A Good Cop, a Wild Driver and a Weird Ride Home

Outside the minimart at 2am was a tuk-tuk driver; mid thirties, furious, waving his fists and gesticulating wildly as he glared at me as if to suggest; ”Barang – you are only scratching the surface of my righteous anger, so do not push me further.”

Rather a hefty and out of proportion reaction for attempting to pay the guy off for running out of petrol and attempting to guide me across the road to Dante’s vision of hell known as Bodeng, where the driver assured me we could refuel. Somehow, I didn’t fancy that.

At the riverside ten minutes earlier and against my better judgment, I’d hopped into the rear of this wiry but wild-eyed man’s tuk tuk. I should have known better and realized this when he attempted an unscheduled detour around the back of the tenement building and only reluctantly got back on course when I insisted on him stopping at the late night minimart on Sisowath – directly opposite the notorious crime ravaged tenements and still a few hundred yards from my apartment.

Just two doors away from the mimimart is a small and rather unkempt police precinct building and it was there that I proposed we went – the two of us – to resolve matters.

He snorted with absolute derision before yelling, ”Yes! We go. Now! We go police – no problem. I…am…Khmer! Ha!”

The implication was clear: his fellow countryman – police officer or not – would side with him as a matter of national and racial pride and I was being an idiot to assume otherwise.

The cop, who was in his late forties with a thick neck topped by a careworn placid face, sat positioned on a blue plastic chair at the entrance to his station; barefoot, knees apart with his hands resting on a generously proportioned tummy.

He seemed indifferent both to his fellow countryman screaming and shouting about the grotesque indignity he’d just suffered at the hands of this barang and also to the barang himself standing a couple of yards away surreptitiously trying to attract his attention with a rolled $10 note.

As he panted with the immense physical effort of being so angry, the tuk tuk driver’s face twisted and contorted to show rage and then indignation as the words spewed out far too quickly for my very limited Khmer language skills to pick up. I did work out, nonetheless, that the agreed $2 late-night premium fare from the riverside to my lodgings a few hundred yards away had in quite mysterious fashion risen to $5.

And as the ranting continued the cop sat there, still buttoned up and inscrutable as I scanned his face for any visible emotions: any sign of which way this would go, but there were no emotions, no signs, just the same unchanging poker face.

After what was only perhaps three minutes but seemed more like an hour, the cop raised a thick sausage-like finger which he allowed to hang ominously in midair for a while before pointing it at the tuk- tuk driver and then flicking his wrist sharply and vertically upwards.

No words were said, but the implication was clearly understood as the now ashen-faced tuk tuk driver – looking like a goalkeeper who had just picked a thirty yard injury time screamer out of the back of his net – turned tail and sloped off into the night, glancing back just once to grimace menacingly in my direction.

The indignant oaf continued to loiter outside the minimart, still quibbling and now attempting to drum up some interest from a pair of passing motodops. On noticing this, the cop spun around on his stool, summoned a young rookie cop from the depths of the scruffy shophouse station and – wagging that sausage-like finger once more – instructed the teenage recruit to take me home on the back of a beaten up Honda Cub while simultaneously ignoring the $10 I was offering him for the assistance he’d provided.

Later and while nursing a very large scotch, I quite oddly bore the tuk tuk driver no ill will – rather I blamed myself for trusting my safe passage home to such an obvious loon who’d been gibbering angrily to himself from the outset. It came as a great relief, nevertheless, that the local constabulary don’t always live up to the woeful reputation that precedes them.