The Railway Corridor, however, proved to be so much more than just a green thoroughfare for trekkers and cyclists. It provided glimpses into different worlds: some gone, like the crumbling Hindu shrines left behind by railway workers, some neglected, some underground but all varied and equally valid. Experiencing Singapore from what was, at times, a subterranean level was most peculiar. Under the vast Commonwealth Avenue flyover, I stepped onto a 1970s New York film set starring Charles Bronson. Graffiti adorned the concrete walls of the flyover, some of which was exceptionally good and deserved a bigger audience than the rare railway walker. The sloped sides of the flyover leant themselves to an instant underground skate park, already being used in an ad-hoc fashion judging by the litter. At the edge of the flyover, three rebellious Caucasian teenagers were taking turns to throw rocks overhead. On closer inspection of their expensive designer labels, they were three wealthy Caucasian teenagers, probably from the bungalows nearby. I have little patience for affluent suburban kids playing out the downtrodden, disaffected “boyz in the hood” routine at the best of times. Watching Western expat teenagers in baggy pants pretending to be Jay Z of Holland V always tempts me to ask, “Sorry to interrupt the gangsta trippin’, homies, but does your maid know where you’re at?”
They glared at me, perhaps understandably. Vandals do not expect their work to be interrupted beneath Commonwealth Avenue by a lone ang moh. They continued to chip away at the ceiling with their rocks, but more tentatively.
“Hello, boys,” I said cheerily, stopping to examine their handiwork.
“Hello,” one of the rock throwers grunted.
“Are you enjoying yourselves? You seem to be enjoying yourselves. Well, I can see you’re busy. I’ll leave you to it.”
I took out my notepad and made a few scribbles. They dropped their rocks, picked up their skateboards and left. At the next flyover, I planned to tackle global poverty and famine.
Instead, I was hit with a multiple homicide. After passing my old friends Proteos and Immunos at Biopolis, I stumbled upon a macabre murder scene beneath Portsdown Avenue. There had been carnage at Queensway. The flyover was 30 to 40 metres long and the ground was damp and unstable, with the water often submerging my ankles, but that was the least of my worries. Jackets, shoes, umbrellas, handbags and cases were lying across the muddy pebbles. I ventured closer to examine the belongings, promising myself that if I found so much as a speck of blood, I’d run all the way to the Alexandra police post. Singaporeans were going about their daily lives in their thousands not five metres above my head, but inside the gloomy, filthy flyover, I was very much alone and a trifle concerned.
A male silhouette appeared at the other end of the flyover, ominously framed by the concrete walls. Without thinking, I stepped back from all the personal belongings and scrambled up the sloped, cobbled flyover wall to navigate my way around the soaking, sinking soil and to reassure the silhouette. My haste only heightened his concern. He started running through the caliginous tunnel towards me. I thought he was a murderer. I quickened my uneven pace across the near vertical terrain. Our paths were about to cross.
And then we both pretended that nothing had happened. He surveyed all the bits and bobs and realised nothing was missing, then examined me from head to toe and ascertained that I was not a thief. I spotted the camera he was holding in one hand and the expensive-looking lens in the other and worked out that he was either a professional photographer on a funky urban underground shoot or he was going to batter me to death with his Canon. So we just nodded as we passed each other and continued on our way, like it was the most everyday of occurrences to encounter a stranger beneath a deserted flyover and chase him across its slippery cobbled walls.
As I happily returned to daylight, I smiled at a couple of models standing on the Jalan Hang Jebat side of the flyover touching up their make-up. Tall, slender and blessed with that other-worldly bone structure of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth so popular with modelling agencies, they were dressed as goths, sporting war paint and lashings of lacquer that had been poured onto their heads to make every hair strand stand erect. They were a cross between Lady Gaga and Adam Ant. Where the hell was I?
Eager to leave Zombieland, I picked up the pace, passed the AIA Building and followed the Railway Corridor as it ran parallel with the AYE. The path was a jungle trench. Wading through knee-high lalang grass, my ankles rolled in every direction as I struggled to maintain my footing. With the Bukit Merah industrial estate on my left, I had no one but snakes for company. Bodies could be thrown from the AYE and never be found.
