This decaying theatre lays in the middle of Malacca, Malaysia, a city most famous as being a UNESCO World Heritage City with its remarkable history as a centre of transaction and trade between innumerable nations and dialects for over five hundred years.
The roof had fallen in long ago, the vegetation had begun to reclaim the building. I couldn't see it from the outside, but the entire floor, front to back, was covered in this pink, purple, yellow and blue powder; perhaps the sizeable Indian community celebrated Holi here.
A man passes by the doors outside, stops and walks straight to me. He was maybe 60 years old, dressed in shabby, soiled clothes, and was sweating more than I was in the 35 C heat.
We stood in the middle of the room for an hour and talked about everything: his banishment from society, his devotion to the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, how he had studied English literature in England when he was 20 years old, his near homelessness, his paranoia and use of psychiatric drugs. He spoke with the lucidity of someone who spends great deals of time alone, which he said he had. As we talked more and more things devolved into what would surely be described as paranoid schizophrenia, what with police following his every move, secret dealings that fought against him.
He talked about materialism and how he came from the northeast of peninsular Malaysia. He said the Muslims were taking over. He talked about surveillance and an exaggerated police state.
He told one story of how he went to pay the rent for his small apartment room. The man at the desk, he described, carried a subtle but calculated disdain for and superiority over him; his aimless musings on these microlevel aggressions, a miniature world of power was superb.
It was one of those strange moments when the mad make more sense than the sane. Remarkable was that he was completely aware of his diagnosis, maintained a tremendous mastery of English, and decidedly chose to live the way he did, outside of society, in poverty, in simplicity, in thought.
I asked to take a photo of him but he believed I would use the photo to bring the police to him. I didn't press my request.
