port dickson (say it, now, in the malaysian way: poddick son). it’s a hell of a town. at the tail end of the development boom of a decade ago, my father bought a holiday flat here, which swiftly went to seed. a corner on the tenth floor of cell block c — that’s us.
but once you look past the mildewed exterior walls, and the eerie green tint of the swimming pool, it is possible to live it up. the two hours of traffic jammed down the highway from kuala lumpur — fully explained when we passed by a rainbow bus in the ditch — became mere hiccups of the past the moment we set foot in billion pasar raya, a behemoth in the middle of PD town, crammed full of cheap everything: children’s clothing fashioned from lurid nylon; brown-paper-covered notebooks; small aluminium curry pots; big, ugly shirts for big, ugly men; that primary school paste of my childhood, in little tubs of primary hues, with matching applicator paddles (i had to buy a pack, just for the smell. if they’d had those lotus-scented erasers, i would’ve bought those too.) and let’s not even get started on the grocery section on the ground floor. i lingered too long at the self-service bins, a wall of familiar savoury crackers and sweet biscuits, and left, eventually, with nothing.
but there was no shortage of food of course — two nights brought us two slap-up seafood dinners for not very much money at all. the first night, in the fabulously faded restaurant of the terribly nostalgic hotel merlin, the classic cantonese dishes competed against a backdrop of pink and green.
the next night, at a much newer establishment — built to an exact match of the adjacent chinese temple — we were serenaded by the karaoke caterwaul from upstairs, and the operatic new year salute to the gods next door. we had a dish of mean little crabs in chilli sauce, but we got them back by chomping right through their brittle belly shells. there was a steamed pomfret, in the teochew style, all strips of salted vegetable and chunks of tomato — and a piece of lard, we were assured by our mother — but the kid ate her share, and mine, and quite a bit more. there was squid in crunchy batter, and the lightheartedness and glee you get from fried food, until we discovered a tiny, inquisitive snail making its way across the lettuce garnish.
i’d like to tell you that all our prior reservations about port dickson were vanquished during our short time there, and for the most part, in a purely superficial way, they were. late on the second day, we overcame our misgivings about the glowing green water in the swimming pool — a man languidly walked the perimeter that afternoon, flinging ladles of what i took, trustingly, to be chlorine from a bucket hanging off the crook of his elbow — and splashed about to no ill effect. we made sure to keep our heads above the water at all times, and this is how we did not miss a tabby cat by the pool’s edge, thrown back by violent convulsions before vomiting up a disagreeable something or other.
we walked uphill through the rainforest of cape rachado to a historic lighthouse, talking all the way of monkeys, and coming across none. we got caught up in banking hijinx. we bought cake boxes at billion! we stayed clear of the beach, fearful of the blinding sun and the warnings from concerned relatives about the high levels of e coli in the surrounding waters. so we took long naps in the afternoons, and that always makes things better.
we had driven past the fixtures of a military history on the way into town, but on the way out, it was villages and dusty brown all the way to the highway. the schoolkids walked along the road to get home, the chinese and indian girls in bright blue pinafores, the malay girls in baju kurung and headscarves, the harsh afternoon all around. we were heading home too.
