langkau fiction

I was so looking forward to this trip to Miri and got dang excited at the prospect of doing that 12-hour drive up to Miri on Christmas eve. That is, a 12-hour drive if you’re a regular driver who delights at challenging the wind for a race. But I’m not that ‘regular driver’ because I drive on average of 80km/h on a highway. Some people call it ’slow’. In fact, there have been times when I turn my head to see a car overtaking, I could see the driver glaring while mouthing some unintelligible words at me. I’m sure they were swear words. Saniney. At that gerontological speed, that ride to Miri would take 14-16 hours. Let’s just say I enjoy the Sarawak scenery too much to let it off my sight.

On Jan 24th I packed my backpacks into my pickup and managed to haul a motorbike onto my truck’s bucket. Yes, a motorbike. I was instructed by my niece to send it to her in Saratok, a 4-hour drive northeast of Kuching, on my way up to Miri. That’s the thing about driving up along that highway. Relatives tend to find something for me to bring to pass to their relatives along the way. On this particular morning, I had a motorbike to transport to my niece’s kampung in Saratok and two bags of rice for my aunty in Miri.

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I’ve seen this kind of thing happening on TV a couple of times. I remember once I watched a documentary on tigers in India, and there was this local Indian tiger expert explaining tiger behavior in the Sundarbans. He was speaking English and I understood everything he said. But the TV program thought otherwise, so subtitles were provided. I didn’t know whether to hear him talk or read the subtitles.

Below is a funny video about the use of subtitles among non-native English speakers (ada kah such thing?)…

Ear Shit

I was squatting by a huge brown patternless flower pot at the entrance of the New Zealand embassy in KL, busy wiping away the beads of sweat that’s soaking my face. It’s a hot midday on Friday and I was told to wait outside by the embassy staff, a short lady with a face resembling one of Walter Arnold’ sculptures. My balding and overweight cousin, Jolibut, waited in his car a few feet behind me, trying to escape the sun’s relentless heat.

‘Hey, is there a cotton bud in the car?’ Jolibut asked me. Without turning to look at him, I murmured ‘In the glove compartment.’ ‘Oh, okay…found it,’ he said. I could hear him chuckling in the background. A short while later, Jolibut called out to me ‘Hey, look at this!’ and he chuckled again.

I turned around, while still squatting, to look at him. I could see he was holding the cotton bud  between his fingers with a stupid grin on his face. I stood up and walked over to him to see what amused him. As I got closer, I saw the white tips of the cotton bud have turned to dark yellow, like the color of the Tiger Balm. It was his ear wax. Lots of it.

‘Oh fuck! That’s so disgusting!’, I told him. He laughed so hard that the flab of his beer belly trembled violently.

Langkau Fiction