Only three girls were in the class. The instructor who walked in that first day would become my brother. I did not know this yet. Neither did he. But the universe apparently did.
When You Want to Feel Something Quietly
For the days you need slow and honest reading
It began with the wrong MRT station. We were staying on Orchard Road. Dhoby Ghaut was two minutes away. Instead we walked ten minutes in the wrong direction and took the longest route possible. Not one person told us. Every time we passed that Holiday Inn for the next four years I laughed.
I wanted to be present for every ritual, every prayer, every step of the journey the tradition says the soul takes after the body is gone. I wanted to light the fire. Instead I watched.
Something about Karna’s life has always unsettled me. Not sympathy — something closer to recognition. A quiet awareness of how profoundly unjust a life can be, even one lived with extraordinary courage and generosity.
There is a kind of exhaustion that does not show up on your face. You still show up. You still manage. But somewhere beneath all of that is a heaviness that has been there so long you have stopped noticing it. Like furniture you have walked around for so many years you no longer remember choosing it.
She worked in my home for six years. Every time I see her — cheerful, unhurried, arriving with a smile that has no business being there given everything she carries — I think the same thing. Would I have her grace?
Some dreams you wake from and immediately begin to forget. And then there are the other kind — the ones where you lie still after waking, afraid to move, afraid that moving will shake something loose.
A sunset so precious — the quiet gift of nature. Little we realise the sun stays, and it is the earth that moves. A short poem about light, time, and the promise of tomorrow.
A short poem about the distance between the person you are not and the one you are becoming.
On coffee without sugar, a wok full of vegetables, and the city that quietly changed me