Spidermaid: The Finale

“You’ll soon have an entire apartment soap opera on your blog,” my boyfriend said, when I told him of my intention to wrap up the chronicles of Spidermaid online. And so I shall!

The conclusion to this tale is more prosaic than its exposition. A few weeks after the Spidermaid incident, I was working in my study when I heard a strange noise from the hallway. I went out to stickybeak – working at home is boring enough to welcome any distraction! At the end of the hall, silhouetted against the light, I saw a woman climb out over the low wall and onto the ledge on the other side. She was very angry – it was clear in the way she hurled her bag over onto the ledge and then swung her leg up. I think she saw me, but she ignored me, and I thought it prudent not to intrude. Here was a woman who would brook no obstacle, and as she disappeared around the corner of the building, it appeared that she knew exactly what she was doing.

A little while later I went out shopping. On the apartment driveway outside the lobby, two police cars were sitting. The shiny black car of the deputy minister who lives in our building was also there, so I dismissed the police as the official entourage.

When I returned with my groceries, the minister’s car had gone, the police were still there and the lobby had been thrown into disarray. In its centre was a pile of baby paraphernalia – multi-coloured blankets, cot, toys. A lift door opened to display two policeman and a woman clutching a baby. She was angrily telling the police in a broad Filipino accent, “No, you get out first, go on, you get out!” Eventually they all disgorged into the foyer and, not wanting to make my gawking too obvious, I took the next lift up.

So, I thought. I knew the white man who lived in the apartment at the end of the hall had a baby – I met him as he was moving in. I didn’t meet the mother, but clearly this was she, and she was Filipina. Now she was being taken off somewhere by the police – the husband not in evidence. Was she an illegal migrant being unfairly evicted?

The answer had to wait until the building’s next joint management body meeting, an event that is usually crushingly boring, but this time was alleviated by a little gossip. No, the management staff said, the police were helping her, not arresting her. The woman and the man were not married, but had a baby together. She had come home to find herself locked out. This had, apparently, happened before – her husband was probably entertaining another girlfriend in the flat. And this is where I imagine my piece fits in – furious at finding herself locked out, the mother of the baby climbed round the outside of the building, got in at the window, and caught them both in flagrante delicto. At which point, according to the management staff, she called the police, demanded to be sent back to the Philippines, and took her baby with her.

The only mystery that remains is this: who was the Spidermaid? Was it the mother of the baby, mistreated by her partner, possibly locked in and trying to escape? Or was it this girlfriend (or another) hurried out the window by the man when the mother returned home unexpectedly? When Brian looks back on it, he remembers that when our Spidermaid exited our apartment, he stayed listening at the door. Around the corner in front of the lift Spidermaid seemed to meet someone else, a woman, whom she spoke to in rather passionate but quiet tones, until one left. I wonder what these two women said to each other. “So we meet again, Spidermaid!”?

“Oh, anything” — on sometimes not being a foodie

At the end of an essay on first learning to eat well, iconic food writer MFK Fisher wrote, “And never since then have I let myself say, or even think, “Oh, anything,” about a meal, even if I had to eat it alone, with death in the house or in my heart.”

Beautifully worded in classic Fisher prose, but like most of Fisher’s work it is both grandiose and unbelievable. Never after that, in all her life, did she dismiss the art of eating as labour or as tedium?

I won’t make such a claim. I am guilty of eating all sorts of things without thinking about it, and also of that terrible gourmet crime of eating while doing other things: watching tv, working on the computer, reading, playing with the cat. I rise from my work regularly with the urge to eat something, doesn’t matter what, but quickly, quickly. Sometimes this results in the consumption of instant noodles without even cooking them, which some people find repulsive, but after all, someone has made a lot of money off Mamee snacks which are exactly the same. It isn’t that I can’t wait the three minutes that it takes instant noodles to cook, but that I want something crunchier, more substantial. I choose life, I choose raw instant noodles.

