Kristang short fiction sample
Harimau Jadian
by Kevin Martens Wong (2015)
6606 THERIANTHROPY GQE ORDINARY LEVEL (2015 REVISED)
INTRODUCTION
This document provides details of the Ordinary Level Therianthropy syllabus for candidates in Vyarapare.
N.B. Not to be confused with the GQE A-LEVEL subjects 8906 H1 THERIANTHROPOLOGY (REVISED) or 9903 H2 THERIANTHROPOLOGY (REVISED). Therianthropology refers to the study of therianthropy, whereas therianthropy refers to the actual process of shapeshifting.
AIMS
The aims of this syllabus are:
- To develop an awareness in candidates as therianthropes of their special skills and powers, and their special place in society as a result
- To develop the ability in candidates as therianthropes to control and manage their powers, for the benefit and continued optimal functioning of Vyaraparean society
- To develop in candidates an understanding of current issues in therianthropy and applied therianthropy, and enable candidates to respond critically to them
- To encourage in candidates positive attitudes towards therianthropy, and a sense of empowerment and one’s role in the community
ASSESSMENT
- Candidates will complete two papers: a practical assessment (6606/1) and a written assessment (6606/2). Each paper forms 50% of the final awarded grade.
- To earn a GQE O-LEVEL PASS in 6606 Therianthropy, candidates must pass both papers (a minimum of 50% for each paper).
- To qualify for exemption from Section 29A of the Revised Shapeshifter Act (CAP 404), candidates must pass both papers and achieve a minimum B4 grade for 6606/1. In accordance with Section 32 of the Revised Shapeshifter Act (CAP 404), candidates must pass 6606/1 on their first attempt in order to qualify for exemption.
Detailed breakdown of the assessment can be found in Appendix A.
*
He takes the first puff, and exhales, slowly.
The shuddering grips him again, and he leans his head against the wall as the arm twists and jerks like the pincer of a lobster trapped in a boiling kettle, snapping, flailing, seeking desperately to be free from the clawing heat –
A second puff. He breathes hard, and fast. The arm writhes. His mind contorts. He sees a kaleidoscope of colors, too many of them orange.
A third puff. He almost bites off the end of the cigarette. Pain lazily sinks its teeth into his shoulder, but it comes to a halt at his neck, and he relaxes.
Spots and stripes pervade his vision. He begs for breath like a drowning man thrown unexpectedly to shore.
Just stripes. Gradually he slows, and gravity returns.
The arm lies still on the cold, pink tiles of the toilet floor. One claw still twitches, but its light, ginger scratching of the wall is demur and unassuming. He observes his ballooning veins inflate and contract, now more visible as the fur recedes, and he dazedly traces their contours across the Martian landscape of the arm.
Whump-whumps punctuate the still air. He glances down at his lap where his phone is sequestered between his thighs, blinking back grains of sweat.
10:59; recess was over nine minutes ago. Arfie’s original
where u?
has gone unanswered; now there are two more, almost simultaneously, from him and Wee Khee:
can see selva lookin for you from outside leh. Hurry up.
Selva asking for you babe
It is hard to touch-type with one hand and holding a lit cigarette, but it’s one of the few skills he feels he’s actually acquired at school.
I know wk told me alr. Waiting for left to unswell.
Coming back. Say i got stomachache.
He takes another puff, finally able to savour the taste.
Lol i don’t think she believes you. she just told the class shapeshifters are compulsive liars. They can’t stick to one form and one story. and muhammad namir is the worst of the lot.
A sudden surge of bitterness and ash. He spits, involuntarily.
She’s a compulsive shithead. Coming.
He looks at his left hand. Most of the fur has disappeared; only a few streaks of orange among the black now. He feels his face; no fur there either. He lifts it up, clenching and unclenching. Or trying to; his ring finger is still swollen, and the nail (claw? He doesn’t know) bites into the smooth, human flesh of his palm when he closes his fist. He wrings his left hand out, still observing with both a morbid fascination and a keen irritation the throbbing veins and arteries.
Still bad ah?
Yeah arfs. tell you more later. Going back now.
Lol relek ah. don’t call her mother a fuckface again please.
Do my best.
*
One hurt in gas explosion in Dakota
October 4, 2017
One person was severely injured in the early hours of Saturday morning when a gas leak caused an explosion in her seventh floor Dakota flat, shattering windows and rousing neighbours.
