Traveler (Klang)

Four odd hours on the bus felt like more. Sealed up in the tin the elavator behaviour didn’t help, all understandable of course. Confession: Klang was endurable only for one single hour. Where was a sweet little teh place, Chinese would have done? What about a hotel for soft-feathered aircon refuge from the drab and dirty street? The only one visible on the round was a ten storey tower off a-way. Were the street people in this old port town foreign workers, or tough-living local Indian? It was hard to tell. The one single piece of relief was the frieze of Indian working girls in their colourful saris on a stretch of sheltered walkway. Picasso writ large and more colourful than the old Spaniard had known. (Gauguin knew better.) What man could resist an hour in their company in some sequestered nook away from the harshness on every turn. Grey, shuttered and dilapidated Klang. Even colourful advertising boards would have helped. No one smiled calling you sir. (Only one of the Indian girls.) At the auto supplies shop enquiring about a wheel cap for Arthur’s Proton Jumbuck the woman answered with a smile, But you’re in kota bahru here! The train station was very far for walking. Once-over suspiciously given the bulging backpack. Thirty metres around the corner a big silver bird with red stripes offering KL in one and one quart hours, RM3 - a buck. Kotaraya what was more, in the centre. (The bus from Muar had deposited us at some moonscape Sentral depot perfect for a refugee camp.) One day there will be a return and a stronger effort applied, if there was any luck in company with Mike Tong, who has not returned to his home town in thirty years after the government diddled him outta plenty biz dollars. Wouldn’t that be grand, if Malaysia Bahru really did live up to its name, turn a new leaf and was going to play straight and honest from here on?