Game of “tiak”

The carrom middle finger & thumb style used in “tiak”.
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UNABLE to gamble with money, we used pain to wager. The game went like this. Open a book to a page and add up the individual numbers that made up the page number (subtract 10 if the total exceeds 10 — only a very thick book would give numbers adding up to more than 20). Page 219 got you “2”, page 134 got you “8” and so on. The winner in this case was the guy on page 134 and he got to “tiak” the guy with 219 the difference i.e. six times.

“Tiak” meant using a finger to hit the finger of another at the bones called “proximal phalanges” — similar to the way we hit a Carrom chip (when the middle finger is held back by the thumb and released with great force). Hit repeatedly on the same spot, the finger would bruise and turn blue-black.

Anyway, it was all for fun. Whenever pain became unbearable, we just dropped out of the game.

© Lim Siang Jin