And even if it was a matter of time, I have no excuse for eating without proper deliberation. Within a three minute walk of my home I can procure, at various times of the day and almost instantly, mutton curry recommended by numerous KL taxi drivers, curry mee which according to my mother tastes exactly like the famous curry mee from Jalan Alor thirty years ago, spicy noodle soup best eaten at midnight bought from a dry smiling man who sets up his stall in the base of the ghetto flats, cheap and minimalist chicken rice whose undercookedness my cats delight in, and banana leaf all-you-can-eat for the most ridiculous price. If you expand the time limit to a five-minute walk from my home, the choice is overwhelming.

So there’s no excuse for my laziness in eating. In my defence, I can only suggest that, sometimes, perhaps food isn’t really that important — blasphemy! Sometimes it is just a basic bodily need, satisfied to assuage hunger, or to calm oral fixations, or just for distraction.

Picky eaters are antisocial. Overly interested eaters are too. My sister tells a story of going on a roadtrip with a gourmet friend who insisted on traveling miles out of their way to eat at a highly recommended restaurant which none of them could afford. Then again, people who are not interested in their food at all are aliens. I once worked with someone who maintained that he didn’t enjoy eating at all, and wished that he didn’t have to eat because it was so disruptive to his daily life. I don’t think that he was anorexic, but he was vegan. Either his veganism caused his disinterest in food (how much interest can that food really sustain?) or his disinterest in food caused his veganism. In any case, when he visited me in Kuala Lumpur, a city which is about nothing if not eating, I hardly knew what to do with him.

I just finished reading Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, a collection of essays by foodies and authors about cooking and eating for one. Apparently my raw instant noodle habit is not unusual. And now that I have my new oven, and every night have urges to create extravagant casseroles that are not at all suitable for this climate — lasagna, ox tail, roasts — perhaps I am allowed, during the solitude of the day, to rest on my laurels and my Maggi Kari Letup.

Spidermaid: The Return

Last night, while my boyfriend and I were watching TV, we heard a knocking sound coming from the study. My boyfriend went to investigate and found a young woman sitting on our open windowsill.

“Can I come in?” she asked. We backed up. She came into the living room. She had long hair, cut in a fringe, with expensive highlights. She was wearing a short denim skirt and high heels. She had obviously been crying.

“Can I leave please?” She sounded Filipino.

We were non-plussed, and she was embarrassed and anxious. She muttered something about her husband mistreating her and needing to get to the Filipino embassy. I made some flustered noises, asked her if she needed help getting to the embassy, if she was sure the embassy was open at that hour.

“Can I leave please?” she repeated. The last thing I wanted to do was to make a woman just released from bondage feel as if she was being held against her will! I escorted her to the front door. She hesitated at the door a moment, listening, and then rushed out.

It was all over in less than a minute.

It was a strange experience. We live on the fifth floor of an apartment building. The tiny balcony outside our study window is inaccessible from other apartments. It isn’t even very accessible from our apartment; it is only there to hold the airconditioning units, and you have to climb through the window to get to it. After the woman was gone, my boyfriend leaned out the window, and he couldn’t see how she could have arrived there. Two 6-inch vertical concrete pillars jutted out between our apartment and the next.

This morning, I stood outside on the street staring upwards. At last I saw that on the fifth floor the gap between the two pillars that separate my apartment from the next is crossed by a narrow concrete bar. She could conceivably have climbed out the window on her side, swung around the concrete pillar to put one foot on the concrete bar, brought the other foot around, and then repeated the process again to get onto my balcony. And she did it all in heels.

It was a strange enough experience, but what made it stranger was that a similar experience happened to a friend of mine in Singapore a few months earlier. In his case, he heard a small voice saying, “Help! Please! Help!” coming from the window of his apartment building on the eighth floor. Now, five floors is high enough, but eight is an unendurable panic-inducing height. The woman who came through his window was also Filipino, but claimed she had been mistreated by her employers rather than her husband. She was in great distress, and my friend succeeded in connecting her with both her husband in the Philippines and the Philippine embassy. He later determined through the Philippine embassy that she had been successfully sent back to the Philippines and reunited with her husband.

There isn’t anything unusual about a woman, especially a mail-order bride from the Philippines, being imprisoned by her abusive husband. It is also fairly common for migrant domestic workers in Southeast Asia to be locked into the houses of their employment by their employers. With the world full of poverty and misery, poor desperate women will continue to take whatever opportunities they can to improve life for themselves and their families. These opportunities are often very risky, and single migrant women often fall victim to abuse and exploitation.

