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written and photographed by PINAKI CHAKRAVARTY

Local coffee, Chinatown, fake and real Rolexes,
Chinese dragons, paddy fields and the monorail

KL
The new Asia

Kuala Lumpur is so cool it can actually pull off being called by its nickname. KL, as everyone who lives within or passes through knows it, is also a revelation: a hip, international city with enough culture, money and vision to beat most others hands down. First impressions start with Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA, of course), which makes most of the oil-soaked Persian Gulf ports of call look like village shacks in comparison. Welcome to the new Asia.

That’s US$3.5bn splashed on the terminals around you, across that fabulous stretch of Duty Free and everything you see as mini trains whisk you past restaurants, massage parlours and bookshops that can make even a five–hour stopover seem to short. The entire complex is spread over 100sq km, making it one of the largest in the world, but its selling point might just be the fact that from the minute you leave it for the capital – about 50km away – you are surrounded by what seems like a mixture of endless plantations and rainforest.

The roads are excellent, not unlike Oman’s in terms of quality and width, and while the traffic does tend to be on the thicker side, chances are you won’t hear a honk. Everything just flows along KL’s networks, with an easy bonhomie that accommodates monorail trains high above the tarmac, a home-grown fleet of cars that look suspiciously like other more internationally-known models and the ever-present blur of scooters, their riders inevitably encased in windcheaters that they wear topsy-turvy, i.e., the back of the jacket is worn across their front, with the front of the jacket left open behind them. This is done to offer some protection, while still allowing them to let off steam in the notorious humidity of the city.

A KL-ite offered another explanation: “We wear our windcheaters the other way around so a lady pillion rider can put her arms around her boyfriend in complete privacy. Our women are very shy.” He must have been joking. The local girls will have you reeling through Kuala Lumpur with their miniskirts, stringy tops and, most of all, the sheer abandon with which they move through the tepid air of inner-city streets.

It’s all clean though, and Malaysia has somehow managed to stay afloat even while some of its neighbours have sunk themselves deep into human trafficking. KL’s streets are squeaky, the food is safe, taxis probably won’t cheat you and one can walk back to the hotel in the dead of the night without much of a second thought. KL is easy.

It can get quite organic too, once you discover the depths of the lanes that dive into Chinatown and the old Indian quarter that meet somewhere in-between, where you will find statues of peeling paint telling of some Indian mythological story rubbing noses with a Chinese dragon, peering through the thick air with half-demented eyes. Walk past the creatures and you will probably find yourself in a courtyard leading to the main altar of incense sticks, offerings of fruit and all the Chinese symbolism you could possibly ask for. Entrance to the shrines is a breeze: just walk in and out at will.

Even more interesting in Chinatown is the street, where you will find countless restaurants spilling out with collapsible plastic tables and chairs, bookshops that extend into dark buildings filled with Mandarin texts, barbers sitting listlessly in alleyways, pet shops with puppies behind glass doors and, everywhere, shops crammed with ceramics: classic blue and white cutlery, mah-jong sets, chopsticks, guardian dogs with their paws on orbs, dragons, icons and the inevitable old woman behind the counter who will follow you around, clucking approval.

But perhaps the biggest draw of Chinatown isn’t the most traditional of knick-knacks. It is the central street, shut to traffic, that draws hundreds of customers every evening, perhaps even thousands. This is where you will find the products of your wildest dreams, specifically the RM100 Rolex Daytona that you will see lined up, case over case, and occasionally flashed at you as you walk by. That works out to be about RO12 as opposed to the roughly RO5,400 you’d pay for something a bit more real. Who could resist? Few don’t.

But the charm of KL is that you do get the real thing, and a lot of real things for a lot of money, just minutes away, in malls, boutiques, skyscrapers and complexes of glass and steel, where you can literally shop till you drop, or at least till you run out of money. Try the shopping complex directly under the Petronas Twin Towers, until now the highest skyscrapers the world could boast of. The Middle East is taking over that honour, but while Dubai can build higher buildings, it will never compete with the complexity of life and the layer upon layer with which they come slapped over each other.

That can only come over generations, and KL has had time on its side. Over the centuries, it has become home to Indians from Tamil Nadu, Chinese from the southern provinces, Thai from across the border, Indonesian boat people – and all of this multitude of culture over the original tribals, the orang asli, that you can still find on your travels through Borneo, especially Kalimantan.

It is also there, on the island, far away from the unbeatable glamour of KL, that you will find the other Malaysia, the villages built on water, the coffee asli and the fried bread stuffed with vegetables, the paddy fields half soaked with rain, the Bajau children who run barefoot over mud turned to sticky clay with the rains that always hint at typhoons over the Philippines.

BAJAU
The water villages

Barely an hour away from the jam-packed waterfront of Kota Kinabalu, where open markets of vegetables, barbequed chicken cheeks, fishing boats and Chinese electronics vie for space with international boutiques, the inevitable Starbucks and a no-frills nightclub called Bed, lies the ‘water village’ of Munkabong.

