Buah cempedak di luar pagar,
Ambil galah tolong jolokkan,
Saya budak baru belajar,
Kalau salah tolong tunjukkan.
Rasa sayang, hey!
Rasa sayang sayang hey,
Hey lihat nona jauh,
Rasa sayang sayang hey!
Pisang emas dibawa berlayar,
Masak sebiji di atas peti,
Hutang emas boleh dibayar,
Hutang budi dibawa mati.
Omar had not felt inspired about anything for years. He had put up little resistance in his life. His father had dictated everything by remote, somehow. From him being sent to boarding school, to the subjects he took for his O- and A-Levels, getting into Cambridge, to a quick succession of spritely, blonde English girlfriends whom he bedded in university and then in London.
It was all rather predictable. Even Jessica was somehow scripted into his life. Everything just happened to him, especially when he didn’t want anything to happen in particular. When he met her out on the town with his mates one night in a pub in Farringdon, she had seemed shy about the fact that he was, to all appearances, from the east.
“Malaysia, that’s where you’ve got those lovely white beaches yeah.”
“Yes, we do have quite…a few of them.”
“Have you been? Must be oh…so gorgeous.”
“Yes, well…”
He didn’t mention that his father owned a small island off the east coast, and that his fondest childhood memories were of summer holidays swimming in clear, deep emerald waters, frolicking with green turtles and clown fish, tossing a line into the sea from the battered sampan with his father, gutting the fish and cooking it over a fire on the beach. Moments like that stayed with him. Like the smell of fresh innards being ripped from fish bellies, and the taste of grouper and barracuda sizzling from the marinade of onion, garlic, lime and chillies over a charcoal fire. Licking the last flakes of fish from his fingers and nodding when his mother asked if he wanted more rice. Or more coconut water. “Yes,” it was always yes.
Within an hour, after five vodka shots, Jessica was riding him in the ladies’ bathroom, head back, shrieking like a banshee. A week later, she was unpacking a pink suitcase with wide-eyed glee in his studio apartment in Shoreditch, and he wondered how on earth he had gotten her there. He didn’t even want her there, but she had found her way into his life, his apartment and his bed.
A month later, after the news of Anwar’s arrest, he had decided to leave London for good and so he ended his brief, high-sexed relationship with Jess. No doubt, she was great in bed, but she also wanted to be his wife. He knew that she was in love with him—they all fell madly for him somehow. He had no idea why. Perhaps it was his nonchalance, the kind of easy parley that certain women longed for. Perhaps the less one gave them, the more they yearned for.
With Del, it was different. He hated to admit it, but yes, it was love.
We were viscous, we slid into each other like two halves from the two-headed four-legged mythic creatures that Zeus created. We finished each other’s sentences, we thought the same things, despaired over the same things, we read the same books, loved the same music.
I would spend my days at the Saksi office, write, edit, get the pieces out, upload them onto the website. And then he would come pick me up. We’d rush back to my place, tear our clothes off and make love till we screamed. The sorry state of politics incensed us. We made love with our tongues, fingers and teeth. There was blood. It turned us into animals; we fucked to stay sane, fucked to go insane.
Then, we’d lie on my bed and smoke cigarettes. He never liked the covers, so he’d be there naked, and I would put my head to his chest and hear his heart pounding. I loved him so much I wanted to punch him, claw his face, bite morsels, tear flesh off. I felt possessed, like one of the women from The Bacchae, inspired by a beastly, primal longing that made me ache for forests and trees. I saw shadows lurking in the dark and heard low guttural moans. I knew that this man could be the beginning and the end of me.
Hey you, come here.
I slid up towards him, on all fours, naked. His eyes were slits and the flecks in his eyes glowed like fiery seeds. He touched me lightly with his mouth. His tongue played on my lips, then moved inside my mouth, teasing, and then he sniffed my neck deeply.
Cium sayang.
Sayang. My love, my love.
Sayang. Darling.
He eased inside me, and pulled me up in one swoop. I was over him, my hair covering his face, chest, shoulders.
You’re so beautiful, Del.
