Winning the Lottery

A pillow-hawker with a fold-out chair now carried over his shoulder arm through the rails. Where in the heck had he been trying up that end toward the Checkpoint? And in his wake almost immediately after the newly released Lottery numbers hitting the street, chaps running around with their limp sheaves folded over their hands. There was a limit of some kind to their usefulness, the first couple of hours after the draw for all these people without access to the Net. Interesting. One of the hawkers doubled back here to deposit his large pillow in the rear of the little canary yellow motor parked on the corner (like the Roma in Europe, the runners have back-up from the operators). Woman from a few nights ago out again with her sheets on the same corner. From memory up in KL three or four years ago they charged 20 sens for early release of the numbers. (Later the girl at Reception revealed they were 50 sens currently.) Young Indian on the phone searching for the particular coin in the dark to give the woman. The old Bersih sympathiser rounding back from his supper on Meldrum stops to chat and takes one from her. Each night during the candle-lit vigils for Maria, the Bersih leader, kept a week or ten days in solitary, the group had gathered at various locations after being moved on by the police. (In advance of Bersih 5 the local Sultan here had forbade any public agitation against a duly elected government on his patch, democratic principles and all that.) Each night the old man—Peranakan Chinese-Malay—had come out to stand opposite the gathering giving his cautious, tacit support. The raja filling their pockets; nothing for the rakyat, the old man had explained in whispers. Another regular leaflet man in this quarter quick-stepping past, in his case killing two birds collecting aluminum cans same time in a large plastic bag.