Orlando Rises: Chow Kit Chronicles, #3

By Leon Wing

A sequel to 'Becoming Ah Lan Toh', this new novel continues the ongoing story of Ah Lan. She has now completely transitioned into a full blown man. He is more than merely unusual in his gender transformation. He has managed to outlive all the characters in the last book—by more than a hundred years.

He is a very very old gentleman these days. Having lived for over a hundred years, he has come to accept his longevity. But lately he has noticed once again the beginnings to another set of subtle changes are about to happen.

Now officially named Orlando Toh, he had married and had children. They in turn married and had their own children. Living as he is now for up to a hundred years and more, he regrets watching loved ones come and go.

Now, still living in ultra modernised Chow Kit in vastly developed Malaysia, he mostly contends himself with a quiet life, living under the same roof as his surviving great great granddaughter, Mary. And she is now herself 80 years old, with her own grown and married children, and in the course of things, she has her own grandchildren.

Mary will be planning his great great grandfather's ultimate birthday.

In the course of her preparations she learns some hidden histories about old Orlando.

And in the end, what will happen to Orlando?

• Language: English
• Publisher: WingWorldWeb
• Release date: Jan 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386732259

Leon Wing

Leon Wing's poems can be found in PoetryPoem, Readings from Readings 2, The Malaysian Poetic Chronicles, Eksentrika, Rambutan Literary, and Haikuniverse. A poem about the Syrian migration to Europe is featured in the Fixi anthology Little Basket 2017. He occasionally takes some poem apart and puts it back together, on the poetry blog puisipoesy.blogspot.com.   He has short stories published in Eksentrika, Queer Southeast Asia and the Canadian Asian literary magazine Ricepaper, and in anthologies like PJ Confidential and Remang, a collection of Malaysian ghost stories.

Book preview

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

––––––––

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [e-mail]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

––––––––

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is coincidental.

––––––––

Cover image : Kyiv city fine art by Olenka Kotyk/Unsplash

About the book

A sequel to Becoming Ah Lan Toh, this novel continues the story of Ah Lan. She has now completely transitioned into a full blown man. He is more than merely unusual in his gender transformation. He has managed to outlive all the characters in the last book—by more than a hundred years.

He is a very very old gentleman these days. Having lived for over a hundred years, he has come to accept his longevity. But lately he has noticed once again the beginnings to another set of subtle changes about to happen.

Now officially named Orlando Toh, he had married and had children. They in turn married and had their own children. Living as he is now for up to a hundred years and more, he rues watching loved ones come and go.

Now, still living in ultra modernized Chow Kit in vastly developed Malaysia, he mostly contends himself with a quiet life, living under the same roof as his surviving great great granddaughter. And she is now herself eighty years old, with her own grown and married children, and in the course of things, she has her own grandchildren, even a young son.

This old woman will be planning his great great grandfather's ultimate birthday.

And in the end what will happen to Orlando?

Chapter 1

The man supine on the bed possessed a long body. His equally lengthy legs and arms had been splayed in awkward angles.

In the small hours of the morning, outside his windows, the sun had not risen yet, and sky was still dark. In fact, if anyone had sleepwalked into the garden, and had suddenly opened his eyes, he would never have seen anything recognisable past any distance anyway. It would have been murky because of the perpetual haze caused by perennial smog blown in across the Malacca Straits from the islands of Indonesia. The heat would have been unbearable and would have seared off the hairs on anyone's skin and, at worst, for people with little hair covering it, it would even have burnt off a thin layer of skin.

Inside, in the man's bedroom, the temperature was being lowered by the central air condition which pumped cooled air into his room, as well as three others in this big house set in middle of Chow Kit, in the city of Kuala Lumpur. But, in that instance of time, he felt a heat suffuse his body.

He was not cognizant of any of his actions while asleep, his limbs coming alive as if from inertia. His eyes shut, one hand moved and grappled about to locate the folds of the bedclothes. Finding a limp corner, he fought for purchase and flung the bedclothes off his chest. They lay rucked down at his feet.  The toes curled as a dream penetrated his subconscious.

His eyes remained shut still. But behind the lids, his eyeballs shifted side to side, and in this darkness and unseen, they happened to roll up into his head. The curtains were drawn over the windows behind his bed. The room was nearly pitch-black, with no lights on. In spite of this, he raised a hand from his side, up towards his face, to shield his eyes. The images in his head flashed bright streaks of colors across the retinas.

The man's lips parted but no sound issued. In his dream, he could hear a song accompanied by old musical instruments, the kind you would never find in this day and age of everything electronic. The old and wooden were relegated to some historical museum. If they hadn’t rotted down yet because of the damaged air on earth, they would have been digitized and exhibited within the screen of a touchscreen or,  if the museum could afford the expenses or had donations, they would be lasered into the atmosphere as a three-dimensioned object.

The song was rendered in a style unlike anything found on the internet. The music today was mostly sung harshly and over electronic notes. This was old. In fact, it was ancient. But surprisingly he thought (or his slumbering subconscious did) or figured he somehow recalled this kind of music.

He also seemed to recognize the voice sounding the notes. The high timbre was not from any male provenance. A female was singing this song in a style from a forgotten era. She was pronouncing the lyrics in English, for sure, but the accent was not Western, neither any of the English registers in the European continent, Australia, New Zealand or North America. It was Asian, and more precisely, Chinese.

He rolled on his stomach and muffled whatever sound he thought he had been letting out. But to no avail: he could still hear it. The voice and the music permeated him and they swam amidst his insides, floating with the corpuscles in the streams of blood within his body's vessels. The range of the music reached as wide and as far, towards the extremes of his being. He clenched his fingers and at his bottom extremities, he curled the toes as much as his strength allowed.

His face pressed against his pillow, he imagined he had opened his eyes. He saw a flash of lightning strike down, towards the source of the voice, the music. In the brief illumination, he spied a face fringed by heavy black hair. Its countenance matched the femaleness of the voice. The sloe eyes were deeply kohled and the lips darkly and richly painted red. The cheekbones stood out between a nose with a high bridge.

He zoomed into her eye. A scene played out upside down. He moved his muffled face in the pillow and affected to correct the balance. He could now watch whoever were themselves watching her sing. The eyes under his lids swivel about, to focus. He caught sight of a dark-skinned man seated across another, also male but quite the reverse in color, being light-skinned. Both possessed similar facial characteristics: round deep eyes, high noses and slim lips. But this other had very short but very light hair. Even though seated, holding a bottle which he occasionally tilted to drink from, he looked very much larger.

The smaller man was taking surreptitious glances at his neighbor. The light-skinned man was not any the wiser; he was drinking and looking towards the front. Strange, but it seemed like he was gazing straight and directly at him. It was uncanny the way both their gazes follow the sleeping man's own. If was as if they were looking at him. It was as if he was inside the body of this female singer.

Then the direction swished down, and