A spokesperson for the Civil Defence Force said the agency was alerted to the incident at 05:44 am, and responded to the incident with a fire engine and a support vehicle.
The cause of the gas leak is under investigation.
Madam Nurul Fatima, 45, was taken to Pek Sua General Hospital after suffering third-degree burns, as well as wounds inflicted by broken glass and cutlery propelled by the explosion. She had been preparing to take her son to school when the explosion occurred.
Madam Fatima’s husband, Mr Syed Abdul Hamid, 46, and her son, Muhammad Namir, 11, are
understood to have been asleep at the time of the blast, and were not injured.
154 words
*
“Trigger?”
“No trigger. Felt it during Math. Tried to hold it in but ended up running to the toilet when the bell rang.”
“Sian.” Arfie bats away the air around his nose with Namir’s Shapes and shifters vol. 2. “Fuck. Damn strong today.”
“I had another one after PE.”
“You compulsive already lah.” Arfie offers Namir water, which he declines with a wave of his hand. “What did Selva do when you got back?”
“Nothing. Just kind of ignored me.”
“I saw you standing outside when Png walked by.”
“Ya man. Shit. He asked me turn out my pockets, but luckily that was my last from the first packet. But don’t know if he could smell.” Namir kicks at a branch as they walk down the long, meandering driveway between the main road and the school compound.
“Better hope not. You how many detentions already this term?“
“Eight. More than James.” Namir smirks a wan, bloodless smile.
“They’re definitely going to arrest you soon.”
“Don’t be a fuckface.”
Namir means it in their usual, jesting way, but his smile is gone, and Arfie realizes he’s touched a nerve.
“Come on, you’re not that affected by it, right?”
Namir succeeds in splitting the branch in two.
“Come on. Don’t be a faggot.”
Namir kicks the branches away. “It’s in three weeks. I still can’t control it.” He strongarms Shapes and shifters vol. 2 away from Arfie and waves it in the air like a dishcloth. “You know I’ve been taking Theri for years and they’ve taught us nothing. And they’re still teaching me shit. I think they want us to fail.”
“That’s sedition,” says Arfie, mock-treacherously. He absently rubs at the long line of a scar that starts from his left elbow and travels upwards into his shirt sleeve.
“No but you know, sometimes I think the bloggers are right. I don’t see how they expect us to pass like this. And one exam means freedom or jail for me. Stop, Arfs,” says Namir, uncomfortably, looking at Arfie’s scar. Arfie acquiesces.
They reach the bus-stop, and settle down next to a middle-aged woman with a briefcase and two thick, yellow files. She eyes Shapes and shifters vol. 2 pensively. A young man behind them moves to the other end of the bus-stop.
“I guess you’re in a pretty unique situation.” Namir raises his eyebrows and Arfie lowers his voice. “If your dad – “
“If my dad, and if my mom. But it doesn’t change where I am now. It doesn’t change the fact that 29A doesn’t apply to me because I have no home to be home arrested under.”
“You won’t fail.”
“I will. And then they’ll arrest me. Because I’m a shifter. A security risk and an abomination. If my dad, Arfie. If my dad.”
They are silent for a while. The woman shifts uncomfortably, clutching the files a little closer to her chest. Arfie breathes in. “You could go to court.”
“With whose money? Yours? Like your parents will ever sponsor a shifter child.”
“You’re my best friend.”
“That doesn’t change what else I am,” says Namir. The roar of an engine interrupts them; it’s a 137. They clasp hands; “Text me about tonight,” Arfie says, and Namir nods.
He boards the bus just behind the woman with the yellow files. It’s crowded, so he sits next to her, only liminally aware of her apprehension and discomfort.
*
HPA should not take sides in therianthropy debate
Published on June 21, 1999
I am concerned over the recent “Different stripes, different lives: FAQs on Therianthropy in Vyarapare” booklet published by the Health Promotion Agency (HPA) on June 13 (“FAQ on shapeshifters divides public opinion, June 15).
The HPA without doubt is of the opinion that therianthropy is normal and that therianthropes are normal, healthy human beings like the rest of us.
