Her Eyes

The conveyor belt shackles across the dimly lit hall as the screeching planes scream the sun into existence. One by one black bags lay strewn across the hall, slowly moving out of the reach of their owners. An entourage of tourists from all over the world--a "batik painting" as my father jokingly said--pounced on their bags, ripping them off from their once peaceful respite. A monotonous voice captured the speakers and flushed the airport with a homophony of delays,delays, and more delays. Little girls danced to the beat of his voice, leaning forward every time he paused and falling back on their feet when he resumed. Security agents laid their heads on their metal chairs while their eyes shunned the dark light from the scanning monitors. Fields of palm oil trees strained across the plane as far as the eye can see, but I got quite the surprise when I looked out the window.

Just outside the airport, thousands of Malaysians wandered around a new pasar--a familiar sight but not in a place like this. Market vendors boasted about their fabulous prices and spat the quality of their goods to a crowd of craving Malaysians. Anybody could smell the alluring concoction from a mile away: fresh fish, fresh meat, and fresh fruit. From above, the market was an incomplete puzzle of colorful tents shining red, white, and blue. Engraved across their roofs were classy British slogans that the Malaysian vendors barely understood. Keep Calm and Eat Abang’s Roti Bomb, Bloody Hell My Kuih Is Bang Out of Order.

The flow of customers did not seem to end, a fresh sight compared to those pasars out of the city. One stall, Bang Mohd’s Bulldogs, looked particularly enticing with its fiery grills and brown smoke. Spanning its black grills were a variety of hot dogs (the one with chili was a sight for sore eyes), but most of the customers surrendered to their famous plain white hot dog. A lady, who wore a red tudung (as most ladies did in the pasar), scrambled for money as the vendors explained why they only accepted dollars or pounds. The growing smog burned the lady’s eyes and trapped her in a state of distress while she checked her pockets again. The world is getting smaller everyday my lady, we don’t need a million different currencies. She acquiesced in her lost and abandoned her plain white dog, living to starve another day in the fog.

Overwatching the commotion was an old lady who hid behind her bright shredded tudung. Her stall was made of a small plastic table, probably unable to hold a heavy dinner. She had three small containers of kerepek kacang that had been crushed into little pieces. There was no line, and surrounding customers did their best to resist her bright shredded tudung. Beside her was a drain deafening those who surrounded it with its violent cascade, crashing and falling back again. The only things I could see from her shredded tudung and her worn out baju melayu were her wrinkled hands. Her veins popped out from her measly skin, strangling her body with a flood of blood. Her bones and joints were trembling, refusing to remain still--refusing to give in. As she tried to turn her head away from the brown smoke, I managed to capture a glimpse of her hidden face.

Moles were mottled across her face and were whipped by her wrinkles moving against the smoke. But nothing defined the lady more than her eyes, and there they were. Plagued with cataracts, her eyes mirrored the clouds above, and as if nature was pulling a trick, something about the decrepit lady seemed lucid. Compared to everybody else in the pasar, her eyes didn’t seem to burn from the growing brown smog. It was as if her eyes lived and saw beyond the pasar and beyond the field of palm oil trees to whatever lay there…

As we found our luggage, the brown smog encompassed the pasar, and the old lady, clenching her bony hands, cringed as the smog lashed her from her seat. For a moment there, I thought I saw her veiny hand reaching out and gesturing me to come down. But the smog clouded my eyes, and, for once, I was blinded.

After I looked back at the pasar, she was gone--almost as if she had never existed. The brown fog cleared up, and the army of customers appeared once again, lining up and waiting to consume whatever the vendors had to offer.

And just like bags on carousels, they waited to be picked up and taken away beyond the fields of palm oil trees. But they waited, and their eyes stared straight ahead...endlessly.