It’s early February, and I’m caught up by a growing tug of time. In October and November, especially, there was a feeling that our time in Singapore was limitless, and that we had months ahead to explore. Now our return to Vancouver in early April is visible on the horizon, still very distant, but approaching, after Chinese New Year and the beginning of the Fasting Month. In the last month I’ve also paused, after a very productive time writing fiction in November and December. 

The structure of my life has become more fragmented. I’ve been editing, putting a manuscript together. I’ve gone back to the archives, finding my way again into Rajaratnam’s library and his annotations. I’ve spent time with my friends and mother-in-law. And, turning 62, I’ve found that there has been a rush of forms, applications, and paperwork to manage: finances, retirement schemes, citizenship and residence applications. Yet, beyond the busy surface, there’s a sense that time is beginning to pull me in a slow rip current that’s beyond my control:  I have to somehow get away from the busyness of the surface, focus on what deeper, what’s important to do here, before we get on that plane at Changi Airport in early April.

In December we went, for the first time, to the annual giving of Chinese New Year hong baos from the local MP. On our way out of the ceremony, we were stopped by a young man who was doing an oral history project about Hillview Avenue, the small HDB estate off Upper Bukit Timah Road that we lived in for the first few years of our married life, with its three point blocks, its wet market, hawker centre, and POSB branch. Our current estate, rather unimaginatively named Goodview Garden, was built to house Hillview residents when the old estate was demolished almost twenty years ago. It’s near to the old estate as a bird might fly, over the hills of Gombak Camp with their restless, unsleeping radar arrays turning all night, but a long way if you take the road around the hill, past Little Guilin, the mosque, and then old factory buildings that give way to new condominiums and malls. We were asked if we had any memories or stories of the estate, and I remembered the wayang stage set during the seventh month set up at the back of the estate, which foreign workers from Bangladesh would watch with curiosity, or fruit trees thronged chattering mynah birds in the early morning. For a few years we were that rarity in Singapore, an opposition ward, and then we were promised upgrading, voted the opposition out, and were SERSd and relocated to Bukit Gombak instead.

The brief interview, and the memories it provoked, reminded me that I’d written very little about the Hillview estate at the time, and did provoke me to include it in a story I was writing. Yet it also made me aware of how retrosapective memory is very different from lived experience. I often forget to record the everyday moments and rituals that Ilive through, the gestures or journeys that I make every day. In my twenties I worked for a year with Vietnamese refugees at a reception centre for recently arrived families, located, strangely, in a huge red-brick nineteenth-century mansion in the heart of the English countryside. Every day I’d drive the lane from the house to the nearby village maybe four or five times, on runs for shopping, to take the children to school and the young adults to work placement. Years later, after my father’s funeral, I drove back to London and took a detour to the village where the reception centre was located, although it had now been gentrified into a series of luxury apartments. Driving up the lane, I was conscious that I knew every turn and twist of the route: the ditch that opened up on the left-hand side, an overhanging tree, or a farm gate that was sometimes left open for cattle to return for milking in the evening. I’m curious about the rhythms of my HDB estate now, which I’m part of yet I will not always be part of, which will recede just as Hillview and the reception centre receded.

There’s a rhythm to leaving. If I’m spending a long day in the archives, I set off early. I’ll come out into the living room of our flat and switch on one of the spotlights, so that I get ready to go, pack my bags, under a small pool of light in the darkness. If I open the curtains I’ll see lights beginning to come on in individual flats in the block opposite, almost as if someone was filling in the boxes of an enormous puzzle between the gridlines of the lift shafts. When I leave the apartment and lock up behind me there’s aways the pressure of my thumb on the padlock for the door, and then the click as the bolt slips into place. At times, in the corridor before I reach the lift lobby, there will be a gust of wind from the fire door to the staircase that our neighbours prop open with a single red brick. At this time of the morning the lift is often be empty. If not, perhaps an NS man heading for camp, someone in smart office attire, looking at their phone, or a child with a huge backpack on an early trip to school. Unless it’s a neighbour I know, there’s no conversation. We keep our eyes down, although we do reach out and press the button to hold open the doors for anyone taking longer to enter or exit. When we reach the first floor there’s a crisp voice telling us we’ve arrived, and we leave the lighted box of the lift to cross the darkness of the recently renovated playground, and the low one-storey building, open on two sides, where Chinese wakes and Malay weddings are held. At this time of the morning, everyone walks along the covered walkway or the roadway towards the MRT, as if pulled by a slow, insidious gravity. I pass the eating house, where the bee hoon stall and coffee stalls already open. There’s a smell of bee hoon being fried, and the glass bao case is still full up. The seats are already be half taken by the old, who have ample leisure time but perhaps cannot sleep, and the young, who drink up very quickly before they depart on their way to work. And then it’s a further series of covered walkways from the estate to the MRT, first following the line of the most southerly blocks, then branching off under the MRT tracks. There are three paths, each built by a different agency: the covered pathway by the road, the park connector, and a third track that hugs the hill under MRT line. There also are different paces to walking here, no matter which path you choose. You pass some figures, but are always passed by others going so fast that they almost break into a run. Every now and then a bell from a bike or the light from a PMD, and you move aside. When you get to the station, you’re swallowed up by the light, the tiled floor below you and little shops on either side. You reach into your wallet for your concession card, and the stream of people splits up to flow through the entry gates.

It’s Saturday morning as I write this. The sun is coming up over the estate, and swallows are swooping in the air over the hill. From the playground, the sound of music, then rhythmic clapping. Look down and you can see the group that has gathered to exercise, wearing white shirts and dark pants, mostly women, mostly my age. For a moment there’s only repetition, stasis. Time stops, or is caught in a loop. And then a car alarm sounds, or the garbage truck arrives, and the world begins to gather speed again, pulling me along.