It did seem strange, however, that both my friend and I would be privy to two such similar risky escape plans. What do they teach these Filipinas on their training course before they go overseas to be maids, nannies, waitresses and shop girls — advanced building scaling and rappelling? Or do the women, in desperation, climb up on their windowsills hoping to end it all, and then, oh wait, there’s a step there, I could climb down, I could hold onto that – I could be free!

Not all such bids for freedom conclude with a safe re-entry into an apartment full of well-meaning, if baffled, neighbours. After this incident, I Googled it. The coincidence seemed too pat. I must admit that my first reaction had been, “This has to be a scam! While she engages our pity she’s scoping out our apartment! She’s going to take us for all we’ve got!” And the Internet is justly reliable in reporting the prevalence of scams and cons. But all I found was a news article from Singapore, reporting that an Indonesian maid locked in by her employers had attempted to climb out of her apartment building on the eleventh floor. She made it down to third floor, where she slipped and fell, breaking her back. When the article was written, it appeared that she would never walk again. When asked why she had done it, she replied that she was very homesick, and she was overjoyed to hear that the hospital would transfer her to Indonesia. As the article reported it, it seemed as if she thought her broken back was worth it.

It really is a measure of the depths of poverty and deprivation – that your prospects can be so slim and so dark that the small promise of homecoming can overcome the terror you must feel when looking out an apartment block window and down eleven storeys.

The news article on the Indonesian maid. There are also numerous accounts of maids forced out windows to hang washing or wash windows, and then falling to their deaths, which one news site calls “the phenomena of falling maids.”

Brood parasites

When I heard my first Asian Koel (Eudynamys scolopacea), I thought it was an Argus Pheasant. How could I make such a mistake — koels go ko-el while Argus Pheasants go kuau-waau! Very wishful thinking on my part. Now koels have become such common birds in KL, thanks to their habit of preying on nesting common crows, that their misidentification is impossible, even though they are seldom seen.

Bear Stearns on duty. He really doesn't blink.

My kitten Bear likes to look out the window (left). He is also a keen student of wildlife in the city, and the habits of man. Unfortunately, he isn’t very clever, so when a big black crow swooped down on him out of the blue, he didn’t have the sense to run away. Luckily I was there to frighten the crow away, and now the big cat Huki and I keep an eye on him.

I think the crow was so protective because it had a nest nearby. The second time the crow attacked, there was a strange creature perched in the tree beneath our window. The crow was protecting it, but the creature didn’t act like a crow and didn’t look like a crow. It could have been a juvenile koel that the crow had raised, which was beginning to leave the nest except that all the websites indicate that the juvenile koel is brown and barred like the adult female koel, but and this one was definitely black. Couldn’t see the colour of the eye from so far away, but it didn’t appear red. After a while it got nervous of our attention and flew off down the street.

Strange bird in tree.

Bear Stearns on duty. He really doesn’t blink.

So how?

Saw V — Nocturnal KL Botanical Massacre

11pm. Rrrrrr. Silence. RRRrrrrr! Silence. Like a delinquent teen gunning his recalcitrant bike. We lay in bed listening to it go on and on and on. I finally went into the living room to have a look, climbing onto the back of the couch to get a better view down onto the street. Then I almost fell over — a few metres beneath me was a man in a cherry-picker, clutching a chainsaw, which he was applying to the trees outside our window. Thankfully he didn’t see me, clad only in night shirt, so I crouched on the sofa and watched for a while, wondering why the hell they choose to perform kind this activity in the middle of the night. His friend beneath would occasionally shout out that useful word, “Hoy!” which can mean anything or nothing.

Beware the man who comes in the middle of the night with a chainsaw!

Voices in the night

Woken at 4 am by voices outside my window. In bleary half-sleep, thought there was a tidal wave of French men rioting on my street. Turned out to be only five or six African guys, leaning on a car outside, engaged in energetic conversation. About football, I suspect. I vaguely wished that the police would arrest them for illegal assembly, to make up for them disturbing my sleep, but couldn’t help admiring what seemed like witty repartee accompanied by vigorous gesticulation. Oh, and arrest them for drinking on the street, too. Back to bed.

