​

​

​

______

​

 

   Silence was a scarce commodity in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown. Good. Pull your surface inside out and wrap yourself around me, city, I said. The hostel’s lobby was up a skinny staircase inside a lanky 3-4-5-dunno-story building. In my room a bunch of dudes. Good ones. We were a Kiwi-chimneysweeper, a Chileno-Sandalero, a Japanese kind-heart, and a me. One gave me a gift, and one some South America, and one good words. There was liquor and laughter and maybe cigarettes on a tiny balcony I seem to vaguely recall, and a quick-dry bond held us together for some days before we parted ways.

What else… heavy, heavy rain, drops the size of water balloons, plummeting down from black thunder-skies, Dosas that were even cheaper than in India – Kuala Lumpur was suspiciously cheap in those days, somewhere around recession-cheap – and just as good, and a Quebecois instant-buddy who I surfed a wavelength or two with but never heard from again. We had talked the Chinese hostel owner out of being a racist when he refused a black guy who was an actor on a local soap, and we had talked about lost loves and such depths. Ah well. There was also a big old Texan guy and in my recollection he’s always sitting right in the middle of the lobby, all these backpacker-babies strewn like satellites all around him. He was in on the end of the world, a conspiracy king really, prophesizing that a meteor would hit Indonesia, or a mega volcano would erupt there or something, and the end was very very nigh. We had a couple of weeks. He blanked when asked why he had set up his expat camp in the immediate vicinity of such definite doom, but he knew of underground cities and trains in the US. I was in Kuala Lumpur on and off and when I came back a couple of months later, the doomsday had gone by doomless. When I found him dishing out a new apocalypse to new listeners in the old lobby, I asked what had happened to his old story and he was embarrassed. I felt bad. I liked him. Almost as much as the friendly burger man on the corner of Jalan Sultan and Jalan Pudu whose cart we frequented more than was reasonable by any measure.

Kuala Lumpur was a most underrated hub, a node all lines and travelers went through without befriending it all that much as a destination. There was no good reason for it, only a self-fulfilling prophecy – being a scandalously cheap Air-Asia hub, it was too good a gateway to be known for anything else. For those who stayed just a little longer though, it had plenty of tricks, and green, and it was yummy, and young and old, and diverse, diverse, diverse.

​

​

​

​

______

a glimpse

​