Sitting in a cafeteria, slovenly sleepy. Felt as if I've stayed out all night for some reason, stumbling now among waking up streets. Wearing the same underwear I slept in, a t-shirt greasy with today's and several other days' sweat. Eating in a cafeteria in KL's Petaling Street Market. Petaling Street Market's mornings are like a whore pausing for a cigarette.

The faces here are blearly, the clang of stalls being set up for the day, a few voices with little force offering me dvds. By night, Petaling Street is two narrow corridors of pirated haggling, the sky invisible, a faery maze where to drop your eyes from your companions is to lose them forever. Hands reach out to cup your elbow and ask you to look at designer bags, watches, shoes, jewelry. Voices extoll the virtues of the underworld - "Sir, this is a geniune copy"; "It's the real thing but only missing the brand name"; "Shoe too small? Don't worry, fake shoes stretch".
But by day, the spell is broken, and I spoon in greasy fried noodles to match my outer shield of grime. In that Mayalsian way, several stalls share this seating area - I choose someone to serve me noodles, someone else wanders up to offer me drinks. Is this a sign of cooperation, different stalls specialising and working together, or are they just renting space from the same owner, or do they maybe even charge each other for food referrals? One noodle stall stands vacant, a posted sign disowns it: "NOODLES MIXED RICE STALL FOR RENT". I wonder what it would be like if I went over and asked to rent it out for a while. For one, I have no idea how to cook these noodles. Secondly, I am leaving KL tomorrow for some Highland cool and quiet, and my hostel is currently washing and drying my other clothes. I may kid myself that I fit in with the grime and pirates and market sellers, but really, I am just a visitor.

--

Is it possible to be calmer and angrier? I feel much more relaxed in the last few months, Mark immediately remarked on how I'd changed, but equally, my temper seems to come much quicker. I admire this sometimes: I am quite impressed when a very large agressive taxi driver keeps hassling me and I turn and almost shout in his plump face, "NO"! However, anger is not that easily controlled, not a very well behaved tool. Sometimes I've been exploding in frustration at people who don't really deserve it - or maybe they do, but getting angry with them doesn't help me in any way. And, in what I assume is a kind of Buddhist/Star Wars way of looking at things, it probably isn't very healthy for me to be angry frequently. So hoping to turn the other cheek a bit for the next couple of weeks.

What have I been up? In KL, I met up with Leticia, from Brazil, working here in the city - later three Chinese-Mayalsian friends of her's joined us. They were all fun people, and the Chinese friends gave me a lift back to my hostel. At one point the girl driving muttered something in Chinese about a car we had just passed - her friend shrieked, "Oh, you're so rascist"! Then she turned to me and explained, "But it's not rascism to talk about other people in Malaysia... it's just racial". I don't know what this meant.

Then Mark, Georgina and I went to the small coastal town of Port Dickson and stayed with a Tamil-Sri Lankan Mayalsian family - their relative who lived in England was friends with Georgina's family. They were lovely and kept feeding us.
Kervassa met us at the bus station and when he and his fellow Tamil work colleague saw Mark, they immeditely complimented his hair - "good short soldier's hair". Fortunately, they gave me a let off from my wild thatch - "you're a traveller". He took us to the town yacht club, "We call it the Royal Yacht Club, but there's nothing royal about it". He was a great laugh, telling jokes, buying us beer, recounting his time working in London. After supper at the club, we went to a Chinese restaurant to meet various more relatives and friends. We met the town's immensely likable drama king, known as "Chinnapoo", who declared he would cast Georgina in his next production of My Fair Lady - although she would have to fund the airfare back to Port Dickson; and Toh, a kind of Chinese-Malaysian combination of The Fons and Micheal Corleone (we noticed the restaurant's service became far more attentive once Toh had joined our table). Georgina was very charming that night, you could see they all wanted her to stay longer. My main involvement in the conversation was that several times that night someone would stop and point at me, "Doesn't he look like Peter"? Peter was, it seemed, the son of a relative who had married a Canadian - but their family and its marriages across races and countries had pretty much confused me.

The next morning, Shamala, his sister, took us to the main Hindu temple in Port Dickson, and the priest decided he wanted to give us the same Hindu blessing he had given her. Generally, I wouldn't participate in a Hindu ceremony, any more than I would take the Eucharist, kneel to Mecca or pray to a Mayan stone idol - if I don't follow someone's religion, I think it's rather disrespectful to take part in something that's very real and serious to the people that do. However, if someone invites me, I figure that the invitation to take part includes an acceptance by them of my unbelief - clearly they want to do their best to keep me out of the hellfires / being reborn as a maggot. So the three of us smeared a line grey chalk across our foreheads then added some red to the dot of wax or oil that kept the red in place. Strangely, Mark later told me that Shamala had checked with him first whether I was a Buddhist...?

The family had just come back from a trip to their father's home town, Jaffna - their first trip of their lives, possible now only because of the ceasefire between the Tamil Tigers and the government. I asked Shamala what it felt like to have gone "home" but have been such an obvious foreigner, reeking of comparative wealth. She nodded, the villagers they had met believed she lived with servants and private cooks in a Malaysian mansion - that is what rich people did after all. She tried to convey to them this wasn't the case.

This little boy is Kervassa's son. When we met him, he didn't speak at all. After a few hours of playing with him, he wouldn't shut up and didn't want to say goodbye. He was learning English, Malay, Cantonese, Mandarin and a bit of Tamil, so no wonder it took him a while to remember which vocabulary to use. After all the games of football and being carried on my shoulders, he announced, "I have two daddies and one mummy" - but we were negligent parents, and left him so that we could return to KL.

Daniel, 17 June 2004, KL