It began with the wrong MRT station.
We were staying at the Holiday Inn on Orchard Road. My husband had been called to Singapore by his senior for a week-long client workshop, and I tagged along.
This had brought us to Singapore for the first time, a week after our first wedding anniversary, and we were awestruck by everything. It was special in every sense. The Singapore Airlines Airbus A380, the cab ride from the airport. The clean, ordered, quietly extraordinary city that appeared outside the window and seemed to say: things work here.
On the first morning we needed to find my husband’s office. The concierge explained the route kindly. We walked ten minutes to Somerset station, confirmed the journey, and congratulated ourselves on figuring out the city.
It was only after we moved to Singapore for what would become a four-and-a-half-year stint that I understood the comedy of that morning. We had been staying on Orchard Road. Dhoby Ghaut station was two minutes from the hotel. A bus point right outside the MRT station ran directly to his office. We had walked ten minutes in the wrong direction and taken the longest route possible. And not one person told us.
Every time we passed that Holiday Inn for the next four years, I laughed. It became our private joke about Singapore: on the one hand, it was beautiful, efficient, and perfectly organised; on the other, it had no qualms about letting you discover for yourself when you were headed in the wrong direction.
A City That Simply Worked
Nothing had prepared me for it. At twenty-four, newly married, never having been abroad — I was suddenly in a country where the roads were swept by machines, where cars stopped at zebra crossings without being asked, where public transport was marked so clearly that even my father — visiting for a vacation, venturing out alone — could find his way back when he got turned around at Dhoby Ghaut. A kind bus driver helped him. He came home perfectly fine and slightly delighted by the adventure.
That was Singapore. Clean in a way I had not imagined cleanliness could be. Organised in a way that felt almost philosophical — as if the city had decided, at some foundational level, that things should simply work. And they did.
The buses were my favourite. Not the taxis — those were a luxury for special occasions. The buses—clearly marked, reliable, and connecting the city in a way that felt democratic and dependable. I took them everywhere. They became mine in a way that nothing else in Singapore did in those early months.
The Career I Left Behind
I had quit a successful job in Mumbai to move to Singapore. My employers were dismayed enough to offer me a consultancy with work from home — an arrangement almost unheard of at the time. I stayed on for another two months before finally leaving for good. The move came first. And slowly, without any dramatic moment or conscious decision, family began to take the place my career had once occupied. Completely.
Once in Singapore, I worked for a year. Three companies in twelve months.
The first company paid irregularly, and the uncertainty of never knowing when the next salary would arrive brought its own kind of stress, even though the work itself was interesting.
The second hired me for a project that never materialised. I remained on the rolls for a while, tried my hand at a few different things, and eventually decided to leave, worried that staying would add little real value to my career.
The third — gender discrimination and workplace bullying. In a country I had arrived in expecting order and fairness. I had not anticipated that the clean roads and reliable buses did not extend to certain office cultures.
After the third I stopped. Not dramatically. Just quietly understood that this particular chapter was closing. Every experience created anxiety in me, only to close the doors at the third. I realised managing work and home wasn’t easy. They say it takes two to tango. In practice, one of us cooked, packed lunches, cleaned and managed the home while the other worked. The tango had a very clear lead.
I tried creating ready-made rangolis, favour boxes — there was something creative in me that needed an outlet — but the social network in Singapore was too small and too closed for something like that to gain traction.
That was the start of my career break. The seed was sown in Mumbai, not in Bangalore, where I expected it, in Singapore. In a condominium with a South Indian joint outside the gate, a temple nearby, a few supermarkets — enough to feel a distant echo of home without quite being home.
A Life Between Two Worlds
My usual day had a rhythm I built slowly and kept to carefully.
Finish morning chores — breakfast, lunch, my husband’s lunch box. Freshen up. Pray. Something that stayed with me everywhere: the prayers to handhold me to cross the ever-changing life. The rest of the day followed, and I filled it the best I could.