I find this to be inaccurate and misleading. Although there is a body of scientific evidence purporting to show this, scientific debate continues to rage over whether therianthropy is genetic and biological, or related to environmental factors such as upbringing and culture. There is therefore no scientific consensus for the HPA to base the conclusions it has drawn.
The FAQ encourages therianthropes to see themselves as “normal, healthy human beings” who are “just like the rest of us”.
This explicitly contradicts legislature in Vyarapare that has defined therianthropes as possessing a “special place in society” due to their range of powers and skills that are not possessed by normal people (Shapeshifter Act, CAP 404, Section 2). They are thus treated differently from normal homoanthropes on valid legal grounds, a fact which the FAQ seems to have ignored.
There are also moral and religious considerations regarding therianthropes that many Vyarapareans consider when dealing with therianthropes. Some people, for example, believe that therianthropes may be possessed by demons, and are spiritually unclean. The FAQ’s failure to take these into consideration may be seen as a failure on its part to account for the disparate views of the population.
In conclusion, I believe that this booklet was ill-timed and ill-advised, and the HPA should reconsider publishing such materials in future without due consideration and process.
[name of author not published in database]
*
Namir sits up in his bed, breathing heavily. Hits the power on his phone.
August 2. 4:27 pm. No new messages.
He lies back down, one hand reaching out beneath the phone, feeling the scrap of faded, green cloth that has lain on his bedside table for four years.
Arfie might call this part of his ritual (right before he “lets his morning glory blossom”), but it is a habit for Namir, to touch that ragged, tattered piece of cloth as soon as he wakes up. His day cannot proceed without it; sometimes, on school days, he won’t leave, but will wander aimlessly through the house as if looking for something until he realises that he’s forgotten to touch it.
Beside it is a picture of his mother, which Namir always keeps face down; above it hangs William Blake’s The Tyger, the only piece of decoration in the otherwise sparse, almost clinically-clean room.
Namir picks up his phone and scrolls through his newsfeed, ignoring the
16:00: Study E Math
flashing at the top of the display.
A knock on the door.
“Mir? Can you go alone today? I need to help Mrs Ho with the garden.”
Namir mumbles a yes, almost inaudibly.
“Mir?”
“Mmmm.”
She opens the door, sees him engulfed beneath his sheets. “Mir.”
“Yes nenek. I will go alone.” Namir doesn’t look away from his phone.
“You’re supposed to be studying.”
“Don’t feel like.”
“Don’t feel like?” His grandmother circles around the ruin of Namir’s pile of ten-year series, and perches herself at the foot of his bed. “Usually it’s ‘I did already’, or ‘Finish already’. Never ‘I don’t feel like’.”
“Don’t feel like giving excuses.”
“Mir.” His grandmother insists. “Namir. Look at me.” Her tone rises; Namir raises his head, as if lifted on puppet strings. His gaze is stubborn, his brow furrowed. “Talk to me.”
He looks away.
“Namir.”
“Why did you let mom marry dad?” He tosses out the words like illegal firecrackers; they spark and crackle in the room, their embers and sounds ricocheting off the sterile walls. But his grandmother is not to be fazed; she is an admiralty unto herself, a vessel that has sailed far more treacherous and wrathful waters than this.
“Why the question?”
“Why did you let mom marry dad?” Namir repeats; but his words fizzle and hiss as they sink into the nonchalant sea. His grandmother moves closer.
“I didn’t let her,” she says, finally. “It wasn’t a choice. It wasn’t my choice to make.”
“But you knew Dad was a shifter.”
“Yes. Were you not paying attention? Give me that.” His phone is in her hand in an instant. “Your mother was twenty-six. It was her choice. And you are feeling sorry for yourself because you have to take an examination in three weeks. Because of your father’s genes.”
“It’s completely unfair.”
“It’s completely unfair. Definitely.”
“I hate being a shifter. I hate my power. You saw what dad did to mom.”
“I occasionally hate your father for what he did to your mother. I hate the power too.”
“Do you hate me?”
“Namir,” his grandmother says, “you are not your father.”
He shrugs. “My teachers think I am.”
“Your teachers see you smoke and defy them.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m going to kill people. Or hurt people I love.”
“Yes but it means you can’t control yourself. It shows them that you can’t control your power. Like your father.”
“I can’t control my fucking power – ”
“You can’t even control your words.” His grandmother looks at him impassively. “You cannot hope to change people until you change yourself.”