His eyes burned into mine and when I mounted him, a frenzy seized me. Sweat drenched us, glorious and golden. And before I came, I saw visions of myself on a horse, thundering through a forest, mist rising from the ground and when the explosion came, I was on the pinnacle of a rock, arms outstretched, looking at a black sky.
Omar said he wanted to change Malaysia. We talked about reform, of needing to get rid of the status quo, of ridding the Malays of subsidies. He believed the National Economic Policy had crippled them, made them dependent on government handouts—instead of making them resilient—and the Malays had become greedy, only wanting more and more, but without doing it the hard way. Without having to work for things.
Embrace the land. We need to let our feet kiss the ground again. He kept saying it again and again. Tanah air—this is our homeland. Our. Homeland.
The sons had to return to the soil; the tar and concrete had corrupted the very nature of what it meant to be Malay. Perhaps, the only option was to return to the past, to embrace the colonial construct of the “lazy native”—an ideology which undermined native labour with a certain consequence and ease, yet which allowed Malay culture and tradition to flourish. To acknowledge the fact that they were once Hindu, live off the land, follow the harvests, bathe in clear, clean waters of the rivers made alluring by nubile virgins in batik sarongs, who laughed and sang in clear voices—and then govern a people who were gentle with a firm hand.
We were this, the Malay rulers were this. They knew who they were. The fact of the matter is we have become who we are not meant to be. So what if they sat around with their courtiers and drank tea and smoked all day? There was jealousy and treason, there was bloodshed when it was needed, but the very nature of who we were was simplicity. We only wanted a life that we knew we always had. Change was a detriment, we did not know how to manage it. We became victims of ourselves. We have become rotten to the core.
Omar spoke with such passion, such clarity. It was dangerous rhetoric, but I knew there was a truth to it and I began to understand his infernal struggle of what it meant to be Malay.
But for now, the battle lines had been drawn. We hated Mahathir. We hated what he had spawned. We had to end the regime, we had to do what thousands of others were doing on the streets. Omar got tear-gassed for the first time, we stood and shouted in solidarity with the others. Many were getting arrested and hauled into Black Marias, thrown into smelly lock-ups. And we bailed them out.
We wrote articles, we took pictures, we attended rallies, we stood and sang the Negaraku with Anwar’s supporters, we supported Keadilan, the new Justice Party founded by Wan Azizah, Anwar’s wife. We stood on street corners with hand-made slogans and placards, we drove activists in Omar’s car to and from the courthouse, we drank endless cups of tea, talked of more reform, of plots, conspiracy theories, we were reckless, we did not care.
We were in love, we were fighting for what we believed in and that was all that mattered.
Anwar’s trial had once again attracted the world’s media to our shores. His black eye became emblematic of our dissent. It was representative of all that was wrong and all that had to be righted. The Inspector General of Police Rahim Noor had later confessed that he had personally delivered the black eye. Not his finest hour. People rioted.
Saksi kept getting more recognition and our stories kept getting angrier, edgier. Fairman had been questioned once by Special
Branch—three officers showed up at the apartment one morning and took him away. Sumi, who had started seeing him—We just have sex, lots of it really—had to bail him out.
Imran had started writing a daily column called Face Off. He had lost twenty pounds from running the streets and looked leaner and browner by the day. Saksi had close to fifty thousand hits a day and Imran’s popular pieces were visceral and pointed. His commentary on the trial became iconic and the foreign journos used the site as a reliable source as to what was really happening on the ground.
The local newspapers kept getting boycotted by KL-ites. It was shit news, and many refused to read it. Any of it. So, we kept the site going, we knew that we had to be the voice of reason, the only voice that was free in a country that was imploding within itself.
KL had woken up to a fury. Something that lay latent for so long had unleashed itself. The streets became fluid; it beckoned the multitudes of people who ran across the asphalt, it broke our falls, it carried our blood and sweat into the drains and rivers that birthed the city. We knew that there was no turning back. And that many took risks—the long row of shops on Jalan Tunku Abdul Rahman had paid a price too. Jalan TAR was the backbone of the protests; it was the trunk that fed the leaves, branches and roots of our anger. That road had also swallowed the racial riots of ‘69. The shop lots then and now had owners who were sympathetic to us. Some had been fined and threatened by the cops. Most just barricaded their doors when we ran, some let us in where we waited until the tear gas and water cannons all stopped.
