"Ta'da hantu, Uncle"

With the recent bout of ‘school-girl’ hysteria, allow me to relate my experience in this regard. Early last year, a friend called to say his teenage daughter was in a recurring bout of hysteria and he asked me to come over. He said the ‘devil had again taken over’ the girl and he was helpless. Familiar with my non-superstitious persona, he was desperate for another angle to his predicament.

Instinctively I brought along a headmaster’s cane. When I arrived at the middle-class home, a ‘bomoh’ was hovering over the girl, whom I know from birth. Wielding the menacing looking cane, I announced clearly I was driving the ‘ship’. I asked the medicine man to step aside and forcibly ushered the screaming teenager into the study. I locked the room and struck a leather chair repeatedly with the cane. The strokes evoked piercing shrieks from the girl, audible enough to alert the congregation outside the room who thought I was already inflicting the pain of the stick upon her.

Amidst her shrieking, I looked into her eyes and with a measured smile I said that, as sure as I know my name, I am poised to offer up to five hard strikes upon her buttocks and upon each stroke, I will enquire if the ‘devil is within’ her. I promised her that with the excruciating pain culminating with the fifth, her explicit answer would be ‘ta’da hantu uncle’. I assured her of a ‘cure’ and that I had honed the procedure to a science.

Without delay, I held her by the scruff of her neck and struck at the chair to warm up my swing. As soon as I bent her over a table to begin the procedure, she said in an almost inaudible voice ‘ta’da hantu uncle’.

I ignored her and struck the chair again almost missing her flesh and this time, to my relief, she screamed aloud those four ‘revealing’ words.

With her pinafore drenched in sweat and tears, I held her and reminisced that in my time, we use to feign fevers and such to miss school. In response, the chirpy teenager smiled and whispered that with the help of acting classes in nuances of hysteria and such, feigning fevers have taken on new levels and that she and her friends have honed the procedure to a science.