I haven’t been to a mosque in a while, but I’m back in Malaysia and its Ramadhan now, so I’ll try to be good, eh? My younger sister is home as well so at least I’ve got someone besides my dad to go with. My mum doesn’t go – she says she farts too much and it would be too troublesome to make her way in and out of the prayer ranks to take her wudhu again.
“We have to go to the mosque in Section 14 instead of our normal one,” my sister, KJ, says.
“Why?”
“Because they’ve bulldozed the one near here to build a shopping mall.”
“WHAT?! Surely that wouldn’t be allowed? That mosque is always packed.”
“Just kidding,” KJ sniggers. “It’s being renovated.”
I shake my head and say something about menipu masa bulan puasa.
“I miss the old mosque, though,” KJ adds. “I knew people there. All the regular makciks and neneks were my friends. We nod at each other in the wudhu room.”
“Yeah, and I’m sure you give each other backslaps and say ‘Yo, bitches! Wassssssuuuup?” KJ smirks.
“How come you always seem to be pals with the old people?” I asked, not really expecting an answer. “Anyway, don’t they go to the Section 14 mosque?”
“Naaaah,” KJ says. “Too far away, unless you’ve got someone to take you in a car. One of the makciks has got a bad knee, another has gout, and there’s one with a bad heart….”
We both look at each other and burst out laughing.
Seriously, my sister is a geek.
As it turns out, KJ gets a bad tummy ache after breaking fast and I end up going with just my dad. He says he’ll meet me in the mosque canteen after prayers. Knowing my dad, it’ll probably be a long wait as he likes to gab with anybody will listen. Still, as I made my way down to the canteen, Dad isn’t there yet – only a few boys and one lone woman. I went to join her at her table and was quickly joined by another lady, who I figured must be the wife of the mosque caretaker.
She was a nice lady but proceeded to tell me in detail how to make the cucur udang which was served on the table and its accompanying chilli sauce. I don’t think I looked foreign and I certainly could speak Malay, but the lady got it into her head that I was a girl who had no clue how to make a good cucur udang and must therefore be educated in the ways.
I was spared a lecture on how to make teh-o when more people arrived and the Recipe Lady left to look after them.
The other lady at the table, who was busy putting away the said cucur udang, asked me where I was from and what did I do etc, etc. I mentioned that I was back from England to visit my parents and the conversation swerved to how cold the weather is over there and how hard it must be to fast in the winter, because her sister found it extremely difficult, did I find it difficult?
“Not really, we break fast at 4pm,” I said. The lady looked disappointed at my answer, as if I had contradicted her somehow, so I added, “What I find more difficult is doing wudhu (ablutions) in winter when you’ve got no hot water.”
At this statement, the lady perks up and says, “Oh, yes, definitely. My nephew, he used to study in Egypt, and you know, they’ve got their cold seasons as well.”
I nodded.
“There was a time when ah, you know, how sometimes men have wet dreams at night….”
Errr…
“….and he had to have a shower before his dawn prayers, but he didn’t have any hot water so he had to make do with cold water and he told me, ooooh it was torture! Of course, I told him, he could have boiled some water and used that but he said there wasn’t time.”
My head was nodding automatically at this point as my brain tried to process what I just heard. There are two things wrong with this scenario. One, why is this lady telling me about her nephew’s night-time doings, and secondly, WHY DID THE NEPHEW TELL HIS AUNT ABOUT HIS WET DREAM?! Surely, there was a better way he could have illustrated to his aunt the unpleasantness of a cold shower in winter without having to go into details about why he had to have the shower in the first place? Good God, I think we’ve just hit rock bottom on small talk.
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