This article was written by Janet Halliday

1st Photo by Janet Halliday 2nd Photo by Norhendraruslan

Peter Carey made a good choice when he set large parts of his novel My Life as a Fake in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. It's a city where not just some things, but most things, are not as they first appear.

It seems dedicated to hard commerce, but pragmatic businessmen hire lion dancers to bring good fortune. It looks ultramodern but a traditional Malay village survives in the central business district. It appears divorced from nature, but rainstorms can paralyse it and pythons periodically pop up in new suburbs. And you think it has a single population, but it is really home to three distinct peoples and cultures.

And of course you can buy all kinds of fakes here.

I lived in KL, as everyone calls it, for four years. I then returned to Britain, read My Life as a Fake and was struck by its authenticity, which is paradoxical for a book about (possible) fraud. Moving between Britain, Australia and Malaysia, it focuses on the discovery of some wonderful poems and the mystery of their author's identity. It powerfully evokes the KL of 1972. That was long before my time, but I recognised scents and sounds, localities and ways of life.

"My only impressions of this foreign capital were heat and smells," says Sarah Wode-Douglass, one of the main characters in the novel. When I went back to KL for a visit my own 'second first impressions' were of heat, noise and colour.

Sauna-like heat and humidity under a white sky. Manic traffic; tenor roar of cars, lorries and homicidal buses, overlain by the soprano whine of a myriad small motorbikes weaving crazily in and out. One buzzes past with a whole family aboard, the man drives with a small child between his legs, the wife sits behind with a toddler on her lap and a baby in her arms. None wear crash helmets.

Office employees pass by. In Britain they'd all be in monochrome clothes. Here that applies only to the men, who wear crisp shirts and trousers, ties if they are 'management' (nobody wears a suit jacket unless about to meet a high dignitary). The women, though, are resplendent in brilliant saris, colourful western dresses, or batik kebayas, graceful traditional costumes combining ankle-length sarongs and long-sleeved tops. 

The women's clothes highlight the best thing about Malaysia, which is its tri-ethnic culture and the way the three peoples comfortably coexist. Other countries pay lip service to multiculturalism, but here it's a daily, living reality. A Malaysian is not just a Malaysian, they're a Malay Malaysian, a Chinese Malaysian, or an Indian Malaysian, and most of the women wear a kebaya, western dress or sari accordingly.

The three Malaysian siblings have had their bad patches, of course, same as any family. In the aftermath of the 1969 election there were terrible ethnic riots and killings. Whole streets burned and bodies floated down the river.

That horror had two consequences. Firstly it compelled recognition of, and remedial action for, the interethnic economic inequalities and subsequent resentments which led to the violence. Secondly, and more importantly, it shocked everyone to the point that harmony has been key ever since.

It sounds like a trite, implausible cliche, but nowadays the three peoples do live together pretty contentedly. They work and eat together, share each other's public holidays and festivals, may worship in a mosque, temple or church all in the same street, may send their children to the same schools. They're retiring but welcoming, overwhelmingly hospitable, smiling and courteous except when in charge of an internal combustion engine, and with a capacity for eating which proves a quart will easily fit into a pint pot.

I'm hungry.

Sarah and John Slater, another main character, walk to Kampung Baru for banana leaf curry, murtaba, chilli crab and a stomach upset. Kampung Baru's still there, and in another of KL's contradictions, it's a Malay village marooned by history slap-bang in the city centre. The traditional single-storey wooden homes, with delicate fretwork along the eaves, are designed for coolness: raised on stilts to catch any breeze, with floor-length unglazed windows with balustrades for safety and curtained for privacy. They sit in surprisingly large plots, originally intended to enable the owners to grow vegetables or keep chickens (goats were banned). Given their location, today they must be some of the most valuable gardens in Southeast Asia.

However, stomach upsets aside, I'm not going to eat there. It's the only place in Malaysia where, for no tangible reason whatsoever, I've ever felt a vague disquiet, felt I wasn't wanted. Instead I choose one of the many clusters of back-street food stalls which provide lunch for the (very picky) local office workers. All kinds of goodies are on offer: rice fried or boiled, curries of meat or vegetables, noodles in soup or fried, naans, murtaba, roti, dahl.

I perch on a plastic stool at the roadside next to a group of ladies, and soon we are chatting amiably about the glories of Malaysian food while I devour a plastic plateful of nasi campur. Tha'ts boiled white rice, with an assortment of curried vegetables such as okra, long green beans, aubergine, carrots and kai lan. It's delicious, and doesn't have any untoward after-effects.

I set off for Chinatown, one of my favourite places in KL. The city centre seems to be just a forest of skyscrapers, but suddenly between them appears real jungle. A low hill, Bukit Nanas, has somehow retained its patch of tropical forest amidst the frenetic roads and gleaming offices, and is now designated a reserve. I can hear birds, and monkeys crash through the treetops.

The hill is crowned by the pink KL Tower (not to be confused with the iconic Twin Towers). Local gossip asserts that it's pink because, when it was built in the early 1990s that was the favourite colour of an important politician's wife.

I turn down Jalan Dang Wangi, a seething thoroughfare once called Jalan Campbell and a pivotal location in Carey's novel. Christopher Chubb, the man who gradually reveals the fabulous poems to Sarah and who is the focus of the mystery, lived - hid? - in a bicycle repair shop on this street.

Wandering down it, I suddenly feel cold in the heat. The traffic noise seems to fade, obliterated by the memory of a squeaking bicycle wheel, which heralds Chubb's first appearance.

After all, there really is a bicycle shop here. Maybe it does repairs, too.

