Before all this, I used to think Merdeka was just fireworks, flags, and maybe a free long weekend.
Now? When I think back to what tore at me most while stuck away from Malaysia, it wasn't the big national grand gestures. It was the Pakcik who sold nasi lemak near my bus stop every morning. He knew my order by heart; half the time he’d have it packed before I even pulled out my wallet. I never thought a RM5 packet of rice would end up occupying so much space in my head.
Spending two years away showed me how heavily the ordinary stuff actually weighs.
It was 17 March 2020. I was carpooling to work when my colleague brought up some news about a new virus spreading and rumors that Malaysia might lock down the border. I didn't think twice about it. None of us did. We thought we wouldn’t be affected.
By lunch, our manager gathered us Malaysians around. The Malaysian government was announcing a Movement Control Order. Two weeks, they said.
I sat there staring at my desk, trying to process what "two weeks" actually meant.
Then my director came over. Working from home wasn't an option for my role. He needed me on the factory floor. No debate. I rushed back to my house in Johor Bahru, threw some clothes into a bag, and told my wife not to worry. “Just imagine I’m away on a two-week business trip,” I said. The company arranged a temporary stay at a hotel for those of us commuting from across the Causeway.
I still remember that cab ride over. I had no idea I was looking at the last normal day I’d see for almost two years.
The next day, 18 March 2020, the MCO kicked in. And for those of us caught on the Singapore side, the clock just stopped. Two weeks turned into months. Months stretched into almost two years.
I had never been away from home, my country, for more than five days straight in my entire life. Suddenly, there was no end date. No plan. No one knew.
I missed my parents. I missed my wife. Seeing her reduced to a daily WhatsApp video call killed me. I missed the smell of hot nasi lemak, and hearing my mother clinking pots in the kitchen while the scent of chicken curry filled the house.
I could have resigned and gone back, sure. But that meant losing my job, with zero guarantee I’d ever get entry approval back into Singapore to work again. So, I stayed. And I hated every second of it.
I thought I understood Merdeka. We learn it all for Sejarah: 31 August 1957, Tunku Abdul Rahman at Stadium Merdeka, independence from the British. I knew the facts, but I’d never felt what freedom meant on a personal level until I lost the simple right to walk back into my own country.
On paper, I was a free citizen with a valid Malaysian passport. I realized freedom is actually as simple as being able to go home when you want to.
Every evening after Buletin Utama on TV3, I’d call my wife. Same time every night. I just wanted to hear her voice and check if there was any new update on border openings. In between calls, I spent half my time fantasizing about food. I missed the soto from the kakak at the food court. I missed nasi lemak from the bus stop pakcik. They say you can't take the Malaysia out of a Malaysian, and sitting in Singapore, I realized my stomach and heart were still firmly on the other side of the Causeway.
My parents called constantly. I always told them I was fine. I didn't have the heart to tell them how hard it actually was. One kilometer of Causeway. Home was right there in plain sight, completely out of reach.
During that first year, I didn't feel patriotic. Honestly, I just felt guilty. Guilty for not being there while my parents aged. Guilty for missing life happening without me.
About six months in, my passport was expiring, so I managed to secure a renewal slot at the Malaysian High Commission.
Walking through those gates, I saw a small courtyard with a few bunga raya bushes in bloom. It sounds minor, but seeing the national flower hit me like a wall. I hadn’t seen these flowers in ages here in Singapore. Inside, the waiting area felt like any government office back home, only eerily quiet.
Sitting on those plastic chairs, surrounded by dozens of other Malaysians stuck in the same boat, the homesickness finally caught up with me. We started talking. No one cared about politics, background, or race. We all shared something in common, we were just ordinary Malaysians who desperately wanted to go home.
One guy talked about missing the birth of his first child. A woman talked about her father having a stroke back home while she was trapped here. Hearing them didn't fix my problems, but for the first time in months, I didn't feel alone.
When the Vaccinated Travel Lane (VTL) finally opened in late 2021, I scrambled for a bus ticket. I told my wife I’d be home on the 26th of December 2021.
I lied. I secured a seat for the 24th of December 2021 to surprise her.
I’ll never forget that bus ride over the Causeway. I glued my face to the window the entire time. Johor Bahru looked different. Most of the bike shops along Jalan Tun Abdul Razak Susur 4 were closed, with only a couple of convenience shops open.
Once I cleared immigration, I alighted at Larkin Sentral for a short swab test, then booked a Grab straight home.
