The annotated budak

Behind the stool pigeon

After last Saturday's walk, the visitor centre was a hub of hungry animals. The morning's visitors were packed into the theatrette for a dose of crabby tales, while less attentive guests gathered by the gangways to restore collective spirits. Despite the crowd, the dense square of vegetation between the showroom and cafeteria proved to be a rich foraging ground for a young male dove. Peckish and persistent in his repeated surveys for midday morsels, the bird drew scant attention from groups that flocked toward larger attractions or walkers too weary to lift their eyes for the weight of yet another sighting.

More often (or rarely) encountered as a flash of green that erupts from a lonely path, emerald doves scour the forest floor for the fallen fruit of the bloom. This individual bore on one leg the cold ring of a earlier encounter with foul fingers. He was, however, disinclined to betray past trauma and picked his way to within a footstep of well-occupied benches. Inflamed with enthusiasm, a trio of ladies stomped through the shrubbery in a merry chase for close-up memories. The hunt was cut short by the arrival of a van laden with styrofoam deliveries. By then, the dove had fled to the fringing pond, where the stir of lazy lizards drove it further askew to plunder fresh patches of litter.

Two much to ask for

Hold on tight. It's a time of fickle winds. The sun blows hot and the breeze swings low. The sudden chill freezes your feelings in mid-step, forcing your heart into a wedge with no way out. What can you do when the choices before you beckon without promise and woo with woe? The world is your oyster and yet it clamps shut, leaving you to wander afield in search of a sigh. How long can you last before each cold shudder reduces the room you have for a new round of disillusion? Look before you leap, they say. But when wisdom shunts you short, does it matter if you turn your back to the clutter of emotion and give in to the timeless intimacy of wild and wordless engagements?

On the road of no return

The highway to Old Gombak Road passed by miles of mercantile erections that nestled in the faint shade of retreating cliffs. A shadow (or two) loomed over the late morning, threatening to launch a meteorological assault on our mission and dampen what began as an questioningly lucid state of mind. The good people of the valley once navigated this hillside road in their hunt for higher fortunes, but swifter routes to dicey death and random destruction have turned this windy passage into a roaring thoroughfare of corporate retreats and neglected villages.

A still, cool seep that had formed close to a trackside riffle provided a fishless refuge for tadpoles and striders, as they hovered on both sides of a liquid mirror. The air hung low with the weight of depressed humidity. As if to avoid the smothering deep, damselflies with half opened wings and a foothold of gold darted under the knee line and clung to twigs that threaten to snap at unimagined offences. In the nearby brush, a spider with the body of a marbled pearl manned a ragged web. She was the largest of her kind that I have seen, and her girth hinted that she had reached the final prime of her life that precedes her passing. 

Hunger and the hope of fresh energies drove us to a stall of rural snacks. A wood-fuelled fire in a long pit fanned the fragrance of grains stuffed in briskets of bamboo. A native indulgence whose making is too raw and risky for a rugged island, lemang is a confection of glutinous rice wrapped in banana leaves, stuffed in cylinders of bamboo and topped with a thick layer of santan (coconut milk). Two bars over the fire allow the segments to be placed like the loose rafters of a leaky roof. After about two hours, the rice swells, swallows the santan and burns with the sweet stench of soft woods.    

The cooked, compact mass is shaken from its chamber, sliced and served with a side of dry curry. Each bite is a splash of sweet and salty flavours that melt in your mouth and wedge into fragments of memory that linger but do not last. A cat with pale blue eyes and a face of dust cried for vain attention. The day grew long and words cut short in this slow, suffocating crawl for satisfaction through strange paths that lead to nowhere in particular and every secret fear you hope to leave behind.

Reference: Sri Owen (1976), Indonesian Food and Cookery, Prospect Books, London

Beesy bodies

Besides the birds, bees thronged the fresh blooms of Melastoma that flanked the boardwalk to the visitor centre of Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve in the cool hour before a hive of human activity.

Few, if any, were true honeybees of the kind ravaged by a global malady. Some were big-bodied carpenters that probably match the smallest avian visitors in bulk if not in beauty. Tiny halictids, too, invaded the flowers' crown of powdered gold, vying with minute beetles and shiny ants for the morning's portion of plant protein.

And zipping between the boughs in flashes of beady blue were Amegilla bees that sipped their share with displays of deep throat amid a cloudburst of pollen. Neither unbearably social nor a serious danger to civil society, these overlooked and underrated bees serve as unsung heralds of forgotten fruit and end each day in the bedlam of low grasses, where they rest and slip into the capricious grip of burrowed dreams that still sting long after they fade away.

By the Big Bamboo River

The promise of something new, something surprising, is what brings me back again and again. For many of today's visitors, though, even creatures that seem commonplace to men of the mangal are novelties to be accorded their full share of shock. Children shriek as water monitors stride with cold-blooded audacity through the visitor centre on a manic morning. The first glimpse of a small crab on a tree draws long gazes of disbelief. And old ladies invade the shrubbery to corner the emerald hues of a dove once captured yet unshy. 

Earlier, while the reserve was still stewing in the dew of a monsoon night, the welcome pond stirred with the bubbling of water hens and bulbuls as they squabbled for prime perches on the fringing shrubs. The flaming seeds of the simpoh ayer and dark pulp of purple Melastoma draw too pairs of pink-necked green pigeons and families of flowerpeckers who cast coyness aside in their eagerness to break a nocturnal fast. The metallic chirps of the mistletoebirds invite unwarranted comparisons with superior singers by passer-bys who dismiss every little bird as a warbling white-eye.

By the mangrove boardwalk, a squirrel gathering bedding from the fibres of a fishtail palm inspires awe for its death-defying leaps into a plantain thicket of bamboo. The rising assemblies of roots, however, fail to arouse similar wonder at their quiet struggle for survival between silt and sea. Save the pink-tipped puffs of sea poison trees and sweet visions of soft jelly, the brown superstructure of shade on stilts faded in significance to smaller sights. An inchworm arouses a minute factor of fear. A greater cacophony of amazement and aghast resounded in the first shelter on the route, when eager fingers pointed the way to a paradise tree snake on the hunt for geckos under the eaves. 

After a while, the need to negotiate two worlds grew weaker as eyes sharpened by newborn search imagery feted the crabs on every mound and each skipper on the mud. Nodules that infest nearly every trunk turn out to be lined nerites and pale periwinkles. The resident halcyons are condemned to laugh off every hunt, while audible flocks of migrants sweep over the canopy on their way to old prawn ponds. A whip ray flew under the platform, but gained much less favour than the rosy armed fiddlers that wrestled beyond the wake. The water drew closer as the guests greeted still bodies with frowns and gestures of unfond recollection.

Later, when the buses had rolled out to the point of no return, the straits swelled with a rare fury. The wood creaked and three-and-a-third metres of brackish water flooded the banks of the bamboo river. Rangers on buggies rounded-up stragglers on deluged trails and urged flight to dry ground. A curtain of thick wet velvet draped its folds over the shore, driving humans to the hides but failing to dampen the spirits of more rugged waders who bathed and bickered in a stormy teacup. A gambolling posse of hounds and a bedraggled osprey did little to add to their misery. But there was no silver lining to be seen and half-drowned husks beat a retreat to oblivion, having no further hope of repeating the day's final request of a wee serpent that struck but sorely missed.

Green-eyed monster

Slender skimmer, Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve.