The annotated budak

The last of a line

The far west of Singapore is a wasteland of industry, a wedge of long, straight roads that lead to nowhere in particular and have long run out of names, bearing instead digits and mind-numbing epithets: crescents, circles, loops, links, views, places, walks, circuits, sectors and squares in a flat and flattened corner of the island that shunned the city for as long as it could until the town beat a way to its shores and made an offer it could not refuse – a chance to be reborn, remade, reshaped, reclaimed as the engine of a nation and a cog in the transformation of a country from fortress to factory.

The far west of Singapore is a land forgotten by history, a long, ragged line of inlets and capes, rivers and estuaries, mangroves and mudflats, freshwater swamps and fringing reefs that fed and fuelled the residents of coastal settlements who looked away from the city and towards the straits, whose names were lost, reclaimed, buried, expunged as the town turned Jurong into a corporation and Tuas into a broad belt of wharves, yards and terminals. The headlands of Tanjong Gul, Tanjong Rawa, Tanjong Karang and Tanjong Merawang now rise only in expired maps, while Chichir, Kuching, Bajau, Blukang and Merawang have faded from charts and now float under tar and tanks, tracks and threads – isles with no names, no memory and no place in a country that refuses to be constrained by its past and its borders.

The only remnant of Tuas to survive untamed lies between a biochemical plant and a marina, and is marked by a starboard beacon erected on a rocky mound at the tip of a tongue of sand, mud and seagrass that runs northwards along a sea wall, fords the mouth of a storm canal and swells again to host a copse of mangroves, Avicennia and Sonneratia, around which fiddler crabs scour the silt for meals that arrive twice a day or not at all when the luminaries find themselves at odds with each other and temper the tide with their tiffs. Considerable stretches of this shore are littered with rubble, dead shells and skeletons that hint of richer depths or recall a time when the edge of this sea felt the lay of the land and the waters rose to soak, flood, probe, stroke, brush against the folds of hills, farms and forests, only to sink back again when the elements found no clear points of departure, no telling where one ends and the other begins, no lines to be drawn, no love between the lines.

Slippery filaments of blue-green algae cloak portions of the beach like a thin layer of greased hair with limp, unruly partings. The cyanobacteria appear to wax as the flat nears a break in the wall, the final destination of municipal discharges that emerge from a culvert by Tuas West Road and trace a straight, northwestward route to Merawang before a trickle and a sigh, as the waterway meets a grill with two tiers and sheds its burdens into a sallow trough. The lower edges of the canal, along with its floor and a row of bulkheads that guard its gap, are infested with tropical oysters that spare no hard surface below the high water mark and, like the microbial tufts that cling to softer rims, seem to revel in the sweet-savoury soup of rain, runoff and tidal incursions that steeps in this swale of fertile suspensions.

The higher reaches of Merawang are by and large a slope of raw particles, boulders and ridges, miniature ramparts and worn formations, surrounded by the remains of corals, clams and scallops, broken by porous fingers, soft green blades and carpet anemones – cracks, creases and cavities in chunks of loose rubble overrun by porcelain crabs and other filter feeders that prefer the dark side of every mound and slip away helter skelter when their world is overturned and tumbled out. The falling tide also reveals a terrace of pools fringed by algae and Halophila, and holding just enough water to cover the spires of shallow coils. An olive whelk ploughs through a bare patch, its long snout raised and tilted at possible sources of nourishment. Gangs of gold-spotted mudskippers play tag on the surf or cling to perches where the foam dashes against their flanks and washes the silt off their backs. The epibenthos is otherwise dominated by zoanthids, their crowns tucked in columns that perforate the shore with a minefield of squat, shrunken blobs, buttons to a magical mystery tour just a step away from a sinking feeling. 

A small xanthid on a bed of pebbles gave in to the urge to budge, betraying itself and its neighbours: gobies that stuck their heads into hollows and an even tinier hermit that kept calm but refused to carry on. The crablet, identified as Leptodius sanguineus, bore somewhat spatulate fingers, miniature versions of the chelae welded by other, much larger beasts that lumber over reefs in the straits to the south. Though not uncommon at intertidal depths and having a range that spans the Red Sea and Hawaii, this crab is still rather poorly known, the possible artefact of an inconspicuous profile and cryptic habits; the animals tend to lurk in pieces of coral or bury themselves in the sediment. Reported to prey on small shellfish, the xanthids are themselves consumed by swimming crabs that encounter them in exposed positions and manage to crush their defences with brute, brachyuran force.

