Matahari’s Mystery Minibag

I bought a shoulder bag in a bid to stay within the permitted luggage weight on the flight home, since I noticed in the fine print of my ticket ’lady also allowed a purse’ (I think that’s Thai Airways Americanese for handbag, just as ‘pocket book’ is the term for wallet) as well as the allotted 7kg of cabin luggage. It’s quite a smart accessory, made of Thai silk (genuine or faux, I don’t know) which I bought for $10. It has a tiny extra, zipped bag-ette, attached by a split pin and chain to the main bag.

I’ve been amusing myself as to what this teeny compartment could possibly be for. Too  small for a lipstick, your average purse, a mobile phone, a credit card, spare knickers, or even a modern-style hotel room key. Perhaps a pair of headache pills, a coin or two for an emergency call from an old-fashioned call box? One tissue, precisely folded four times? A mini tampon, placed diagonally (or sawn in half)? A solitary cough lozenge or a barley sugar to suck in the descending aircraft as the ears they go pop?  A diminutive pair of bargain, 18 carat gold stud earrings from the gargantuan Phuket Gem Gallery? A little souvenir bi-valve shell, combed from the beach? Or a single Thai 1000 baht  note, crisply folded?

Even more intriguingly, maybe it hides a microscopic, Mata Hari-style braille espionage code punched onto a bus ticket, a discrete stash of small, white, illegal happy pills in a tiny ziplock plastic pouch, or one snort of coke, to be used by the carrier, or passed discretely on in a nightclub’s sulphury haze (nah, she’d probably stash that one where the sun don’t shine). Ditto a love poem, written in tiny, spidery, lemony ink, that requires either a magnifying glass or candle flame to decipher?

 Hmmm, none of these things are quite ‘me’ but…Ah yes! One or even two of the tiny glass bottles of essential oil from my travel stash, which are variously medicine, perfume and deodorant. For this purpose, the wee mystery pouch promises to serve me very well.

The purse evokes a sudden flashback memory of my Red Lady Purse, bought by Mum after careful browsing on my part, in the market at the end of our street in Sama Pah, in Singapore. Made of red vinyl, which got stinky in the humidity and whose brass clasp closed with a satisfying snap, it had the face of a glamorous western-looking, 1960s brunette with Doris day hair painted on it. To my 3 and 4 and 5 year old girl self, it was delightful. My tiny childhood treasures disappeared into it for years afterwards, even once we were living in Australia.

These markets are magical events, the tradition being that they pop up at night only. Just as I loved the food market, where we went regularly to eat delicious chicken satay sticks with peanut sauce, and drank sugar juice from a ‘ju bag’, I loved the lantern-lit markets, where all sorts of bric-a-brac could be purchased cheaply.

My Dad was inclined to give a small ‘unbirthday’ present to the one whose day it wasn’t, and I also recall an equally delightful green umbrella adorned with multi-coloured butterflies, which served as a rain umbrella in the wet, and a parasol in the heat. It was bought for me unbirthday by Dad, in honour of The Green Umbrella, a Ladybird book I could recite verbatim from memory at the age of four: ‘once upon a time a bunny lived beside the deep blue sea, once upon a summer  evening “lovely for a swim” said he…’