‘W’ (the girl I tried to shrug off multiple times in the last 4 days) I conjured today, is a typical delightful malaysian simpleton. I had lunch with her today, discovered she’s 29 (when she seems like an innocent braced-up 22 yr old). She has these serious solemn moments while she listens to someone or eats…infact she’s an intent listener without knowing it. She has feelings for a guy who’s homosexual (which she’s aware of, no doubt)…she has a passport sized picture of him pinned against her cubicle (god knows how she got a hold of that) and publically refutes her lust for him.

While we were waiting at the lifts to go out to eat, he walked…or butt strutted (you know, that style of walking and swinging your ass when you wear killer heels; they showed it on Oprah) out of the men’s ‘teddy factory’, strapped with a serious man bag. He has the same last name as me, and is another fine specimen of a  male (God’s private joke against us straight women). Anyway, when she caught a smidgen of a glimpse of him, she bolted for his face, clutching it with both hands and almost pressed her nose  into his neck (it was quite a racy moment for a bystander to envision). She’s a muslim and she’s single…I thought that doing such a thing was dangerous altogether. She loves him, because even after she stopped gushing about him, her blush wore off after 30 mins or so.

I got to know that ‘W’, although conditioned to be a devout muslim (as I guess most of them are) seems to dialectically battle (also without knowing) with the forever existent notion of how muslim girls (especially) don’t eat after Friday prayers like Males do, and that they can’t go against the prescribed order or codes of conduct , lest dire punishments will befall them.

I, having a ‘forever foreigner’ attitude to “cultures”(even though I’ve travelled around so much; its just the safer option to act like that), had the booger to enquire into how and who would punish them if they did question or go against the prescribed norm. She had to be all obvious and condescending and say “God lah” adding a “when you die, he’ll do this this that one” to which she got a “aoh” from me. She told me she feared such things and I tried my half assed best to tell her she shouldn’t be afraid (its so easy to make people fearful of things that dont exist, according to me). I was too full from my ‘mamak’ lunch and was drowsy as hell.