THAT FLEETING SENSE OF WONDER

My senses are heightened in this new place. But there’s only so much I can savor before the spurt of novelty vaporizes.

In the middle of the woods all I heard was the murmur of forest creatures. Not more than half a mile away was another jungle, one in concrete, that was a part of the lush grounds of the Science Park in Singapore, home to many hundred multinational corporations and national institutions. If I craned my neck far enough, I had no doubt I’d spot a crane or two in the sky, but deep inside the canopy trail inside Kent Ridge park in the southern ridges, the metropolis felt far away even though nothing could be deemed distant in an island nation of some 700 square kilometers (translating to 0.01% of the size of the United States).

On another morning I experienced that same stillness. Inside the botanical gardens in the heart of the city, a few hundred yards beyond Swan Lake, I could have been in the jungles of Costa Rica save for the assiduous descriptions of flora along the railings and the ubiquitous warnings to keep our masks on and maintain social distancing even out in the open. The decorum of Singapore tends to encroach, with its characteristic style, into its wild green spaces.

Every city has character. It tells stories in distinct ways. Across town Singapore does a thorough job of telling tales about its glorious and grim past because it meticulously records its history and heritage. Singapore has a fund of modern-day stories, too, beginning with how its buildings look perpetually new despite the copious, frequent rain. I’d been awed by this on every flying visit to the city and my sister, a resident, educated me on the stringent requirements on building exteriors. It’s mandatory for buildings to apply a fresh coat of paint every five to seven years. This manic upkeep of all things is the first thing that every visitor to Singapore notices. I now think of it as the constant drone of self-calibration and self-improvement. I heard that bus stops are washed down at night with some regularity but I have yet to locate that information on the website of the National Environment Agency. Covid also presented opportunities for change, of course. Several institutions in Singapore decided that the lull during Covid was a perfect time to renovate and renew themselves, another reason for the din all over town.

I find Singapore’s urban sprawl daunting. Its biggest malls feel larger than its parks. Its parks, which often meander around bodies of water, are larger than its community townships that are, in effect, micro-cities, self-contained enclaves in which to live, commune and play. The city’s walking trails unfurl endlessly, linking one park to another such that the entire city is navigable on foot or by bike.

A local told me that some time in 2016, the country laid down plans to eradicate diabetes; obesity is a concern across age-groups in this country just as it is in other parts of the world. But I’m puzzled. I’ve rarely seen obesity here—except perhaps my own which, by the way, is now being contained.

Now a relentless public transport maven, I walk, climb, stop, pant, wheeze and start again. It’s not easy though. The heat is oppressive even in March but there’s always at least a little breeze fanning me from foliage born into a vast green palette. My eyes have recorded these shades of green: mint, olive, pear, lime, emerald, chartreuse, pear, tea, army, sea, pine, and jade. Writer Pico Iyer describes this effect on him as the “overwhelming presence of nature that remains one of Singapore’s marvels”. The walking trails in this country have held me in their thrall since the day I stepped into real life in the town. We’ve already been here a little over two months and I’m afraid I may have to bid goodbye at the end of six months without having explored them all.

We know two young friends, Ramya and Mukund, who have been discovering new trails every weekend even though they have lived here for several years. A few weeks ago they were chasing a trail—it took them back to the Jurassic period, they said—that followed a slice of the extinct rail corridor connecting Singapore with Malaysia.

Still others say that there’s only so much to see and that Singapore does begin to shrink if you live here long enough. “After a year of sightseeing, I was done,” a friend, Nivi, said to me while sending me a long list to things to do. Upon arrival here three years ago, Nivi went on every walk and every tour for one whole year. At the end of it, she decided she was done and  she was ready to sign up for a full-time job at a tech company.

I was struck by what Nivi said. Her moment of capitulation to the humdrum of city life—that point of time when pixie dust turned to sawdust—made me wonder about my own state of being. Was it possible to always be in that magical space of alertness to new experience? How did anyone bottle that heightened sensitivity and stretch it out just a little? If this was often the reason we came back refreshed from a vacation, why weren’t we always in that mode?

This phase of newness made me challenge myself and harness it to my benefit. After the release from our two-week quarantine I forced myself to climb, daily, a few more steps at the neighboring Clementi Woods Park, something I’d not been able to do with relative ease, due to some physical limitations and also due to an inertia that makes me lie around, sometimes, like a beached whale. (Most whale species have an excuse.)