A walk around the locality was always refreshing, Singapore’s lush greenery and order, making even a simple walk feel like something intentional. Return. Prepare dinner. Evenings with CID and Adalat on the television — crime investigation and courtroom drama from home, familiar voices in a foreign city.
We were rooted in India in ways Singapore could not dislodge. The shows. The food. The temple visits. The occasional call home. But we were also far from home, entirely on our own—freer in some ways, lonelier in others, and quietly building a life between the two of us that needed no audience.
The Part No One Saw
There was a period during those years that I do not talk about much.
I fell ill. A painful lump on my arm. The hospital in Singapore assessed it and recommended surgery — expensive, significant, not something to approach lightly. We decided against the surgery and instead spent almost a year on the strongest medication that cured it. The medication worked, but it took its toll. Severe fatigue. Body pain. The kind of tiredness that is not fixed by sleep — you wake from hours of rest feeling drained rather than restored.
I managed this largely alone. My husband worked. There was no family nearby. No close friends who understood the particular texture of what I was going through. I got through it with walks and prayers and the ordinary discipline of keeping a daily routine even on the days when the routine was all there was.
I do not say this for sympathy. Singapore is a small city-state, and there is only so much life can hold within its boundaries. It is not just the A380 and the clean streets and the safety. The illness was part of my Singapore too. And so was getting through it, quietly, without much support; that was also me.
The Little Things That Stayed
The late night movies at Yishun deserve their own mention. We would watch films long past midnight and take the bus home with complete ease — public transport running reliably, the city safe at that hour, no fear of the journey. There was a particular freedom in that. In India, a late night out carries a different weight. In Singapore it was simply — we watched the film, we went home, nothing required courage that should not have been required.
It gave us access to places that had once felt distant—Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia. Singapore sat right in the middle of Southeast Asia, making these journeys easy in a way Mumbai never had. Those trips belong to another essay, but they are part of my Singapore story too—the ease of movement, the accessibility, and the growing sense that the world was bigger and far more reachable than I had once imagined.
And then there was the tax office. I still think about that encounter.
At a government counter—a bureaucratic setting, not one you necessarily associate with warmth—an official looked at our situation and realised we were eligible for a tax refund we hadn’t known how to claim. Instead of simply directing us elsewhere, she patiently walked us through the process and showed us exactly what we needed to do. We followed the steps, and a week later, the money arrived.
I don’t know if this happens in other countries. I only know that it happened to us. And somehow, that small, ordinary act of official kindness stayed with me. She didn’t have to help us. There was nothing in it for her. She simply saw that we needed help and chose to give it.
What We Took With Us
We left Singapore after four and a half years. I was sad about Takashimaya — a slightly absurd grief, I know, but real. All that time on Orchard Road and I missed it. We visited it many times during the stint but the first trip’s missed opportunity still sat with me. It still does. The comedy of it. The waste of it. Yet every bit of Singapore stays close to us. The way Singapore held every culture with equal ceremony — Orchard Road extravagant with Christmas lights, Little India blazing for Diwali, Chinatown alive for Chinese New Year. A small country that made deliberate space for everyone to feel included.
But here is what I know now from the distance of Bangalore.
Singapore gave us each other. Being away from the noise of extended family, from the familiar pressures and expectations of home, forced us inward — toward each other, toward the life we were building together rather than the life being built around us. There is something that happens when two people are alone in a foreign city with no audience for their marriage. You find out what the marriage actually is.
That warmth — despite the bad workplaces, despite the illness, despite the loneliness of ordinary days without a real social network — that is what Singapore earned. The aww that arrives even now as someone mentions it. The closeness I feel to a city that was never mine and somehow became a part of me anyway.
Singapore was the beginning of a lot of things I am still living.
Is there a city that lives in you the way Singapore lives in me? A place you never quite called home, yet somehow became part of you? I’d love to hear about it.
100% resonance with your thoughts. Cherished memories and the tiny red dot never ceases to amaze !