Namir thumps his chest. “How do I change myself? It’s a part of me. It’s me. No one understands that. Not the government, not school, not you…”
He blinks back tears, and the room is silent for some time.
After a while, he looks up, more composed. His grandmother’s expression hasn’t changed. “I’m sorry, nenek.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t apologise, and don’t feel sorry for yourself either.” She hands him back his phone. “Get dressed, and go and see your mother. And then come home and study.”
As Namir folds his sheets, his grandmother pauses at the door. “And Namir?”
He looks up, willingly this time.
“I may not understand what it’s like to be you, but I still love you.”
He nods.
“I’ll be done at the garden at 6. I expect you home at 7.”
“Yes nenek.”
*
names and labels; ~arferz
august 2, 4:36 pm.
So Mr eng continued calling me arif again today. Despite everyone in class telling him that no one calls me that, and my name in school is Arfie. I told marcus and namz about it and they both said it was so formal. Qinhao said it was gay. lol.
I dont mind i guess but it made me realise how powerful names are. When people call me arif they give me one kind of name. Or label, i guess. Like a very formal one. and me calling me Arfie is another like less formal label. it changes how people talk to me and think about me. Like my identity to them i guess? I suppose its kinda related to how i stopped being suicidal. but its hard to show other people.
i mean society does it all the time with other stuff too. look at namz and other people like him. you call em shifter and it sounds so wrong, you know, like the word itself makes you think of his dad and all the killers and the people who died. but you call em theirantope (i don’t know how to spell it still lol) and it kind of sounds better. but at the same time you know that whoever is sayin it is just trying to be nice.
its weird and scary how powerful names can be.
In other news i think i might get a tattoo around my scar one day. make it look more badass.
*
This is Namir in the hospital.
He is a little sullen and very much not in the mood for conversation after his outburst with his grandmother, but she has brought him up too well to be impolite to strangers.
He hopes his breath doesn’t smell.
“Hi. Um. I’d like to see my mother? Please.”
“Good afternoon, sir. Could I please have your NGDC?”
“Ah. Yes. I don’t have it.”
“Do you have your student pass or PulsePort?”
“Yes. PulsePort.”
“One moment, sir.”
Namir drums his fingers on the counter like his grandmother does, and takes a swig of water. He knows the ward. B29. But he also knows the hospital doesn’t take kindly to visitors who barge in without signing in at the counter.
“Ah. Mr Namir?”
He is a little embarrassed by the ‘Mr’. “Yes. Muhammad Namir.”
“Is your grandmother here today, sir?”
“No, she had to help her friend at the garden. The, ah, HDA community garden.”
“One moment, sir.”
Namir checks his phone. One new message from Arfie.
Shitz man vectors is effing hard. you studying today?
He fires off a quick reply.
Nah maybe later? i went to see my mom.
“Mr Muhammad Namir?”
Namir looks up; a man dressed in a suit and tie is speaking to him. His name tag reads ‘Gerald – Assistant Duty Manager’. “Yes?”
“Ah. Would you follow me please?”
Namir looks confused. He looks at the clerk. “Er, I’m waiting to see – “
“Yes, I understand that. Would you follow me please?”
Namir takes his tap&go from the clerk and follows the man down a side corridor.
“Well, you see, Namir – can I call you Namir?”
“Sure. I’m still in school, right?” Namir tries to smile and puts his hands in his pockets. The man smiles thinly and continues.
“Well, Namir, you usually come with your grandmother, but she’s not here today.”
“Yeah. She had to help a friend with the garden. The HDA garden. It’s a group project.”
“Ah-huh. According to our records, Namir – “ the man looks at his PDA “ – you are a registered therianthrope, is that correct?”
Namir nods, withdrawing slowly. He senses something is wrong. “Yes.” There is a tingling feeling, a sensation of something dancing on his right shoulder. He knows this feeling.
“I’m sorry, Namir, but we can’t let you into the ward without being accompanied by a homoanthropic visitor.” The man looks him in the eye. Namir detects a mild sympathy, but more akin to pity than empathy. “It’s for our patients’ safety and well-being.”
“Um,” Namir says, slowly, “I came here without my grandmother before, last year – “
“Yes, but the rules have changed.”
