Carried Away

 

Hivis orange (faded) lads in their mid/late 50s if not older, one hobbling, huddled under cover by the stairs. They were permitted to escape their labour in such weather, even only steady drizzle now. Electric bikes with mounted milkcrates carried the tools of their trade. Garden maintenance, keeping the forest and jungle from our urban amenity; roadside verges in their case. Another one of their number was greatly surprised couple weeks back being slipped a two returning to the digs after supper. A forested area out near Jurong was due to be cleared shortly for an extension of an industrial complex, the newspaper reported this morning, noting that the habitat was a breeding ground or home to a particular butterfly and would not be easily replicated. (Deft soft pedal for devastation, always cannily delivered here.) The other night the retired engineer Mr Cha couldn’t decide whether the beneficiary of the two working on the grassy fringe below was Chinese, or Malay. Definitely hailing from Malaysia, said Mr Cha. Nearing ninety now, Mr Cha had come down as a babe in arms with his parents from Fujian, on the Mainland. The rhetoric of the new Japanese “lady” was of more concern to Mr C. Could the Americans press the Japanese into conflict in those parts? would that finangling be the best way to fix their trade imbalance? Over two hours without cease – and two & one half steady fall. Era had lost ten family members in NW Sumatra last couple days; 1,200 across the region had perished. Mr Lim the plate-collector, whose Bahasa was good, did not know banjir, the term for flood. In his almost seventy years Lim had never left the island and did not watch television – never watched, it seemed. Likely he was illiterate in any language and on some kind of medication too. (There had been a couple sudden verbal outbursts.) Yet it had come down to the man that swi chai could indeed be highly serious, carrying all before it. Decades ago it must have been when it first filtered down to the young Lim, the oldies remembering.

NB. A week later the count of casualties is 1,600, with more rain forecast.