In the cat’s mouth

I serve the cat a blob of caramel custard, in a white dish sitting on the carpet. She tucks in, delicately, but I say to my boyfriend, “She won’t finish it. She thinks caramel custard is too rich.”

He looks at me with a raised eyebrow. I have done it again — said something he thinks is patently ridiculous.

“Don’t put words in the cat’s mouth,” he says, “She can’t talk. And remember she’s only a cat.”

I remember. But he’s right; I should have said, “Caramel custard is too rich for cats,” rather than, “She thinks…” because of course she is just a cat, and cats don’t think, “My, this caramel custard is too rich,” they just give it a few licks and then retire to the corner of the room to wash their faces, leaving more than half on the plate.

My boyfriend says consolingly, “Don’t worry, you will always know that cat better than anyone else.” And I do. I especially pride myself on knowing what she will and will not eat. Perhaps because of her childhood as a guttersnipe, she is pleasingly omnivorous. She eats, among other things, chickpeas, rice, sweetcorn, popcorn (and in fact all manner of junk foods that are probably bad for her as well as for us, including barbecue-flavoured corn chips and twisties), and other starchy items, as well as the more normal meats. She will not eat green vegetables or fruit, but she will eat most dairy products, including ice cream. She especially favours lamb, but will not turn up her nose at finely chopped samples of whatever I am cooking for dinner. She also likes to taste the meat after it’s been cooked, while we sit at the table, but not if it has been cooked in too much ginger or chilli. She is, and I am never unaware of it, extremely spoiled, but after all, she’s only a cat.

Although she is not picky, I would not suggest that the cat is not discerning. One large tin of cat food lasts her through four dinners, but by the fourth dinner the food has become decidedly stale, even in the coldest part of the fridge. She does not merely turn up nose and tail and leave the room, she reaches across the dish and paws repeatedly at the ground, the same action that she uses to bury her faeces. Quite clearly, and this time I am not putting words in the cat’s mouth, she’s saying, “This stinks.”

The cat has dried cat biscuits for breakfast, and wet tinned food for dinner. I rotate the flavours of the tinned food — ocean fish, seafood platter, mackerel, tuna, calamari, mussels and prawns. She doesn’t much like the chicken flavours, and I can’t say I disagree with her. Strangely, though, and this is where I think I will never understand her, she prefers the cat biscuits to the tinned food, and would probably quite happily subsist on tinned food alone. Gourmand that I am, and spoiled by the availability of every different cuisine, I am appalled by the mere notion of such austerity.

However, it is a companionable thing, giving snacks to cats. My boyfriend doesn’t share my liking for food, and anyway prefers different things, or the same things cooked differently. My cat, however, can never say, “That’s a good piece of white fish, but I really would prefer it grilled rather than deep fried.” She just eats it, or more rarely, she doesn’t. And, like any loving Tamil mother stuffing her son with chappatis and ghee, I take great satisfaction from watching her eat.

Only in one instance has my cat disappointed me. She does not eat durian. Now before you think that the whole concept is outrageous, consider that tigers (and elephants) are very partial to durian, although they prefer them in an even more putrid state than that enjoyed by most humans. And my last cat, who was a great love of my life, but hardly as personable as my current cat, loved durian. And anyway, my current cat will eat avocado, which is similar to durian in its fatty fruitiness.

But she will not eat durian. It does not appall her; she does not run into another room at the first whiff, and hide under the bed, as she runs from my boyfriend playing the harmonica. She will sit next to me when I sit on the floor, in the outside hallway, the pervasive stench of durian exiling me from the house, as I gradually work my way through a whole fruit by myself. When I offer it to her she will sniff my fingertips, consideringly. I have gone so far as smearing it on her whiskers and forcing her to lick it off, which she has done with some indignation but no disgust. She just doesn’t want to eat it. Sorry, she says, no.

