12 November 2025

From Where I Was Standing

51 Chin Swee Road

I had come up from Outram after a late supper and was walking towards the station when the first siren cut through the ordinary noise of the street.

I remember the hour because the kopitiam shutters were already half down and the last buses were thinning out. My shoes were still damp from a shower that had passed through an hour earlier — the kind of rain that leaves the pavement shining without really cooling anything down. I had taken the long way because I wanted to walk off the heaviness of the meal, and Chin Swee Road felt familiar in the way older streets do when you have passed them a dozen times without stopping.

The evening had been unremarkable until that sound. Not one siren but several, arriving in a staggered sequence that made people on the pavement turn their heads in the same direction. I was perhaps forty metres away, near the corner where the five-foot way narrows, close enough to hear the urgency in the air and far enough that I could not see whatever had drawn the lights.

What I could see: red and blue reflections sliding across wet tar, a cluster of figures standing still in the middle of the lane, the bright rectangle of a phone screen held up by someone on the opposite footpath. What I could not see: the centre of whatever had happened, the faces of the people involved, any detail that would let me tell a story with edges.

I stopped walking. Others stopped too. There is a particular quality to a crowd that has not yet decided whether it is witnessing something or merely overhearing it — nobody moved closer, nobody spoke loudly, and the sirens kept coming from more than one direction. I thought about crossing the road and thought better of it. Some instincts are slow and sensible, and mine told me to stay where I was, at the edge of the light.

After a while — I could not count the minutes — the street took on the organised chaos of response. More lights, more uniforms at the far end, voices that carried without words I could distinguish. I watched from my patch of pavement, arms folded against a breeze that had picked up once the rain finished. A man beside me asked what was happening. I said I did not know. He said the same. We stood there like that for a short time, two strangers sharing an absence of information.

When I finally walked on towards the MRT, the sirens were still audible behind me, fainter with each block. The station was its usual late-night self: fluorescent, a little too cold, people pretending not to have noticed anything outside. I sat on the train and looked at my reflection in the dark window and tried to arrange what I had seen into something coherent. I could not. I still cannot.

On the ride home I thought about how often the city asks you to keep moving when something has clearly paused. The carriage rocked through Tanjong Pagar and Outram again, and I watched the tunnel walls without seeing them. At Buona Vista I changed lines out of habit, though I could have stayed on the circle route. Habit is a kind of comfort when the mind has nothing useful to hold.

Back on the hill, the lift lobby smelled faintly of rain — the same smell our block gets when the doors have been open during a shower. I did not turn on the news. I did not search for explanations. I made tea and sat at the kitchen table and let the night finish itself without my commentary.

I do not know what happened on Chin Swee Road that night. I know what I heard, where I stood, and how the city looked when ordinary pavement briefly became a place nobody wanted to walk through. That is the whole of it — no conclusion, no lesson, only the memory of wet light and the feeling of stopping when everyone else stopped too.