Anis Rozalina Ramli

In your half-closed eyes I see - the life we made in half-made beds the morning breath and many cups of tea; - the lips we kissed and kids we raised, much taller now  than me; - the love that overfilled and flowed and then quite suddenly... it slowed. But now an empty stare, a frozen face are all that I can see. Rest well, my love, the night has come for you to sleep  in peace.

  Macalister Road on a Sunday morning was the perfect spot. Big crowd, plenty of distractions, lots of tourists. The scent of musty old books reached my nostrils and its familiarity made me smile. Many of the old Indian Muslim vendors here were my friends. When I was small, they welcomed me into their shops and allowed me to choose a title from their towering stacks of second-hand books. I’d sit quietly in a corner to read page after page, escaping to worlds of fantasy, romance, and dreams, where life always seemed to be much better. But today, I wasn’t here for the books. Today, I was here to work. It was almost the end of the month, and Tok Pah had her grocery list ready. It wasn’t a long list since it’s just the two of us living in Lorong Maqbul for many years now—and for many years more, I was sure. At the very top, in big bold letters, she’d written tembakau. I grinned to myself thinking of her weakness for it. She never could part with her tobacco, or her snuffbox containing the

  I found Kareem outside the museum, smoking furiously, a cloud of smoke whirling about him. I sidled up close. “Hey…” He just grunted back, still in a foul mood. “It’s not an on-off switch for me,” I repeated my words earlier, this time, gently. When he didn’t say anything, I continued, “I’m hoping it will be more like a dimmer control.” He snickered at that. A half-laugh was better than a grim face, I thought. “So, it’s not easy for you, either?” “The hardest thing I’ll ever have to do," I said. He turned to study my face and measure my words, a questioning look on his face. I nodded, suppressing the tears. Without another word, he flicked the ash from his cigarette and passed it to me. I took it gratefully, inhaling a long, deep drag that hurt my lungs, before sighing out the smoke around us. (An excerpt from a work in progress)

  Throughout the 30 years of my existence, I never knew my mother. The first time I heard her voice was also the last. “I’m sorry,” she whispered over the long-distance phone call. Days later, she died. Space and years of separation between us took forever to cover. In the little village where she was buried, six feet down and worlds apart now, the chasm between us widened irrevocably. That made me cry even harder for a woman I would now never have a chance to know. (An excerpt from a work in progress)

  It's only the second day in the week and already I feel like my brain is slush. The vomit of words onto paper, I had to lick and swallow back again. Vomit, lick, swallow. Repeat. Think I need a hug... and maybe a flavoured ink (or a stronger drink).

Thirty years after the pandemic swept through the country swiftly and cruelly, forcing a state of emergency on the whole of Malaysia and the evacuation of the entire population, I found myself back in Kuala Lumpur. It wasn’t the city I remembered from memory. That one had flash floods in the middle of the day after a heavy downpour, and horrible jams immediately thereafter. It had double-parkers, tailgaters, and very little sense of polite civility. That one was also warm, chaotic, colourful. The people were divided by politics and religion, but united on the streets and at dinner tables. It was imperfect, but it was home. At least for the first 25 years of my life. And now, here I was in KL. A very different KL than the one I had left in 2020. A new government, new leadership, new laws. Together with the rest of the Southeast Asian countries, it made up the Greater Indochina Confederation, a new world order after the fall of Asia during the pandemic, under the single rule of the Chin