reduced and recycled

It was past one in the morning on Friday when I thought to myself, ‘I’m going up to KL’. When I was younger, I always thought of it as ‘going back to KL’. The former sentiment was more accurate, of course; I was so divorced from KL that I hardly remembered it. The last time I went up north was about a year ago, and then two years before that. I remembered standing at the foot of the twin towers and looking up its ordered designs of brushed steel and glass. I was ambivalent about the twin towers at the time; it was monstrous, and it was awe-inspiring. Perhaps such a building was constructed to inspire those feelings.

It was early, and I tried nestling in for some sleep, but I couldn’t. The muted roar of the bus’s engines and the interminable road shocks kept me drifting in and out of sleep. I thought about our reasons for going to KL, and entertained thoughts of success. I say ‘our’ because I was making this trip with Martin, and we were on a mission – of sorts. We arrived in the early hours of the morning, and found Puduraya still alive with people, incandescent and washed-out fluorescent, and the mingled smells of diesel exhaust and discarded rubbish.

I stumbled out of the bus, and felt a slight dissociation. I couldn’t place where I was, but it looked like some derelict part of JB, thanks in part to the sight of the Puduraya bus-station rising up like a block of dirty black and brown. I was then assaulted by the noise of buses and touts rattling off room rates and hotel locations. Martin ignored them, and walked on. I followed, breathing in air that felt different. It was a crisp, early morning and the sun was still out of sight.

We stopped somewhere for coffee. There were tables and chairs about, the blare of a television and the news read in Malay coming from a nearby shop. It was slightly disorientating to see people still up at five in the morning, and they all desperately in need more sleep, but who stopped for a caffeine boost to keep going. I knew how they felt, obviously. Martin, as usual, was far too busy checking out the ‘wildlife’.

“Here we go again,” I remembered thinking, as Martin motioned me over to another table – one, naturally, closer to a group of women. Martin, being male, has an irrepressible need to impress women with his manliness. He feels male, very alpha male, and I usually sit helpless or disgusted.

That morning was no different.

In a deep, affected voice that everyone could hear, he commented on the tunes coming off of the nearby television. Bossa nova, he said; the girl from Ipanema, he said, delivering his verdict. It was amusing, frustrating, and a little cheesy. I wondered if such showboating impressed anybody. As if by answer, the ladies got up to leave, and none too soon; if they hadn’t, I’d be the foil for his various discourses on the technical aspects of mushroom cultivation. The rest of the walk to Petaling Street was thankfully uneventful.

The stalls were closed when we got there, which wasn’t surprising. The paved street was covered with streaks of water, no doubt from vendors clearing out the day’s rubbish; the reek of the place seemed to confirm this. I suddenly felt uneasy, my shoes splashing in essence-of-trash. I looked up and saw, of all things, a roof. It was a series of roofs, more like undulating sheets of hard plastic. In the early morning dark, they looked like opaque, sea-green waves, and as I walked down Petaling Street, they looked like a series of frozen picture frames.

Our day started a little later, the early hours of the morning spent sitting on our beds and watching cheap, television programming available in most hotels. Stepping out of our hotel was an experience that was at once reminiscent of my childhood memories of KL, and at the same time completely alien. It was the din that gave me pause. There was the usual riot of colour, noise and smells familiar to all sorts of hawker-inspired locales from JB to Penang, but standing in Petaling Street was a little different. There was a pulse to the place and, alliterations aside, it was thrilling and it put me on edge.

The side roads off the main street looked worn and old, and there were shops with roofs teetering on wooden columns, almost permanently buffeted by steam and smoke rising from busy woks and vigorous cooks. People sat in old plastic chairs, eating, oblivious to the obvious health hazards of sitting beneath suspicious roofing – not to mention cooking. Maybe it was that old world charm they were sitting there absorbing; old world charm: almost always accompanied by real life dirt and detritus. It reminded me of Kepong in the old days.

Upon stepping into the main, paved street, we were accosted by strangers who seemed to know me. “Bang, nak beli DVD?” or “Brother, I give you nice offer!” : nothing like the ministrations of peddlers selling cheap knock-offs to give you a sense of brotherhood in these trying times. We wandered past stalls whoring cheap watches, bags, belts, bolsters, stuffed toys and faux perfume; I almost half-expected to see a cheap “Guci” or “Eau di Toilet” but found the imitations syntactically sound. I was surprised, and found the whole air of high-stakes cheap sales exhilarating.

We didn’t stay long, and our first stop was the British Council. Martin believed he knew where it was, though we later found out that it was somewhere along Jalan Ampang. We would spend another half-an-hour walking before deciding to take a taxi, after which we learned that ‘a short distance away’ meant an hour’s walk in any direction – or more. I wondered if Martin realized this, but I resolved, then, never to walk when I could take a damn bus.

Wisma Selangor Dredging felt like a transplanted, Singaporean edifice in the middle of Jalan Ampang. We were greeted by a couple of security guards dressed in blue, though their expressions turned indifferent when they realized that we weren’t of the same class of people who normally visited their building. A short walk later and we found ourselves at the entrance. Security guards in white and black held up metal detectors, and gave us the once-over. The security wasn’t as tight as it is over that the British Club in Singapore, but it brought home the possibility of a terrorist strike in the heart of KL. I didn’t feel all that bad about it, over in Singapore, since I was the one doing the checking, way back then. But seeing such measures taken in Malaysia sobered me.

But the library… dear God, there were books there – and a reception counter too. It was convenient. I took a queue number and waited my turn. By the time I found myself seated before one of the ladies at the counter, I suddenly realized that her polite replies resembled the ones I used to endure at government offices in Singapore. Which meant my business was over in less than five minutes. I think I should’ve called instead of making the trip.

It was anti-climatic, and in a fit of inspiration, I decided that we needed to visit the KL International Motorshow. We arrived at the Putra World Trade Centre by taxi, and I was amused: I had travelled across the state of Johor to find myself standing before a building that reminded me of KOMTAR in JB. We made our way past the lobby and into PWTC proper and were confronted by a large crowd that had gathered around some booths. We bought our tickets; we spent about two hours there and then we left. It was that interesting. The interesting cars were the sort we could hardly afford, and the ladies splaying themselves over said cars were the subjects of quite a number of photographers – amateur or professional. Martin paid more attention to the ladies than to the cars, as usual, and I found myself drifting from one booth to another, listless.

By the time we got out and got back home, I had with me a bag full of books from Kinokuniya, thankful for the first time for being in KL, especially since I’d spent an ungodly amount of money acquiring said books. That’s the thing with spending money, isn’t it? If you’ve spent a lot, it behoves you to enjoy your purchases, even if you don’t, really. But I’ve got a good selection, so I think I might be genuinely happy.

It was about twelve in the morning when we found ourselves walking down Petaling Street again. The stalls had closed by then, and vendors were busy sweeping away the accumulation of oily-looking plastic bags. I remember looking down the street and seeing rubbish in colours of white and red like waves cresting down its length; it was a sea of trash, as far as I could see. The diesel roar of garbage trucks could be heard, and headlamps from slow-departing vans and cars came into view, and then subsided as they passed us. I looked up again, and saw the sea-green waves of plastic, a series of opaque, moulded sheets, and looked down again. Standing there, in the middle of the street, I suddenly saw the significance, and the similarities.