Stone crabs are far more visible bruisers, being probably more than a match for most portunids. Young individuals occupy the chambers of coarse rocks, while full-sized specimens peep from incomplete shadows and tight corners, which they grip with bulldog force and belligerent glares. Come dusk, the menippids emerge from their dens to taste the ground for stray snails and bivalves, whose shells they crack with a blunt, broad tooth on their major claw. Deliberate in nature and thoroughly indifferent to the rhythms that hold us captive to the hours, to the clock that fails to talk and to our singular fear of a temporality with no ends in sight, the crabs are unlikely to make a dent in the molluscan population, which still seethes with recruits from recent emissions into the thick, brown broth of a shuttered sea. This corner of the straits, the far west of an island in love with larger dreams, still strains against its walls, against the lines that seek to carve and conquer its waters, to turn the tip of the peninsula into a dry and promised land. But the sea may never rise again, save with a slow, warm wrath, for the time for trysts is over, and the city has turned its back, shut its eyes, buried its heart – this straits has shrunk and gulf has widened between two worlds too removed from each other, too close for comfort, too long apart.

Hedgey

The roads of the lion city are dominated by hedges of camwood, an African treelet that probably gained traction with local planners for its leguminous ability to thrive in poor soil, the shy, undistractive flowers that never seem to set seed in this country, and a singular lack of character. The plant's high tolerance for regular pruning is a boon to estate managers who spare no effort in creating bland, green walls that separate pavements from parks and screen the street from the smart. The natural habit of Baphia nitida is markedly less tidy, however; left to its own devices, the shrub tends to explode in all directions with long, intrusive sprigs bearing dark, shiny leaves, and may even grow a trunk and attain its true height under a canopy of blight.

Strays are seldom allowed to mar the serenity of suburban fences, so every sapling that breaks the monotony of sanctioned thickets is removed with extreme prejudice by men who are also under orders to inspect the gutters that run alongside the hedges and slice off any shoots that peek out from the slopes. The ferns, vines and herbs that temper the harder edges of the heartlands suffer a cropping but they come back again and again with every breeze and storm that sends spores into the ditch and seeds down cracks and culverts, where they vex the efforts of councils on the warpath against untrimmed maladies.

The green reapers do miss a few spots that are hard to reach, easy to overlook or hidden between paths where few bother to stop and nobody gives a damn. One such recess, tucked in one of the busiest corners of a satellite town, ends by a deep monsoon trench as a grassy cul-de-sac fringed by camwood and ornamental gingers. Palmflies, day-flying moths, grass blues, chocolate pansies and small brown skippers rest on leaves between sips, changeable lizards guard the feet of rain trees, and bees – blue-banded as well as carpenter – work their way through the costus, unbugged by passers-by consumed by sweeter stuff. The vegetation also harbours a flutter of dragons: some use the shrubbery to recharge after flights of passion over a nearby pond, while others hunt from the safety of dense foliage until they gain the livery to make a play for open waters.

The farthest end of this nook also hides a wild cinnamon, barely visible among the camwood but still holding its ground against the onslaught of municipal blades to reach the height of its neighbours. The bushlet has also managed to weather the appetites of browsers, with perhaps a little help from parasitoid friends, but the odds evened out for at least one common mime fresh from its penultimate moult as a wingless grub and sitting smug on an exposed leaf. Having run a gauntlet of beaks, stings and bites for nigh ten days, the cat probably felt entitled to a breather and a break from its daily routine of hide and feed.

In its earlier stages, Chilasa clytia discourages predators by offering a passing resemblance to fowl poop, but the disguise probably wavers as the cat grows and crosses the line between excrement and enticement, from shit to sweet. By the fifth instar, protective mimicry has given way to trigger warnings that bring up the memory of off-flavours and bitter treats. The pre-pupal mime, a gaudy contrast to the greys, browns and greens of other local swallowtail cats, sports a streaky pattern of cream and pale black, with rows of carmine spots and bicoloured processes between the head and final abdominal segments.

The cat presented a chance to observe the later stages of its life-cycle, so its perch was plucked, rolled into a makeshift cocoon and shoved into a side pocket. It then spent the next four days in the safe haven of a clear plastic container, munching on young cinnamon leaves (picked from a largish tree by a quiet bend in a nearby neighbourhood), resting for hours at end to process its meals, and extruding copious pellets of frass that recall black peppercorns but consist of globules of undigested fibres. When molested, the cat readily everted an osmeterium from its prothoraic segment, creating the effect of a miniature kaiju as it reared up and issued silent screams of rage and odorous emissions accompanied by the thrashing-about of pudgy forequarters.

