Siam Chronicles 9 - Our Parlay with the Malay

24 hours in Penang

Morning
“It can’t be up that way,” Alex shook his head, a definitive no. We were seeking the path to Kek Lok Si temple, and the stretch of stalls that tunneled up the hill, crushed and suffocated with hawkers and gawkers, garlanded with all the gumboils of garishness, seemed a most minatory ascent. But there is always a test a before the temple, of course it was up that way, the gauntlet must be tholed by the bold.
Clawing and kicking, we swam the crowd. Voices exploded from the insensate clot around us like landmines, and these shamans of hokum were through asking.
You WANT ice-cream. No, but if I could get one of those spinning crystal pagodas that emits ear-piercing Asian pop, I’ve got a nephew with a birthday coming up whose been nothing but bad.
You WANT t-shirts. No, but you’ve got fifty hectalitres of dried cephalopod in every possible flavor assortment, and I’ve got a great hunger for all things suctiony.
You WANT puppets. Perhaps, but I’d rather try my luck with smuggling those sacks of scorpions and endangered tiger’s paw through customs.
You WANT tapestry of dogs playing billiards. Yes, actually, you augur my heart’s desires. How much and will you throw in that psychedelic Ganesha clock to seal the deal?
In short anything and everything you’ve never wanted limned our path while we coerced our way over the heaped masses swathed in saris, passionately perorating for a good price for these atrocities - hopefully to gather them together and lovingly burn them in a ceremony commemorating the continuance of global good taste.
Let’s not dwell on that tortuous journey any longer. Let’s just lie and say we achieved the temple quickly and easily, in good spirits and not at all despising our fellow cows.
We mumped our devotion to the sacred turtles who were thronging the pagoda in piles with all due diligence, we skulked the garden grounds with the monitor lizards, we browsed the solemn explication of the swastikas from another time adorning the statuary.
Then we dreaded going down again.

Afternoon
Snake temple was slithering with pit vipers, black with yellow stripes and eyes bisecting the blood red walls. Legend has it that incense keeps them drugged and docile, and, fact or fiction, as homage to this most poisonous of snakes they do in fact employ the largest sticks of incense I have ever seen in all my life – fully five feet tall and four inches around, hot pink and blowing enough smoke to knock a giant cross-eyed into a mountain.

Night
The city outside burbled and clamored like loose change in a washing machine as Alex and I sat sessile, playing gin rummy and drinking something called Buccaneer’s whiskey in the echoing expanse of the hallway. An octogenarian labored up the staircase, “There’s going to be a storm,” he adumbrated, smiling in creases, “A big storm,” then padded off into the penumbra of the receding vaults.
As if on cue, a blast of wind blew open the wormed wooden shutters with a bang, carrying heat, the smell of dust, rain, disinfectant, and a brief blue view of close cluttered streets, alive with rain, running, and cantonese characters pulsing in neon coruscation, scumbled soft in gloaming and storm. Our cards caught in the current to prang and lodge into the curious mixture of massive art deco armoires and plastic lawn furniture that so uniquely characterized the hundred year hotel. The thunder and rain with their peal and douse puddled the marble floors in moments as we slipped to grip the shutters and brace them fast against the island storm.

Kuala Lumpur or Armeggedon?
“It’s the burning in Sumatra,” the businessman explained with a tidy gesture of dismissal, “900 fires and counting. Until it clears up, well…” he shrugged and held his portmanteau close as the elevator pinged open, wishing us luck as he made his escape. In the lobby, sardined with an Indian family of epic proportions, the smell of fire was already penetrating into our clothing and hair. The front doors slid open with a hiss, revealing a vision of the apocalypse.
It was a bit like a major US city - clean, full of sky-scrapers, ultra-modern. It was a bit, in fact, like San Francisco, under a scrim of a heavy fog - if you had a packet of smoldering matches stuffed securely up each nostril and a roaring hair fire in your lungs. We came and left when the toxicity was designated “very-dangerous,” a few days before it ticked over into “deadly.”
But, on the upswing, Kuala Lumpur has both a monorail AND a spaceneedle.

A Moment in Malacca
I was running under a swarm of dragonflies on the hill of St. Paul's church and the city flared out below in a patchwork of color. It was an oneiric whirl of images - the orange of the insects, the blue of the sky, the green of the field and the red brick of the ruin cascading into the city's labrynth of cobalt, carmine, and saffron, ringed round merrily by the turqouise sea. The light and color, dizzying in that moment, were scrimshawed on my psyche, like a secret map to sunshine for days of murk and grays.