The annotated budak

National birds

Keppel Harbour as seen from Imbiah Lookout. For lowlier views from the island of the dead, one must overlook the rampant scenes of pretty plasticity and descend the seawall onto a half-forgotten shore little touched by leisure suits. Here, in the shadow of a waxworks fort, there is an underwater world lost to national interests and shunned by beachcombers who prefer to pay the price for enclosed encounters with fishy captives and other corralled fragments of the life acrylic.

Contagious cat craves for a cuddle

Even though he's courteous, the tourists can tell he's lion.

That time of the year

The rear wall of the Maghain Aboth Synagogue holds two memorial boards on which the names of departed members of the community are inscribed. Beside each plaque is a small power socket in which an electric light can be plugged. I am told these are modern versions of Yahrzeit candles, which are lit every year on the day when death overtook a life long lived. Three short of a dozen were ablaze on one board, and it's likely that the light never fully fades over each cycle of seasons, for no fire, holy or hellish, can fully quench the pain of every mourning.

Yellow bird

Budgie found in carpark lot.

Downtown dive

Beyond the market bustle of Tanjong Pagar lies a small lane that leads uphill to a near-forgotten corner of the city. A soon-to-be-completed arch of residential triumph now looms above the alley, by which stands isolated clanhouses, a temple that has seen livelier days and the community centre of a glorified constituency.

Behind a curved wall of cracking paint, one can see the dry pits of empty pools and still towers named after a Cantonese doctor drilled in tooth. The gate is now barred and crows swoop over the concrete from which young feet once leapt into waters that harboured loansharks and other beasts of modern myth that have largely succumbed to the present vice of pleasures too private for the goodly gift of public largesse.

Boom and bloom

Shining blue and burning brown. The sky's no limit for the masters of the financial universe in a city that never slips into low gear and chugs high above a river on whose banks stroll flowers in bright prints and predators clad in leather. Entombed within a shell of solid ground, the forgotten earth stirs in a stubborn effort to reclaim the land. The concrete cracks and stiff tiles blush with the colours of living corrosion. Seeds swell with water and burst to send tendrils of acid over stone and sidewalk. Heavy shoes and sharp blades cut these pioneering stems down to size, waging a war of attrition against their own future and the hope of life beyond a harvest of weaked modifications.