“My mother’s in a coma,” says Namir. His fingers curl around his phone. “She’s a patient here. She’s sick.”
“I’m sorry.” The man says this with finality, and apprehension. Namir’s arms are bristling. Throbbing. People are looking; he must have raised his voice. “Those are the rules. You can come back tomorrow with your grandmother, or another homoanthropic visitor.”
“Ah-huh.” Namir’s voice cracks. Whump-whump. He looks down at his phone. Kk, says Arfie. Namir feels like saying ‘Kk’ to this man, and then punching him. Skinning him.
“Do you know your way out?” says the man – Gerald, Namir thinks. Gerald wants me to leave. The man – Gerald – has taken several steps back. “If not I could show you the way out. I’ll escort you out – ”
“No need,” says Namir, suddenly exhausted. Gerald. This man has a name. This man has a family. He exhales disspiritedly. “I mean, no need, sir.” His blood hums with less intensity every second; he exhales again. “Thank you. I’ll see myself out.”
*
Arfie still dreams about it, sometimes.
Of course, dream is such a wonderful word. If there was a verb for nightmare, he’d use that.
He can’t really remember why he was following Namir home that night. There are conflicting stories: Namir remembers it as “Arfie being a fuckface” and wanting to know more about his dad, who had just been put on death row. Arfie (Arif back then, before he became friends with Namir) remembers it as Namir taking one of his books, and refusing to return it to him.
He remembers Namir was wearing green.
He remembers it was late in the day, and the sun had set; he remembers the street-lamps, and the back alleys looping along canals and drains that Namir took in a bid to avoid him.
As they were walking down one of these, Arfie remembers Namir turning around, and shouting at him, and then…
And then, the transformation.
Arfie remembers the monstrosity that ripped its way out of Namir’s clothes. Red, or charred orange fur, with black stripes running over that like rivers of blood. Gleaming green eyes. Swollen, distended claws that ended in sharpened bone. Muscle and mass and monster that could not have been contained in a small, thirteen year-old boy’s body.
He remembers the fear. The wet, naked terror that seized his body and made him trip, crawl, run, anything from the beast. He can’t remember if he screamed, or was even able to open his mouth.
He remembers tripping over Namir’s bag, tossed away from the transformation like a scrap of cloth, and falling, and turning to face the beast, and looking into its eyes, and seeing naught but the hunger contained within their green shells.
He remembers lifting his arm up to shield his face as he wriggled desperately backward, which probably saved him. He remembers the pain that sprouted along it as the claw that came shooting forward missed his face and instead split only the skin and muscle of his arm, carving the future scar that he will insistently touch every time he remembers what Namir can become.
He remembers squeezing his eyes shut, and finding his voice, as most do when death is so violently alive and near at hand. He remembers most shamefully whimpering, shouting, screaming Namir’s name, even as the claw came back.
*
“Hey…Namz…oh shit, man…”
This is Namir after the hospital.
His chest is heaving; swelling, even. So are his arms, and his legs, and every part of his body, ripping through seam and stitch, tearing at collar and sleeve. Fur creeps along his skin, black and orange and sharp to the touch; the mangy stub of a tail is convulsing, mutating, clawing its way into existence through the fibres of his jeans. Tears flow wet, and warm, and angry; inhuman noises ride with them into the still air.
Namir’s eyes flash from brown, to green, then brown again, then green again. Yellow, occasionally. Faster, and faster.
“Away…awaghr,” he whispers at Arfie, in terrifying self-awareness. “Arfakh.” Namir’s body – the tigerman’s body? – shudders, and the eyes stop flashing. Settle on brown, for at least a little while. “Arfie.”
“How you gonna…pass like this, huh, bro?” Arfie is bolder, but he is still afraid. He dares not move forward, nor step back. “How to pass?”
Namir growls, and the growl becomes a sob. Claws slice through empty air, and Arfie’s heart breaks. He is scared. He takes a step forward. “Come on…Namz. You don’t wanna hurt me, right?”
Namir rolls onto his side and his back arches sharply. He opens his mouth but no words escape it, no sound. He convulses. Brown, to green, to brown.
Still Arfie trembles forward, and now he is crying as well. His scar aches. His entire body shakes each time Namir spasms. But he keeps going.
