if there's one language that i think i was born to speak, i am pretty sure it's malay. i love the malay language. it's like my tongue was born to curl and roll and lick the 'l's and 'r's off at the right places. the intonations. even i can get the accent right. the only think i'm lacking is the circumcision. but that's another story for another day. and till today, i am darn sure that i'm rather good at listening to the language itself. it's something that i've picked up all thanks to my ex, my nursing background and of course, my current workplace where i have 5 malay colleagues and another 2 clueless chinese ones. i ain't a fluent speaker or anything like that. no. but i know enough to impress the average malay when i have sex with them. plus i can give you the translation for all the private parts. enough to get you through spas and gay clubs.

thus, during my initial forays into behasa melayu, one of the first words that i learnt from my ex was the word 'kewat'.

now, kewat is malay lingo for gay. just like the cheena chinese like to use AJ instead of gay. the local gay malay population (that sounds really taboo) use kewat instead. so the right way to use it would be like:

'that one confirm kewat one'.

or a pet phrase my gay colleague and i always use during work to signal the arrival of someone we think is prolly gay:

(in the most exasperated tone that we can muster) 'i think he's ok-what!'. (follwed by hysterical makcik laughter on our part)

when speaking to the melayus, i actually prefer the term kewat rather than gay cos it's so much more fluid than the latter. saying the word 'gay' kinda reminds me of an ah pek i once saw at the swimming pool toilet who had a brazilian wax. imagine, with an already wrinkled penis, a very white tanline around his pelvic area, and that sagging body of his, he had a brazilian wax the width thinner than his penis. not that it was really big to begin with. he was obviously gay lah. but you know what they say about ageing gracefully. and 'brazilian wax' and 'graceful' are not two words that you would normally use in the same sentence. the brazilian, just like saying gay, was so like 'in your face'. kewat is much more cheeky, graceful and..... well, liquidated (i've already used fluid, so there). (NB: after reading through this again, i realized that the word i was looking for was INVASIVE, makes a homo-revelation moment almost like a surgical procedure, but that again, for uniquely homophobic singapore, it's like taking them through a sex change).

and since we're almost throughly orientated about kewats, lemme go on and tell you about two people i have at my workplace who fit the definition of kewat. one is a gay colleague and close friend of mine. the interesting thing was that we found each other on a local gay profiling webbie and then went on to start chatting with each other and prepping each ohter on what to expect in brunei. lucky for him, he has found a rather charming local for a boyfriend. and i, have only met up with one skinny cheena guy for sex. but anyways, we bitch and i love bitching with him.

the other is a colleague from the administrative department. a clerk. he's uber-professional. and one look, no matter whether you're gay, straight, bi, trans, blind, dumb, deaf or even devoid of all senses, just one look and you will know that this guy is kewat. is it in the limp wrist? is it in the flailing arms during conversations? is it in the wry smiles? is it in the scrutinizing eyes? is it in the soft voice? is it in the tender touch? yes and all of the above.

if i had a show and tell class and my topic was kewats, i would drag them down, kicking, screaming and bitching. cos i know these happy people are gonna get me an A+. and bless my colleague here, but he's pretty soft at times what with his big anime eyes. and my chief clerk has that wry smile that screams kewat. let me tell you some of their trademarks. both of them love watching malay award shows. both of them have all the Siti Nuhaliza songs in whatever music devices that they own. both cannot talk if you tie their hands behind their back. both of them exchange thai drag movies with each other. i daresay that the both of them are just meenas trapped in a mats' body.

and they are surprisingly rather bimbotic too. just the other day, the clerk called my colleague to join him for a trip to the petrol station. reason being that he had to top up his boss' fuel tank and he didn't know how to do it. which makes me wonder, how in the bloody world did he get his driving license in the first place? perhaps instead of thinking about the upcoming elections and who's going to win majority of the seats (we all know who's going to win 'em seats anyways), we ought to focus on the more practical issues like gay rights and education. like teaching gay men how to actually pump petrol and use a hammer and fix a light bulb etc.

my colleague's idea of D&T (Design and Technology classes: IMHO the most boring and useless subject in the cirruculum, and i never learnt much except how to sandpaper wood and hammer metal into useless lumps) basically involves taking the hammer and just knocking a few places. i guess in the hope that something will resolve itself. whenever he does that, i'm like freaking out. cos it's just ridiculous.

i was actually passing by the medical centre when my colleague received the phone call. so i offered to stand in for him while they went out for a quick petrol pump. little did i know that to top-up a fuel tank comes with many other side quests. they bought banana fritters, samosas and spring rolls back. i mean that was nice. but they didn't have to take FIFTY MINUTES just to go out and pump petrol and buy some afternoon snacks right?

beacuse of them, i couldn't go gym and i felt really horrid and obese for the rest of the day because of the uber-oily samosas, springs rolls and banana fritters that he made me eat. but all the same, i still love my colleague for what he is. be it flailing arms, fatty food or even hammers.

---