Blind-Sided

Older duck-billed chap who sold fruit and drinks from the stand mounted on the handle-bars of his bicycle up through the low lorongs where the girls worked only finally seen clearly tonight here at the Al Wadi tables. Once or twice the man had sailed past on the path along this end of Geylang without ever having taken his supper there. Scroungers like him did not patronize eateries of any kind, even for $1 pratas and not often teas. Dark female companion surprised too, middle-aged Thai or Filipina who likely made the drinks, cut the fruit and packaged for each night's trade. In fact it was only beside this woman that the man could finally be sighted properly. Clearly tonight, no two ways about it, distinctly Eurasian. There was hardly any mark whatever of the Han. Nothing. Parachute the fellow into the middle of any Western city you had a ready-made baker, plumber or janitor skipping to his van and flitting through the neighboring streets. How in the heck was that missed on the innumerable sightings in the first year when that night quarter up there fascinated so completely? Man’s manner, occupation, freedom with the girls, his earnest work ethic pedaling tirelessly round and round—for a time one had confused him with the look-outs—had taken every last bit of the attention. The woman had been rescued from the streets, got her residency, sent money back home to elderly parents and schooled younger siblings on the back of that night trade. It was not difficult to put the story together. A help-mate sharing the load and staving off all the loneliness targeting misfits like him.