KL seemed to be a maze of unruly streets when I was a child and there were only a few places that I could remember as landmarks. Once a year my mother would take me to a shop called Pei Ping Lace on Jalan TAR. It was at the end of a row of shophouses which sold all kinds of fabrics, and above it was a carpet house run by an old blue-eyed man from Kashmir with the longest silver beard I’d ever seen. Owned by a Chinese family with small children, the lace shop sold the most exquisite hand-embroidered fabrics and lace from China. In glass cases and encased in shiny plastic envelopes, there were rows and rows of tablecloths, runners, napkins and bedclothes. Starched, thick, white cotton sheets, with delicate flowers hand-sewn into the edges of scalloped pillow-cases. It came in sets. Matching duvet covers, bedspreads, and long dutch-wife cases. My mother loved those sheets, she said that they made her feel like the Queen of England when she slept. She would trail her fingers across each piece, caress it lovingly, saying, Imagine the work, Del, all that work, sitting there for days, just for one piece.
She would spend hours deciding on what to buy, and I’d sit there bored, staring out onto the street, watching the cars ease in and out of traffic. I’d see the toddlers waltzing around in their walkers, pink and red dummies sticking out of their mouths and sometimes I would stick my tongue out at them. When she was done, we would emerge onto the street and make our way to the famous nasi kandar place on the corner, Where all the famous stars from the fifties and sixties used to eat, she said. She would order a mee mamak pedas, and I’d have the rojak and cendol. We’d sit and eat in silence and then drive home.
It was the only time my mother ever took me out to town. Once when I ran past the shop house, dodging tear gas with Omar pulling my hand, I saw that Pei Ping Lace had closed down. The doors were boarded up, and the blinds were drawn. I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I felt hot tears running down my face.
Marina decided to go shopping. She needed to give herself a day off from work and get herself some new clothes and perhaps some new make-up, or some perfume. One of the girls had told her about Masjid India or the Indian Mosque market, which was a half-hour walk from Chow Kit.
KL’s red light districts were many and scattered across the city, but Chow Kit was where men came to have sex with transsexuals. She was sharing an apartment with two other transsexuals and she had a room, a clean bed with a recently purchased mattress along with pink, flowery sheets. There was a narrow kitchen with blue tiled floors and the stove was next to a window, which overlooked an alley where the children of sex workers kicked around an old football, and where she made instant noodles from time to time. In the living room, there was a couch, two chairs and a stuffed teddy bear propped up next to the television. Marina enjoyed watching the Malay soaps during the daytime and late at night after work.
There was a bond among all the sex workers in Chow Kit; they looked out for each other. If a client was abusive, they would all avoid him. Word got around about clients who refused to wear condoms, and those who had weird fetishes. Marina had been lucky so far, she had not had any issues or problems with her clients. Most of the men she had sex with were married to women they had no desire for. Marina had a theory that most Malay men were bisexual, many closeted due to religious and cultural values, and many desperately unhappy. So for fifty ringgit an hour, Marina made their lives liveable again and gave them the pleasures that only she could and left them with smiles and promises of more.
The rows of shops along Lorong Haji Taib were fronts for brothels, but many were genuine businesses as well, some having been there since the end of WWII. There were coffee shops that sold rice, noodles, spicy soups and curries; there were car dealers, cloth and biscuit merchants, printing shops and wholesale shops for jewellery, clothes and plastics. Many clients sat quietly waiting their turn at the many coffee shops, before climbing up staircases to simple rooms that had a mattress, a window, a cheap table fan and rolls of toilet paper on a side table.
Marina was content. She had enough money to send to her mother and she had enough for herself. The purple hormone pills were expensive, but she had to keep taking them. A sex change operation in Thailand was going to cost almost 8,000 ringgit and by her estimates she would be able to save that amount in five years. She would finally become a woman.
