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2004-07-21 - 2:56 p.m. Railings -------- As a child, I was always warned by my mother not to touch the railings that zig-zag vertically on the medial side of HDB staircases. Her rationale was that 'people spit from above', and consequently, the metal railings are coated with saliva, contaminated and thus stripped of its supportive function. They become, instead, sites of danger, where initially they would provide some safety, especially if the stairs are slippery. Another site which represents a potential space of hazard is the threshold at the periphery of the block, where one walks from the void deck into 'open air'. This is a space of vulnerability, where one is exposed to infelicitous weather: a rain of tissue paper, cotton buds, sweet wrappers, cigarette ash, and if of sufficient mass, what has been called 'killer litter'. Thus HDB existence is characterised by aerial threats, where a mouth expels its contents, a hand dispatches its cargo, before withdrawing back into a planar anonymity (which one hides the culprit, one wonders, looking up), where a primary accomplice to misfortune is gravity. Faulty Lighting --------------- Most HDB corridors are serviced by low-wattage fluorescent lighting. In some estates, the fluorescent tubes are protected by wire cages, what one can assume is an index of the level of delinquency in the area. There are times when a fluorescent tube expires, with blackened ends, and thus starts to flicker. If not replaced soon enough, the corridor will be subjected to washes of strobe-lighting, a paroxysmal vacillation between light and dark. This flickering strikes one as even more disturbing than pure darkness, because it conjures the rhythm of the unnaturally prolonged death-throe: someone is wheezing yet refuses to exhale his last breath. Thus what is generally a technical malfunction becomes imbued with a supernatural function (what corruption would turn a luminous tube black?); the corridor is now haunted. One walks quickly to one's unit as if being pursued, by an apparition that will appear between one flicker and the next, in the transition between the menace of darkness and the full horror of illumination. Electricity Meter ----------------- Mounted on a cheap-looking wooden board is the electricity meter, which occupies a spot on the right side of the front door, slightly above eye-level. It faithfully records power consumption, its dial digits expressing these in kilowatt-hours. A fascinating scenario occurs when a representative from Singapore Power arrives to inspect the meter. Officious in his white uniform, and holding a clipboard, he seems like a doctor about to read an X-ray (like an X-ray the meter's legibility is available to only one of two parties). I, on the other hand, am watching him through the peephole, noticing how his head inclines upwards, as if to suggest--I am only taking directives from above. As the peephole offers me a glimpse of the outside, the meter reveals to him a segment of the inside. As I judge him (by his moustache, by the slightly bored look on his face), so is the house exposed to an assessment, which even if mathematical, is not without ethical nuances: of extravagance, or parsimony in one's use of resources. We are, in short, locked in a pleasurable game of mutual spying.
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