I forgive her. She has tastebuds more accommodating than most humans and she will go with me on most of my culinary adventures. And she doesn’t mind me putting words in her mouth, or at least she has never said so. At the moment it’s late, it’s time for bed, we have all been extremely well fed, and the cat says, “Mrrrooo!” Her words, not mine.

Where are we eating?

It’s funny how certain food experiences evoke certain countries.

I was standing in the food court at The Pavilion the other day when my boyfriend called it, “A little slice of Singapore in Malaysia.” My immediate response was, “No, lah!” After all, most of the food is solidly Malaysian, apart from the ubiquitous teppanyaki joint. And KL has had classy food courts before, like the bottom of Star Hill before it got redesigned. (It’s even more classy now since its renovation, but arguably it’s no longer a food court.)

But I thought about it, and realised he was right. There is something intangibly Singaporean about The Pavilion’s food court. The over-airconditioning, the outlets individually styled to within inches of their lives, the sparkling cleanliness and the utilitarian feel of get-’em-in, feed-em, get-’em-out, plus the hordes of people clearly enjoying this departure from KLness, all combine to remind me of our neighbour to the south. It would only take a few waitresses who cannot believe I cannot speak Mandarin to complete the illusion.

Perhaps the head honchos behind the Pavilion deliberately set out to create such comparisons. After all, they have Tangs as one of the anchor stores, full of charming colourful items that no one can afford, and the Singaporean franchise J.Co probably does better business here than anywhere else. Or perhaps the change is just the natural consequence of Malaysian consumers wanting something cleaner, more stylish, and more efficient.

If that is the case, then Dempsey Road in Singapore — which simply shouts of Australia — could be the natural consequence of Singaporeans wanting somewhere more relaxed and sociable, with a hip back-to-nature kind of feel. That might be the case, except that Dempsey Road seems to be populated exclusively by expats.

But I wouldn’t want to be at all disparaging of Dempsey Road. I spent a wonderful day there with friends on Sunday, drinking too much wine and eating too much food in a leisurely chatty manner all the way from brunch into the early evening. We started off at PS Cafe, where the menu is rather limited during brunch, especially for those looking for something healthy, but thankfully I’m not one of those, so I polished off half of one of the best burgers I’ve had in a bloody long time. (I did not leave half a burger on my plate, I must add; I would NEVER do that. I shared it with my friend Kiran, because we both suspected we were going to spend the rest of the day eating, and so, delightfully, we did.)

Then we wandered around the furniture shops, while I marveled at the huge old trees, the manicured lawns, and the enormous sense of space that is always so lacking in pint-sized Singapore. Apparently the area was an old army base, and the restaurants that sprouted like mushrooms with the last rain are occupying tastefully converted old barracks. Why the Singaporean government didn’t see fit to turn the area into 20 blocks of HDB flats I don’t know; perhaps they restrained themselves with an eye towards what tourists want. I pitied the majority of Singaporeans whose budget may never allow them to experience the excesses of Dempsey Road, and who probably would have preferred more HDB flats, but I didn’t pity them that much. After all, I’m a tourist too.

We had a beautiful bottle of red at the wine bar, I think it was The Wine Company. They had a charming menu, too, styled like a mini Women’s Weekly cookbook, but we were too lazy to order from it. We ended up at Jones the Grocer, where I suppose the Australianness reached a climax, because it is, apparently, “Australia’s premium food store concept”. Not to mention the Australian red we drank at The Wine Company (or was that the night before?) and all the Australian furniture at PS Cafe.

At Jones’ we ate grilled prawns, crusty bread with dips, ceviche (a little disappointing, but the only thing that was), lamb sausage and cold meats with, naturally, more wine. Sitting outside under the eaves, as the sun crept behind the tall trees, talking, laughing, telling outlandish stories deep into the afternoon — well, we could have been in any cafe in Melbourne on any given Sunday. And it was glorious (and cheaper than Australia, although not by much).

We finished the day at Ben & Jerry’s, with ice cream, in typical Sydney beach manner. But by that stage I wanted to leave; I was Australia-ed out. It’s wonderful every now and then to have a lazy indulgent day in completely fantastic surroundings, but was impatient to get back to reality. When we finally crossed the border in the gathering dusk and headed for home, I felt that that little slice of Australia in Singapore could well last me a long, long time.

