Singapore Short Stories - Pontianaks

For those of you who are still pretty clueless about the Kin Jio Leaf (The Banana Leaf), it is actually a sacred text recording the history of Singapore by a tribe made up of Orang Utans where the head is called Khirsah (Khirsah is a hereditary name given to the elected orang utan and he will have the sole responsibility of recording the accounts and protecting the Kin Jio Leaf). The Kin Jio Leaf actually went through several trails, (resulting in some lost leaflets, thus the incompleteness of the records :P) and the earliest one is retold here...
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Heard of pontianak? Legend has it that pontianaks are woman hantu (ghost) who supposedly die during/after child labour and turned into vicious spirits. They are normally seen in white/red clothes, long hair, with fangs and claws etc...much like M Jackson. During daytime, they're thought to hide in banana trees and only come out of the tree to hunt at night...they don't like to be too tanned you how...

Actually their origin relates to the Hairy Apes in Mandai Forest and The Kin Jio Leaf (KJL). Well, you see, our sacred text (KJL) had to be written on real banana leaves and it's not just any type of banana leaves. Only certain banana trees fit the criteria and we can only use the leaves of those trees.

But then hor, the locals have so much use of banana leaves like, wrap nasi lemak, otah, bah chang, tutukueh, weave baskets, for laying tables, as mattresses etc so we had to compete with them for banana leaves. (Note: Flo did point out that bah chang and several other items do not use banana leaves...but they do, in the past until banana leaves until the pontianak scare incindet so the locals use the alternatives :P)

One day, we buay tahan liao. Come one, we don't need ALL the banana leaves...we only needed those from certain trees and the humans simply don't understand and just go chop chop chop all the banana trees. So some of us stand guard at the trees, even at night to make sure that they don't touch the leaves of those trees that we need. But the stoothpick, superstitious, shortsighted humans mistaken my guards as long haired, ugly women wanting to rape them, went screaming back into the village howling that they saw hantus ....

Many moons passed since then and humans seldom disturb our trees. So we standdown our guards and things went peacefully for a period of time. One of the apes called Innu Weisen thought that it's is quite difficult to identify those banana trees that we want so he thought, "why don't we mark those trees? Just poke a needle into the tree and tie a red string into the needle so that the leaves gatherers can work faster!" It was a very innovative idea and so we adopted it. However, some young punks of the villagers wanted to hao lian their courage and impress the pretty village girls, started venturing into the forest again to dare the "banana tree ghost" . They discovered the red string and started pulling on it and one of us who happened to be there jumped out and yelled at them...and again the stoothpick, superstitious, shortsighted punks mistaken my guard as long haired, ugly women wanting to rape them, went screaming back into the village howling that they saw hantus ....

So over time, they learned to leave the banana trees alone, especially those with red strings and ignorance became legend that pontianaks live in banana trees and will haunt anyone who goes near it.