The cat put a halt to four days of surreptitious detours when it abandoned its feast and fury to take up a spot on a twig in its cage. After securing its butt to the bark and throwing a belt of silk around its back, the caterpillar entered a stupor that caught me off-guard, for it shed its skin during a mid-morning economic noodle run, by the end of which the larva no longer resembled a bug but the broken remains of a minor stump, albeit with an ill-disposed head capsule at its base. The pupa then dozed for nearly a fortnight before the imago emerged, again with infortuitous timing, to float around the desk and frustrate the other captive cat as it sought the sky beyond a wall of glass. There was a brief pause, for the record so to speak, then the mime found a crack in the screen and fled this high estate for a spell on the wing and sips of heaven in the gardens of a city on edge and in loathe with its drains.

Strangers in paradise

Otters were nowhere to be seen when I waddled along the promenade that links Marina Bay Sands to the Gardens by the Bay last Friday, with faint, foolish hopes of spotting the resident pack or at the very least stepping over a spraint or two. The reservoir formed by the damming of an estuarine basin may offer wayward mustelids a dubious refuge, but its bare expanse is too bleak for most waterfowl, which prefer the marshy reaches of a civilised wetlands where one can suck on a skewer in between potshots at waders and warblers. There is enough prey in the bay to satisfy lutrine appetites, though, and buoys and bulkheads aplenty where grey and striated herons can fish. White-winged terns have also flocked to the city's southern reaches to float over grey-brown waters and glean morsels from the water surface. 

A wall of bromeliads, broken by the odd pandan or palm, lines the path by two glass domes in which the climate is controlled and, in one, maintained at a festive chill. Their prickly foliage – barbs, spines, thorns and hooks in a rosette of fleshy blades – keeps curious visitors and wayward children from a slippery slope into the spoils of three tamed rivers. The Americans, like their human counterparts, arrived bearing gifts of dubious value: a population of brown anoles that probably survived passage over the Pacific as eggs or neonates in the warm, cosy axils of the chosen cultivars.

Careless visitors to the park, who fail to be faithful to their mobile devices or who find nothing worse than a garden that's merely clean and green, may notice in the vegetation small, brownish tetrapods, larger than typical house geckos but nowhere near the bulk of local 'chameleons', with streamlined heads and limbs that end in long, slender digits. The biggest and darkest of these lizards tend to cling head-down from small trunks, flower spikes or even utility poles, with their throats exposed; every other moment, a flap of bright, orange unfolds to strike fear in nearby rivals and inflame the passions of a lurking dame. These males continue to display their necked crests and perform accompanying push-ups and head bobs even when observers approach at close range, but most hop or scamper off when the going gets too tough for comfort. Juveniles and females prefer the security of lower clumps and sport dorsal stripes that distract and disconcert, creating the impression of a beast that is not quite as small, or sharp, as it appears to be.

Changeable lizards also maintain look-outs on the waterfront, and seem to have held their ground against their neotropical interlopers. Two half-grown moggies, visible only from the upper foyer of the domes, negotiate their way through the succulent maze, while a pair of white-bellied sea eagles glide in from the straits to circle and bank over a flyer that never really took off, a wheel of ill-fortune that still rolls a positive spin. Norops sagrei have fared slightly better, with a slow expansion in range beyond their artificial turf, and will find plenty of fans in the birds, snakes and cats that hunt by the bay. But this invasion by stalk and sheath, via shipments of fallen talents, will find little else to bar its way on a land reclaimed, a paradise for strangers in a grave new world with few friends in sight and fine tales to sell.

Lesserus Island

The southern tip of Lazarus Island, hidden by the long, low hill that dominates this rocky isle, boasts a shore of remarkable beauty, a bay formed by two curving walls between a coastal forest and the Straits of Singapore, into which sand, coral and seagrass have mounted a slow assault, turning what was once a barren beach into a plain of uneven terraces, where memories of picnics and other weekend pleasures lie buried under the stolons of delicate halophiles and mermaid swirls, where trees stumble and double over at the water's edge to become playgrounds for arboreal crabs, and to which the sun bids a premature farewell with a rapid dip below the slopes of St John's into a fretful west.

