The annotated budak

Strait to the city

The city seems to fade as one sails further from shore. First, the towers lose their colours, turning pale blue and grey and merging into one another, a wall of steel, glass and fibre that separates the sea from the country that grew into it. Then the buildings become phantoms, a long, thin line of unresolved forms and irregular tidings, and for a while, the sky appears to reign over the town that tried to scrape it away, to hide the heavens behind its heights and reach for the stars without losing its fear of flying.

But the launch soon enters the confines of a different city, slightly less dense than the one grounded in illusion but still largely defined by the utility of every square mile, an archipelago of filled lands and reclaimed seas: factories, bunkers, cranes, berths, chimneys, smokestacks and crackers that labour under a thick, dark cloud of their own making. Once a passage of distance, a gateway to a middle earth between the far east and the furious west, the straits has shrunk as its reach has grown, as beaches and bays are buried under breakwaters and bunds, as the coast crawls out to engulf its shoals, and ships from three oceans now converge and compete to drop anchor by channels with little room for manoeuvre and no margins for error.

From their vessels, sailors from colder lands descend into workcraft that forward them to piers in the middle of nowhere, at the oddest of hours, to check out their bags and lose their bearings in long rides to town. These mariners will find a country where the sea has grown distant, its people detached and detained in high places, its fairways displaced and diverted to ports with few ways in and placed way too far and apart for citizens to remember what it's like to live on an island, to run from street to shore, to flee from the tide, to float on the waves, wade in the wrack and sleep with the sound of the wind in their beds.

The straits has shrunk as its isles rose in power and industry to devour their reefs and drive their children into exile, into unchartable territories where the flats have no fish and the sky is a hole in the wall, a space with a price but no sense of place. Reduced to roads, avenues and byways nourished by a link to an insatiable hinterland, the islands that guarded the straits have traded their spot in the sun for a world of strangers in a paradise lost to gain and razed from the memory of its makers. The islands where Singapore began are now footnotes and furnaces, plants and plots, the heartland of an economy built on the fringes of the lion city and sustained by an appetite for heavy fuel.

The islands where Singapore began have been pushed away and back, consigned to the very end of a country that is all at sea but never quite at home in waters that may be captured but refuse to be tamed. Every attempt to land on these remnants of a wetter age is thus fraught, a step into clear and prescient dangers and a surrender to the elements, to the mercy of freak storms, stray tides, bleak slopes and a moat of weed and rubble – the welcome mat to a field of dreams gone bad and to seed. Every approach to these banks is an exercise in caution, a glimpse into depths that peak without warning and graze the bottom of fragile craft with living glass and limestone, followed up clumsy flops and stiff lurches toward the highest, sometimes the only, rock in a basin of coral and sand, a pan of ripples in a near-forgotten corner of the straits where the sea still runs deep and true.

The reef offers no friendly faces, only greetings of shock and horror, splashes and tumbles, snaps and rustles, the shivers of a tailfin, the tip of a feeler, a gaze of reproach, a twitch, a bump, a sinking cloud of silt that betrays the fans of a buried ray. Schools of fish dash from pool to pool, then scatter to take their chances in random holes. Little terns float by, mewing and chattering; some land on low mounds while others plunge into pails of easy pickings. Swimming crabs, red from tooth to claw, guard every puddle and patch of weed, but happily ditch their posts to scramble over stone and sponge into thicker clumps. Only when cornered or caught flat-footed on a bare trap do they brandish their chelae and wave their spiny arms in a wide-eyed invitation to bite. The pose is not a bluff – the fingers are sharp and ready to nip and tug before the crab tucks one claw in and paddles away with the other in a dangle.

Herons, grey and sacred, make a bee-line for nearby shores where they can hunt and be harassed with impunity. Off the northern flank of Beting Bemban Besar, dredgers, barges and regional freighters work their way down Selat Pauh past the reefs of Pulau Hantu, while tankers assemble between Semakau and Pulau Senang, awaiting their turn to feed the refineries of Jurong. For an hour or more before sunset, the straits sank and its isles rose in power and majesty, laying bare the secrets of their keys and beckoning to islands that once or never were, skeletal outcrops of a warmer age that once welcomed women in boats who wore flowers in their tresses as they combed the flats, before they, too, fell silent and slipped off the mind of a nation with no heed for stories from its margins.