“I’m not stopping, Namir. I’m not running away. You think you’re a big evil tiger, huh?” Arfie raises his arm defiantly, brandishing his burning scar like a sword. “Come on then, you fucking tiger. This is all you got, Namir. This is all you got.” He jabs at the scar, his finger trembling, his voice shaking. “You couldn’t even cut deep.”
Brown, to green, to brown.
“They call you shifter. Therianthrope. Monster. You can be more.”
Brown, to green.
“You are more. More than what they call you. More than your father.”
To brown.
“Be more.”
*
“I think we have to recognise that therianthropes are an integral part of our society, and that they are here to stay, whether we like it or not.”
– Ms Tyra Lee, MP for Chia Keng SMC
speaking at the Parliamentary Debate on Therianthropes in Vyarapare, November 3, 2009
*
“Ya. Sorry. I’ll call you before next time.”
Namir and Arfie sit on the twelfth floor of Arfie’s apartment block, in Pek Sua. It is late in the evening; about ten o’clock, and the moon is out, though as is often the case, there are no stars.
“I can’t believe you told her I was depressed,” says Arfie, as Namir puts down the phone.
“You used to be.”
“Ya, like years ago, please.”
“She’ll know you transformed.”
“She always does lah. But at least I can delay for a bit.”
Namir holds up the remains of his T-shirt. Both sleeves are gone, and the collar is far too wide now. He finds Arfie’s T-shirt a little too small, but doesn’t really mind. “It’ll make an excellent singlet lor.”
“Yes. It also tells everyone what an animal you are.” Arfie stands up and lobs a small pebble he has been playing with out into the night. He hears it make no sound as it falls.
“Did I injure you?” says Namir. He lights a cigarette.
Arfie brushes the question away. “Like I said. You’re quite fail at being an evil tiger.”
“Tell that to the Ministry.”
“Fuck you.” Arfie slaps him gently across the right cheek. “Go fuck yourself.”
“Don’t be a dick.”
“Look in the mirror.” Arfie takes Namir’s hands in his own, and looks at him squarely in the eye. “You know how I got myself out of depression, Namz?”
“Hmm. You remembered that ‘gay’ is actually a synonym for ‘happy’.”
“Close enough.” Arfie lets go of Namir’s hands and sits down again next to him. “I realised that being gay was only one small, tiny part of my identity.”
“You sure? You have a crush on half the school leh.”
“And you have one on the other half.”
“Girls are so much better. Please.”
“Your only experience is with Wee Khee. No count. Also, distraction. My point is, I didn’t let it define me. I didn’t put a label on myself – I didn’t call myself Arfie the Gay. I’m just Arfie.” Arfie jabs a finger into Namir’s chest. “And you are not Namir the Shifter. You are just Namir. Being a shifter is just one little, tiny part of who you are. But you keep seeing it as everything.”
Namir stubs the cigarette out and flicks it away.
“There’ll always be people like my dad,” he says. His voice rises as little as he reaches the last few words, and his shoulders tense ever so slightly. “Who give us a bad name.”
“There are always paedos who give us a bad name.”
“Paedos aren’t always gay.”
Arfie smiles ruefully. “People still hate us. And there’ll always be people who give the rest of us a bad name, from every race, and religion, and category we can think of. Every label. It’s showing people that being a category, having a label doesn’t make you bad. The label doesn’t make the person. And you have to believe it too. Not let the label take over you. But by being more than that. Building that trust with people.”
Namir sighs. Arfie puts his arm around Namir’s shoulder. Namir squeezes his hand, and then, tentatively, like an artist unsure of what he is painting, traces the scar on Arfie’s arm. Arfie tenses involuntarily, but they both know what this gesture means.
They sit in silence like that for a while. Arfie makes out a single star, dim and feeble, but still there all the same.
“You think my dad let it take control of him?” says Namir, finally.
“Duh.” Arfie sniffs. “Please. You think your dad was born a killer? But he killed nine people. You yourself think he even attacked your mom that day. He became it. Don’t become it.”
“Then what do I become?”
Arfie thinks about this for a while.
“A better Namir,” he concludes.
Namir plants a kiss on Arfie’s cheek.
“Go fuck yourself,” says Namir.
“‘Wash your lips before you touch mine,” says Arfie, mock-hotly.
Namir throws his pack of cigarettes away as they head down.