I called my wife from outside the condominium and told her a friend was dropping off a parcel downstairs so she’d come down. She didn’t know I was back.
When she walked out and saw me standing there, she froze. Then she just ran and broke down crying. We stood on the street hugging each other for a long time without saying a word.
I spent a few days visiting family and friends, going back to the Kakak Soto. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the Pakcik Nasi Lemak; I guess he closed down during the MCO. I had to collect my renewed driving license at JPJ Taman Daya and, for the first time in my life, I was so happy to be in a government office. Seeing the crowd, the queue, the people, I missed this a lot. I was finally back home.
In 2025, I finally stood in my gown at UTM for my MBA convocation.
As the VIPs made their way in, taking their places on stage, we were told to stand up for the National Anthem, and a hush settled over the room. Then came the first note of Negaraku and everyone rose as one. I stood too, but something in me shifted the moment the anthem began.
I hadn't sung it live in years. Not since school assemblies, not since the days when standing for the anthem was routine, unremarkable, just something we did. But this time was different. The melody rose, familiar yet new, and before I knew it, my voice joined the swell of others around me. My eyes welled up. There was something about hearing hundreds of voices rise together, imperfect and unrehearsed, that struck at something deep and unspoken.
In that moment, Negaraku wasn't just a song I'd sung since primary school. I felt every line—the prayer for peace, the promise of unity, and the weight of a country I nearly lost. Negaraku—my country. My home. And singing it there, surrounded by my MBA course mates, I felt an overwhelming surge of pride. A pride to belong, a pride to remember, a pride to still feel something so simple cut so deep.
Standing there, I understood something I hadn't fully felt in a long time: that love for one's country isn't always declared. It reminded me that patriotism isn't always loud. Sometimes it's just a lump in the throat, tears you didn't plan for, and a heart that remembers exactly where it belongs.
Malaysia isn't perfect. We are a nation built on contradictory energy. We can spend seven days a week endlessly debating politics at the mamak shop, venting about the jam, and tracking the API index during haze season like it’s a full-time job. We complain because we care, and honestly, because it’s practically a national sport.
My ancestors came from India generations ago, crossing the ocean with little more than hope given by the British. I have never walked the soil they left behind, nor breathed the air of the villages they once called home. India is a land of history to me, but Malaysia is my blood, my breath, and my life.
I am a 3rd generation Malaysian Indian. My roots do not lie across the Indian Ocean; they are buried deep in the warm, rain-soaked earth of this country. I grew up with the rhythm of this land in my veins. I know the Rukun Negara by heart, five simple principles, each one a thread in the fabric of who we're meant to be as a nation. I hold onto it not because I was forced to recite it in school, but because I believe in every single word.
When I was stuck across the Causeway, I didn't long for a distant ancestral past. I longed for my mother’s kitchen, the quiet warmth of my neighborhood, and the familiar rhythm of home. This country raised my grandfathers, sustained my parents, and cradled my own dreams. I have no other homeland to look back to, and I want no other.
Malaysia isn't just where I live, it is everything I am.
Being Malaysian isn't a complex political theory. It’s tearing up in an embassy waiting room with strangers over a shared story. It’s the way the kakak at the stall calls you dik. It’s seeing a bunga raya plant across the border and feeling a tug in your chest. We have our differences and we argue, but when push comes to shove, we know how to find our way back to each other.
That’s what Merdeka means to me now. It’s not just a date etched into a Sejarah textbook, or a distant memory of Tunku’s voice echoing through Stadium Merdeka. It isn't just about a flag raised in 1957, or a public holiday we use to escape work.
It is the simple, unglamorous grace of walking through your own front door at the end of a long day. It’s inhaling the scent of hot sambal your wife cooks, and knowing that the people who shape your world are sitting right across from you, not reduced to glowing pixels on a phone screen.
When you are stripped of that, when a single kilometer of water stands between you and everything you love, making home look so near yet so entirely out of reach, you finally realize what freedom actually costs. You realize that patriotism isn't born in grand speeches or political debates. It is forged in the quiet ache of missing the everyday ordinary, and in the overwhelming relief of finally making it back.
I survived those two years away, and coming back, I brought home a truth I will carry for the rest of my life: Merdeka is knowing the true value of home, family, and belonging, not as abstract ideas, but as the very breath of who we are.
Because you only truly understand what it means to be free when you’ve had to survive without the place that holds your soul.
Negaraku, tanah tumpahnya darahku.
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