Reflections Under the Overpass
Rain held in the gutters long after the sky cleared.
I am walking back from a late dinner in town, shoes finding the drier strips between puddles, the kind of night where the city feels stitched together by fluorescent strips and the occasional whirr of a taxi indicator. Chin Swee Road is not my neighbourhood — I live on Pasir Ris Street, where the sea air sometimes reaches the corridor before midnight — but tonight I cut through here because the MRT connection was faster than waiting for the last bus eastward, and because I wanted the walk to finish something the meal had started: a conversation that ended without resolution, the way most honest conversations do.
The overpass ahead throws a shallow pool of light onto the five-foot way. I notice it the way you notice a coin dropped on pavement — not because it matters, but because the surface is briefly honest about what fell on it. Water sits in the low points, carrying orange from the lamps above and a thin ribbon of green from a pharmacy sign two shopfronts down. My reflection breaks every time a motorcycle passes, then settles again, which seems like the right metaphor and also like reaching for one, so I leave it at the image and keep walking.
Somewhere to my left, closer to the junction than I am, I hear sirens. Not the long wail that films use; a shorter pattern, urgent without theatre. I stop near a shuttered provision shop and listen. There is no crowd noise from where I stand, only the wet hiss of tyres and the distant clatter of someone pushing a metal trolley across uneven tiles. A few windows on the upper floors have lights on, rectangles of ordinary life continuing while the street below rearranges itself into whatever the sirens require. I do not move towards the sound. I am not needed there, and I know better than to treat curiosity as courage.
What I can see is limited: a flicker of blue light bouncing off the underside of the overpass, a cluster of figures too far away to distinguish, the kind of scene that will become a headline for strangers and remain, for those nearby, a sequence of sounds and guesses. I do not know what happened. I am stating that plainly because the temptation to narrate beyond your own sightline is strong on nights like this, and I have no wish to borrow gravity I did not earn. I heard sirens. I saw lights. I felt the small tightening in my chest that arrives when the city reminds you it contains events you cannot soften by walking past them.
I think about the dinner table I left an hour ago — porcelain, a shared plate of greens, someone asking whether I still enjoyed the east-side flat after five years. I said yes, and meant it, though I also meant that enjoyment is a quiet verb in an HDB block: the fan on setting two, the kettle clicked off before the boil overspills, the park connector at dusk when the railing picks up the last teal in the sky. None of that is relevant to the sirens except that ordinary life keeps its appointments even when a street nearby does not.
A man exits a lift lobby ahead of me, umbrella closed but still dripping. We nod without speaking. Singapore is full of these courteous silences, especially after eleven. He turns towards the taxi stand; I continue under the overpass, choosing the route that slopes gently down towards the station rather than the alley I do not know well. The sirens fade, or perhaps I simply walk out of their acoustic reach. Both explanations feel true.
At the corner I pause again, not from fear but from the habit of checking whether the air has changed. It has not. Same humidity, same faint smell of rain on concrete, same distant fried-onion note from a stall that should have closed hours ago. If something serious occurred, it occurred beyond my sightline, handled by people whose job it is to respond. I am a person who writes notes about bus rides and stairwell paint. I am not a witness in any useful sense, and pretending otherwise would disrespect whoever may be affected by whatever unfolded.
I reach the station entrance and the scene closes around me: escalator lights, the ticket barrier's soft beep, a couple discussing tomorrow's school run in half-whispers. The city resumes its interior rhythm. I ride eastward with my forehead against the window, watching tunnels give way to elevated track, then to the dark mass of trees near Tampines. By the time I unlock my door it is after midnight, and the flat smells faintly of the morning's coffee grounds, which I forgot to empty — a small domestic failure I am almost grateful for, because it anchors me in the realm of things I can fix.
I sit at the kitchen table without switching on every lamp. The fan stays on setting two; the window stays open a finger's width. I do not write immediately. I wait until the sirens become a memory with edges rather than a live wire. When I begin, it is not to explain the night, only to record what reached me: wet light under an overpass, a sound I could not interpret, the walk home that was still, in the end, a walk home. If I learn more later, from someone who was there with authority to speak, I will adjust these lines. Until then, this is the honest extent of it.
I do not know what happened on Chin Swee Road that November night. I know I passed through the neighbourhood on my way back to Pasir Ris, and that the city showed me one of its harder faces at a distance I could not cross. That is all this note claims. The rest belongs to people whose names I do not have, and to a morning I did not see.