singapore - kuala lumpur - butterworth

I am on a lower berth in a second class sleeper train heading up peninsular Malaysia from Kuala Lumpur to Penang. Cynthia and I are traveling together, and she seems to be asleep in her bunk, which is directly across the aisle from mine, although I don’t know because her curtains are drawn and she could be just as sleepless as I am.

We left Singapore at 7:40a this morning, after almost missing our train. It was somewhat stressful to run out of the apartment, take a cab the half mile to Tanjong Pagar train station, gulp down hot tea at the railway terminal, run (literally run) through immigration, and then run down the length of the platform to our first class seats way at the front of the train. The station is old and somewhat worn, unlike seemingly everything else in rich and clean Singapore, and I would have liked to linger in the white waiting room admiring the vaulted ceilings, but there was no time to do so, as we were immediately on our way.

Our seats were comfortable—wide, large, and with plenty of legroom—but not as cheap as I would have expected (about $45 USD, still a very good price for our morning’s eight-hour journey), and they carried a smell of septic solution and mildew. We ate our takeaway parathas and sambar in the restaurant car and I then wrapped my handkerchief (on which I had just wiped my sambar-covered hands) around my face to take away the septic smell. Cynthia and I chatted idly for a few hours, although I can’t remember much of what we talked about. I told her that there was something about my face that made strangers want to tell me their life stories, and she told me that what I said echoed something that Nick Carraway said in the opening pages of The Great Gatsby. She also told me a story about Ling visiting her during a hot spell in Geneva, where Cynthia was interning, and Cynthia not permitting Ling to crack the window (because Cynthia was deathly afraid of Geneva's aggressive spiders) and instead instructing Ling to “lie very still” in order to stay cool - ridiculous, funny, ineffective advice.

Although I tried to dehydrate myself in order to avoid having to use the train toilets, I used the toilets twice. (We are now rolling backward, although apparently nobody else on this train is awake to notice.) Cynthia had lent me a skirt in order to normalize my gender presentation and also to relieve the heat rash that my plastic travel pants had caused on my thighs, and I was afraid that in squatting to use the toilet, I would touch the hem of the skirt against the wet, fragrant surfaces of the washroom. This did happen, the second time around, and I made a noise. When did I get this squeamish? On the way back from the toilet, I noticed that the exit doors were flung open, so I held onto the handrails and leaned out the train into the wind, a totally exhilarating experience that reminded me of being thirteen and on the far rear end of the cruise ship from the Bahamas to Florida, looking out at the dark void of the sea and not so much seeing but feeling and hearing the rush of our progress, and thinking that if I made any slight error, I would be lost into the sea forever. Later I told Cynthia about this, and she said that she would’ve come looking for me had I been gone longer than half an hour. And anyway, dropping off a train in a crowded country is not the same as dropping into the Atlantic Ocean at night, two hundred miles from shore.

Our train arrived at 3:30, an hour past schedule, and after a brief stop so that Singapore immigration control could run its exit procedures. Cynthia pointed out that no other country she could think of controlled the people leaving as well as the people entering its territory. We found the left luggage storage at Sentral KL station and took a cab straightaway to the Petronas Towers. We were unable to ascend to the viewing platform on the connecting gangway on the 41st floor, but nonetheless I was very excited to be outside it and looking up at it. I expected it to be sheathed in some sort of sandstone—I don’t know why; I guess I never looked very closely at the pictures—but instead it is made of large rings of wide gauge steel tubes, stacked up to look like an outdated vision of the future. Each cross section of the towers is composed as such: two superimposed squares, one rotated 45 degrees to the other to create an eight-point star, with small circles centered on each of the four points where the two squares intersection. This creates a perimeter that alternates between sharply angled and rounded edges. The effect is that each cross section looks like a dimpled circle, and there is more surface area, glass, and light inside the building. Apparently this mimics patterns in Islamic art. Cynthia called it Art Deco, but it felt more futuristic noir to me than that appellation could capture. Cynthia sang “The Jetsons” as we walked past it, but she mistook the tune, and sang the Jetsons words to “The Simpsons” melody instead.