The lower reaches of this cove, built nearly four decades ago to replace, in part, a now landlocked coast, is a crest of coral, a reef fed by currents from an ancient channel in which planktonic larvae surf between two shallow seas before they drop anchor and take harbour in friendly shores. Freighters from the four corners also plough this straits, and have done so since the flagship of Juan de Silva ran briefly aground on a nearby rock en route to his death in Melaka. Luso-Spanish vessels then also faced the threat of unallied locals, who knew every fair way and foul route, and who swore fealty to upland kings but bowed to native lords. These men, who surveyed passing vessels and weighed their chances from wooded fringes, and whose families built houses atop sturdy logs at the feet of insular refuges, have left few traces of their existence, however – the true masters of the Malayan sea, a folk of maritime lore, gave up their homes and broke their habits when islands such as Sekijang Pelepah had their leases renewed as mainland haunts, bereft of history and shorn of the communities who lived and lost their lives by the tides. Lazarus now sleeps with his loins entwined with a stiff landscape and artificial lagoons to which yobs set sail for a spot of sun and the chance to unleash, beyond earshot of the lion city, their inner beast.

Other creatures, relics of an even earlier age, roam the dark side of Lazarus, beyond sight of Sunday yachts. On rubble, rock and weed are countless bodies and many more limbs, an epilayer of tissue and torsos that battle for space, reach out for food and keep their senses peeled for elements of danger, or perchance, objects of desire. Worms long and lean hunt flat out, a black sea cucumber probes the sand with its tail in a trench, shrimp with long arms and broken backs amble in stranded pools, and crabs armed with shears, spoons, pliers and paddles run riot until they sense unwanted attention and retreat under silt or stone. Conches, eyes aloft, vault to fresh turf, polyps with bold, braided heads raise their columns from the sediment, and the reef stirs with nocturnal tension, a stage of trysts, blows and affrays with few witnesses and no room for regrets.

Octopuses turn up as daylight fades, making their way across the reef with fluid ease. With no bones to hinder their passage and eight long arms that pack a punch and still fit into almost any hole, the cephalopods prowl even the shallowest of flats, stretching, hooking, huddling, squeezing, pouncing, groping, scrounging – touchy-feely monsters seeking their supper in the shadow of sea almonds and beach hibiscus trees, whose foliage, purple with age, litter the seagrass and lose their fibre to submarine jaws.

Amid portunids that found it hard to chose between fight and flight, I found one largish octopus with glazed eyes and deep hues sitting tight over a crack below a weedy slab, watching over a probable clutch and brooding on her eventual destiny as a mother to many but once. Another, more detached, individual swept across a broad puddle, spreading terror in three inches of salinity as it swooped over bland leaves towards promising outcrops, whereupon the loose tangle explodes into a pale, pulsing canopy that envelopes the rock and bars all ways out. Eager tentacles invade every crevice as the kraken seals the deal with an interbranchial web, a tent of expanded mantle that sends crab, shrimp and fish fleeing towards a fatal beak. Some traps are duds and the octopus moves on to another assembly, a strategy that probably pays off when almost every other cavity is filled with small, shelly things, more than enough protein to reward an evening of speculative pursuits.

The walk back is a slow plod over Jurassic formations that section the shore into parallel blocs of sedimentary layers, natural barricades riddled with tears, folds and fractures, too high to leap over yet too rife with gelatinous filaments to risk a casual slip. Between the miniature ranges are unconsolidated pits that invite tired feet to stay, and sink. Porous logs and bent trunks turn the narrow beach above the surf into an obstacle course with a cheerless crowd: ghost crabs nibbling on fleshy parts, grapsids playing hide-and-peek, and Coenobita in clicking droves. The sand, coarse and crudely heaped, pulls away and plays loose, leaving grains that never seem to fall off the threads of rubber soles even after several hosing downs.

Meanwhile, Lazarus in his true, truncated form – not the scrubland of snails and worse pests that was raised from the seabed to be welded to the corpse of a silenced reef – beckons to the left, offering bluffs that remain a habitat for rare trees and still welcome the worst-kept of secrets, where the survivors of recent disentombments rest on ridges that overlooked their homes, their prisons, their shrines, their wards, camps and quarters where they enjoyed cold, cramped comfort after an ill voyage and bade farewell to a life they never got to greet. The dreams of a promised land, bitter and betrayed by the few who found it a blessing, came to a close at the feet of a hill that marks the edge of the port, where the border ends and the unnatural history of an unlikely country began, in the wake of islands that guarded the harbour until they surrendered their badges as points of arrival to a nation that now looks up, out and inwards, secure in its place in the world at large but never fully at ease in the waters that still yoke it to its dim, deep and distant past.`

Low tide

Into a low-tide world
We waded alone,
Past those beaches
Moss over-grown;

Miraculously,
To walk across
A waterless ocean,
A mud-grey fosse;

Beyond us the steady
Yet hurried sounds
Of a sea that forgot
Its low-tide grounds;

A sea that had gone
And long since fled,
And left us to walk
On its ancient bed.

