Riding Past Graves: Notes from Malaysia’s Covid Years
Graduated into lockdown. Rode the LRT past graves. Filed stories while Malaysia gasped. This is how the plague rewired everything.
I have a recurring dream that begins on a silent LRT platform at 6:37 a.m. The platform clock is frozen. A newspaper flutters along the tracks. Every headline is the same: 117 Deaths, 33,464 Cases, 0 Accountability. I wake before the train arrives, already sweating, already late.
For two years that dream was not a dream. It was my commute. I graduated into a plague, handed a diploma by courier, and boarded an elevated train that sped beside terraces of freshly dug graves. Each morning the rows grew longer, like a spreadsheet set to auto-increment. I thought I understood pessimism before the pandemic. Philipp Mainländer told me the universe yearns for its own extinction. Mark Fisher taught me that the future could be cancelled. Camus swore that revolt is the only cure for the plague of absurdity. Yet no philosopher prepared me for those hills behind Bangsar station, terraced like rice paddies, headstones sprouting where I used to see bougainvillea.
This essay is my autopsy of that period: an attempt to exhume the terror, the guilt, and the slow-burn clarity that arose from watching a nation confront mortality with press conferences and hashtags. If the pandemic was a sermon, the city preached it in two voices, one official, one spectral. I listened to both, took notes, and now stitch them together in the hope that testimony can be a kind of vaccine against forgetting.
I. Convocation by Courier
In early 2020 City University Petaling Jaya live-streamed its graduation ceremony. My video froze on the Chancellor’s smile. The buffering wheel spun so long I wondered if that was the new coat of arms: Facultas Interitus. Branch campuses shut. Internships vanished overnight. Friends who expected cubicles found themselves tallying caseloads in their parents’ living rooms. We were the class of Windows Pop-Up Ads: infinite notifications, zero windows of opportunity.
I remember the phone call from the HR officer:
“We like your writings, Fayyadh, but hiring is frozen until the numbers stabilize.”
Which numbers, I asked. GDP? ICU beds? The index of national denial? She laughed without humour and said, “All the numbers, dear.”
For months I shuffled between my bedroom and kitchen, the radius of my world limited by infection curves and depressive inertia. I had dropped out of culinary school five years earlier because the kitchen heat matched the heat in my skull. I switched to journalism believing that facts were cooler, safer. The virus taught me that facts are as flammable as oil. Every day produced new data, every night a new explosion of rumor.
Still the world insisted on symbolism. My degree arrived in a padded envelope, accompanied by a letter congratulating me on my “momentous achievement.” I used the envelope as a mask filter when pharmacies ran out of three-ply.
II. The View from the Kelana Jaya Line
When the Malaysian Reserve finally hired me in March 2021, the Delta variant was already rehearsing its solo.
You cannot unsee a graveyard in motion. It glides past like stock-ticker sorrow. Monday: a hundred new rectangles of earth. Tuesday: plywood planks stacked for the next shift. Wednesday: a backhoe silhouetted against the KL skyline, its bucket poised like a surgeon’s claw. The imam’s prayer tent resembled a news desk: microphones, cables, the urgency of narrative.
Inside the carriage we observed a silent etiquette. Eyes on phones, masks tight, bodies angled to avoid the windows. Occasionally a commuter would lift her gaze, meet the cemetery, and then look away exactly as one looks away from a homeless child at the traffic light. Pity costs attention; attention is scarce.
I adapted by taking notes. Reporters survive by turning horror into copy. I kept a daily log of cases, funerals, stimulus packages, police raids on “non-essential” noodle stalls. The numbers metastasised. Each time they doubled the government announced a stricter acronym: MCO, CMCO, EMCO. I joked to colleagues that the only letters left were SOS.
III. Mainländer on the Morning Train
Philosophical pessimism sounds elegant at a dinner party. It is less chic when the air reeks of disinfectant and your fellow passenger wipes invisible spores from the handrail. Mainländer argued that the world is God’s slow suicide; creation is the wound, entropy the balm. Reading him on the LRT, I felt a guilty kinship. The graves outside were proof-text: the universe really does crave reduction to zero.
Yet the guilt lingered. I was alive. I had a salary, however modest. I was not lying in a plastic body bag while drones sprayed disinfectant over abandoned flats. Survival felt like theft. Theologians call it the problem of evil; journalists call it privilege. I filed stories about cash-flow relief for small businesses while the nasi lemak seller beneath my apartment paid compound fines larger than her monthly revenue. She slipped envelopes of rice through iron grilles like contraband. The state branded her illegal; the virus was less judgmental. It considered us equally digestible.
IV. Fisher’s Specters in the ICU
Mark Fisher wrote that late capitalism kills the future by trapping us in a loop of formal nostalgia. Malaysia practised that theory in real time. At every press event ministers invoked Merdeka resilience, “progress”, the sanctity of family. They showed archival footage of 1998 flood volunteers, Rambutan drives, the late P. Ramlee singing of unity. Meanwhile ICU doctors livestreamed ward corridors where patients gasped against ventilators, the beep graph of oxygen saturation rising and falling like derelict stock prices. The slogans were warm, the ward lights cold.
