- Journey to Segamat
A fashion model decked in feathery boas carries the latest Gucci handbag with bamboo handles. From colossal billboards, she peers down at pedestrians. Just opposite, an equally gargantuan dog, half coloured, half in black and white, stares ahead with doleful eyes from the screen of the latest Apple phone.
People always seemed to scurry a little faster in this part of town. There was always another shop, another restaurant, to visit. But the model and the dog in the poster were not going anywhere. Plastered on tall buildings and peering down, they were still not privy to the plans of these mortals and pedestrians walking past. To be people in posters was to be out of reach. To be elsewhere was a type of luxury not everyone could afford.
Tasha was at Orchard Road, enjoying a girls’ night out after she had finally closed a deal on one of her insurance sales. The insurance was for the employees of a reputable private company. Tasha’s boss had promised her a hefty commission if she succeeded. Charming her way through, Tasha eventually secured the deal. After months of work, it was over, and here she was celebrating at a swanky bar, sipping on a well-deserved cocktail. As her other two girlfriends took turns trading office gossip and their latest spin class achievements, the sky with its swirling orange hues peppered with rambunctious mynahs jostled for Tasha’s attention. It made her think about her home in Malaysia and how it had been almost three years since she last saw her parents. She had officially received permanent resident status in Singapore a couple of years back. There was still work to be done in the office during the COVID period, and truth be told, she could not be bothered to go through the mind-boggling process of pandemic travel.
Those reasons aside, she could not help but feel guilty for not trying hard enough as the sole child of her aged parents. Surely, her parents would want to see her since the last time they had done so was at her nephew’s birthday party. He had just turned three then and was starting to speak in sentences. It was a smattering of speech, less baby babble. Video calls with the cherubic boy surprised her all the time because he could hold longer, more logical conversations. She should secure train tickets home at once if she did not want to miss him suddenly turning into a primary schooler.
“Babe, you there? Nelly and I were just saying we should try the new dessert place at Ngee Ann City after this,” Hazel suggested, looking at Tasha quizzically. Hazel was already clinking the ice cubes in her almost empty glass. She took one last sip and got up to leave. Tasha promised herself that she would call her mum soon.
They took another short stroll under the inky dark sky to Brian’s Bistroat Ngee Ann City and oohed and aahed over the menu. There were light salads, avocado sandwiches, and a wide choice of cakes, from the earl grey banana to the best-selling devil’s chocolate cake. They were to die for! Or rather, that was what everyone who had been here before said. Tasha had a premonition of herself exiting the café later, satiated and in a state of a food coma. Still, the three girls sashayed in for the cheat day they believed they needed. Considering it was the start of the weekend, the café was unsurprisingly crowded.
The music in the café was faint and pleasant. Popular and lyricless acoustic tunes. Neon décor tastefully adorned the mock brick walls. Tasha felt that it was just the right place to be. She had just celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday and second-year work anniversary at this company. Things were definitely looking up. She felt youthful and maybe a little hopeful, despite the world not functioning “as per normal.” They ordered some food. The devil’s chocolate cake, too.
Devil’s Chocolate Cake: A cake layered with chocolate ganache, moist chocolate sponge, and chocolate whipped cream. Perfect for the quintessential chocolate lover. Most restaurants or cafés used the “devil” label to tell customers how sinfully good their chocolate cakes are. At Brian’s Bistro, the devil’s chocolate cake lived up to its name. Purely good chocolate cake. This cake is from an original and traditional chocolate cake recipe. No surprise wafer, no gimmicks in the centre, but still so good! Rave reviews from repeat customers.This was far from a health nut’s dream of vegan or eggless chocolate cake. Brian’s Bistro continued to describe it as an intense flavour of rich, dark chocolate cake with ensconcing chocolate cream. Slight notes of hazelnut.
It was time to taste the real deal. It made Tasha grin as she waved away thoughts of packing on extra calories and how gaining weight was so easy nowadays. They sunk their teeth in its goodness. “Mmmmm!” her friends gushed at the unmistakable chocolatiness of it all. It was “an honest chocolate cake.” The cake was indeed honestly, sinfully good.