Gerai lemang 500 meter

The other day I went to Genting Sempah for lemang and rendang.

I hadn’t intended to go so far. It was my sister’s last day in town, and lemang was still on her list of things to eat. My mother recommended we try the old road between Rawang and Kuala Lumpur. Alas, perhaps only during Ramadhan. The road was hot and choked with construction and notably lacking in anything resembling food stalls. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun; lemang sellers do not.

As we got back to the Batu Caves intersection, I raised the possibility of Genting Sempah. I had discovered lemang stalls there once before, quite by accident, while driving to Cherating. My sister and I drove twice around the roundabout while we made up our minds. Was there enough time left in the day? Was Genting Sempah too far? Eventually, my sister decided that a swim and a lie in the sun were things that could be enjoyed in other countries; a meal of lemang was not.

From the MRR2, the highway to Genting Sempah is easy to get to — just follow the signs to Kuantan. Such an expedition does, however, require some extraneous expenditure, and notable determination. You have to go through the toll plaza to get onto the highway, and once on the highway, you cannot exit or turn around until you get to Genting Sempah, some 10 km further on. Luckily, the lemang stalls here proved to be the type that weathers all weathers, and not the kind to flourish only in the generous season of Ramadhan.

On the way to Genting there is one stall, but on the way back to Kuala Lumpur there are about 25, housed in a row under a tin roof, thoughtfully provided by the government. This illustrates that strange phenomenon which is, as far as I know, unique to Malaysia: the clustering of stalls selling the same thing, in the same place. Whether it’s pomelo near Ipoh, air nipah on the road to Lumut, or, presumably, satay in Kajang, everyone seems to want to capitalise on famous products linked to particular places. Fair enough, but haven’t they ever wondered what would happen if they, say, sold home-made biscuits alongside the pomelo, or durian in the same row as the lemang stalls? What are the actual chances of landing a customer when the twenty stalls alongside you are selling the same thing? And why is it that the way to Kuantan is monopolised by one stall, which has the same-sized government-approved sign — “Gerai lemang 500 meter” — as the 25 on the other side of the road?

Perhaps the single stall has beaten out the competition, but I suspect its loneliness is due to the problem of access. On the other side of the road, there’s probably a discreet path down the hill to the kampung beyond. A number of orang asli men drove their motorbikes, sans helmets, smilingly along the verge of the multilane expressway. On the way to Kuantan, though, there are no nearby kampung and steep hillsides all around. When we asked the lemang attendant how far it was to Genting Sempah, her response was, “Mmm, jauh.” Jauh indeed, in a tin shed at midday on the side of the road with no way out.

I am very fond of wild goose chases. I like to head out at the beginning of the day clutching scanty directions and in search of something that possibly does not exist, and which, even if it does exist, and I do find it, will probably be anticlimactic. The lemang was a little like that — it was enough that it was there. It was cheap — RM4 for a small tube, I think, RM6 for a larger one, and RM5 for a small tub of rendang — but it was nothing to write home about. Varicolored and varitextured, some bits were burnt and some bits soggy. Eaten it by itself, for fear of spilling rendang in the car, we quickly became sick of it. And we still had to continue on the path to Kuantan, accidentally take the wrong turn off to Genting instead of waiting for Genting Sempah, wind our way halfway up the mountainside, and then make a hair-raising illegal u-turn in the wake of two armoured cars toting the rich pickings down from the casino.

Back at my parents’ house, the lemang vanished quickly. I was responsible for some of that. One tube of lemang was packed carefully in tupperware for the long flight to London. My father got stuck into the rendang, and pronounced it the best rendang ever — apparently there is nothing that enormous proportions of cooking oil cannot do. So by the time I got back in the car to drive home, I had nothing to take with me. I had to leave my sister to her international flight, and the lemang to its various destinations. Of course I was much sorrier about the former, because thanks to Genting Sempah I can enjoy a meal of lemang and rendang at any time, but it’s never so much fun alone.

Arrests in the middle of the night

I woke up at three am to see five dark blue trucks outside my window, being filled with protesting immigrant workers. Beware the government who drags us from our beds in the middle of the night!