I can barely breathe walking up the road to the altar. My uncle has taken us to visit my grandfather’s grave in a massive cemetery called Nirvana, the entry to which resembles a holiday resort. A respite one never leaves. We’d stopped beforehand at the Saturday markets to buy kuih for breakfast and bouquets for the grave, and we eat at a weathered stone table while a family offers incense nearby. Their two small boys chase each other in the shadows, though perhaps more cautiously than they usually do. A dog moves sleepily in the heat.
My mother was already here earlier in the year when he died and she flew back for the funeral. A day more clouded than this one. My uncle has told them to expect us so when we finally head out, a blue gazebo is set up over the grave. From the bottom of the hill it takes me a while to spot the blue dot, no bigger than my thumbnail. It’s the kind of gazebo you’d find on any beach in New Zealand with strong steel arms that could withstand any West Coast wind. There is none here, though, the air heavy and still. It feels like there are two hands pushing down on my chest as my breaths grow more laboured. We traipse like ants up the steps in full sun. Dreamlike, moving in slow motion.
When I leave home two years later, my parents put in a deck and an arched pergola. It has plastic curtains that roll up and down the sides and a clear PVC strip that lets sunlight in. “I was worried that if we chose white for the top it would be too blinding,” says my mother, “but it’s not, it lets the perfect amount of light in.” We sit on the deck for lunch. “Wear these,” says Dad, laying out blue rubber slippers. I have been coming home almost every Saturday for five months. The wind picks up, sharp enough to sting when one inhales, and rain starts to spit so my father rolls the curtains down.
Over noodles from our hometown and an assortment of sliced fruit, Mum tells me that her sister has been diagnosed with lung cancer. There is no good way to hear bad news but I’m grateful to have heard it in person, that neither of us had to be alone in the telling or the hearing. Later, my dad takes me down to the fence that borders the neighbouring property out back. For the eleven years I lived there, a thick forest of trees lined the boundary, blocking out the sun, housing insects and all manner of small furry animals. It feels like a different world, a friend said once upon visiting, a kind of paradise. I thought nothing of it at the time, taking the familiarity for granted. But when the neighbours finally sell the property for development so many years later, they chop down all the trees along our fence.
It feels like the world has come pouring in, as if someone has lifted the roof off the dollhouse and uprooted everything with clumsy fingers. I trail behind Dad, not wanting to approach. The soil looks bald and I realise just how tiny the patch of trees must have been, those trees that had once been forest. Dad stands at the fence, hands on hips. I turn away and head back up the steps, thinking how little it takes to build a world and how home might be nothing more than finding shelter in the palm of a hand. How easily that grasp might slip.
He won’t let me sit on the bed in outside clothes. “Sit on that cloth if you have to sit on the bed.” It’s the third time I’ve been to Sydney in the past eighteen months but it’s the first time I’ve visited his room. I needed a place to crash for a few days, so my cousin Aaron kindly offered to share his room with me. I have a queen-sized bed we can share but I snore and I drool, so if you’re fine with that then all good.
“Put these on when you go to the bathroom,” he says, nudging a pair of blue rubber slippers towards me, the exact kind laid out at my parents’ house for when one ventures into the garden. I would’ve rather gone barefoot everywhere. “You’re so Asian,” I laugh. He’s defensive: “That’s who I am and I’m not going to change myself—” “No, no, it’s comforting. It’s like home.”
We find the black tombstone etched in gold. The other half is unfinished, awaiting my grandmother. Pavers line the border of their plot; my dad sits down. A wilting bouquet lies directly over where I imagine my grandfather’s chest must be. All of this occurs on the side of a gentle slope. It faces an opposing hill where urns sit in lines, holding the ashes of those who couldn’t afford a full grave. Wealth tells, even in death. Yellow diggers rest abandoned in the distance, midway through preparing the ground for the next lot of corpses, the soil already half opened and raw.
My mother was adopted by her uncle, so my grandfather is biologically my great-uncle. I know she loves him, but it is a hard-won love. It is a love born from duty. A love in which one wakes up every morning and chooses to honour that person despite the hurt and pain. And to move so far away — I can barely begin to imagine the effort it would’ve taken to try and bridge that distance. It is love not as downward motion but as a steep and patient climb. Ant-like up stone steps. It is a love I will have to contend with when two years later I start to figure out what it means to be a good daughter, what it means to entwine myself with someone else and build a life of my own.
I stop coming back every weekend. It’s months before I sit outside again on the deck with them, taking lunch slowly, sitting around the lounge letting life pass us by. I tell my parents I’m busy. I take days to reply their WhatsApp messages. I am absorbed in the running of my own life. I am exploring a different version of my self — an alternate existence. I say “nothing much” when my mother asks what I’ve been up to. I say “good” when my father asks how I’ve been. I conceal what had always been known to them: my location, moods, my day-to-day. What holds a family together? I wonder as I drive back to the flat. Earlier that day, my flat-mate had asked what I was up to. “Going home — I mean, to my parents’ house. We’re already home,” I’d said. “It’s still home,” he said, “home-home.”