When it was time to leave, she felt a bit too full and said goodbye to her friends heartily. She had mostly enjoyed the evening. The bright company and good food that night made her feel less sullen, she supposed. Tasha was strangely aware of how she felt. She was thankful for having friends she could vibe with. Talking about nothing important like fashion or exercise routines had been nice. It was also salary well spent on entertainment and company.
As it was still early, people were streaming along the street in many directions. Tasha had resolved to be home quickly because she had been sleeping less than five hours each day for the past week and felt physically close to a burnout. That seemed likely, considering how hard she had worked this past week. The younger Tasha would most likely have stayed out with her friends until the wee hours of the morning, but age had crept up on her, and it was not that she was no fun anymore; it was simply the fact that Tasha now preferred more sedentary pleasures. Curling up with a book at home, playing with her cat, video-calling her parents in Malaysia, cleaning . . . the phenomenally ordinary list went on.
Tasha made her way mindlessly to the entrance of the underground linkway leading to Orchard MRT station.
Home was a couple of stops away from Orchard, but as she boarded the train, the strong urge to sit down made her scan around frantically for a seat. There was one! Yes! She plopped onto the plastic green seat and took out her phone. Time for social media. Pictures of Nelly, Hazel, and her behind a gigantic slice of devil’s chocolate cake had already been efficiently uploaded as part of a thread of photos. Swipe. Smiles all around. “Devil’s Advocates!” Tasha “hearted” the picture while telling herself that she looked a lot like her mother in that particular photo. Or maybe it was because Tasha was missing her a great deal. Concurrently, her friends were also sending in streams of candid and silly photos on their WhatsApp chat group. Brian’s Bistro was decided as an exclusive go-to place for them.
The next stop passed, and the MRT roared to life again after stopping for a few rushed seconds. The silence of the cabin lulled her into unconsciousness.
Then Tasha woke up and realised she had dozed off for a short while. A haunting feeling gnawed at her. Though groggy, she knew she was still in the MRT. She did not think she had missed her stop because . . . just a while ago she had been texting on her phone? That was how tired she was. Amid the darkness outside, it looked like Tasha was in a foreign country. There were no signs of the uniform HDB blocks that would pass her by on regular train journeys. No malls in her peripheral vision. Instead, there were thick trees, abandoned factories . . . or did they look abandoned because it was late evening? Surely everyone had gone home. A chill ran up Tasha’s spine as she thought about how oddly deep her short nap had been. Maybe she had missed a stop, or a few. Then she got her answer. The train pulled up in what looked eerily like a Malaysian train station. SEGAMAT, said the sign. Wait. Wasn’t that farther up north? How the hell did an MRT cross the border into another country? That was not the way the MRT worked. Was this some kind of a joke? Plus, the Singapore–Malaysia border was still operating at a minimum capacity because of COVID-19. There was no plausible explanation for the absurdity. Tasha felt a jolt of fear. Had she been kidnapped? But she also felt an overwhelming curiosity.
There were not many people left in the car where Tasha was, but one thing she noted was that nobody behaved like they were out of place. It was like the train was indeed bound for Malaysia, of course it was, how could she not know? No need for a passport, no need for any cross-border declaration. The fact of the matter was this train from Singapore was travelling to Malaysia, and at that moment, that was exactly where Tasha was. She was finally in the same country as her parents, though not exactly nearby. Tasha’s parents had a house in Johor Bahru, the state right beside the Singapore border, and it would take at least a couple of hours to drive from Segamat to Johor. Although it had been just an hour ago that Tasha had enjoyed a good time with her girlfriends at Orchard Road, time seemed to have fast-forwarded.
The theory of relativity was at play—or in this particular situation, it was being challenged. The person (Tasha) inside the train would see time as moving slower than a person outside said train. It was like she had skipped the unimportant parts in her Korean drama series to get to a more intriguing future. Fast-forward. Wasn’t it just a few hours ago that Tasha had wished she had the opportunity to see her parents in Malaysia? The orange sky, the birds returning to their nests at the end of the day . . .Tasha had reached Malaysia.
