a brick or fist is flying into your face it may be more advantageous to duck than to let it meet you with a smack. Baik lik pada lök they’ll tell you as you lie in your hospital bed masked in thick bandage; “It is better to evade than not.” Needless to say you can overdo your deliberate act of neglect and draw criticism for your failure to act. Latchkey types and home alone kids may slide down the greasy road after years and years of neglect, and then it’ll be too late to act. Dok lök tu, ddepang mata lek-lek will be the the alliterative reproach that you’ll probably get from the presiding beak in a Trengganu juvenile court. “You’ve been neglecting them right before your very eyes.”

Lök is good if it brings useful results, but lik is best if you want to preserve your head. Lek-lek is the glaringly obvious that you’d be very neglectful not to sight or to be oblivious of its offending act. So that’s the first and only rule of lök: Don’t lök (ignore) something that is ddepang mata lek-lek (before your very eyes), but if it's coming straight into your path, then it’s best for you to lik. Lök like most everything else, does therefore carry a little caveat: if after days of lök you still walk with a kècök (limp), then it'll do you good to heed the advise of Mök Cöh to go to the hospital and not just ignore it, "Kena gi sepita tu, dök léh dok lök!"