I landed at 3.15 in the morning at KLIA2, which in itself was unfamiliar as these early morning arrivals had always, in the past, been to KLIA on my trips back from Pakistan. Familiarity returned, though, with the passage through immigration, collecting the luggage (as always arriving commendably fast) and walking out of the terminal to remember that here you then have to walk through an entire mall before you get to leave. Of course I couldn’t rock up at my host’s at this time, so I found an open coffee shop, a chain of course but a local one, and lingered over some kaya toast and soft boiled eggs with coffee until around 6. Then I took a Grab to TTDI where my friend lives. It was pitch dark, since Malaysia is not only in the tropics where there is little variation in the length of the day, but it also uses the time zone of its eastern extremity in Borneo, so sunrise is about an hour later than it should be.
A change: there is now a systematic way to get ride-hail cars: a separate waiting area, clearly designated.
I reached TTDI, a nice part of town but not one I’d spent all that much time in, went up to my host’s condo and here I am. In the middle, I showered, breakfasted, we went to the nearby mall (such is life in KL) and I looked into Muji to see if they had luggage cubes which they didn’t, then a mediocre Italian lunch, and back. In the evening we all watched two parts of the Netflix documentary series on the disappearance of that Malaysian Airlines flight. When the GF and I first arrived in KL, there was a sense of trauma around those two hideous flights – we knew at least one person who’d had friends on both flights – and the Bersih protests kept failing, and the 1MDB stuff seemed impossible to disentangle, and the haze lay on Malaysia like a poisonous shroud. It was a feeling of a country feeling trapped and despairing, and now, nearly eight years later, it’s a different country, but still one full of sadness for what could have or should have been.
Anyway, the documentary was nonsensical and had as its chief witness (at least in these two parts) one of those amateur investigator bros who make me want to snap my teeth at them like a rabid wolf. I also felt a lot of sympathy for the government and airline – they undoubtedly mishandled it all very badly, but it was also a truly exceptional situation, and the officials they interviewed were wrecks.
It was good to meet my friend – one from Pakistan who moved here just after I left KL, and I was startled to realise she’d been here for nearly 5 years, twice as long as I lived here. I suppose KL was the last place that felt like home – Istanbul doesn’t and might never.
I get this strange intensity of feeling when returning to a place I’ve lived before. As though the entire history of my experience of that place: the joys, the sadnesses and frustrations, all that I experienced, comes back in a bundle.
After the documentary I was very sleepy and fell asleep while working. I dreamt that the GF cried out sharply as there was a funnel web spider right before him, and I looked up to see another one before me. I wrenched out of sleep and finished my work, but I don’t know how it was as the dream, and the wrench of waking up, are still with me.