As the sky dimmed, the reef stirred and its residents took leave of their senses to choose their own adventures on a tropical shelf. Conches and volutes grub about the sediment, the former for detritus and the other for buried victims, whose detached halves also litter the middens of other bivalve fanciers. Cushion stars – big, blue and built like rock – lurk near the crest where the colonies are at their densest, where the builders dwell in cities of stone or emerge from porous layers to swing to the tune of the tide or star in a show of their own – crowns on thorns with the light of the sun at every tender tip. The reef may feed on solar energy but the real action takes place under dark, in coils and tunnels, under sand and inside rocks, in slippery hollows and unconsolidated deposits, where death comes in a million small doses and is a debt repaid in elements that find new takers – the makers of shells, tubes, cups, bones, claws and carapaces – and return to life at the foot of a long, fluid chain.

Before we fled for brighter parts, the reef offered one more, lesser, mystery. Small plops could be heard among the sargassum that draped the periphery, but there was little to suggest that the sound came from a splashing fish or snapping shrimp. The commotions, after a few false alarms and loops through the rubble, were traced to a small decapod, about an inch or more in length, that hovered in shallow water with its head tilted slightly down. The animal, which had prominent stalked eyes and a humped abdomen, maintained a broad zone of discomfort, so there were only the briefest of intervals between a sighting and a blink that sent the torch aflail into a fire of blank spaces.

The straits no longer sings, but it now rumbles with low, long groans that temper the senses and reduce every call and crash to a hum of muted resolutions. The 'shrimp' could thus cloak its flight in the whirl of shipyards and passing shafts, but it could have also simply steered towards unexpected corners, leaping against probable lines of movement into unlit patches a good few feet from its launch. But a few gave the game away by landing on clumps of sargassum with audible impact, having flicked themselves into a flop. Their jizz, supported by the natant habit and lack of prominently differentiated chelipeds, was penaeoidean, though the prawns showed none of their kin's bent for digging in when pressed. One specimen was then bagged before the reef began to rouse and stretch for the stars, both those that still haunt its banks and the luminaries that have faded as the city spread over the shore, only to find that the straits has grown nigh impassable and shines with such brightness that its beams stain the sky and do their best to keep goodnights forever at bay.

Poultry in motion

Two red junglefowl, a hen and her rooster, popped out of the shrubbery onto the lower ring road of the botanic gardens as I waddled towards the swan lake last week. They paused just long enough to determine that my duck posed no credible threat before retreating to a wedge of thick bushes and low trees, guarded by a girl on a swing, where the pair began, or rather, continued to forage with strong, purposeful kicks that sent leaves, dirt and debris up and back, and short, sharp pecks at whatever morsels their swiping had flushed, dislodged or uncovered from hideouts on the lawn.

The birds shot back into the undergrowth when my duck stumbled closer, issuing, as they circumvented the clearing, soft, fussy clucks that may have combined nuptial assurance with fowl insults. The hoo-hah was too much for another, unnoticed cockerel, who abandoned his efforts to spy on the couple with a beeline towards the gardens' fernery. His flight, which packed all the strength and speed of a fully feathered beast, would have shocked fans of farmyard chooks used to wings that lift little more than their appetites. Such powers of dispersal have allowed Gallus gallus to invade Singapore, using Pulau Ubin as a staging ground or by simply winging it across the straits of Johor. A small population has reached Tanglin, where they grub about in a sliver of a rainforest, dash through plots of plants that heal, thrill and kill, and wreck the thematic harmony of gardens in the way of a city at odds with its roots. The chicken may run but the cage remains open for those who tire of the game, of scratching hard for paltry returns and of the freedom to roam and roost where you choose, and settle for neither desire nor danger, but the comforts of the flesh and the rules of a long and whiny road.

Stormbus

Daily storms raged for much of November, as if the heavens were striving to make up for the drought that had ravaged the island early in the year, turning lawns brown and the woods bare in parts. The squalls that rolled in at daybreak during midyear have run their course, and the winds were in a state of confusion, cantering between closed seas and trapped in a month between two monsoons that forced them to release their wrath almost every evening over a city that could care no less, as orchards became ponds, roads gave way to rage and sidewalks sank under a stream of miserable, misgiven humanity.

Cyrene once enjoyed pride of place in maritime directories, which drew the attention of sailors to a shoal that presented "a brilliant appearance at low water, being covered with live corals and shells, many of the most brilliant colours." In earlier centuries, vessels seeking to chart a safe eastward route from Melaka to China were advised to hug the southern coastline of Singapore until they came within sight of a "small low island with a few trees and a shore of white sand". The learned navigator Jan Huyghen van Linschoten then continued, "You will bear down on this lsland and when you come close to it you will see the straits [of Singapore], towards which you will steer keeping off a little both to avoid the shoals and reefs to the North and also so as not to be carried by the tide to the South side of the entrance of the straits."

