In Continuum.

This, is Mas Selamat bin Kastari. He is contestant number one, and the only one, in this year's biggest manhunt event happening in Singapore, broadcasted to the rest of the world through every major television news channel. At last, a male pageant is getting a lot more attention rather than the female ones, which seems to have been the case for the past couple of years. Everybody sees the Singapore "Manhunt" as a sort of joke, men wearing just their swimming trunks and prancing around on a fancy stage and trying to show off their carefully trained muscles and those million dollar smiles. But ratings for male pageant shows have never been known to be too high, probably because of the fact that women nowadays are not too inclined towards men with muscle structures bigger than bowling balls. I guess we have to thank Mas Selamat for his contributions in the arena of manhunt...wait, we are talking about the same manhunt, right? 

A massive manhunt has been going underway for our friend, Mas Selamat, who really isn't 'Selamat' at all, according to our good friend Azhar while trying to make his way over to Johor Bahru for supper one night. Security measures have been tightened up, at last, around the borders of Singapore and all those officers in uniforms are freaking out. They are checking the rider of every motorbike, the driver of every car and the left leg of every human being going out of Singapore for any signs of a limp. It takes three hours to cover just five hundred meters of the Causeway, which is also why the Malaysian employees at my father's office has been running an hour late every morning these days. Security checks have been causing living nightmares for the commuters on the roads, and everybody has nothing but complaints about the situation, with most of them said under their breaths after the window has been winded up. They were trying to cross over to Johor Bahru for supper and the traffic congestion was tugging at the last strings of their patience. "Selamat" in Malay actually means a lot of good things, which is why their new year greetings are usually preceded by the word "Selamat" as well I presume. It's sort of like the "Merry" in "Merry Christmas", or the "Happy" in "Happy Chinese New Year". But seriously, this man is anything but.

As if it is not already enough for the fact that his face is appearing in every possible corner around Singapore, he has transformed himself into a MMS message and invaded every cellphone in Singapore too. I mean, we have his face plastered on the exiting doors of every bus, the walls in the elevators of my school, on the notice boards in the lift lobby under my block, and he is certainly making his rounds all around Singapore to gain a lot of publicity. That other night was the night when my cellphone started vibrated halfway through a news report I was watching on the internet regarding the case. Opening the message revealed his very bored and very frustrated face staring back at me in the middle of the night, and he reminded me somewhat of a bulldog who lost his bone to the bigger dog in the neighborhood. I stared at the picture for some time, and wondered what he must have been thinking about while he took that picture. Probably devising a plan to escape from his prison, or the toilet, whichever. The great toilet break, I am hoping for him to get caught not so much for the safety of our country from terrorist attacks, but to find out how the hell he did it. 

It has been a full week since his escape, and let's face the truth guys: he's gone. At this point in time, there are three possibilities regarding his whereabouts for you policemen to consider. Number one, he is probably hiding in the house of a friend or relative, feeding off them and just hoping for all of this to die down in a few months' time and then running back home to Indonesia to write a book about his great escape which is going to be a best-seller in every major bookstore, I am sure. It's just another form of house arrest anyway, how difficult can it get. Second, he probably died somewhere in the forests while trying to run away from you guys, since showing up in public to find food would be quite stupid of him. I mean, this is the same man that planned an attack on the airport, I am sure he is not just any other retarded terrorist out there. But then again, you guys have already searched all the woods and found nothing, so I am pretty sure he did not die in the woods, maybe somewhere else. Number three, he is already scott free in Indonesia and running through the rain like Tim Robbins in Shawshank Redemption while tearing off his shirt. To me, he is probably gone from this place, floated out through one of the monsoon drains with a float blown out of his pants, or a small speed boat from one of those shady coasts in the norther shores. He had a whole four hours before you guys even did anything to react, he had a hell of a head start. How else do you explain his week-long escape with over a thousand of you guys combing the entire island. 

I cannot begin to imagine how I would survive a week, though. A buried box of biscuits, a hidden stash of money, and probably a bunch of fake identifications and emergency hair coloring lotion to change the appearance, or a shaver perhaps to shave everything off his head. And shaving cream, and maybe a permanent marker to add a mole or two on his face as well. The most ingenious way attempted by a bunch of fugitives happened in Taiwan about a decade ago, when they stormed into a plastic surgery clinic one day and demanded their facial features to be altered. A few nurses and doctors were shot, I am not sure if any of them were killed though. Either way, I don't think this Mas Selamat guy has any money with him right now, unless he also kept a guitar in his buried stash, which might prove to be a useful tool on the streets of Orchard Road to earn enough money for his ticket home. He could look like anybody in this moment in time, as he is reading about the manhunt conducted in a distant country he just ran away from. It must be quite a rush of blood to the head to read about the whole country being turned upside down for a man who isn't even in the country anymore. 

It must suck to be serving the army right now, it must suck. Imagine the kind of security checks involved in smuggling MP3 players into camps, or pornographic VCDs and magazines. No more putting them in your dirty underwear and rolling them up in your socks, they are going to search every inch of your bag just to show the world that they are cleaning up their butt-holes this time around. I read about those poor army boys combing through the thickets in the forests, pushing down every single shrub and bush in the woods. Just picturing the process of doing so is enough to send shivers down my spine, the kind of extra work they have to go through to catch this sneaky bastard. It is very important to find this guy, a part of me knows that very well. But the more efforts they put into looking for this man with every passing day, the funnier the whole incident becomes in a warped and twisted way. All those ministers and all those government officials are being so optimistic, but then they are paid to be that way on camera anyway. I am sure when they are off the camera and on their ways back home, they are secretly thinking to themselves just how screwed they are. 

In the meantime, we should still keep a look out for this man, and that does not mean calling up the police and claiming that you have seen him on a bus somewhere. I mean, he is on the buses all around Singapore, but not physically anyway. Please refer to the picture I have posted above for possible disguises he may be in right now. Anything from a blonde school girl to an Osama-look-alike, from Jack Sparrow to Harry Potter. Oddly enough, the version of him in the bottom left hand corner looks somewhat like Barnabas, my high school classmate. This may prove to be a crucial lead on things, I should keep the number for the police handy.