After our stop inside the Petronas Towers, we found a Malaysian restaurant in the adjoining high end mall and had curry laksa (me) and asam laksa (Cynthia). True to what I had claimed earlier, our waiter, a well-built and handsomely-featured young man from Kolkata, struck up a conversation with me after we ordered our meal and hung around our table for a few minutes asking about my place of origin, my job, my age, my plans. Cynthia and I whispered to each other about his body movements, because he had a special graceful swagger that immediately caught my attention. Cynthia said, “That never happens to me. Nobody talks to me like they talk to you,” which led us to speculate about the relative friendliness of our faces, Cynthia’s New Yorker distance, and my tendency to look at strangers and smile. But these were temporary distractions, and we forgot about all this and left after finishing our meal.

We had planned to walk around Kuala Lumpur, but we found it nearly impossible to negotiate. First we wanted to take a subway to the colonial center of the city, and we spent ten minutes buying subway tickets, but we were intimidated by the rush hour crowd. (People actually queue up to get on the subway, instead of massing in a free-for-all around each subway door like in the States.) So we left the station and tried to hail a cab, but none would take us for a reasonable price, because traffic was too intense. Then we set about trying to walk there, but traffic was so bad that it took us eight minutes just to cross one particular intersection, and pollution was worse than in Singapore on account of the moped distribution, and it was already near our departure time, so we decided just to hail a cab for the train station. Of course, our cab just stood still for half an hour in the traffic jam. I was nervous; our train was leaving in an hour, and we had made no progress. Finally, we asked the cabbie to drive us one block to the subway station, where we finally just took the subway one stop to the train station. This whole process was again somewhat stressful, though also an adventure, and everything turned out fine, as we got on our train without incident. Although I am perhaps undeservedly proud that I am very good at the mechanics of travel (I can decipher maps and train schedules, orient myself in a city based on the locations of the tall buildings, locate left luggage lockers, and solicit more help from strangers than they are initially willing to give), I hope that my hyperfocus on travel logistics did not intimidate Cynthia or make her feel stressed out.

This is my first time in a sleeper car since 2001, when Deepa and I took a sleeper just like this one from Kannyakumari to Kochi. There were no first class sleeper cars available—those would have put us in an individual cabin, Euro-style, with just two bunks and a washbasin—so instead we are in the second class sleeper train, which is just fine. There are about forty bunks on this car, two bunks per stack on either side of the train. I guess the lower berths can be folded up into seats and the upper berths can be stowed away during the day time, but we won’t find out, as we will be disembarking at Butterworth at 4:30 a.m., when everyone else is presumably still sleeping. The bunks are soft sleepers, and each comes with fresh sheets, a pillow, and curtains for privacy. I don’t trust leaving my luggage on the far side of curtain, so I have been lying in bed with my backpack, my shoulder bag, and my day bag lined up alongside me like a companion. When we boarded, we thought we would be staying in a car full of soldiers. There were a dozen men in camouflage uniforms hauling bags off the bunks. Several of them had assault rifles; one man had three slung over his shoulder. I told Cynthia that there would be nothing we could do to avoid being killed in a hail of rifle fire, should it come to that, but the soldiers appeared to be leaving. Anyway, they don’t seem to be on this ride to Butterworth.

For the first two hours of this ride, two children were running back and forth this car screaming with delight, so that the Doppler effect from the world outside my window was being echoed in the crescendo and decrescendo of these kids as they ran past. Now people appear to have settled in for the night. Almost all the curtains are drawn, and I can hear that someone else is playing Solitaire on a laptop, and someone else is watching a DVD at a low volume. I contemplated masturbation about two hours ago, but was deterred by the thin sheet separating me and forty of my best friends. Now it is 1:20 a.m., and I have eaten an entire box of orange-flavored Tic Tacs, the most delicious meal substitute available in southeast Asia. This train, after a fifty minute standstill (and five minutes of gently rolling backward), appears to be moving forward again, though not with much gusto. I will go attempt not to pee into my pants or let my pants touch someone else’s pee in the bathroom now, and then I guess it will be time to try to sleep.