Fisher would have recognised the schizophrenia. The state sells yesterday’s heroism because it cannot guarantee tomorrow’s. Hauntology is not metaphor when a hearse idles beneath your office window. The future cancelled itself at the toll booth. EZ-Pass lanes accepted death as legal tender.
V. Camus in Latex Gloves
So why bother? Camus says the plague exposes the absurd but also the possibility of rebellion. My rebellion was modest. I kept riding the train, kept filing stories, kept texting bread recipes to friends who were losing their sense of smell. On days when the numbers spiked I bought two lunches: one for myself, one for the security guard who checked my temperature. Small gestures accumulate. If cosmic doom is inevitable, generosity is the only interest-bearing account.
One Friday I interviewed a grave digger at Raudhatul Sakinah. He wore goggles, two masks, and the resigned smile of a man who has accepted that every conversation is a potential obituary. I asked how many burials he averaged. He shrugged. “We stop counting when the earth is too wet to hold another name.”
I asked what kept him from despair. He pointed to a line of saplings at the cemetery edge. “We plant a tree for every tenth grave. One day the cemetery will be a forest.”
A forest of the dead feeding the living. Photosynthesis as resurrection. I promised myself to remember that image each time the infection curve plotted a new peak.
VI. The Economics of Breath
My beat at the Reserve expanded from business to policy. I audited ventilator procurement contracts, studied the ringgit’s pulse, traced supply-chain fractures from Guangdong to Klang. Every figure hinted at a deeper triage: which sectors deserve oxygen, which can suffocate? The state called certain businesses “non-essential.” Try telling that to the barber whose scissors pay his mother’s dialysis.
I fought the urge to moralise. Journalism is not therapy. Still, I noticed a pattern: markets stagnated where regulations clung to racial quotas, rentier monopolies, closed borders. Conversely, sectors that allowed genuine competition improvised faster, retooled factories into mask lines, pivoted restaurants into cloud kitchens. The lesson aligned with my culinary haunt: kitchens that refuse to hire foreigners lose recipes; economies that fear outsiders lose antibodies.
Protectionism is a mask that blocks air from both sides.
VII. Grief as Data, Data as Rebellion
Each night I updated my spreadsheet: cases, deaths, bailouts, hospital capacity. I colour-coded by state, by ethnicity, by income quintile. The disparities glowed like chemical traces. Someone should print them onto the Petronas Twin Towers until we run out of façade.
Data can ossify into voyeurism unless paired with agency. So I joined a volunteer courier network delivering oximeters to home-quarantined patients. We navigated roadblocks, punctured tyres on potholes, learned that Waze cannot calculate the detours created by fear. When the numbers improved and the lockdown eased, I found it difficult to stop. The graves outside Bangsar remained visible, an unpaid debt. Every time I considered skipping a shift the train window reminded me of the interest accruing beneath the soil.
VIII. What Remains After the Curve
The curve flattened. Parliament reopened. Weddings resumed with digital RSVPs. The hillside headstones, however, did not recede. They whiten under the equatorial sun, a barcode of loss.
Mainländer would say the cemetery is the telos of creation. Fisher might argue that the state will repackage the graves into heritage tourism. Camus would advise us to roll the boulder anyway because boulders respond only to muscle, not metaphysics.
I agree with all three, selectively. Yes, death is the honest denominator. Yes, power will try to monetise even grief. Yes, rebellion is the act of lifting one more body into the ground with dignity. But I add a fourth clause learned from the gravedigger: every tenth grave deserves a sapling. Futurity can photosynthesise on soil soaked in despair.
IX. Lessons, If That Word Still Applies
- Precarity is structural, not seasonal. A virus merely removes the wallpaper.
- Solidarity scales through logistics. Spreadsheet first, slogan second.
- Markets reward adaptability, not ethnicity. Antibodies do not carry identity cards.
- Pessimism without action is burial before death. The train does not stop for spectators.
Epilogue on Platform Seven
Last week I stood again on the Bangsar platform at 6:37 a.m. A breeze lifted a discarded mask, spun it like a white moth. The cemetery terraces shimmered after rain, green shoots between the marble slabs. My train arrived on schedule, doors sliding open with the sigh of a ventilator exhaling one last time.
I stepped inside and found the carriage half-full, commuters scrolling election news, football highlights, horoscope apps. Someone laughed. Laughter felt illegal at that height, above a thousand buried mornings. Yet it echoed, undeniable. I remembered Camus: the struggle itself fills the heart of man.
The doors closed, the light flickered, the train moved. I opened my notebook, wrote two words under the date.
Still breathing.
If this essay spoke to you, plant a sapling, share your oxygen monitor, or at least remember the white hillside when the next administration tells you the curve is under control.
