We had developed a nodding acquaintance the last few weeks, recently extended to greetings. The man was not recalled from the time prior to the pandemic. He stayed out in Choa Chu Kang in the West, only visiting occasionally; a little more regularly of late.
Coming by around the back of the chair here, a light hand was laid on the shoulder in passing. Slipping by he skipped on down 15m to the couple who was just then turning from the upper path to cross Onan Road.
It was impossible to tell the gender of either there beneath the umbrella, one pushing the chair and the other within. An elderly pair they seemed, decked in matching emerald green, which, remarkably, the man here going to intercept shared in almost the very same tone.
This must have been some kind of relation in question; friends of some sort, at least.
The chap had been sitting with his back to the path, his wife & daughter facing. So that it was one of the women who had alerted him to the passers-by below.
Neighbours, could they have been? Good, former neighbours, unsighted some long while.
Beneath the umbrella the couple caught up could not have spied the chap; they were huddled under cover and the contact was very brief. The rain had started up again.
This Choa Chu Kang man had been seen extending offerings before; even the rascal busker Rahim, a not-so-secret boozer, had benefited more than once. In this case now from a distance the hand presenting had been hidden and all was over in a flash.
Bounding back in the same way the man, in the full length Muslim attire. Even children or teens did not spring across the ground like that in the Tropics; possibly at riverbanks.
The man here was in his early 50s. Zainal may have been his name.
This was not counted toward the formal zakat—the portion of the annual earnings set aside for charity, Zainal explained when he was pressed.
Sadoqah was the term; alms, Zainal helpfully spelt out and translated. It had not been a large sum, he added.
That was what that was all about.
The pondering continued long afterward without anything adequate able to be settled.
Geylang Serai, Singapore, 2011-26
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