*
VYARAPARE-QUEEN’S COLLEGE GENERAL QUALIFICATION OF EDUCATION
ORDINARY LEVEL
RESULTS SLIP
This results slip acknowledges that the individual named below has completed the Vyarapare-Queen’s College General Qualification of Education (Ordinary Level) conducted in November 2019 in Vyarapare, and has obtained the following results:
Year of exam 2019
Candidate MUHAMMAD NAMIR IBN SYED ABDUL HAMID
ID no. V0138E92A
School TELOK RIMAU SECONDARY SCHOOL
Index no. 400039012
Subject
| English Language | B | THREE |
| Combined Humanities | A | TWO |
| Mathematics | A | TWO |
| Additional Mathematics | B | THREE |
| Chemistry | C | FIVE |
| Biology | A | TWO |
| Therianthropy | B | FOUR |
| Malay | A | TWO |
| Malay (Oral/Aural) | – | MERIT |
NUMBER OF ORDINARY LEVEL SUBJECTS RECORDED: EIGHT
NUMBER OF SUBJECTS GRADED SIX OR BETTER: EIGHT
<<ADDENDUM
EXEMPTION FROM SECTION 29A OF REVISED SHAPESHIFTER ACT (CAP 404): GRANTED
An AI-Dreamfished Analysis of “Harimau Jadian”, by Kevin Martens Wong (2015)
1. Episodic Structure over Linear Plot
“Harimau Jadian” unfolds less like a conventional coming-of-age narrative and more like a dossier assembled from a life lived under surveillance. The story is built from discrete text-objects—an exam syllabus, chat logs, a news report, an opinion letter, a dated blog entry, a hospital encounter transcript, a memory vignette, a parliamentary quote, and finally an official results slip—each episode carrying its own tone, genre, and implied audience. Instead of a single line of causality, the reader is asked to track a pattern: how institutions describe therianthropes, how peers joke about them, how family negotiates them, and how the body itself interrupts everything with involuntary metamorphosis. This episodic construction is not a stylistic gimmick; it mirrors the protagonist’s condition. Namir’s identity is repeatedly “re-filed” by the world around him, and the story’s form recreates that experience by forcing the reader to move between compartments—policy, stigma, intimacy, bureaucracy—without ever being allowed the comfort of one stable narrative frame.
2. Intimacy as Narrative Scale
For all its public scaffolding, the story’s true scale is intensely small. The most consequential scenes happen in enclosed spaces: a school toilet with cold tiles; a bus stop where a woman clutches her files; a spare bedroom where a boy touches a green scrap of cloth like a talisman; a hospital corridor where a rule becomes a wound; a twelfth-floor void deck under a star-poor sky. Even the transformation—spectacular in description—remains intimate in its emotional centre, because it is not written as power fantasy but as shame, pain, and fear of hurting someone loved. The friendship between Namir and Arfie is rendered through the tiny mechanics of care: texting cover stories, sharing books, watching scars, using insults as a handshake, refusing to step away when the body becomes dangerous. In a Kristang short-fiction mode, the story insists that what matters is not how big the world is, but how close the camera sits to the moments where trust either holds or fails.
3. Embedded Orality and Spoken Texture
The story’s spoken texture lives in its switches: formal bureaucratic English (“AIMS,” “ASSESSMENT,” “Section 29A”), news-register neutrality (“was alerted to the incident at 05:44 am”), and the unmistakable cadence of Singaporean youth speech (“relek ah,” “leh,” “sian,” “don’t be a fuckface,” “no count”). These voices do not simply decorate the narrative; they show how language produces social reality. Teachers label; classmates gossip; officials “escort”; friends slang their way toward tenderness without admitting it. Even when the story moves into interiority, it retains an oral rhythm—short clauses, blunt questions, dialogue that lands like thrown objects. The result is a text that feels told rather than merely written, as if the reader is overhearing a community’s competing ways of speaking about the same body: the body as risk, the body as joke, the body as law, the body as friend.