What trees once grew on this low, sandy isle may be guessed by the name bestowed on it by the people who lived on and off the straits. By the mid-19th century, however, Pulo Pandan no longer harboured any terrestrial vegetation and had lost ground, literally, to the waters that hammered at its edges and bore away stray grains with each sweeping tide. Screwpine Island was now a landmark in jeopardy, a hazard for mariners that warranted special concern by the port community, who noted that "no strange shipmaster will come in as far as Cyrene shoal without the services of a pilot, nor would any shipmaster, stranger or not, be willing to drop his pilot here if bound out at night." Signs and beacons were placed on the reef to warn passing ships, and the shoal became "a favourite hunting ground for conchologists" who landed at low water to find creatures of "the most brilliant colours, conjoined with immense variety of form."

Cyrene was still awash in green when we landed on its northern flank in early November for the final survey of the year. The corals that once defined the shoal have retreated to its margins, leaving in their wake a broad pan of seagrass and sand, a plain of short, serrated blades and curving mounds that shimmers and shakes as it rises from the straits only to groan before a scene of new islands and missing lands. Reef egrets, phantoms of ash that stalk the southern shores, swooped in towards pools of rubble near the western tip as the team counted, tallied, measured and pronounced judgement over the grass in their transects. When the tapes had been wound back, there was still a little time to see what lay among the spoons and sickles: hordes of sand-shifting sea stars, hermit crabs in search of companionship, the disposable end of a polychaete worm, frantic young portunids, polyps in limp solitude and carpets held hostage by shrimp in fancy dress. Margined conches were in season; tell-tale tilts betrayed the small, striking snails as they lunged over the sediment with their snouts at indecent lengths probing the silt for modest helpings and nervous eyes casting a spell of truncated suspicion over their surroundings.

We wrapped up just as a storm raced in, devouring the sky with growing shades of grey and a thickening of the air that turned the horizon into a band of cold radiance. For a few moments before the lights went out, Pasir Panjang blanched and Cyrene basked in gold as distant rays rushed in from the west, slipping under the clouds that guarded the straits to strike the port from an angle that turned the reef into a burning glass, from which every ship loomed close and the city appeared rather more lucid than usual. The lion – clad in steel, crass and heartbreak – glowered with rarified clarity, aloof and asunder from the world at its margins, until the gales silenced its roar, sent us packing and the island drowned in a shroud of damp, darkness and despair, shorn of its colours and awash with tempest that flared to no avail and floundered in a flood of its own making.

Beejewelled

A buzz, too gentle to be ignored but too thick for comfort, drew my attention to a logpile by Venus Loop one day shortly after noon. There were two, to be exact, heaps of branches, twigs and minor trunks on each side of the trail, the probable aftermath of a fall that straddled the way before it was hewn and swept off the path. The wood was still firm, certainly months younger than other nearby chunks that sat in a bed of their own chips and crumbled to the touch, too dry and stale to feed all but the least demanding of hyphae.

The source of the sound turned out to be an inch-long buprestid with tapering elytra and a blunt head dominated by eyes with rather more and finer facets than most other beetles. In the diffused glare of the forest floor, the buprestid glowed with emerald hues but the fire faded when a flash of artificial light reduced it into a figure of dullness. Almost aways on the move and more than ready to take flight with every twitch of my thigh, the beetle surveyed random lengths of timber, pausing only to perform regular push-ups, as if it needed a means to discharge energy that would otherwise cause its joints to implode at rest.

On another stump which stood headless by a turn above a ridge a few minutes away, other individuals of what appeared to be the same species dashed about and menaced each other with similar bobs. Disturbed from their displays, the beetles made a noisy exit but probably returned later to continue their rituals: courtship, mating and laying of eggs into wood that is fresh enough to be damp but still far from a fungal mulch. The grubs, which have a long abdomen and large, flat thorax, bore winding galleries between the bark and sapwood, where they turn vascular fibres into sawdust before they pupate in harder depths and emerge as jewels with a side of scarlet, bullets of bronze and copper that sear the air in their search for lumber and love, whose wings do their best to sound the worst but don't ever come close to really mean a sting.