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2003-11-20 - 9:57 a.m. Paya Lebar, 5 AM His mother wakes him up. He finds his way to the kitchen, then the toilet, and then performs ablutions for the Subuh prayer. He doesn’t like to pray with the lights on, probably he’s noticed that everything feels closer in the dark, including God. Maybe Paradise is also a place of darkness, the difference being that the Chosen Ones will be able to see. After the ritual prayer, he sits to perform the doa, the personal entreaty. He can’t think of anything particular—the exams are still months away, no medical crisis in the family—so he opts for the usual: protect us from temptation and harm. His hands are cupped, at the level of his chest. In the dark too, perhaps, God’s blessings are received like a spider-filament of light, pouring into the concavity of his palms, visible only to the unseen angels. Geylang Serai, 6 AM With a knife, she cuts open the plastic bag of noodles and empties it onto a tray. She looks at the hardened, yellow block in front of her, almost overwhelmed by the desire to sculpt it: thumbs for the eye sockets, knuckles for the mouth. Instead, she slips her fingers between the matted strands, feeling the once-impregnable, once-compact labyrinth thaw into slithery, doughy jumbles of string. Her father’s back is turned, sweating from the task of chopping chillies. She closes her eyes, relishing the transgression against the stern, remembered warning: don’t play with other people’s food. Tampines, 7 AM They’ve taken a spot near the MRT doors, and their tans reveal that they have returned from a camping expedition, rather than heading for one. They are surrounded by oversized backpacks and a portable hi-fi set, which one of them insisted on calling a ‘mini compo’, to the amusement of the rest. This same figure is now observing one of the girls leave through the train doors, staring intently at her bag, or more specifically, its front pocket, into which he had slipped in a note. The night before, he had sat beside the girl by the campfire, while the rest were asleep, and he had pointed at stars and furnished pauses with a sigh and the phrase, ‘It’s nice ah, like this?’ If only there was some way to tell if she would read his message, but one thing was certain: already the waves have begun to erase the charred remains of whatever had lent them those orange and haloed masks for the night. Telok Blangah, 8 AM She sits at the table, marking her students’ books, and suddenly hears some giggling at the back of the class. She glares at the source of the noise and asks rhetorically, ‘Do you write your composition with your hands or your mouth?’ And then, in case the sarcasm was missed, ‘No words.’ But the reign of silence is an impossible dream. Thinking is a noisy activity, and she soon devises a mental inventory of the various sounds which constitute the otherwise quotidian hum of the classroom. There is head-scratching, pencil-tapping, chair-rocking, shoes striking table legs, hands rustling through pages, and from a far corner, the increasingly agitated sighs of a girl, finally reaching an orchestral crescendo when she puts up her hand and asks, without waiting to be called, ‘Cikgu, what if it’s less than 500 words? I don’t know what to write anymore!’ Tanjong Pagar, 12 Noon It’s lunch time, and he looks forward to the cigarette that he had been putting off for the past three hours. A practice since his secondary school days—the promise of a reward at the end of an ordeal (discipline and deprivation being close cousins), except that now the carrot is not drawn from a box of biscuits but a small pack of Marlboro Menthol Lights. He fishes into his pockets and realises that he has misplaced his lighter. With the cigarette hanging from his lips, he takes the elevator down, drops by the Mama Money Changer, only to be told that they have run out of stock. He crosses roads, beats lights, breaks into a run. A man in search of an oasis, his cigarette quivering like a divining rod, not for water but fire. Pasir Panjang, 3 PM When she first walked into the Police Post, there was a vulnerability and tremulousness to her bearing that made the officers on duty remark inwardly, ‘Whatever it is, she’s innocent.’ They watch her as she looks at the Crime Prevention posters on the walls, her hands clutching her purse. It’s dry outside but it seems as if she had walked in from the rain, such are the signals her body sends out, all the muffled appeals for warmth and contact. The officer whose rank is higher speaks first, ‘Can I help you?’ The woman smiles enigmatically, shakes her head, and leaves, back into the sunlight. That night, one of the officers, (or perhaps both, for she was the kind of woman who makes men think the same thoughts) will file a Missed Person report before falling asleep. Bukit Batok, 5 PM With their slippers as goalposts, four boys play soccer with a plastic ball; a ball with what looks like a scar across its side, and a navel where the air which gave it its shape might have entered; which skitters rather than bounces. Their field is a void deck, whose floor coats their soles with ovals of grey. When one of them scores a goal, an imaginary stadium roars euphorically, a multitude of streamers and flags flashing like the bells of a tambourine. They play until dusk, when it is time to return to their homes. A chorus of voices would receive them: ‘How many times do I have to tell you, once you step into the house go straight to the toilet!’ ‘Play until don’t know when to come back, is it?’ ‘What were you doing until you got your knees so black?’ ‘When you come back at this time you invite the devil in!’ HDB life: one took the stairs and elevators up to be brought back down to earth.
Bedok, 7 PM Another loaded bus zooms past the bus stop, as the three women glance at their wristwatches, almost simultaneously. They are wearing their blue factory uniforms, which is an exact shade of the transitory twilight sky at that very moment, although this observation is lost to them. The woman who is leaning against the railing has a mother who has had a stroke and is now confined to a wheelchair. The woman who stands near the road is thinking of what to cook for her daughter who had just returned home the day before after disappearing for three weeks. The woman on the bus stop seat has just been proposed to by a Malaysian Chinese co-worker who has promised to convert to Islam, although she wonders whether his conversion to another nationality will be as plausible, considering his income. Another bus approaches, and the three women turn to look at it, hoping this one will have space for them, as if they are looking at their respective futures. Paya Lebar, 8 PM His favourite spot again: right at the top of the stairs, a blind ending where there is a metal ladder leading up to a trapdoor to the roof. The trapdoor is padlocked, but his mischief on Thursday nights does not involve trespass, but truancy. He has smuggled comic books in the satchel along with his Quran and its support, the rehal (the Quran should always be elevated, and if one were to drop it, one should bring it to touch the chin, then nose, and then forehead, a ritual action performed three times). When he returns home an hour later, he will tell his parents that Pak Haji has allowed him to advance by a few more pages, and will show the new position of the satay-stick pointer as evidence. He will not know that they will already have received a phone call regarding his absenteeism. They will extract the tearful truth from him by making him swear with his hand on the Quran, a book he has hardly read but whose mysterious holiness, to an 11-year-old, was incontestable. Kallang, 12 Midnight Three days after her mother’s funeral she discovers the exercise book on top of the refrigerator. It is filled with recipes that were copied from the radio. The penmanship is small, cursive, but neat, and it must have taken a certain degree of skill to write at the speed at which the radio announcer recited ingredients and instructions. She feels a certain grief as she leafs through the yellowing pages, mottled at the edges; this is the only evidence of her mother’s writing, and even then, it’s all dictation. Had her mother ever unburdened herself in a letter? Would it be absurd to speculate if her mother had ever written a poem? Used exclamation marks? What kind of testimony is this, in ounces and teaspoons? When her sister walks into the kitchen, she tells the latter of her dismay. Her sister shakes her head and replies, ‘Just because she never wrote doesn’t mean she never found ways to express herself. What do you think she put into her cooking? What you’re reading is only half of it. The rest was her.’
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