Home Away From Home

It’s 2:00 AM, and there’s a knock on my door. Another knock. I bolt upright in my bed, wondering who might be awake at this unholy hour of the night. My door swings open, seemingly of its own accord, revealing… no one? As my door creaks at its hinges, I am shocked to see that no person has been knocking on, nor opening, my door. It stands ajar nonetheless, and a chill goes down my spine as I am reminded of the fact that Southeast Asia is well known for its many spirits. In Malay they are known as hantu (like “Hahn-tu”), which I found easy to remember, as the hantu haunt you.

As fear instead of fascination is struck back into me, I can’t help but shake the feeling that this scene was the work of some other being entirely. Luckily, my intuition was correct.

“Meooooowwwww.”

“Meow!”

I looked down to see that all this was the work of Goodgirl, one of my Amma’s cats who had always found a way to sneak into my room so that she could climb out my window and explore. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, motioned for Goodgirl to come over, pet her for a while, and went back to sleep.

Such has been my life for the last week, exploring what is the same and what is different about two of the places halfway around the world from Hampton that I have come to call home. In this example, Goodgirl breaking into my room? That’s normal. Doing so at 2:00 AM? Yeah… maybe not so much.

This past week has been chock-full of adventure: A 16-hour flight from Chicago straight to Delhi seated next to an elderly Sikh couple, attempting to communicate despite my Hindi being very poor and their English being nonexistent. Navigating immigration in India, where one of the trolley drivers in the airport insisted that I could not leave even though I had shown him my visa and trip details, whereafter he called a colleague and immediately dropped his charges. Staying at a coworker’s house whom I had met during my internship this summer, enjoying a home cooked meal and some Indian sweets before nodding off to sleep, visiting the Foundation the next morning, and navigating the Delhi metro back to the airport in the span of about 14 hours. All of this is not even to mention anything I’ve done thus far in Malaysia. India was my layover that I happened to make an excursion of, whereas Malaysia has been my target all along.

I arrived delayed, immigration was a bit of a hassle, my bags weren’t on the right conveyor belt, and yet, there is nowhere in the world I would rather have been. I finally made my way out of the airport with less than two hours to spare ‘til midnight on the 31st of December. I was immediately greeted by my host family, and after two years’ worth of catching up, it felt as if everything had fallen back into place. We grabbed a small meal together, chatted, and by the time we got back to the hotel, it was already fifteen minutes past midnight. As it turns out, my segue to 2026 had been celebrated by a single firework off in the distance. It didn’t matter much to me though, as I had something bigger than the New Year to celebrate: a long-awaited reunion with my Amma, Appa, and Akkas (elder sisters).

Since returning to Malaysia, I’ve been busy, to say the least, though I’ll elaborate on that further in next week’s column. What’s been the most striking for me are the changes I’ve seen—how two years’ time has altered or maintained the town of Segamat that I know.

There’s a new shop near my house, and one of our fruit trees had to be cut down. There are two new houses on the block that, last I saw, were only concrete slabs. My school has been repainted, and the principal has changed. There are new curtains in my room, and two new cats my Amma has adopted.

All this is to say that I’ve still returned to the Malaysia I know and love. It might look a tad different, my Malay might be a bit more rusty, but all in all, I am where I want to be. I love this place, I love these people, and as I sit here listening to tropical birds call one another on this lovely equatorial morning, I couldn’t feel more at home.