TEN years ago, after a wild weekend of partying with some colleagues, a friend and I caught the KTM train back from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore.

As the tangled, banana-tree-punctuated tropical landscape zipped by outside the windows, we sat in the dingy cafeteria carriage on orange plastic booth seats, eating lousy sandwiches, while he showed me silly card tricks.

Reclining on the worn seats with their sprung springs and netted compartments for travellers’ mineral-water bottles, he and I talked about inconsequential things until the train pulled into Tanjong Pagar Railway Station.

We sat down at a Malay food stall on the platform and lingered some more over teh tarik and mee goreng.

Then, my future husband and I parted ways.

Last weekend, the Supportive Spouse (SS) and I returned to the railway station where it (sort of) began – in significantly more glamorous circumstances.

He had been invited to have dinner on board the luxurious Eastern & Orient (E&O) Express, and I was his date.

It was a lovely evening, filled with champagne, fun conversation and good food.

With an international mix of passengers – dressed to the nines in tuxedos, suits, qipao, fancy frocks and gowns – conversation flowed as easily as the alcohol.

One of our dining companions confessed an irrational phobia of small spoons.
And we all kept joking about when a murder was going to take place, ala Agatha Christie’s famous crime novel.

And, just like on that first Malayan train journey we took together, the SS and I talked about inconsequential things, and poked fun at each other – only this time, amid art deco panels, sparkling crystal, plush carpets and ornate silk upholstery.

Lovely as it all was, by the time the six-hour round-trip journey to Kulai and back was coming to an end, the SS and I were fidgeting.

“I want to go home and see the kids,” he whispered in my ear, as we discreetly checked our mobile phones for missed calls from our four-year-old son, Julian.

I could still see Julian’s little face in my mind, pleading with us to take him along just before we left the house.

Meanwhile, after so many hours away from our still-nursing six-month-old Lucien, I was starting to feel an uncomfortable need to express milk on the E&O Express.

At last, we were back at Tanjong Pagar Railway Station and I was disembarking with a giant pencil – printed with a cartoon rendition of the E&O’s green-and-cream carriages – which we had bought for Julian as a souvenir from the train’s gift shop.

The Malay food stalls on the arrival platform looked exactly the same, right down to the same yellow plastic chairs we had lounged on all those years ago.
Suddenly, I felt an urge to sit down and order up some teh tarik and mee goreng, for old times’ sake.

After all, what is a train journey but a form of stasis in motion? It is a metaphor for progress, or the illusion of progress, hurtling inexorably down well-laid tracks.

It is destiny. Not for nothing is a Chinese fortune-teller ensconced in the E&O’s reading carriage: The delicate tango of a man and a woman coming in opposite directions down cramped corridors requires a logic written in the stars.

In the years that the SS and I have been together, there have been times when nothing seemed to be happening, although everything was changing.

Marriage and parenthood is a kind of train travel, too – up and down the railway of mundane living, comforting routines and mandatory checkpoints.

It just takes revisiting old ground to reveal how far one has come.

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