I’ve come to understand and accept that this magical space of receptiveness is so fleeting. Early in January it spawned in me the sort of wonder that made me (furtively) pick out and pluck one leaf every two days from the garden at our apartment complex. I stuck it into our mango wood vase that I bought at Lim’s in Holland Village. I admired it every day as it sat on our little dining table. A couple of days ago I realized with a growing sense of horror that I hadn’t replaced the leaf in several weeks.

It had turned yellow. I had let myself descend into the land of the jaded. Was Singapore fast losing its special fragrance for me? When the scent of the frangipani ceased to tease, would I need to leave? Or would I just crawl onward through the rest of my stay in this new state of staleness, the way we continue to drive a new car in which the scent of all newness dissolves even as we’re driving under the influence of it?

I’ve tried. I’ve tried holding on to this newness for as long as I possibly can. I’ve watched how, at Clementi Woods Park, heart shaped leaves hug a tree-trunk in unplanned ways and yet grow upward along the trunk in measured—perfectly parallel—lines. I’ve also noticed how a city that prunes and trims every hedge is unable to put a stay order on the size of the  leaves that choose to grow in it. The monstera leaf here is so monstrous that the name, at least in this country, needs a regrafting of some sort. Should it be “Extra Monstera” or, botanically speaking, “Monsterum Giganticonsternum”?

Several other things are extra-large in this “little red dot” of a nation. The sun, the rain, the thunder, the lightning, and so, too, the fury of tropical rain. It pours torrentially for over an hour and then, in minutes, all the water drains away, slurped by the earth into oblivion. Sometimes I’ve peered into drains, hunting for wet leaves or traces of moisture. Should we not know that it rained today or yesterday or three days ago or last week? Don’t we need a record of nature’s vagaries? Unfortunately, there are no puddles—and, not to change the topic, muddles—in this place.

I’ve also found myself honing in on what I’d normally find mundane back in America. I find myself looking at labels on most products. I’ve noticed that they come from everywhere—more than they do back home. Amazon has brought the Amazon forest to my doorstep, no doubt, but every place is still different because of its geography and its proximity to other places. In the stores here, I see many products from Australia, New Zealand and the UK. The butter we use, Lurpak, is from Denmark. I’m now using a body wash from Japan called Naïve Refresh. Last month, I checked out a Thai shampoo and conditioner with aloe and bamboo; now I’ve migrated to a Malaysian shampoo and conditioner “with babassu oil from Latin America, baobab oil from Africa and chufa oil from France” in a desperate plea to arrest the graying. The bananas on our dining table have flown in from the Philippines. The fresh longan, are from Thailand, although, as my husband pointed out, the longan seems more seed than fruit, and as such they should be sold in the “Nuts” section of the store. I haven’t yet warmed up to the popular grocery store here in Singapore—Cold Storage, a name that gives me the shivers—because after two months I don’t know the aisles in this store like the back of my hand.

I find myself more at home in the Indian grocery stores. There I can hear snatches of my mother tongue whenever I want. Tamil gives me pause. Tamil gives me comfort even though I’ve spent most of my life in the world of English. The Tamil that Singaporeans and Malaysian-born Indians speak is so chaste I’m jealous. They rarely grope for an English filler word and speak almost as well as this country seems to speak it. Every public sign or announcement is spelt out in four official languages: English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. At museums and monuments I stop to read the explanations in Tamil hoping to broaden my Tamil vocabulary. I admit that even as I read them, I’m ashamed of the internal process that ensures that I read the English version first in order to comprehend its Tamil translation. The tragedies of India’s colonial past revisit me in these tiny moments branding my brain with an invisible question mark about my upbringing and my identity.

As much as I love hearing the way Singaporean Tamils speak my mother tongue, I’ve enjoyed listening to the sound of Singlish, too. I hear how the use of the funky “lah” bridges the gap between strangers. When a potential buyer points to something and says “Why this costs so much lah”, I hear the silent wink embedded in the words. It ushers an intimacy. It forces a smile between seller and buyer. I wonder how long someone might have to live in Singapore before deploying “lah” with the swagger of a local.

I admit I received my first lesson on “lah” last Sunday when I texted my  friend, Lakshmy, to find out how she had done in an exam.

“Can pass lah,” she texted back right away.

This was my moment to strut my stuff. “Many many congrats lah. Look how I’m using lah, lah!” I said. Alas I’d shown myself to be as green as Eliza Doolittle at Ascot. My friend told me that I’d used it incorrectly.

I applied myself again. “Teach me lah!” I texted back, awaiting her response, worried that I would not pass the test again. Lakshmy showered me right back with an emoji of approval. Now I finally got it lah.