Ghosts

When I go out at night to Clementi for dinner - sporadically, not often - I make it a point to look into the store-fronts and the back-counters of the shops I walk by. I look past the Filipino workers, the internationals with weird accents (probably from China, I can never tell), past the locals flipping burgers and lazing at the back of clothes boutiques, past the ones cooking in the hawker centres. I look for the old people. The grey-hairs, the men and women who should be retired now, with grandchildren to care for, and grown-up kids they can give old recipes to. But they're not.

Most of them you see in common places. Cleaners: with mops in their hands and cloths for our tables, invisible most of the time because you can't be bothered to think about them while you rush for food. Electricians: slightly better off, but with rheumy wrists and milky eyes, and age spots on their arms. I know one who checks the electrical risers every morning, at my block - he changed my lightbulbs for me once. Small sized, soft-spoken man. I like him.

But the others aren't so common, and they can be heartbreaking. When Tay and I last went to Clementi for dinner, on Friday, we decided to explore the area around the HDB flats - under the badly-lit alleyways and the aging, caked walls, to see what else the place might have to offer. One such alleyway: dark, wooden construction barrier on the left; yellow, ugly lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. And then a sudden white glow - a 7-11 on the right, we walk past and I look in and there's this ahpek sitting behind the counter. It's 10pm. The alleyway is quiet. He's reading a newspaper and there's nobody in the store. We continue walking.

Singapore is the 11th most expensive city to live in in the world. It's second in Asia only to Hong Kong. And that's perfectly fine, I suppose, when you're working and you're in the rat race and your mind is constantly somewhere else while you're rushing for food; but quite another when you've retired and you're alone in your HDB flat, and still the bills keep pouring in. You can't burden your kids. They're working for their own bills. And so you don't retire. You take a job. There's not much to it: the Singaporean government, being ever practical, once suggesting nursing homes in Johor to solve this problem ('the workers can visit their parents fortnightly') nobody really liked the idea, however, and so it was dropped.

But the Singaporeans themselves don't think about this while they go about their daily lives. Their eyes gloss over and the ears close in on themselves. I've watched this curious event repeat itself, all the time, while waiting for a friend in an MRT station: they look at their watches as they rush to work; from work, their faces curiously blank as they pass over these people, not willing to imagine that perhaps one day - a long time away - these ghosts that they aren't seeing might be one of them.

But here's what took me by the hand and hurt me, that night - we are eating at Mos Burger, a fast food chain, and there's this old woman behind the counter pressing salads onto burgers. She's got this bandanna tied over her greying hair, her face pleasant and her skin already spotted with old-lady-spots. She's round and she looks like my grandmother. She's also in a Mos Burger uniform. I keep shooting looks at her while I'm ordering, from where she is behind the outlet manager, and I realize something terrible and immediately it feels like my heart's being squeezed. The people working in the outlet - everyone else? They're young and they're moving so quick, so fast. But this woman, she's moving slow, ever so slow, like she's scared she might miss a step and the burger she'd been working on be incomplete, because her mind can't keep up. She takes small handfuls of salad and pats them down on the bread. It looks like she'd doing it lovingly. Like how she might make lunches for her grand-kids. And it's at this point that I look at my watch and pay my money and leave, because even I can't stand to watch.

I don't want to retire in Singapore. Remind me when I'm at the age.