By Lower Delta Road, I was seriously struggling. The swampy terrain swallowed my weary feet with every tentative step. I tried to get around one particularly flooded area by crawling up the grassy slope. I slipped, scraped my knees along the cobbles and dropped and soaked my street directory. With dusk closing in, I rolled onto my back to allow the spots in my eyes to clear. Despite being flanked by the bustling AYE traffic and the neighbouring blocks up and away to my left, I was desperately lonely.
The thought occurred to me that I had strayed too far. I was still trudging along the former KTM railway, I knew that, but whether I still had the permission of the Singapore Land Authority was another more serious matter. The colourful, welcoming SLA signs at Bukit Timah reminding visitors that the Green Corridor was “for your recreational use” had stopped abruptly around Holland Road, even though I had kept on searching for them (partly because I was hoping to find one amended to “for your recreational drug use” but I never did).
By the time I had passed beneath the Central Expressway (CTE) near Keppel Road, I was under no illusions. I was still on the right track, as it were, but the public Railway Corridor must have halted some time back. I was aware that my exuberant trekking might have ventured into wayward trespassing but the prospect of retracing my steps back to Bukit Timah, or even Bukit Merah, did not appeal. Indeed, the thought of lying back in an air-conditioned police car and being driven off state land now had a certain allure.
I picked out the cranes and hoists of the port at Keppel Terminal and a sign of new Singapore, the giant billboard advertising Resorts World Sentosa, and knew I was close. The path widened as I passed an old, ghostly station house marked Singapura. Indeed the ghosts of the Malaysian railway surrounded me in the encroaching darkness. Dilapidated shacks, broken shrines and rusty signboards written in Malay were reminders that, ironically, I was returning to old Singapore, which had once housed the magnificent art deco Tanjong Pagar Railway Station. New Singapore was now behind me, facing an undecided future for its green corridor.
I stepped slowly along the railway tracks as I entered the dark, deserted station. Frankly, it was a bewildering experience. With faded posters and signs, paint-chipped benches and litter blowing gently in the dusky breeze on the platforms above me, it were as if I had stepped onto another eerie movie set, the post-apocalyptic Beneath the Planet of the Apes. The temptation to fall to my knees, pound the tracks and shout “You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” was overwhelming. But I had a more pressing issue. I was locked in. The station perimeter was surrounded by fences 2 metres high, complete with those small meshed squares that deliberately make footholds and handgrips impossible. As an unsettling murkiness enveloped the station, I was trapped beside its imposing, Gothic, spooky shutdown interior hall. Where were the Asia Paranormal Investigators when I needed them?
I clambered onto the platform and, for the most fleeting of moments, thought I saw an Upminster-bound London tube trundling towards me. Fatigue was failing my mind. Then I thought I picked out a couple of security guards gesticulating wildly and dashing across the bleak, cheerless car park towards me. Hallucinations had taken hold now. Erring on the side of caution, I took off in the opposite direction. Whether they were ghosts or real people, I figured running away was the best option. I was 12 years old and being harassed on a station platform again. All that was missing was a Curly Wurly
.
“Hey, you ah! How you get in here, ah?” a voice shouted. “Cannot lah.”
They were real people, or Singlish-speaking ghosts. I stopped and trudged towards the car park, wearily anticipating the interrogation. The guard wagged his finger in front of me when I slumped beside his security post at the exit. There is something about people who take pleasure in wagging their fingers in other people’s faces, something that makes me want to bite the offending finger off and leave them with a wagging stump.
“How you get in here?” he demanded, rightfully concerned that I had breached his security.
“I walked in,” I replied, far too flippantly for his taste.
“Cannot walk in, cannot. There are fences and gates,” he pointed out.
“No, I walked in from Bukit Timah. I followed the new Railway Corridor all the way from Bukit Timah station to this one, and the corridor must have ended at some point and I didn’t notice.”
