The Soul Of A City, Part 1

Singapore surprised me. I arrived here a couple of days ago for a short trip, four months after moving away. I expected to fit back into these familiar surroundings like a hand sliding into an old, snug glove. But I didn't. As familiar and comfortable as the city felt, there was something missing, something that made me feel like I was in an old haunt rather than an old home.

That sense of absence faded on Saturday evening while I was at Sentosa Island. I was at the beach, and the sound of the sea gently murmuring against the beach sands temporarily soothed my sense of being there-but-not-quite-there.

The same thing happened on Sunday. During the day I felt like a visitor even as I strolled through the lanes of Holland Village for the thousandth time. In the afternoon I looked out across the grounds opposite City Hall and I could not convince myself that I'd seen them before. But when night fell I was watching a movie at the Botanical Gardens. The screen was set up in the middle of a lotus pond. The light from the projector bounced onto the water in a gentle, reassuring glow. And for a couple of hours I felt once again like I belonged.

That feeling did not last very long. It was gone again this morning as I helped one friend buy a Chairman Mao t-shirt and helped another friend not buy a picture-book of "artistic nudes". But in the afternoon I waited in line for a taxi while the heavens opened up with rain twenty feet away from me. I heard the dull rumble of water falling on the road then, and I remembered it again several hours later.

I remembered that roar again several hours later as I sat in a little garden in my hotel. I heard that roar echoed in the sound of the waterfalls in that garden, and in the lapping of the pond that the waterfall poured into.

That's when I realized how much of my sense of Singapore has to do with water. Whether it's falling in a deluge during a rainstorm, or ebbing and flowing through the tidal rivers, or simply splashing in waterfalls and fountains all across the island, water is as much a part of the experience of Singapore as air. Even the absence of water is part of that experience, inasmuch as that absence reminds me that something's missing.

And now that I understand, now that I've seen the rains and listened to the waterfall, now I feel like I've visited home again.