Two weekends ago I went out with a friend of mine. We walked, we talked, we ate and we got to that point in time when the only thing left to do was to buy a bottle of wine and go drink it in a park.

Obviously, alcohol is prohibited in public spaces in Malaysia (Muslim country, remember?:)). So we were careful to have a proper camouflage for it. It was about 8.30 pm and we were very innocently sitting on a bench, drinking a bit of wine and talking. I would like to stress the innocently part…we were literally 1m away from each other and we were just talking!

Completely out of nowhere two policemen appeared. WHo obviously spoke no English, so the whole conversation happened between them and my friend (who luckily is Malaysian) and with me goggling my eyes at them, struggling to catch a few words. It was quite obvious that they wanted our IDs. After which apparently  their first question was “Are you married?” And they didn’t even want to know if we were married to each other! But they were wondering if we were married to other people and hence, on our way to obviously committing adultery!

It felt a bit surreal. I was already considering how much money they will want as a bribe (such instances are well known here so I had heard many stories). It took forever! They kept moaning and groaning and checking our IDs…apparently they were impressed that I was a teacher (it says so on my visa). After which another surreal conversation: why are you sitting here and not where there is more light? To my friend’s “the bench there was not clean” answer, they did not seem very impressed. And continued talking about how sitting like this in the dark can make people think weird things. And why would we want that? We should just sit in the light so that there is no danger, and people don’t get weird ideas.

This whole conversation in MAlay lasted about 5min. They then finally gave us our IDs back (I had been terrified that they might not give my passport back!) and left us with the wise advise: “You can stay here but where there is light”.

You might not be surprised to find out that I was quite happy to just get out of here. To realise only afterwards that, had any of the two of us been Muslim, they would have called the Islamic police and two options would have been in store: either we got married or we went to jail…