As she walked towards Jalan Tunku Abdul Rahman, with a smile on her face, she suddenly realised that she was surrounded by hundreds of people, all walking in the same direction. Some were carrying placards.
Reformasi! Keadilan! Undur Mahathir!
Reform! Justice! Mahathir Resign!
She had heard that there were street protests because the Deputy Prime Minister had been arrested for sodomy. She thought that if that was the case, then all her clients, including herself, should have been arrested as well.
There was a hum in the air, and the people around her were laughing, clapping, smiling. Soon, she was thrust into a crowd of thousands and as they crossed Campbell Street onto the Sogo supermarket, they could barely move. Cars were honking, thousands screamed in unison.
Re-for-ma-si! Re-for-ma-si!
Marina held on tight to her handbag. There were people of all ages, young, old, mothers, fathers carrying their children on their shoulders, youth of all races, singing and clapping together, old men in faded batik shirts, women in tudungs and colourful baju kurungs. Everyone was smiling.
Soon, the shouts became a roar, the voices sounded like a swarm of insects, and the crowd started moving.
“Where is everyone going?” Marina asked a young woman in a purple scarf. She looked like a student.
“Dataran!” the woman screamed excitedly. “This is amazing, kan! Aren’t you proud to be Malaysian today?”
Marina smiled back. The crowd around her had become more frenetic. She had to do what she had planned for the day.
She eased her way out of the crowd. The sun was behind a cloud and she saw a cluster of balloons cutting through the air. She made her way onto Masjid India and saw hordes of shops selling colourful garments, saris, sets of salwar kameez, leather slippers, sticky sweets. A medicine man with bottles of oils and tinctures for health and sexual stamina, made from roots, leeches, sea cucumber. Farther down the road were shops selling open vials of musky perfumes, thick blades of black kohl from India, shops that sold holy books and white shrouds for the haj.
She bought two vials of perfume—sandalwood and jasmine—some black kohl, a green blouse with orange flowers, a p
air of pink sandals, a long black shawl. Pleased, she sipped on a bag of iced coconut water as she walked home, swinging her bags from her left arm and ignoring the catcalls that followed her.
Living together had become a habit, so when Omar decided that we should share a place, it seemed the right thing to do. We decided to rent a three-bedroom apartment in Bangsar. The rent was far more than what I could afford, but he simply said, just look after yourself and I will take care of the rest.
Papa had inadvertently turned my mother into a kept woman and I had no intentions of ever becoming like her. Financial dependency on a man was an area of particular dread for me. Omar was secretive about his money and there were times, admittedly, that I got suspicious of where it came from. Of how much of it he had. Of how it seemed limitless. Papa was a wealthy man, but when I went to university, I lived frugally. Papa only sent me what was needed, never more. So I lived like my friends, not like the wealthy Chinese or Hong Kong students, who had credit cards and who bought brand-new cars. I bought second-hand clothes, I rode a bicycle, I stayed in houses that were almost condemned.
Omar had expensive tastes—soft cheeses, Italian wines, tailored shirts and handmade English shoes—much like Papa—and I sometimes wondered if this was what drew me to him. I liked a man who dressed well and Omar’s vintage BMW, which once belonged to his father, was impeccably maintained, the sleek blue veneer always polished and the leather spotless and scented.
Papa had been kept abreast of my love life and he seemed pleased with what I’d told him about Omar.
Yes, Papa, Cambridge. Engineering. Articulate enough. We’re moving in together.
My father had become more of a recluse. He had turned down Anwar’s request to be lead counsel in his trial, and had retreated even more within the walls of his study and into the pages of his books. Whenever I went home I’d smell the sweet vanilla smoke from his pipe and see piles of plates stacked neatly by the wall. He lived on whole-wheat bread sandwiches with processed cheese, sliced tomatoes and liver pate, milky sweet Milo and 12-year old whisky. And papaya. The trees in the garden had fruited ample bosoms of the fleshy orange fruit and if the birds didn’t get to them they would all be eaten by my father.
Once We Were There Page 6