"I am seeing this word, Jalan, everywhere..." Danae proclaims loudly, her words glauming on to one another excitedly, as she pushes her large brown satchel to one side, "I'm going to ask the taxi driver, what does Jalan mean?"
I see his shoulders sag.
"Excuse me, sir. sir? Can I ask you..." she taps him on the shoulder, "Sir? Yes, Sir. What does Jalan mean?"
"It means road," he sighs, and stares longingly at his GPS, willing it to call upon our final destination.
Peals of laughter erupt from the backseat, and I can almost see him roll his eyes through the back of his head. Then, the mood shifts in the car quite suddenly, as we come over the crest of a steep hill and begin to descend the long and winding road towards home. I notice, all around me, for the first time, flashing lights. A nervous energy winds itself, like a persistent weed, into my body, and I hear my voice, urgent and strangled, ring out in the darkness.
"Is that a police blockade?"
The taxi driver, his fingers wrapped tightly around the steering wheel, nods, and turns towards me for the first time.
"Yes ma'am. Very bad for us..." he smiles apologetically.
"But it's OK right?" I hear myself say, as if from far away, "because you haven't been drinking".
"No ma'am," says the driver in his indistinguishable accent, "they are not checking for the drinking... they are checking for the passports."
My blood freezes in my veins.
I don't have my passport with me, and neither does Danae.
"It's OK", says Danae quietly, all of her previous gusto evaporated, along with my confidence, "we can show them photocopies".
I'm not convinced. The Malaysian police are notorious for taking bribes, and arresting travelers who are unable to show documentation.
As we near the check-stop, a car up ahead is being searched, and I am horrified to see that every officer in the vicinity is sporting an automatic weapon, which resembles an AK47.
Pretty much, this was happening
One heavily armed officer approaches the window, and taps the butt of his gun against the pane. The driver rolls it down hurriedly.
"Yes Sir," he says, timidly, as the police officer ignores him, and sneers into the back of the cab.
"Passports," he says gruffly, and I can tell, for lack of a better expression, that he is not fucking around.
"We don't have them," I state plainly, my voice wavering slightly, "they're back at the house."
"That is not my problem," he says, a callousness buried deep in his voice.
"We have photocopies though", says Danae, a little too brightly, and begins to dig through her wallet.
"You can't produce REAL passport...", he says, "you go downtown".
He opens Danae's door, and motions for us to get out of the cab.
As he turns to speak to another officer, I violently stuff 600 ringgits (about $200.00 Canadian) from my wallet into my bra, and refuse to step foot out of the taxi.
After much pleading, we manage to convince the officers to let me leave Danae at the checkpoint and return to our apartment to fetch our passports. I take her phone, since mine is dead, so that I can use Google maps to find my way. It takes half an hour to get back to her, and the entire time, my heart beats out of my chest.
After an hour of negotiations and travel, I return to the scene of the non-crime, in my opinion, to produce our shiny navy blue passports for inspection. And then, just like that, we are on our way.
One of the things I have thought about often since this incident is how lucky I am to be Canadian. How lucky I am to have a passport. Most of the refugees living in Kuala Lumpur don't have any form of documentation. Nor do they have any ways to obtain that documentation. And for them it means random police checks turn into human rights violations on a daily basis. They are robbed, assaulted, strip-searched, and oftentimes detained indefinitely by police. The system is incredibly broken, because it allows people (and particularly, men) in positions of authority to exploit the most vulnerable populations.
And why is it that I'm special and they're not? Why is it that I can move freely across borders, and my story does not end with violence or humiliation or degradation or detention? Why is it that my face in a little booklet, worth $120.00, tells the police officers in Kuala Lumpur that I mean something?
The more I learn about the refugee plight, the more I realize that the world is not fair.
And it probably never will be.
And that's just not OK.
It seems a small and arbitrary thing, doesn't it, to make such a big difference. You are so right, it just isn't fair.
ReplyDeleteNicely written, Claire. Your posts are certainly covering many aspects of your life there. I'm really enjoying them.
xoxoxox Mom