It's in a row of traditional shophouses. It hasn't moved with the times; there's no plate glass, no chrome fittings or strip lights, just an open-fronted, dim cavern stuffed to the grubby ceiling with a tangle of new and secondhand bicycles, ranging from mountain bikes to tricycles. Two Chinese men squat on the covered pavement in front, silently fiddling with the chain of a bike. Neither glances up as I pass. Neither speaks.

It's eerie.

Seeking protection from I know not what, in Chinatown I plunge down an unpromising gap between two dilapidated buildings. It appears to lead to an unsavoury back courtyard. In fact it leads to Sin Sze Ya, KL's oldest Taoist temple.

Its secluded site and skewed alignment in relation to the surrounding streets were dictated by feng-shui, which is alive and well in this hard-headed, commerce-driven capital. On a main venue two modern, corporate HQs face each other. The escalators behind the glass facade of one form an X, which is bad feng-shui for the business facing it. So the latter has hung a little round mirror on the front of its building to bounce the bad vibes back again. The owners of the X escalators have responded by placing a small, decorative cannon before their doors, to shoot down the flying forces of evil.

Back at Sin Sze Ya, the massive, pillared portal is hung with lazily smoking, three-foot-tall spirals of joss. Inside the incense smoke thickens to a scented fog, through which I can make out intricate carvings, brilliantly painted and gilded statues of the gods, the main altar hung with red silk and piled with offerings of oranges and flowers, and a few people silently praying. Old women in cropped trousers and high-necked tunics, a couple of businessmen, a boy in school uniform who has laid his exercise books before a deity. They all hold bunches of smouldering joss sticks.

I buy a bundle from the fortune-teller's desk and go to a side altar dedicated to Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. She's portrayed as a beautiful young woman dressed in white and I've a soft spot for her because she hears all prayers and protects travellers, amongst others. I light my joss sticks, bow to her three times, silently ask her to look after me and my partner, and jam the sticks into the sand-filled holder in front of her.

No matter where in the world I smell joss, the aroma always and instantly takes me back to KL. As I leave the temple I catch another characteristic pong: drains. Or is it?

Odours are central to Carey's portrayal of the city, "the alien mixture of smoke and spice and sewer and two-stroke exhausts." The smells of smoke and spice and exhausts are still there, but sewers? Am I wrinkling my nose at drains or durians? 

Durians look like green, spiked rugby balls and smell like open sewers. They're said to stink like hell and taste like heaven, but personally I think they're wholly vile. The Malays love them, call them the King of Fruits and are willing to drive miles to find their personal best.

The fruit's stench is why a lot of hotels have notices on their doors forbidding the entry of durians. When I first came to KL I thought they were a downtrodden ethnic minority, much to the hilarity of Malaysian friends.

In Chinatown the renowned nightmarket in Jalan Petaling is the Malaysian capital's own capital of fakery. It's the place for fake designer watches, fake designer accessories, fake designer shoes, fragrances, jewelery . . . and of course the traditional pirated computer software. It's all here, copied with varying degrees of accuracy and quality. Ethically dubious it may be, but there's something endearing about a Lewis [sic] Vuitton handbag or an Ammani [sic] watch.

Sadly, Jalan Petaling has become a theme park. It now boasts a Disney-style Chinese gateway at each end, and has been given a transparent roof to spare vendors and buyers the inconvenience of any tropical rain. The stalls are there all day now, although their numbers increase at night. It's very touristy.

Round the corner at the south end of the street is the Old China Cafe, which isn't touristy, and I stop for a cool lime water. The cafe was once the headquarters of a laundrymen's trade guild, founded to help washermen newly arrived from China to find work and a place to live. I sit at a marble-topped blackwood table under fading brown photos of the guild's long-gone members. Two huge feng-shui mirrors face each other across the room, infinitely reflecting back and forth the good luck believed to enter the building each day with the first morning light.

I prefer the less touristy nightmarket on Jalan Tunku Abdul Rahman. It sells everyday items that I find more interesting: tropical fruit and strange vegetables, clothes and questionable herbal remedies, kitchen utensils and kitsch trinkets, savoury snacks and luridly coloured cakes. It's not operating today but no matter, my goal is to feast my eyes in the fabric shops along this street.

Some are huge department stores occupying several floors; others stretch narrowly and claustrophobically back from a small frontage, sometimes burrowing right through the block to the parallel lane behind. All are palaces of gorgeous cloth, with fabrics for all pockets and purposes. I luxuriate among fabulously costly silks, shot with gold threads, for Indian weddings; damasked satins fit for a Chinese empress; colourful batik lengths specially patterned in two halves to make Malay kebayas, in which the sarong and top match but are differently patterned; and brocaded kain lelaki, the broad cummerbund-cum-apron which is part of traditional, ceremonial dress for Malay men. More prosaically, I could buy machine-embroidered tablecloths or old-fashioned net curtains.

On this street is the dilapidated Coliseum restaurant and bar, a place where in Carey's time there was Worcester Sauce on every table. It looks decidedly dubious, but is actually perfectly respectable. I go in for another cold drink.

The Worcester Sauce has now been joined by HP, tomato and chilli sauces, but otherwise the Coliseum is not only unchanged since the 1970s but since the 1900s. Dark wood chairs, hatstands and door frames; marble-topped tables; frosted glass; an ancient bar; and a framed pamphlet on the wall telling you what to do if your servant gets malaria. It's a unique retreat, forgotten by time, where the atmosphere is pure 1920s-Colonial. So is the food, which is best ignored. But the drinks are fine.

Carey's story is about hoax and fakery, hidden identities. Kuala Lumpur is genuinely itself, but its 'self' has more than one face and its real identity is as complex and mysterious as any novel.

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