“Don’t bluff. Bukit Timah so far, lah.”
“Why would I possibly make something like that up?”
He conceded that I had a point. He pulled the gate open. I wished him a good night. He did not reply. I did not blame him.
Nevertheless, the Railway Corridor really is something special, an umbilical cord that ties the histories of two neighbouring countries together. Not only must Singapore’s green link remain, it should be beautified further with more indigenous vegetation added to keep the landed properties out and maintain a little privacy for all stakeholders. Create not only a lifestyle attraction for walkers, trekkers and cyclists but a legitimate, healthy, practical public transport thoroughfare for Singapore’s commuters. In the week that I visited the Railway Corridor, SMRT trains broke down an unprecedented four times. Had a biking path already been laid over the country’s spine, Tanjong Pagar office staff could have been home in Woodlands and cycling clips removed before SMRT’s packed replacement buses had even shown up.
New Singapore has been gifted an extraordinary trail that must be utilised by all. Build the walking and cycling paths, the skateboard and skating parks and the allotments beside the housing estates of Bukit Merah and Tanglin Halt, maintain the Hindu shrines where possible, preserve Bukit Timah Railway Station and erect information panels and permanent photo experiences to inform future generations of what was handed down to them by old Singapore. The Railway Corridor is filled with the most precious of commodities—land. There is ample space to do all of the above and more. I only ventured along the southern route. From Bukit Timah northwards, there are creative possibilities all the way to the Kranji coastal mudflats. Let the bold development be determined by imagination rather than kiasuism.
And most of all, make sure the Railway Corridor is adequately signposted throughout. Those signs make all the difference you know, particularly between trekking and bloody trespassing.
Sixteen
NEW Singaporeans are trying to be more courteous. They really are, particularly when there is the risk of losing face. The MRT, however, has thrown a spanner in the works. I’m referring to that seat in the corner. Reserved for anyone pregnant, with child, with age or with shopping, the seat lurks at the end of each row, seemingly innocent and innocuous, ready to do its good deed for the day for a weary traveller. In reality, it’s a veritable minefield of social embarrassments just waiting to blow up in our faces. Life was so much easier in old Singapore. We knew who we were on trains. We were all grumpy bastards. No one gave up their seat for anyone, not even for a one-legged pregnant woman with a dozen shopping bags. Everyone knew where they stood, or sat in this instance, head down in a good book and thinking, Piss off, peg leg, I was here first.
Then new Singapore decided to manipulate the average Asian’s obsession with saving face by sticking up highly visible campaign posters above the coveted corner seats. In bright letters accompanied with explanatory diagrams of kind-hearted stick figures offering up their cosy corners for pregnant stick figures, these signs have turned that cosy corner into the electric chair. Few are willing to risk the unexpected shock before a muttering, disapproving audience. On crowded trains, the posters might as well have an arrow pointing at the seat occupier’s head and a sign saying “Look at this selfish tosser. He’s sitting here, right in front of that perspiring woman, who’s either carrying triplets or been impregnated by an elephant, and he’s pretending to ignore her by playing Angry Birds. What a wanker.”
Not surprisingly, I give my corner seat up to anybody. I practically bundle startled Singaporeans into the vacated seat head first, throwing them around in a way not dissimilar to secret service agents when they are slinging presidents into unmarked cars after assassination attempts.
I prepared to do the same as we rolled along towards Lakeside in the country’s southwest. I had the corner seat, but I also had a heavy rucksack, a mitigating factor I thought when I had boarded the near-empty train earlier. The train was now jammed, commuters in the middle of the carriage conjoined by their congealing armpit sweat. A pregnant woman had shuffled her way over to the corner seats, practically straddling herself between the two like an umpire at a tennis court, playing brinkmanship, waiting for either myself or the other corner seat occupier to blink. I got up first and quietly offered her my seat. She turned and peered at me quizzically. She looked confused. I peeked at her belly.
She was not pregnant.