To go anywhere else is to remove the possibility of true return. There is no such thing; there is only a forward travelling. For at that point, one’s life diverges. You become someone other than who you would’ve been had you stayed. And it is strange how, when you leave a people or a place, the label you wear that was once so invisible and so easy before suddenly becomes complicated. Having left Malaysia, was I still Malaysian? Having left my parents, was I still a daughter? Our circles were slowly turning away, drawing wider and wider radii. Perhaps this is what is meant by ‘losing touch’: our orbits no longer crossing. The distance feels insurmountable, the translation between our horizons almost impossible. Jeanette Winterson writes, “What then kills love? Only this: neglect.”
My cousin and I had only bonded the year before on a vacation to Sydney when we ended up walking laps around a park into the early hours. We roam the city again, and this time I recognise the places he takes me. “Oh! This was where — and then we went — and that was the place — and you took me —” He takes me to the same pier he took me a year ago, except we make far more sense to one another this time. To return is to realise how far one has come. Return is forward motion. We build on this, year on year. “You have to come back here,” he says, “you have to come and stay.” Both of us running from the ties that bind. But, in all our freedom, running towards what — loneliness? Maybe love isn’t as easy as we imagine and we’re chasing a fantasy. I am haunted by the idea that what I truly want is something I might have had all this time. And now I sense it only by its loss.
Every weekend over the first summer I leave home, I make my way up the local mountain. There are at least six different ways to the top. Different people tend towards certain routes. Tourists take the main road, marked most clearly on their maps. Runners and cyclists take the steeper road, the one that hugs what feels like the back side of the mountain though mountains have no sides, just shadows where the light may choose to fall. Locals take dirt tracks closest to their street. These are the quietest, where people walk in twos up the mountain, ark-like. They trail dogs, sometimes children.
My favourite one is nestled in a residential area with barely a hint of an entrance except a small blue arrow indicating the summit. Rough wooden steps are hewn into the soil. The incline is dense with trees, so the sun has hardly a chance and you feel you are in the middle of the bush instead of an inner-city suburb not more than twenty minutes from the CBD. You feel you are in good hands. I savour the feeling of being adrift and not having anyone know my whereabouts. Lost in space and time. Unreachable. It feels like a different world, a kind of paradise. I stop halfway up, unmoving.
When we leave my grandfather’s grave, we have to turn back and bank the cul-de-sac which divides the two hills. I almost miss it because at a distance it blends in with the urns but I see it when we make the turn — at the end of the road, balanced precariously on loose gravel, is a full-sized copy of Michelangelo’s Pietà. In the centre of a Buddhist cemetery in a Muslim country, Mary holds the broken body of Christ. She isn’t gripping him. Only one hand supports his ribs, as if she sees no point in tightening her grasp on what has already slipped away. To truly love someone is to grant them freedom, to love them through the consequences of the actions you let them choose for themselves. I don’t know who put the Pietà there; I don’t know who lets it stay, or why. Maybe they see only a woman cradling the remnants of her bloodline — the dead body of the one she loves.
We sit on the hardwood floor because I’m not allowed on the bed in outside clothes and my cousin tells me everything he can’t tell his parents. Mask after mask comes off. We travel through every layer. The good daughter. The dutiful brother. She still prays for me. What does it take to hold a family together? Sometimes love requires hiddenness. Mum does too. Do you think it does anything? But not here — this is a closeness with absolute trust and without fear and I want to cry. We talk about all our hopes fallen short. About the people we love but cannot bring ourselves to use the keys we hold to their happiness. He sits with his arms around me. In this city which neither of us is from, I have never felt so at rest. Like that small thicket of trees next to the fence, like that blue dot of a gazebo. A whole world in a grasp of the hand. What is love — what is home — but the knowledge of when to let go and when to hold on?
The theory of parallel universes fascinates me most for the fact that we continue to cling to the idea and its poetic possibilities. The desire for what one could have been — what one might be, even now, even if it isn’t here. There is a universe in which the things that went wrong didn’t go wrong. There is a self who hasn’t known this sorrow.
There is a parallel universe in which, instead of making excuses, I go home the weekend my mother learns her sister has died from the cancer. Mum texts me on a Sunday and I call the next day. She wishes she’d made the time to properly chat to her sister when they last exchanged a few messages the week before. “You didn’t know,” I hear myself saying, “you couldn’t have.” “I know,” she says, “and it’s just hindsight, but still.” But still, one wishes.
She tells me she’s flying out tonight to go to the wake in two days’ time to do her duties as a daughter. “They said I didn’t have to if I wasn’t up to it. Of course, if I don’t, everyone will talk. But even apart from that, I feel that I should. I didn’t go back when she got married.” It isn’t so much that one ceases to be a daughter as it is that what it means to be a daughter must necessarily evolve. In an age of obsolescence, an age of waste and burnout and burning through others, an age of loneliness despite constant stimulation, it is rare to find people who endure. While much of love is letting go, love is also honouring the commitment one makes to another and all the actions and duties one might otherwise not choose to be bound by if not for this person, this bond. I tell her I’ve cleared my night and ask if I can come home for dinner. She’s embarrassed and says not to worry, that I don’t have to come home — only if I want to.
Only if you’re up to it. Only if you want to. What do I want? To be a person with the right priorities, to be a person who endures and chooses daily to climb the mountain of love and commitment. To find the right distance and span it. To know what matters and hold onto it. To be a sanctuary, to have the ones I love feel that their love is safe with me.
And so, in this universe, we both go home on a Monday.