Salaryman

  

A second sink hole had opened overnight on Jalan Masjid India, KL. The dramatic video of the first that took the poor Indian woman still not found reached Hal this morning, leaving her understandably horrified. At the time Hal had been spared the first item and now WhatsApped it herself.

Just before departure for the newspaper & morning teh, Rony had been caught at the bench outside his door, presenting a lachrymose picture as he prepared his lunchbox, it may have been.

Every day go office, as much as he could deliver in reply to the greeting. (It was very possible enquiries of howdydo? took another form in Eastern cultures.)

Everyday Rony shaved that scone of his; there was never a hint of any growth, never the faintest shadow.

Yet what was the man saying here? Hadn’t he had the previous day free and Friday the same, at least so far as office attendance was concerned? Wasn’t that what he said a couple weeks before when he was caught near Four Chain on his walk after an early supper? Two days work from home either side of the weekend.

The Tuesday return was likely quite bad enough. Some IT/bureaucratic function was involved, where the kinda bucks Wahyu was pulling was no doubt unavailable to Rony. But still, being fifteen years older, Rony was shortly to enter the housing market just like Wahyu. After a few months he would be able to put the little shoebox of Landlord Tan’s behind him. Just the other day Rony had received word that he had progressed from PR to citizenship. The little boost had clearly not lasted.

Another deracinated Indo-Chinese, like Wahyu, although in Rony’s case there may have been some little Mandarin or Hokkien retained. What a visage the salaryman had attempted to hide by the bench there, bowing and twisting his head. Staggering over the afternoon later; mentally thudding in recall. There was insufficient pity in the cruel world to fairly grant Rony.

Had the guess voiced soto voce to Yan on the night of her first visit since the return to Carpmael been correct, that the new housemate had never known a girl? In her own quiet way Yan had seemed incredulous and doubting. In Yan’s experience in her Javanese kampung there had never appeared a salaryman of this kind.

At the encounter in the street near Four Chain, unasked, Rony had promised to keep quiet his side of the party wall. It was just hollow plaster there, Rony explained; nights when Wahyu’s mother had stayed he could hear her coughs.

A week later Rony has proved as good as his word; not a peep of any kind. Only sometimes in the dead of night Rony’s slow, steady rowing across the wastes could be heard as he crossed to our near shore.  Certainly it was not enough to wake and would never be mentioned.