Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize
The visit
5 May 2007
I wish to write about a place of which I know everything yet nothing, where everything is familiar yet strange, a place where I feel I go too often, but never quite enough. This place is the same for everyone, only different.
It is called, of course, Home — not the Home where you now live, but the Home where you were born and in which all things must start.
I used to live in Kuala Lumpur. That is, until I was 15 and my mother rode the Ekspres Rakyat with me to Singapore, where I was to continue my studies. ‘Be careful,’ were her last words to me as she got ready to hop on the next train back to Malaysia. My mother asks you to be careful about everything. You could be sitting, quietly reading a book, and she would say: Be careful.
Nowadays, I fly. The KL-Singapore shuttle, as it is called, takes no longer than an hour. You leave an airport that touts itself as the Best in the World, to land in an airport that touts itself as the Best in the World. I can tell you this — the KLIA is bigger, but Changi International has the better coffee.
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