Once We Were There

A Novel

Bernice Chauly

ISBN: 978-981-47-8517-4
First Edition: June 2017
© 2017 by Bernice Chauly

Author photo by Daniel Adams. Used with permission.
Published in Singapore by Epigram Books
www.epigrambooks.sg
All rights reserved

This is a work of fiction. Apart from the well-known public figures,
historical events and locales that feature, all characters and incidents
are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously.

Table of Contents

• Prologue
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author

Prologue

“An exhilarating fiction with a breathless, breakneck pace, like the new Malaysia it lovingly and bitingly tells on, with corrupt, idealistic, greedy, confused, identifiably Malaysian ordinary-native-citizens-politicians-power-monger-dispossessed-resistant characters to usher in a generational shift in sensibility. A must-read for all who track Malaysian literature into the 21st century.”

—Shirley Geok-lin Lim, author of Among the White Moon Faces, American Book Award winner

“A love song to thwarted motherhood and the blunted dreams of the Reformasi movement, Once We Were There is as Malaysian as teh tarik—sweet, dark and a jolt to the senses.”

—Mei Fong, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment

“Once We Were There is an exhilarating novel, capturing a Malaysia rarely seen in literature, of late 90s political activism and of KL's kaleidoscopic counter-cultures. Chauly also writes so wisely about love, injustice and profound loss, and how the human spirit endures and finds the strength to go on.”

—Susan Barker, author of The Incarnations

“Once We Were There is a timely and important novel. First it plunges the reader into the social, cultural and sexual environment of KL at the turn of the millennium. Then it tells a story which is both heartbreaking and gripping, and deftly illustrates the inextricability of the personal and the political.”

—James Scudamore, Somerset Maugham Award-winning author of The Amnesia Clinic

Also From the Author

going there and coming back

The Book of Sins

Lost in KL

Growing Up With Ghosts

Onkalo

For Tasnem and Leia

Prologue

My name is Delonix Regia. I am named after the most flamboyant of all tropical trees, the flame of the forest. My father, a well-known lawyer and an avid naturalist, had a particular passion for tropical flora and their Latin names.

On the day I was born, he planted a seedling in our garden. Today, it stands taller than our house, where the end of the garden meets Gasing Hill, and where the red flowers fall onto the grass like a magical cloak. As a child, I once saw a black cobra weave in and out of the flowers, this glittery black slash easing the crimson cover left and right. I was struck with fright and watched it slither into the leafy green undergrowth and disappear into the jungle.