This story was written by Shahriman Latif & Chan Su Ling (UnR4) during a writing walkabout in Masjid Jamek. It first appeared on The Daily Seni on 3 April 2016.
He’s shouting at the demons in his head again, ghosts of those who had wronged him in the past. A couple of Scandinavian backpackers keep their distance, for there are people like him in any city anywhere in the world, the ones who have fallen through the cracks of what they should be. Once you fall through the cracks, there’s no turning back. You’ll be a broken shell of the person you once were, and you’ll lose everything. People won’t look you in the eye and avoid you, fearing your failure to be contagious.
Today he’s screaming about that time when his wife left him, that night a few months following his fall from grace when they found the electricity to their home had been cut off. That was the last straw for her and they had an argument and hurtful, soul-crushing words were spoken and she took the children and went back to her parents. He’s questioning her loyalty in the unforgiving afternoon sun now, and somewhere in the fragments of his broken reality the ghost of her walks out on him again.
The lonesome Belgian man walks out of the Hotel 1915 and passes the argument in mid-stream. They lock gazes for the briefest of moments and glimpse into each other’s realities, one looking for a purpose not yet realized, another mourning over a simple life once lived.
Samir had a bit of a culture shock when he first set foot here. They told him about Kuala Lumpur being a busy city but they never accounted for its chaotic pace. He was used to the laid back life he led in Brussels. He knew that he would get used to the craziness of the hustle of a city that never sleeps, but it drained him, made him feel tired. That thought occurred to him in that brief moment, as their eyes met. That crazy man. KL was a mad, mad city. Was this raving lunatic the future if he stayed here for much longer?
“What are you looking at?” the lunatic asked. It made Samir uncomfortable and he tried ignoring him as he walked on, but the man followed him.
“Why you ignore me?” he screamed. Samir thought he could lose him at the traffic lights, but compliance to traffic laws is the least of concerns in a lunatic’s mind.
“You think you so good? I know people like you just come here and take everything! You foreign devils. How you think I lost my job? I was flying high until one of you thought they were too many of us!” Samir turned to face the man, eyes widened.
The screaming man may be a different person but the story was the same. Samir had a job to do and he wasn’t going to let sentimentality hold him back. The company he was consulting for was bleeding dry thanks to redundancies; cutting a hundred over people would at least allow it to break even and not bleed red into another year. Some of the staff somehow took it badly and protested overnight, and he became the ‘bad guy’ instead of the saviour he rightfully was.
“I had to do it! Pressures were on me to deliver targets!” he said in the middle of the street.
“Did you think of the lives you were playing with? I’m forty two! Who’s going to hire me now?”
The lunatic threw a punch. Samir, surprised, lost his balance and fell to the ground. Eyes feral, the man clawed his way up, tearing at Samir’s shirt, trying to draw blood. He straddled Samir, raining punches onto his face. Samir snapped back into reality and tried to buckle him off, but in that moment, despite the fact that Samir may be stronger, lunacy and rage surged through and the man overwhelmed Samir and choked him.
Samir clawed at his throat trying to pry off the fingers enclosed around his neck. He started to see black and red spots cloud his vision, floating at the edges of his consciousness. He could feel the spittle drip on his face and he tried to hold on. The last thing he heard was the chanting of “Devil! Devil! Devil!” before giving into the darkness.
This story was workshopped in the fourth edition of the UnRepresented: KL writing programme. Check out more writings from our alumni in the Past Works section and make sure to follow UnRepresented: KL on Facebook.
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