12 November 2025 · near Chin Swee Road

The block felt ordinary until the corridor went quiet

I had taken the long way back from Kovan because the lift at my block was still out. The plastic handle on my NTUC bag had already left a red line across my palm, and I was thinking about nothing more dramatic than whether I had remembered to turn off the kitchen radio.

Chin Swee Road is not my neighbourhood. I know it the way you know a place you pass through on someone else's errand — the slope, the smell of exhaust mixing with rain that had stopped an hour earlier, the way the HDB blocks sit close enough that you can hear a television through an open kitchen window if you walk slowly enough.

That evening I heard sirens before I saw anything. Not one vehicle — several, arriving in a rhythm that made people on the pavement stop mid-step. I did not run towards the sound. I am not that sort of person, and the stairwell upbringing in me says you do not chase trouble you cannot help with.

What I saw, from maybe two blocks away, was light — blue and red, bouncing off wet asphalt, reflecting in the glass of a bus shelter. A small crowd had formed at a respectful distance. Nobody was shouting. Singapore does this particular kind of quiet very well when something serious has happened nearby and nobody in the crowd actually knows what it is yet.

I stood with my groceries and watched the lights pulse for a long time. I did not take a photograph. It felt wrong, and also unnecessary — my phone was already heavy enough.

Later, on the MRT home, the carriage was full of the ordinary murmur of people scrolling. I looked up Chin Swee on the news when I got in, but the reports were sparse and careful, and I closed the tab because I had no facts of my own to add — only the memory of sirens, wet road, and a corridor that felt suddenly too narrow.

I still do not know exactly what happened that night. I know what I heard, what I saw from far away, and how my walk home changed pace. That is the whole of it. I am not writing this to explain anything to anyone. I am writing because the landing light in my block came on while I was putting the bags down, and the ordinary click of the timer made the earlier hour feel both close and very far away.

When I tell this story to myself, I always return to the groceries first — the weight, the handle, the ordinary errand that carried me through someone else's emergency at a distance. Hougang has its own emergencies: lifts that stall, buses that never come, neighbours who play mahjong too loudly on a Tuesday. Chin Swee was different because it was not mine, and because the sirens sounded like they belonged to a version of the city I visit but do not live inside.

I washed the vegetables when I got in. I put the fish in the freezer. I made tea and sat on the floor because the chairs were still stacked with laundry I had been avoiding. The radio was off — I had remembered — and the flat was quiet in the way flats are quiet when you are alone and not ready for bed. I thought about calling someone and did not. Not out of bravery or isolation, just because it was late and the story was incomplete and I did not want to spread an incomplete thing.

Weeks later I rode past Chin Swee on a taxi to the airport for a trip I had booked before that night. The road looked normal. Fruit stalls, delivery bikes, a man smoking under an awning. I looked once and then looked out at the expressway because that is how memory works — it attaches to a place until the place refuses the attachment and goes back to being asphalt and signage.

If you read this looking for answers, you will not find them here. I am a person who writes on a landing, not someone who investigates. What I can offer is the honesty of partial sight: the wet evening, the lights, the pause on the pavement, the ride home, the timer clicking on above the sixth-floor door.