The Sound of Settling

I’ve been freaking out a bit more than usual these days, at all the oddest and most mundane things. Things that wouldn’t have made me bat an eyelid in another life.

Peeking into my wardrobe made me panic slightly. I… have a wardrobe? With clothes in them? I haven’t had one in years, or what felt like it. I’ve lived out of backpacks for far too long. Even when I ‘properly moved’ somewhere, to Dubai last year, it never felt like it could be home, so I never put things into my wardrobe. Not that I had to since I left Dubai every other week.

I could not understand the logic of wardrobe organization for a couple of weeks. Where should blouses, pants, jackets or underwear go in one, and how they should be folded. I now have a permanent room, i.e. a place at which I did not have to pay a daily rate, and which wasn’t a friend’s couch in a random city, but for the first few weeks I lived like a vagabond out of my own room, out of several suitcases. Now I’m doing a little better — most of my clothes have made it out of bags and into the wardrobe. I even got myself an iron so I could feel reconciled with the idea. (Though there’s still a suitcase with some of my possessions sitting in a balcony in The Greens in Dubai, the boxes with my pillow, bicycle, water jug and some clothes from a London apartment near Regent’s Park have finally arrived…)

Life has a funny way of getting back at you. As a child (and a teenager) I knew I would live outside Singapore the first chance I got, but in those daydreams the venues were inevitably in the northern hemisphere. What happened? I got there, found neither America nor Europe as attractive as they once were, yet instead of Bangkok or Bombay — my probable destinations in Asia — I found Kuala Lumpur. Love had a lot to do with that, but life is working out for me in and around this city.

It’s a familiar city. The food, the people, the languages. The fact that I’ve spent most weekends here in the last two years, that I visited very frequently from childhood, and never once thought of it as foreign. It’s a city with my favourite haunts and favourite people in them, one with a circle of friends and acquaintances, and opportunities wherever I want them. One in which I have been paying rent for some time.

For all the insane travel of the past years, I never properly moved into a city. I made bases out of a handful: Bangkok, Bombay, Bangalore, Dubai. I passed through many of the same ones on my way somewhere. I made my plans for every aspect of the year ahead, right down to what airlines I fly and which cities I fly in and out of and in which order, around passing through London at least once every five or six weeks. Chalked up frequent flyer mileage and was upgraded to Emirates Silver way too quickly. But I never had to put anything into a wardrobe.

Never had to buy an air-conditioner. Never had to own a water jug. Never had to do laundry on a regular basis. Never had to go shopping for tables, bed frames, or measure the width of curtain rails. About this time six months ago I agonized over how much I missed owning my own pillow, and plotted madly to aim for some measure of ‘stability’, ‘constancy’, and normality. Now that I have it, I’m enjoying every moment of it but I find I have to re-learn some very basic things.

From graduation until now I have aspired to relish whatever I could grab — the quirkier, weirder, the more dangerous the better. I needed to have relatives of former headhunters tattoo my back with tribal tattoos the traditional way — with sticks and needles. I needed to live in a mud brick house in Sana’a's Old City with descendants of the Prophet. I had to smuggle myself into a Yemeni bus in a full burqah/balto for 12 hours so as to pretend to be a local, since foreigners were banned from riding certain routes for fear of risk of being kidnapped or shot in the head by terrorists. I meandered from Beirut to Damascus to Palmyra, Homs, Aleppo, Antalya and Istanbul in a succession of buses, taxis and trains. I needed to go straight from a longhouse deep in the jungles of Borneo straight to Barcelona so that I could eat at El Bulli. I needed to wander about Europe with no plan and no money. I lived out of a backpack and quite successfully made a living with a pen and a camera. That life? It was beautiful. Wonderful. I consider myself lucky to have had the chance to live it. It was also incredibly hard. And pretty fucking lonely. (Which was okay, for a while.)

Since I’m now here, it evidently got the better of me. I’m never going to give that up, but like all my photojournalist (and other hobo type) friends, I’m coming around to the idea that I’d like a place, and person, to come home to. KL, and the girl in it, is that place and person. Life is, as usual, throttling ahead and I’m fumbling in trying to catch up with it. I’ve learned they always work out in the end.

So here’s to paying rent, painting walls, filling wardrobes and building a life in a city not too far from my own.

P.S. I wrote a book. It’s out at Borders, Kinokuniya, etc.