I had offered a young woman my prized corner seat for entirely different reasons. She declined the seat. Being on a packed train, I could not return to the warm corner beckoning my behind. No one around us was conceivably pregnant, over 65 or overburdened with shopping, so the seat remained empty, lonely and adrift, a victim of new Singapore’s attempt to create more gracious people in a country preoccupied with face-saving. This is the internal struggle that commuters grapple with daily now. We must give up the seat to the elderly, but how do we define elderly? Is that anyone over 50 or anyone who appears to have only a 50 per cent chance of getting through the MRT trip alive? Is a woman pregnant or, as my mother would say, merely “big-boned”? We cannot ask for a recent BMI reading before vacating our seat.
On reaching Lakeside, I turned from inconsiderate commuter to potential serial killer. I have inherited a rather bombastic street-greeting habit from my mother. When she passes strangers, she invariably offers a breezy “hiya” in a voice that just shies away from sending them into the hedges. She lives on a quiet estate in Kent where such exchanges are commonplace. They are less so in sprawling cities and, if one is being brutally honest, practically negligible in Singapore. Strangers do not generally speak when they pass each other here. Strangers do not generally acknowledge each other unless one of them is on fire. For that reason alone, I greet passing walkers with an enthusiasm that suggests one of us might be tied up and gagged in a car boot before the night is out.
“Hello, how’s it going?” I asked warmly as a middle-aged power walker approached along the Jurong Lake Park path.
Well, you would have thought I’d dropped my shorts and cried, “Anyone for noodles?” Her eyes widened, the pace slowed and she stepped awkwardly to her right like a first-time line dancer struggling to keep up with “Cotton Eye Joe”.
“Er, hello,” she mumbled, still debating whether to pass me or swim around me via Jurong Lake.
“Lovely day for it.”
I love saying that. My puerile sensibilities get a perverse kick from its jovial ambiguity. A lovely day for what? A gentle amble around Jurong Lake? A one-way swim in Bedok Reservoir?
“Er, yes, yes,” she agreed, her apprehension visibly dissipating. I was not a serial killer. She could see that. There was nowhere to hide a chopper about my person. And she smiled back at me, an invigorating warm smile that added a spring to my step. I reciprocated and we bounced past each other looking like Ronald McDonald.
I had reasons to be in Jurong Lake Park other than disturbing power walkers. Jurong Lake is about to get a makeover to rival Joan Rivers. Her cosmetic surgeon pulled back
anything natural, created something artificial and functional in its place and gave the American comedian new material to work with. The government has similar hopes for the Jurong Lake District.
In the next 10 to 15 years, Singapore’s neglected west must rival downtown and the only way to achieve that vibrancy, apparently, is waterfront hotels and shopping malls. Obviously there is a shortage of shopping malls in Singapore. As part of the HDB’s $1 billion Remaking Our Heartland Programme, Jurong will join Hougang and East Coast in getting sexier. There is already a new shopping mall called JCube (another worthy contender for lame name honours), with a network of park connectors, a healthcare hub comprising a couple of hospitals and the 20-storey Westgate Tower on the way. Jurong will become the largest commercial hub outside the city centre, with shopping malls more than half the size of ION Orchard. This is supposedly a cause for celebration. But the inference is clear. Jurong Lake is a frumpy embarrassment, left on the gym bench on prom night, tapping its feet while more sexed-up neighbours attract handsome, wealthy suitors.
So I expected to find a Plain Jane by the lake. Instead, I discovered a sleepy beauty.
When I left my new power-walking friend, I snapped a photograph of my favourite Singaporean sign to date. It read “Toilet 906 m away”. The precise distance threw up two of the more obvious questions. Who measured it? And who cares? Surely, the pedantic accuracy is not going to affect the decision-making process one way or the other. No one is going to stand cross-legged before the sign and say, “Now, if it was 905 metres away, I just might make the toilet in time but 906 metres is beyond my bowels ... Wait, too late, pass me the wet wipes.”
Return to a Sexy Island Page 16