![]() ![]() I only remembered the eerie darkness, the turtles, and monks scurrying about in yellow robes. ![]() As a child, I hadn't appreciated the natural magnificence of Ipoh's limestone caves. Inside the caves, the air was cool and the rock faces astoundingly beautiful. Modern conveniences abounded, but the turtle pond is in a clearing and you can't air-condition open space. Malaysia had become even hotter, no doubt about it trees had been cut down in the name of progress. ![]() I felt sorry for the turtles, who barely moved in the heat. And the water was still as murky as I remembered it. When I returned with my mother 32 years later, the pond was still there. When I left for school in England in 1979, I took away a host of memories, little knowing that I'd resurrect them one day. Ipoh is also my hometown it feeds my dreams. We were in the Sam Poh Temple, one of several Taoist-Buddhist temples built into the limestone caves around Ipoh, the northwestern Malaysian city in which my first two novels are set. But I was they had strange-looking limbs and primeval shells, and their heads bobbed up and down as they moved around the green pond. "How can you be afraid of turtles?" my mother asked, with incredulity. I must have been about three - an age when all animals terrified me. ![]()
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