I dislike thinking of primary school because it reminds me of the one thing one cannot undo. However, on a less quasi philosophical level, it is embarrassing to think of the stupid things that you do yet not being able to blame yourself for it. Those were us, after all, before we learnt of responsibilities and social etiquette, of the hundred different sensory spasms which we would later identify as pain, infatuation, humiliation, compassion, cruelty- although I'm not one to speak of the several other kids who probably did have to learn of such things. But that's a whole new basket of eggs.

My friends from back then and I, for example, knew better than to eat during the only chance we had to roam free on school grounds. The fashion back in the 90s for the horticulture of primary schools was to garden metre-tall bushes around the fences of the school field so that if you walked past, at a much later age, much of what you would see were the skinny chicken legs and thighs of children running in the field, eclipsed by these vigil bushes. As kids of course, we enjoyed the attention and abandon this gave us, to run like a mad flock of ducks in the narrow crawl of space between these bushes and the fence and have the consenting gazes of ahmoys and ahmas walking past in their trolleys, but we were far less knowing of the other kind of gazes that dwelled.

One day, past the sweaty squadron of boys playing in their uniform, we retreated to this crawl space of ours, the girls with their unassuming green pinafores and the boys with their bowl shaped haircuts in a mad charade of giggles and bounding. That day, we were playing with a pair of girls whom we had lured from their chillout space at the sit up benches, although that was not the only thing new that happened that day.

Unfamiliar with the rhythm of our childhood games, one of the girls suddenly leaped out from between the bushes and beckoned us with a waggy finger, exclaiming: "Come see a magic show!" Was she going to levitate a bush from the ground, with roots and all with the same levity her skirt hung above her knees? Undecided, we joined in the unapparent ambush.

Standing in a row facing the fence, an Indian man was paralleling our line-up in the opposite block, on the fourth floor. I was already nursing a blurness of sight bordering on myopia, so all I could see was the shrivelled up magician, bellowing indistinctively when he saw us. Sorry, what was he saying?

"He says no boys." One of the girls, with an instructive face, suddenly deadpans. Immediately, the rest of the girls, pent up with the sheer aura of this Indian man on the fourth floor, cackle like a group of ducks: "No boys! No boys!"

Disappointed, but also mildly intrigued, we disbanded from the line-up of what must now seem rather funny: a group of maybe four Chinese Primary one girls gripping at the fence to catch a glimpse of one large slab of concrete flats, thinking that this magician can fish a coin from their ears twenty five metres away. Anyhow, I was leading a life of convincing myself that I was capable of magic, so I was not going to let any gender restrictions forbid me a life of magic. Impishly straying from the disillusioned group of boys, I crawled into the bushes a few steps away from the girls and looked up at the Indian man.

Almost on cue, the Indian man slowly drops his pants and wags his hips with such bravado that his blur figure shakes wildly in my field of vision. Come to think of it, his whole reveal must've taken at least thirty seconds, whereas the girls take almost twenty to react to this- even then, at least one of them is not screaming five decibels above ultrasound- I don't dwell much on this. My immediate reaction is "Ech!" first, then to leap to my feet and crawl out of those oppressive bushes and the converging group of my friends who are now abound with news of an Indian naked man with no magic tricks to show.

We soon find an unimpressed teacher on duty at the field and develop into an outpouring of "Yucks!", and cry for helps and shocked faces all at the same time. On an unrelated note, the duty teachers at the field are always the impassive bunch- to blend into the grass, I suppose- and I've encountered more than a handful- once, to report that half my teeth were broken when i fell face first onto the situp bench. This time, she calms the dilution of noises from us, and tells us: "Go tell your teacher, ok?"

As a cynical adult now, I think the idea of a penis hardly shocked her. It might have stirred something in her, but nope, definitely not shock. In any case, amongst ourselves, we are more than disappointed with not one, but two adults. But soon, the bell rings with such animosity that it kills any fighting spirit left within us, the image of an indian man dancing with his pants down taunting myself in my head.