Deaf for a day
I gulped down some saliva. Did not work. I gulped down some more saliva. Did not work. I waited for five minutes, and in the process collected as much amilase as my mouth could hold. In one swift motion, I tilted my head back and flooded the back of my throat with saliva. Did not work. I feared then that I was going to have muffled hearing for quite some time.
Nothing I tried seemed to work. I tried jabbing my pinkie as far into my ear canal, I tried pushing my palms hard against my ears and then releasing it to create a plunger effect, I tried humming to myself and holding my breath and turning my head real fast and coughing and sucking saliva up to my nose. Nothing worked, and we were already at the base of the hill.
When your ears get screwed up because of altitude, it’s funny how everyone sounds so soft and you sound really loud, almost as though your voice box is miked-up directly to your brain. Just so you know, I regained my hearing over the next hour. Unlike normal circumstances where swallowing saliva takes you from muffled to crystal clear in an instant, the recovery process in my case was gradual where sounds slowly got more and more clear. As a precaution, next time I’ll just descend a foot a day.
After driving 2 hours North, Mom, Dad and I met up with Hui Chin and her parents in Ipoh for lunch. After lunch Mom and Dad headed back to KL and I proceeded North to Taiping.
Upon arrival at Hui Chin’s, we walked up several dark flight of steps until we came to a metal gate. On the way up, there was a segment that I could have sworn had total light loss and would have been sufficient for film development. I vowed to bring my yellow miners hard hat with a light attached on my next visit. We unlocked the metal gate, skipped up another flight of steps and voila, the place where Hui Chin grew up. Hers wasn’t the glamorest of apartments but the place had character and was definitely a potential birthplace of a Keruoac.
Downstairs, Hui Chin’s apartment building neighbored a bike repair shop and neighbor to that neighbor was a restaurant of happy half drunks belting out songs from day to night. There were food courts and a market a minutes walk away. And it was 5 minutes on foot to get to the Taiping Lake Gardens. Actually, everything you needed was less than 5 minutes on foot from Hui Chin’s apartment.