CHAPTER 2 – ECHOES BETWEEN LINES

It was a tiny vintage shop that pulled her in. Narrow. Dim. Smelled like camphor and rain-damp wood. She didn’t even notice the signboard. Maybe there wasn’t one.

Inside, she sifted through old glassware, forgotten diaries, trinkets that looked like they had stories but no one to tell them. That’s when she saw it.

A small pendant.

Wooden. Hand-carved. Dangling on a faded silk string inside a cracked glass case.

Lana opened it.

There, carved in soft lines: ليانا (LIYANA)

Jawi script (an older script used in Malay handwriting using the Arabic writing). She didn’t read it, not really—but something about the way it curved… it felt like her. Like a memory of her name in someone else's voice.

“Berapa ni?”  

("How much is this?") she asked the elderly woman behind the counter.

The woman looked at her, eyes narrowing behind thick lenses. 

“Lima ringgit saja.”

(“Just five ringgit.”)

Lana dropped the coin in her palm and left before she could think twice. She didn’t know why her hands were shaking.

1910-s Colonial Era, Malayan Peninsular

Hot humid rainforest, a group of British Soldiers were marching across a watery marsh. One boy, Xavier who struggles to walk in the muddy terrain was slower than the rest. His step was slowed down by a deep mud, and when he looked up, he was left alone. He walked and shouted for his men, but no respond. He continued on.

Xavier stumbled into the kampung (village) after taking the wrong path near the rubber estate. His boots were caked in red earth, sweat stinging his eyes. The sun was relentless, and his father’s voice echoed in his head like thunder: Never wander off the road, boy.

But curiosity was louder.

And it brought him here—where children were gathered under a banyan tree, listening to a young woman read from a yellowed book. Her voice was steady, laced with rhythm and authority.

She paused when she saw him.

“Lost?” she asked in clean, precise English.

Xavier nodded. “I was following the river. I think I... lost it.”

“You’re not the first white man to lose a river,” she said, standing up and brushing off her baju kurung (a traditional Malay long dress worn by women).

He tried not to stare, but she was magnetic—her confidence, her ease, her eyes that seemed to study him like a page half-read.

“I'm Xavier,” he said awkwardly.

“Liyana.”

There it was again. The name from the pendant. Only now it was a voice.

The second time he came, it wasn’t an accident.

He brought paper and a pencil and asked her to write his name in Jawi.

She smirked and wrote it with surprising grace.

Then she handed him the pencil.

“Now you try mine.”

He did. Clumsily. She laughed.

“Wrong direction. You write left to right. I don’t.”

She leaned over, guided his hand, and for a moment he forgot about the world entirely. The forest behind them. The weight of uniform and expectation. The empire his name belonged to.

She smelled like jasmine and earth.

In the present, Lana traced the carved pendant with her thumb. She was sitting cross-legged in bed, notebook open, but her song was stuck.

No lyrics would come.

She looked down at the wooden charm again, the curve of the script oddly familiar. She had it around her neck now, like it had always belonged there.

She started humming again.

This time, she followed the melody to the end.

Xander dug through an old storage box in his studio and found something he didn’t expect.

A notebook. Leather cover, edges stained. Inside—notes in two different handwritings. One half was in English. The other… was in Malay. Neatly written. With corrections. Laughter in the margins.
He flipped to the center, where the two handwritings overlapped.

One word repeated on both sides: Liyana.

He blinked. It made his chest feel heavy, like grief without context.

He pulled out his phone. Typed a message to Lana.

Are you free this weekend?

The reply came almost instantly.

I was just about to ask you the same.

They met at an old gallery converted from a colonial house—weathered white walls, creeping vines, wood floors that creaked like old memories. The exhibition was on “Languages of Memory.”

Lana wore the pendant.

Xander couldn’t stop looking at it.

They wandered past old photographs, Jawi manuscripts, grainy portraits of British officials posing with stiff posture.

At one display, Lana paused.

A black-and-white photo of a banyan tree.

“I’ve seen this before,” she said softly.

Xander glanced at her. “Where?”

“I don’t know.”

They walked out as the sky turned copper. The air smelled like wet stone and something sweeter—maybe frangipani.

They stopped beneath a tree outside the museum.

Lana looked at him.

“That uniform would suit you.”

“Don’t say that,” Xander said, half-smiling. “I feel like I already wore it.”

That night, she sat in her apartment again, notebook open.

She began to write a song called The Hollow Tree.

And far away, Xander dreamed of red earth, warm hands, and a girl teaching him how to write.

[END OF CHAPTER 2]