Tasha felt a little lost as she was not exactly ready for a weekend trip in Malaysia. The only thing she had on her person were her clothes. Cash and a couple of cards in her purse. No Malaysian ringgit notes. In that twilight moment, she looked at her wristwatch, which showed that about twenty minutes had passed since she started to make her way home from Orchard.
Where would she go? She did not know anyone in Segamat, had no relatives here. From what her father had told her, it was a small town and not very developed. It would be a different story if she had found herself in a big city like Kuala Lumpur or even Johor Bahru for that matter.
Those cities seemed to never sleep, just like parts of Singapore itself. Funny how city dwellers were often comforted by the very things they wanted to run away from. People said the city was a stressful place which devoured their souls, and that they longed to languish in the countryside or on a sandy beach. But at times, though it was hard to admit, the pulsating street lights outside of her bedroom, ever present and warm like a hug, seemed to be the most comforting thing to turn to. There were not much of those in Segamat. While Tasha did not feel alone or terrified, she wondered what to do next. Or if she would ever wake up from this strange lucid dream.
Quickly, she switched on her data roaming when she realised there was some signal. Now she could send messages with no worries of chalking up hundreds of dollars’ worth of handphone bills. She called her parents first, and unsurprisingly, their frantic voices filled the other end of the line when they heard she was in the country. “But how? Tasha, is everything okay?” Her mum did not let her dad speak at first. Tasha, not wanting to exaggerate the whole thing, promised them that she was alright and that she missed them and wished to see them soon. So near, yet so far. Her dad managed to interject to say that they were willing to drive to Segamat to get her. She was still, it seemed, a little girl in their eyes. It was bad enough that she had to trouble her aged parents to come and get her all the way from Johor Bahru. But she said yes.
What would she do for the few hours that she had to wait at this dilapidated old station? Tasha wondered if she should have told her parents to come for her in the morning. She could have tried to find a hotel nearby to stay the night. Her fingers hovered inches over the hotel-booking app, but she decided against it. They were already on the way, and she wanted to prevent the barrage of texts that would come her way if she told her parents that she intended to stay overnight in a city she had not really been to. The truth was she wanted to go home, to where her parents were. A hotel was temporary, like her residence in Singapore. Home had become many places to her, but that night, she wanted to feel like she was back at her childhood home. In her old bedroom with the same lumpy mattress facing the old brown wardrobe. Familiarity. Family.
It was a long wait at Segamat station. She thought about the faces she had not seen for a long time. Mostly of neighbours and cousins. It would not be long before she could see them again. She had friends in Singapore, and life was nothing but comfortable there. But it was something else to be in a place where her first memories were made.
When someone finally cried out Tasha’s name, it was music to her ears. Her parents were here! She ran to envelop them in a hug. There they were in front of her, in flesh and blood, not mere pixels on a Zoom screen. Her mother had a floral scent on her, and her dad wore a bright polo shirt and smelled like sandalwood. It was an unexpected homecoming for Tasha. She shed a few tears, and her parents laughed kindly at this. “You were the one who said you could take care of yourself now, that you would not need us as much . . .”
“I kind of miss being home,” she answered honestly.
Then her mother motioned for her to sit on an outdoor bench by the station as she took out a transparent microwavable container. In that rectangular box was chocolate cake moist. It was different than the ones in cafés, her mother’s chocolate cake was. Tasha had a fleeting memory of her mother raving to her when she had first successfully replicated this trendy Malaysian chocolate cake recipe. On top: rich chocolate sauce with chocolate sprinkles. Below: a chocolate cake layer which had been steamed instead. Saccharine chocolate sauce and steamed chocolate cake in every spoon dug and devoured. A no-bake cake.
Her mother fed her daughter several spoonfuls. Still the same taste. Eating this chocolate cake was like receiving a hug from a beloved. Tasha realised she had not reached her quota of chocolate cakes eaten on that day.
The storyline is a plateau instead of a mountain. Most of the characters do not go through much development. Also, the story has a primary school composition kind of feel to it.
