Two different worlds

Salam is my colleague, the friendliest guy. He was born in Yemen, bred in Saudi Arabia and is now working full-time in KL while officially still a college-goer in PJ. We are in the same team: his operation territory is the Middle-East while I’m covering Indonesia and Thailand.

As we started our first day of work together, we bonded quite quickly. Yesterday we had a lovely chat during lunch. He’s a convinced Muslim, prays five times a day, doesn’t eat pork (obviously), drink alcohol, touch cigarettes nor drugs. The only thing he does is smoking shisha (water pipe) with grape taste. He likes it a lot he says, maybe I want to try one day. I say I’ve already tried one with watermelon taste, strawberry and something else sweet (can’t remember what) when I was in Turkey.

He likes living in KL; he’s been here for five years now. It’s more liberal here, even the Muslim population shows more skin than back in Saudi Arabia. There’s hardly any camels in the neighbourhood and not many men wear dresses.

He also likes Indonesia very much and for that statement I praise him. Many of his fellow students are from there and the places that he’s been so far are nice. He wants to go to Bali one day too. And he prefers speaking Bahasa Indonesia. He says Bahasa Malaysia is more suitable for ladies: if he speaks it, he doesn’t feel like a real man. All the singing and the “la” in the end of sentences, he doesn’t understand that.

When I ask about his future plans, he says that he wants to get a job experience and marry his cousin (mother’s brother’s daughter). “Insya Allah”, if God permits. He wants to save up some money first so he can support himself and his family. I ask, “What if your cousin meets another guy who can support her now?” He says, “If I deserve her, God will give her to me, the day will come.” Whoever she will be, his future wife will have to cover herself from top to toe, even her eyes. No other man is allowed to look beyond the black, he says while peeking at my (decently covered) cleavage from time to time.

He asks me what The Netherlands is like. I was speechless for a while, thinking of tactful things to tell him without blowing his mind. I say we’ve got four seasons, windmills and tulips. It’s a nice country, very nice, we ride the bicycle a lot. He asks whether you can buy drugs everywhere and use them too. I say only soft drugs and not everywhere. He seems satisfied with the answers I give him.

I could not tell him about the gay friends that I have, or possibly paint a picture of the Red Light District of Amsterdam, or the coffee shops, or explain the fact that prostitution is legalised, or the belief in monogamy (our laws permit gay marriages, yet officially a man cannot have more than one partner), simply because I’m afraid that everything would be beyond his belief. And seriously it would.

He’s the friendliest guy. He holds the door open for me, he gives me his seat so I don't have to stand, he pays for my lunch when we go together. But Salam and me, we come from two whole different worlds.

Will explore this further…