Seriously considered booking a flight back to the motherland, aka the place in which I, by accident, was conceived, and in which my parents still reside, but upon further contemplation I decided that a flight to and from Southeast Asia costs way too much, especially for the visit I had planned to not exceed two weeks.

Anyway, I only felt the sudden impulse to drop in on the folks in KL because my last surviving grandparent is living with them now, and her memory has weakened over the past few months. I wish I could be with her at this dwindling stage of her life, because if there's one relative I've ever been close to it's my maternal grandmother.

I had lived with her for 3 months at one point in my childhood, in conservative Kota Bharu back in the mid nineties, where I would watch old black and white P. Ramlee films on the TV with her at night in her tiny flat, usually with the movie playing as the two of us had dinner. Some days I would hold her hand and we would walk to the market under the sweltering sun, her head wrapped in a scarf, me in shorts, so she could buy vegetables and fruit.

She walks with a slight limp ever since I can remember, so we would walk slowly and have clumsy conversation along the way. She would say things in her rich Kelantan dialect, and I would understand but struggle to respond in my unpolished Malay, with some scattered Kelantanese phrases thrown in just to amuse the two of us.

Sometimes she would just sit on the floor of her living room, staring blankly at something I couldn't see, and she seemed to be singing softly to herself or reciting verses from the Quran. This is my grandmother who lost her husband some years into their marriage and never had children of her own but took in my mother to help ease the burden of her sister, my mom's biological mother, who had five kids.

It must be tough to be old and helpless. To think that being young and lonely is bad, or frightening, and then to imagine what it must feel like to know all of your friends and siblings, people you have known and grown with for over 70+ years have passed away long before you, and there's only you left behind, waiting.

Waiting for the train to get to your stop, finally, so you can get on and wave goodbye.