Chi ko pak and ice cream stick 'guns': Life lessons from riding the school bus
Blood and innocence on the school bus: Fighting dorsum against bullies
I had bunny feet, bunny teeth and was a little tubby from eating too many buns at teatime. So I wasn't exactly in the best physique to come out on pinnacle when it came to fighting, or adopting an aggressive swearing stance. But it didn't matter. Nosotros all came unschooled and innocent to the school double-decker.
The school omnibus was where we learned what schoolhouse could non or would never teach usa. This was a sacred space, gratis of parents and teachers, held together past a pact between students to never divulge what went on, no matter how bad your bruises. It was a place of pure anarchy, with a tolerant bus commuter who rarely stopped the bus to bargain with any misbehaviour, fifty-fifty when the occasional blood was drawn.
One of the first lessons I learned on the school bus was how to take a chance. The year was 1990. I was all of 9 years former. Information technology was the Earth Loving cup in Italy, and over in Singapore, young boys were going crazy for the Panini sticker book that featured all the teams and players, some with glittery edges (which fabricated them even more valuable).
This was my first time collecting stickers, and male child, did I go crazy. All of my savings, carefully squirrelled away, were being depleted at a massive rate to keep up with the addictive demand to buy packets of stickers most every day from the mama shop below my block.
Naturally, the ratio of getting a sticker that you lot need versus getting duplicates is rather skewed. And and so the boys on the bus taught me to bet with the extras. Ane of them would be the dealer, and he would lay out his stickers face upwardly in a series of groovy piles. We would so go on to bet with our ain duplicates on ane of the piles. The dealer would then flip all the piles and the highest number (based on the numbering in the sticker collection) would win.
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After a while, though, betting with stickers grew a little mundane so nosotros started with real money. The minimum was 20 cents, and it could go all the way up to one whole dollar. Talk about real world awarding of mathematics!
Out of World Cup season, Harjit, my best friend, would sit down next to me and regale me with stories near the movies he had watched. I had rather strict bedtime rules, and was not immune to stay up tardily to scout movies, merely Harjit apparently had no such curfew and would launch into an ballsy retelling of the previous night'southward moving-picture show.
Years afterwards, when I finally watched some of these films, I realised that he had completely fabricated up all of the plots.
No homework was ever washed on the school omnibus, and the closest affair to exams was a chi ko pak contest, with the winner taking dwelling forbidden snacks from the canteen. It was where you agonised over what to say to the girl you lot've been crushing on at schoolhouse, and discovering new worlds through the genius that was the Walkman. The schoolhouse motorcoach was when I outset heard Roxette and Michael Jackson, and where we all learned to rap along to Ice, Ice, Baby.
All right stop
Interact and mind
Water ice is back with my brand new invention
Something grabs a agree of me tightly
Flow similar a harpoon daily and nightly
Will information technology ever stop?
Yo, I don't know
Turn off the lights and I'll glow
The school coach was where nosotros learned to swear. And fight. In one case, my spectacles flew out the window after a scuffle and landed under a selection-upwardly truck. I had to yell to ask the driver to cease the passenger vehicle so that I could pick information technology up. Another fourth dimension, Harjit kicked me in the nether regions so difficult, I couldn't sit downward for a couple of days. This was par for the form, forth with the fart sprays.
Harjit and I were as well a minority duo confronting the dominant Chinese boys who sat at the back of the bus, were ii years older, and frequently bullied us. They made fun of our peel colour, threw our school numberless around and reduced us to tears with their pinches. Being prissy to them did not help. Complaining to the double-decker commuter was similar speaking to the Dandy Wall of China.
In agony, we went beyond the jitney. Our friend Timothy, who was Indo-Chinese, did not take the school bus because he lived in a huge house just down the road from school.
More importantly, he was a gunsmith.
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Okay, he was a "gunsmith", only one of the highest calibre. We commissioned him to brand us water ice cream stick guns for five dollars each. He would sketch out a design of the gun before committing to cutting and gluing the sticks together. He ran tests to make certain the firing mechanism was smooth, since we would be fighting and firing from i seat to some other. He fifty-fifty tried making a dual trigger gun, so that two safe bands could be fired in quick succession.
For a while, we gained valuable ground, and managed to pin the bullies to their single long-row seat at the back of the charabanc. Just one day, they went dorsum to the time-tested way of fighting with paper bullets. They were folding them hard and heavy. They injure. Nosotros started losing ground. And so nosotros went dorsum to Timothy for assistance.
He suggested making them thinner and lighter, and to tack a staple to each bullet and opening it on one side. Each bullet was lovingly made for an ideal arc, conveying the right corporeality of heft to maximise affect velocity, similar a perfect string of swear words. This was fighting dirty. But we loved it.
Until we shot someone (accidentally, I swear) too close to his middle and his parents complained. So we had to call a truce, surrender our bullets and lay downward our rubber bands.
When the motorbus neared our stop, it was time to tuck in our shirts, brush the clay of our sleeves and straighten our spectacles. The school double-decker lesson was ending, but tomorrow – who knew what tomorrow would hold?
Marc Nair is a poet and photographer. He has published 10 collections of poetry. New episodes of My Singapore Life are published every Lord's day at cna.asia/podcasts.
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