Unless and Until you see it, you may never know.

This morning I took a friend to the hill with me. She has been to that hill a number of times before but this morning was the only time when it was after the rain. Of course, the ground was wet and a little slippery. But despite a little bit of complains concerning the wet clayey soil going into her shoes and the slippery slopes, she did trek the hill with me for almost an hour. That was very good exercise.

However, there was something I did not bother to warn her about and that was the presence of leeches along the wet path. It could have been fine too if she had not seen a few women holding some plastic bags of golden yellow 'assam fruits'. When the women were a little distance from us, she commented on those women bringing along fruits to enjoy on the hill. I told her those were not the ordinary fruits which you can consume raw but the sour 'assam' which came from a particularly tall tree. I then told her how we could cut the fruit, slicing them into almost thirty or forty slices to be dried in the sun. those dried slices of assam could then be used to cook a salty, sweet sour soup for a bowl of thick noodles which people in Malaysia call 'laksa'.

As she was interested in gathering some of those fruits, we looked around for them but was unable to find any as all had been collected. As I have known of another assam tree off the route, I asked her to follow me down a little used path to a small stream where the tree was located. When we reached the spot where the tree was located, we found seven fruits which we collected. Without a plastic bag, that was all our hands could hands and pockets could mange anyway. Happy to have found the fruits, she followed me down the slope to reach the bottom of the hill through another path.

As I descended that last stretch down the slope, I felt an itch near my right ankle. Not wishing to stop until I have reached the bottom, I hurried on. When I reached my car, I squatted down to have a look at the spot where there was the itch and found the two centimeters long, dark brown leech already punctured my skin and starting to draw blood. I forcefully pulled it off and after a few flicks of my fingers, managed to send it to the ground where it curled into the letter ‘n’, moved the front end forward, lifted the hind end to place it just behind the front end. Again the front end was lifted upwards to stretch forward to a spot in front of it. In this manner, it moved forward.

Noticing the little creature that I had caught and the blood slowly seeping out of my leg, my lady friend gave me a horrified look and gasped in disgust at the little blood-sucking leech on the ground.

“Do I have any on my legs?” she enquired, obviously frightened at the prospect of a few getting some blood donation from her.
“Let’s have a look,” I said as I looked at her socks and pulled it down. Oh, my gosh! There were two of the creatures enjoying their meal. At the sight of those new kind of ‘vampires’ she screamed. Caught unawares by her piercing cry, I looked around to see if there was any attention drawn to us. Who knows? Someone could have thought I was up to some kind of mischief. Fortunately, there was no one around the vicinity. What a relief!

After getting rid of a few more leeches from myself and her, she wanted me to make sure that there was none under her pants. My goodness! What was I to do? Take down those pants and have a look? No! I may be a fool but not that stupid for such a deed in bright daylight. So, I cautiously folded the lower part of her pants up to midway to check for the leeches. I certainly would not go all the way up as I fear another scream from her. Hey! Perhaps, it would be a moan. Fat hope! Forgive this guy but he is sometimes up in the clouds with his dreams.

She told me how she shuddered to think such creatures could slip under clothing and go to forbidden places. At the thought of it, she did the most unexpected which was to vomit uncontrollably. What a smelly mess she made! But she was a woman so what can a man do?

Frankly, that was the first time I have seen a woman experience such a disgust for those creatures. Well, there is always something we have never seen or thought would happen until and unless we see it with our own eyes.