KL 2

An essay I wrote in school, Kuala Lumpur Nocturne, more than 50 years ago, tried to describe the city in the night. The source of the idea was a walk one late night with some school friends from the Coliseum theatre in Batu Road to the bus terminal in Foch Avenue.

It was a long walk and normally we would have taken a bus from the theatre to the terminal and from there a second bus to where we lived. By walking the distance from the theatre to the terminal we saved the fare of first bus trip. We just had enough money for the one fare.

The shortest route to the bus terminal was to turn left into Malay Street from Batu Road, cross the old bridge over the Klang River on Mountbatten Road take a right turn to the Embankment and from there through Old Market Square into High Street and then to Foch Avenue where the bus terminal was located. The crescent shaped Malay Street linked Batu Road to Mountbatten Road and edged a colony of ramshackle huts and buildings which was also famous as the main Red Light district of KL, Belakang Mati as it was known. The Klang River formed the other boundary to the colony.

My friends and I were in the last year of High School. The School Certificate examinations were still some months away, so the pre-exam quarantine that we would all soon face was not yet in force. We could still bargain with our parents to go to a movie every fortnight or so. On that night, after the movie, we felt an excitement walking past the wooden tenements thinking about all the things we were told by older boys that took place there. It was a forbidden place with a name that was always only whispered even among adults.

The whole area was poorly lit without any street lights. The smell of talcum powder and scent mixed with the acrid odor of urine drifted from the makeshift houses. Many of the houses in the colony had a tiny porch built in the front. In the dim light we saw women sitting and chatting in the porches in the most casual manner, fanning themselves with little bamboo fans. Most of them wore Kebayas or pants and blouses, which they constantly adjusted. Despite the yards that separated us, we saw that all the women had painted their lips with the brightest of reds. Now and then they would look at men passing on the street and make signs and noises to attract them. We obviously were of no interest to them. We walked hurriedly without speaking, excited and frightened; we were afraid to look in their direction but we could not look away.

Once past the place, we gathered at the big pillar on the near side of the bridge, panting with excitement, laughing and giggling, boasting about what we would have done had we the money. Our discussion then turned to what it would cost and we began to dare each other to find out. None of us was really bold enough to accept the challenge so we made up excuses to explain our lack of courage.

But suddenly someone agreed to do it and he strode off in the direction from which we came.
We followed several steps behind, not believing that he would actually do it. He walked determinedly without looking back; then leaping over the drain that separated the road from the houses, he approached the nearest hut and to our shock saw him speaking to one of the women sitting on the porch. From where we were, we could not hear what was being said, but most of the women rose to their feet and moved to where our friend stood. Then we heard one of the women giggle loudly. Another said something obscene. After a few moments, there was a loud shout from one of the women and we saw our friend running back the way he had taken to get to the huts. As soon as we saw him run, we too turned and ran and continued running until we reached the pillar on the far end of the bridge.

We were breathless and could not speak.
Then our hero of the night, puffing and laughing for his life said, ‘Five dollars lah, five dollars.’

‘Why did they chase you?’

‘I asked if they would do it for 50 cents.’

Revisiting the place many years later, I was surprised at how short the distance actually was from one end of the colony to the other. You could have walked past the whole stretch of huts to the river wall in twenty or thirty strides, but on that night, running that short distance had taken forever.

Kuala Lumpur Nocturne did not narrate any of those incidents of that night. Instead, I wrote about how at ten o’ clock in the night the city had gone to sleep, all the shops shut and with their lights turned off; how Sikh watchmen, with their turbans off snored on rope beds, supposedly guarding the banks that employed them, how the neon lights on the top of buildings had stopped blinking and how the roads were empty with only the occasional car on them; how the last stragglers were returning home in buses that spewed dark smoke, and how on the deserted five-foot ways, the homeless people we dared not look at, slept quietly on beds of cardboard and rags. I wrote about the fluorescent street lights that hummed the city to sleep.

That was the city that I could write about more than 50 years ago.