For my friends who speak to me in quiet

Last year, I was grieving the loss of my dad’s little brother, my Uncle Kumar. I wrote this poem the night that I attended his memorial service over Zoom. My uncle will always have a special place in my heart. I moved to New Zealand from Malaysia in 2004 when I was 14 years old. A year later, my parents and my little sister followed. Every visit back home to Malaysia for the next 15 years, Uncle Kumar would be there to greet us at the airport. His familiar face would be the first to greet us when we landed, and the last to see us off when we left. I miss the feeling of seeing his warm smiling face in the KL airport’s arrival area. Climbing into the familiar comfort of his car in Malaysia’s thick humid air was always my first warm welcome home. In this poem I remember my Uncle Kumar, with whom I enjoyed sharing space with in both conversation and in quiet; The quiet tears he tried to hide while driving me back to the airport at the end of my visits home; The quiet meals I shared with him while scrolling through my phone; The quiet drives home during my childhood, when my parents were busy at work and weren’t able to pick my sister and I up from school that day. He loved being our uncle. He never outright said so, but he showed us how much he did. Uncle Kumar always showed up and I am so deeply blessed to have known and loved him. He is a person I learned so much from, and whose demeanour and temperament I so often see in myself. My world changed when you left us, and we miss you so much.