The para-athlete who once won a medal for Singapore and now sells art on the streets of Kuala Lumpur

His departure was so sudden that his family in Singapore had no idea where he had gone. Mr Dasuki now reckons his mother may have later figured out that he was in Malaysia, since he had briefly stayed at his sister’s place in Johor.

With no idea where to go or what to do, he spent the next several years wandering through Peninsular Malaysia, taking up odd jobs and seeking temporary shelter at mosques or whatever he could find.

“At one point, my backpack was stolen while I was asleep in a mosque in Johor,” he recounted. “Luckily, I slept with my skateboard under my head (like a pillow), or else it might have been stolen, too.”

One of his pit stops was Langkawi, an island in the northwestern state of Kedah. He spent about six months helping out on prawning boats, which he enjoyed.

“When we had nothing to do out at sea, I’d jump off (the boat) and swim,” Mr Dasuki said, adding that he had been an avid swimmer in his youth.

Next, he headed to the northeastern state of Terengganu, where he found work as a packer for keropok lekor (traditional fish cracker), earning RM7 (S$2.20) a day.

More unexpectedly, he also found a new family of sorts.

“When I reached there, a resident saw me at a mosque and asked, ‘Where are you going to spend the night?’ When I said I planned to sleep at the mosque, he told me to go live with him and his family instead.”

Mr Dasuki still acknowledges them as his “adoptive” family, returning to Terengganu to visit them many times over the years. Those visits later came to an end, for a reason some may find peculiar.

“The patriarch kept asking me to cut my hair each time I visited. And he’s an elder, so I tried my best to show him respect. So I eventually stopped visiting.”