– Margaret Leong, Rivers to Senang

Balik Pulau

Photo by Peter Geddes. From Balik Pulau: Stories from Singapore's Islands, National Museum of Singapore, 2 June - 10 August, 2014.

Every man is an island. And no more so than when the island lies dead, buried, burnt and banished to a hinterland of the mind, a life that lingered above the tide before sinking into dull recesses and clement states – unsaid, unfelt, undeserving of a hearing until a word or two, an innocent query, draws out a cry of anguish, of pain that can no longer be deferred or deleted, a punch in the gut of a man who found a world to his liking and tasted paradise before it was paved and forty years of work came to an end in a flat of four small walls.

Other islanders, still hale and handy with bubu and boats, lurk on the fringes of flats that survive in an archipelago of tanks, cells and smokestacks. These terumbu were not their traditional hunting grounds, for the men sailed to more distant haunts, close to the lands of the fathers of their fathers. The reefs, just a few paddles away, belonged to the womenfolk, who once wandered on them early in the morning or in the dying hours of the day, clad in sarong and with bunga raya (hibiscus) in their locks, seeking spider conches, edible crabs, gulong and the gelatinous fruit of the sea. The sound of their chatter would waft towards the village and caress the ears of fishermen in huts by a shore of sand and coral, a barricade of natural mysteries before an isle of ease and eternity. To the north, nine sullen islands, named after vessels, beasts and trees, guarded the borders of Jurong and exchanged words in the dark as voices floated from house to house, isle to isle and across the water, over mud, slope and shoal, to their kin by the coast, to villas where gin, tonic and trust were traded, to the tip of Tanjong Kling where pleasure was launched and the past resides, in fits and empty starts, in eyes of bright blue and distant frowns. 

Few return to the islands today, and fewer still reside on them, but for accidents of history that gave rise to an abode of pilgrimage, a minor attraction in a city of far more luxurious sights. Some continue to endure the ride to these shrines, though in scantier numbers than the flotillas that used to surround the turtle at high tide and unleash a mob of nonyas, grand- and would-be mothers, hawkers, beggars, captains of twakows and champions of commerce who clambered out of rocking sampans, waded across a bridge of sand, walked up a hill and prayed to a trio of saints before attaching their desires, in codes of primary colours, to sundry boughs and offering token and tribute to the grand old uncle of the southern sea, patron of sailors, protector of sojourners, a god who looks east and askance at the port that sought his favour only to forget his name.

Few return to the islands today, for many have bid farewell to their homes and others have burnt their boats, preferring to save the worst for last and spare the powers that be the trouble of scuttling their craft and sending the owners the bill for a grave on the bottom of a dire strait. Those who still do so, who charter bright yachts and dingy ferries to greet the dawn and land between lanes filled with ships that could crush a reef or islet with half their hull, find piers with happy names and silent walls, barriers of misery to both history and humanity that displaced a century or more of coastal settlement and banished old reefs to the margins of a maritime hub. Some corals have returned, but not all can take the heat and the polyps grow in waters that have turned cold and no longer tell stories of pirate queens, watchful dragons, ancient duels and wrathful spirits to frighten and frustrate the children of a flagrant harbour.

Few now return to the straits to find islands of ease, islands of confinement, islands of refuge, islands of industry, islands on fire, islands of light, islands of shadow, islands of trees that have lost their roots, islands of cats, islands of goats that devoured nearly all vegetation, bald islands, barren islands, islands of stone, islands of evil, islands of laughable loves, islands of fatal, forbidden ties, islands of revolt, islands of seclusion, islands that have found a second life as habitats in harmony, button islands, butttressed islands, islands lost to the waves, islands left to rot, islands of no account and islands of last resort – names without places and places without names. Every island has a story, but not every story has a tail. The islands remain in place but have grown distant and detached, the wind has abandoned their sails, their myths have lost their makers and their children now reside in flats that the tides can never touch, where time passes with a sigh and each day is a dream gone bad, a life cut short and caged with nowhere to go, no way out and no way back.