opening hours: rainy nights, of course.

It’s easy to get lost in bright carnival lights, the sounds of laughter, screaming, and the rides’ gurgles & blips of electronic joy. The people push you around and argue about which rides they want to spend their money on.

But when the rain comes, the tempayan tipping just slightly (as if hesitant on whether it should rinse out the festivities), the blanket of rainbow-lit lalala-ism is traded for a new one, where umbrellas pop up like mushrooms, & people start to cluster. Those who aren’t ready just exit altogether. The rain dulls the lights and drowns the sounds. What’s left is the real deal of the funfair, the world of the win-me toys.

I see the toys at the booths - (the only place for everyone to seek shelter from the rain, and so the funfair is shrunk into a village of booths, darts, & hung toys) - and realise that they are now the leading act. The crowd and big spinning machines have stepped back and under the mushroom-&-booth blanket, the toys shine their flashlights to play, to reveal themselves to the world; those who stayed, and those who cared enough to notice little things.

Like the line of plush chicken-littles hanging a small distance from the shelf of white tigers with different expressions (from left to right: haughty, angry, surprised, and eeriely friendly). Chicken-little tiger bait, to see if they will leap and pounce. The ducklings float along, some spinning on their own, some pushing through the others like a race, and some bent out of shape, doing yoga as they go along. One of them has forgotten how to float, and follows the crowd sinisterly, only the eyes visible above the water. The Care-bears are stacked in a queue, a few queues, all misbehaving. A stray frowning Pooh somehow found himself in the queue of standard-happy Poohs, looking amusingly out of place. The line of Disney-Poohs next to them are in fact Porno-Poohs, hugging each other from behind. In pairs. It reeks of happy orange homoeroticism. What’s more amusing is that one of the bears is clearly uninvolved but unfortunately stuck in the action, its arms wide out and its eyebrows stitched high. I took photos of all the toy moments as they revealed themselves one by one, but I missed two. The hung doll with its pants almost falling, no one caring enough to save him the humiliation at the gallows. And the big girl doll reaching out from her clones to rest her hand on the head of a small boy doll hung nearby, tenderly, as if she was patting him gently & froze when I turned to look.

Before the rain fell I spun on two rides, one slowly, and one fast, my legs kicking and my eyes half closed and my vocal chords deciding on this moment to learn how to scream.

The rain turned out to be anything but a killjoy, but the next time I go back I wouldn’t exactly be thrilled if the tempayan tipped again. The toy world tends to be creepy, more creepy than the screams the machines forcefully yank out of people like me.