4. Memory as Active Reconstruction
“Harimau Jadian” treats memory as something unstable, contested, and re-edited in real time. Arfie’s recollection of “that night” arrives with an explicit admission of competing narratives: he cannot remember why he followed Namir, and even the two of them disagree about what happened. Yet the memory is not weakened by this uncertainty; it gains force, because the story shows how trauma lives less as a perfect record and more as a recurring reconstruction—replayed through the ache of a scar, the compulsive touch of an object, the flinch at a bureaucrat’s tone, the sudden hunger of the body. The past also intrudes through documents that preserve selective memory on behalf of society: a letter to the editor that fossilises prejudice, a news report that turns a mother’s catastrophe into “154 words,” a results slip that converts a life-risk into a grade boundary. In this way, the story’s structure argues that memory is not only personal; it is civic, archived, weaponised, and sometimes—through friendship—rewritten into something survivable.
5. Cultural Knowledge without Explanation
The text assumes an audience that can decode its world without being handheld. “Vyarapare” is presented as familiar; CAP numbers and agencies appear with the confidence of lived bureaucracy. School culture is treated as self-evident: recess timings, ten-year series, the pressure of O-levels, the way teachers patrol pockets, the social logic of bus stops and void decks. Malay kinship terms like nenek sit naturally beside English and Singlish, and the reader is expected to understand what it means—emotionally and culturally—for a grandmother to be “an admiralty unto herself.” Even the therianthropy metaphor is handled like a local given rather than a fantasy novelty: the story’s real interest is not “how shapeshifting works,” but how a state, a school, and a neighbourhood manage difference through rules, exemptions, and stigma. This is a hallmark of Kristang short fiction’s stance: it performs belonging by refusing to over-translate the world for outsiders.
6. Quiet Irony and Emotional Restraint
The story’s sharpest critique arrives through understatement and tonal friction rather than overt moralising. The opening “syllabus” reads like empowerment propaganda while quietly threatening jail; the hospital scene weaponises politeness (“sir,” “would you follow me please”) to enact exclusion; the letter to the editor performs “reasonable concern” while reproducing demonology and legalistic dehumanisation. Humour—often crude, adolescent, and affectionate—functions as both shield and truth serum. Arfie and Namir’s insults are not simply banter; they are how boys in a hard system smuggle care into speech without being punished for softness. Even the story’s tenderness arrives side-ways: a kiss followed immediately by “Go fuck yourself,” a star appearing dimly and “still there all the same,” an official exemption granted not by societal acceptance but by exam performance. The restraint is what makes the emotion hit harder: the narrative rarely begs the reader to feel; it lets the world’s small violences accumulate until feeling becomes inevitable.
7. Ambiguous Endings and Open Futures
Although the results slip looks like closure—Therianthropy passed, exemption granted—the ending refuses a neat resolution. Passing the exam does not dissolve stigma, erase the father’s legacy, or guarantee that the body will never betray him again; it merely changes the legal terms of survival. The “open future” here is double: Namir earns a conditional freedom, but the structures that made his childhood feel like probation remain intact. At the same time, the final addendum also plants a fragile hope in the most Kristang way possible: not utopia, but a workable opening. The story ends with paperwork, yet the reader’s last felt image is not bureaucracy—it is the cumulative insistence that Namir can be “more” than a label, and that this “more” is made in relationship, not granted by the state. The future is therefore left suspended between the violence of systems and the stubborn agency of two boys who keep choosing each other—but to what end, what purpose or what kind of future relationship also left unclear.
8. Negotiation of Mixedness and Belonging
At its core, “Harimau Jadian” is a story about mixedness as a contested category—biological, social, moral, and linguistic. Namir is mixed between forms (human/tiger), between inheritances (a father’s genes and a mother’s loss), and between how he is seen (student/fugitive, patient’s son/security risk). Arfie’s own identity negotiations—names (“Arif” versus “Arfie”), sexuality, scars, self-labeling—mirror Namir’s, making their friendship a shared practice of refusing reduction. The story also frames belonging as something that can be revoked by institutions at any moment: the hospital’s new rule turns a son into a threat; the teacher’s rhetoric turns a class into a courtroom; the law turns adolescence into a sentence. Against this, the most radical act in the story is not transformation but refusal: Arfie walking toward Namir when the tiger arrives, and insisting—without sentimentality—that a person is not the worst story attached to their category. In that sense, “Harimau Jadian” performs a distinctly Kristang negotiation of belonging: identity is neither pure nor singular, and survival depends on learning how to live inside contradiction without letting the world decide which half of you counts as real.