3. Snapshot Malaysia – Yusuf Martin

The 3rd in the new Snapshot series. 500 word contibutions welcome.

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Throughout the sundering heat of the equatorial afternoon, the pink, nude lizard watched.  This creature’s bulbous eyes swivelled each time I moved in my chair, or answered the telephone, watching like some Gecko CCTV, spying for knows which crazy organisation; constantly recording each itch I scratched, each brush of hair from my face.  On occasions, just as I had gotten used to the near silence, there was a disapproving ‘tut tut tut’ piercing into my room, as the gecko rested, affixed to the corner of my studio ceiling.

This constant reminder of my being in Malaysia peered down at me, sporadically sending small, white and black, torpedoes to land on books, magazines and neatly printed pages of my manuscript.  It was house gecko detritus, which, with age, crumbled to dust and floated in the air, borne by gusts from the constantly revolving fan, and caused my sinus to enlarge, giving me breathing problems.

At night, lights extinguished, pillow plumped, suddenly an explosion of gecko talk expanded to fill the quiet.  It was as if the peace of silence was too much to bear, and needed some sound, any sound to punctuate the overt clamber of stillness.

During the early years, I would jump at this sound, dash to the light switch to reveal – nothing, just some undressed lizard cavorting with some other undressed lizard, which looked the same as the first.  I am a slow learner, and Malaysia, its heat and its fauna were as foreign to me as I was to them.

It was part of the package I guess, and, in many ways, there was always going to be a price paid for living near such majestic mountains and limpid lakes.  It simply was not going to be possible to have it all – the landscape and the peaceful idyll, so there were the geckos, the parping frogs, the wandering buffalo, the chicken killing civets and the snakes.

The spectacular refreshing waterfalls, dappled leaf bathing areas and rounded rock streams more than make up for the tormenting beasts, as I mentally dip heated toes into chill waters freshly escaped from lofty jungles, or laze in the shade watching some heavy headed toucan glide from branch to branch, tree to tree.

It is like that here, in the rural, pastoral, real Malaysia.  Here, in a place where attap roofing tops wooden stilt dwellings – housing chickens/children beneath, cooled by the shade, warmed by the constancy of the tropical sun.  It is here, where large areas of extinct tin mining have created a multitude of lakes, giving residence to tilapia and the hard to catch snakehead, swooping kingfishers, standing heron and stalking storks.

As the rude nude gecko ‘tuts’ its way back into my consciousness, I look across at the blue of the distant mountains, a white scudding cloud, and remember just how blessed I am to be here, in this pastoral haven, and not in some black, grimy, stench ridden city only dreaming of my mountains, lakes fauna and flora.

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Yusuf Martin is an Englishman, writer/poet who holds Masters Degrees in Art History & Theory and Gallery Studies, with a first degree in philosophy. Yusuf currently writes columns for The Expat magazine and the Ipoh Echo, and articles for Senses of Malaysia magazine.  He has written for The Star newspaper, UT Today and The Malaysian Insider. Yusuf’s short stories and essays have been published in anthology volumes by Silverfish, MPH and Matahari Books, while his voice has been heard on BFM radio and his increasing girth witnessed on NTV7. He is snugly settled in the ample bosom of Perak, Malaysia.

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