Passengers rise from their seats in the small café at the entrance to the Sabah State Railway station in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo . They pick up their fragrant nasi lemak – Malaysia’s famed rice dish cooked in coconut milk and pandan leaves and sold in brown paper pyramids – and their sweating 100 Plus sports drink cans to crowd onto the platform.

There are uncles wearing baseball caps or songkok, teenage boys making jokes and mums wearing colourful tudung and shouldering babies.

Above, lavender clouds pattern a peachy tropical sky. There’s no way the train will be on time. Everything runs late in Sabah, where my father was born and where I moved two years ago to live here for the first time in my life.

The train grumbles into the station, blue and white, diesel-powered – and amazing

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