After a short circuit round the block and being put off for further by the dark clouds, one of the girls pointed the way up the lane. You could get through there, yeah, she indicated. Back onto Jalan Trus, Straight Road. In broad daylight there was nothing to fear. (A newspaper report relayed to little Lia in Puchong, KL, had detailed the slashing death of a woman in the same suburb. Found by her car, you had to think robbery-gone-wrong. Li had been working illegally in Puchong so many years now and had herself been cut in a snatch-and-grab.) Groups of girls in the brilliantly coloured Indian dress lined the lane, though at least a couple might have been Indos like Lia. Again, the same as a year ago in the drab corner of Klang, the port up at KL, these painted ladies in their finery suggested the remarkable release offered the labourers, the construction and industrial workers in their harsh, dismal circumstances. Amid the broken paving, the dust and grime and grey, crumbling buildings, startling birds of paradise waited. In the age of affluence elsewhere there was nothing to compare; no possible costuming able to provide anything like the same contrast. Fantastically mesmerizing bright colours, the clasps for the hair, the flash of cheap glitter. Broken concrete, bits of garbage and streams of dirty water marked the wider lane where the first of the girls loitered. Younger girls there still in their twenties; around on Trus near the methadone clinic cheaper older women stood in the entryways of the blocks without any of this finery. Pretty and fresh young girls some of them in the lower end of the lane, some with smooth, clear skin; not all “used up,” as used to be said for working girls. In the clasp of those arms wonderfully soft comfort. On the other side the alley proper, once it was entered, was every bit as wondrous. Single file only up along there; if someone had started before you in the opposite direction you needed to wait your turn. Two or three rats darted under the treacherous concrete steps; handrails were unnecessary with the rearing walls so close. Any coddled boy would climb wide-eyed and flabbergasted; gritty noir movies could never hope to capture the scene. You would like to run the old corrupt former PM here up through there with a cracking whip behind him; he and his grotesque wife with her fondness for handbags. In the capital the pair was currently undergoing numerous trials, defended by expensive lawyers drawing out the legal process every which way.
NB. Since published by Midway Journal (US), #14/No.4 Oct 2020
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