Forget the glass and concrete that now rise up from KK, as the regional capital of Sabah district on Borneo Island is commonly called. Munkabong is made up of thousands of planks of wood hammered into each other barely a couple of metres above the sea: an entire village of houses and bridges propped up on stilts above the water. There is no land here, just the ocean beneath, the promise of fishing and a restlessness that comes and goes with the tide.

Spread over villages like this, there are about 10,000 Bajau tribals in the area, living off the sea as they have done for centuries. Jusli bin Haji Talib has lived here all his life, saving up to buy his own boat that he takes out every day. Most villagers here never moved beyond small-time daily earnings, trying to scratch together the 3,000 ringitts for an 18bhp motor, or the 7,000 for a fibreglass boat. Most fishermen can only venture out a handful of kilometres into the sea with such craft, looking for fish like the tamano and basong that they will sell at 100 ringgits for half a bucketful of catch. Jusli and his friends bring in between 900–2,000 ringgits a month depending on the weather, and have to divide this among the five of them.

But the Bajau know that the sea is the past, and their lives are drifting closer to the mainland, to the real world where they will have to shed the romance of sea gypsies and compete for education, work, money and everything else that comes with hard ground.

In a way, you can see this business ethic take root in the new quarter, where the soggy bridge makes its way to dry land. It is here that you will find a shack stuck in the earth, the local grocery shop, with living quarters for its resident owners just behind. A ten year old runs it, while his parents go to Tuaran for supplies, the local big town where Jusli sells his fish. But take a look at the kid sitting behind the desk and you know he’ll never dangle his feet over the ocean. He helps the family bring in about 400 ringgits a day, which pays for his education. He says he wants to become a teacher when he grows up. “My family already owns land in Tuaran,” he says while slurping on a can of local cola in the shade of the corrugated roof. “I just have to build my house on it.”
For now, though, most houses teeter over the salt water, their insides smothered with blue paint, Avril Lavigne and football heroes, the occasional cartoon character, newspaper clippings and a generous spread of passport photographs.

HABLI
Love on the wall

You will discover more character along Sabah’s country roads, slowly winding between hillocks of steamy vegetation, open fields and the occasional village. I met Habli Dali, 24, sitting by himself on the porch of a rickety shack held up on stilts, swatting mosquitoes as he looks out on a country road in north Borneo. There isn’t much to do except try to keep from sweating and talk about the massive centipede tattooed on his upper arm.

He was barely 18 when he founded his gang, and each member had to be initiated with the black insect crawling up his torso. “We were getting so wild,” he says, looking over the overgrown tangle of jungle below, “just a bunch of kids looking for a good time.” Habli had to give up his friends in time, opting for a job as a driver of heavy machinery, a decision that has him stuck in the middle of nowhere, in a wood shack all by himself. So Habli sits in the rented house that his employer has provided him: a giant, dilapidated, soggy construction that gives the impression it might cave in any second. “It’s best if my wife stays away from this house. Besides, she has to send our children to school.” Instead, Habli visits the family once a month, returning at night because there is no one else to take care of his employer’s trucks, parked outside the house.

It is lonely here, far away from family and friends. The most he can manage is a wave to a passing motorist as he looks out from his perch. Habli is an orang asli, or original inhabitant, of Sabah, belonging to the Dusun tribe. His boss is of Chinese origin and from KL, and won a contract for Sabah Railways, which Habli is helping to renovate. He drives the heavy machinery parked outside the shack, from the truck to the road roller, learning on the go between ten and seven, earning RM1,300 a month or more with overtime. Work is half an hour away, where he manoeuvres his earthmover and prepares for new tracks that will come from Kinaruth.

After work, he returns home to cooking that revolves around vegetables and rice, though he sometimes might break open a can, and then just sits listlessly on the balcony with the blank stare he will repeat the next morning. In three months his year of contract will get over and he’ll be out of here, faster than you can yell ‘Centipede Gang.’ “I’m already going crazy all alone here,” he admits. A radio might help, but he’d gifted his to the wife on a visit home.

Back home, he will give his wife between RM5–800 a month, depending on how much he can save. A couple of hundred pay for the schooling. Others his age are farming in Danau, taking care of vegetables or rubber plantations. Habli has his own land there, gifted by his parents. But village life was never enough, and he will eventually move on to Tenum, where the railroad work will continue. It will be better, he thinks, because there will be villages in the area, and that means Habli will finally have company.

It must have turned almost nine by the time he had finished his story, sitting there in the muggy morning air, with the mosquitoes woken up and an ever so slight breeze beginning to blow across the road, catching in the dense vegetation under the house and not quite making its way up the rotting wooden staircase to where we sat.

Such atmosphere wasn’t lost on the previous tenant either, and he had written his sad story on the faded wall. He was of the Suluk, a tribe of Sabah, and in love with the teacher’s daughter. He was writing to her in pain, felt-pen pressed hard against the damp wood, for he was too poor to afford her RM50,000 dowry. For, as he cried to the house, the girl and no one in particular, “Even if I had the ringgits for your marriage, where would I find the money to feed you after?” n Oman Today was a guest of Tourism Malaysia