about an overhead bridge
21 Jan 09 - Wednesday - 2:10 p.m.
It used to be such an adventure going swimming at the pool or to Holland Village from my parents’ place. We’d trek down a grassy slope, cross the railway tracks, over a treacherously deep drain, up another grassy slope, across a 4-lane dual carriageway, then up the stairs, across a large car park. It all takes about 10 to 15 minutes or so.
There were times during school holidays when we would just walk along the train tracks for fun, looking into the little wooden huts along the railroad and peering at papaya and banana trees and little farmland cultivations, all the while listening out for the sounding of the horn of oncoming trains as drilled into our little heads by the parents.
Then too many people died while crossing the railway. When I was about 7 or 8, they started construction of an overhead bridge extending across the railway tracks and leading to the large car park. I remembered wondering why the bridge that was built was huge and grey, looking quite different from the overhead bridges with the skinny green railings that we are so used to. After its construction, it was much safer but less of an adventure going to the pool. Anyway, we eventually grew up and found different things to occupy our time and lost interest in going to the pool together.
I remember the scorching hot afternoons crossing the bridge alone going from a bus stop at Holland Village on my way home from school, looking down at my feet pacing along, lost in my own thoughts. Then there were all of the other times walking to Holland Village to meet up with friends, standing right in the centre of the bridge over the train tracks with a boy one National Day night laughing about how we’re in Malaysian airspace, rushing across the bridge after doing laps in the pool after school every day for stamina training, walking home across the bridge in the dead of the night all tired and stressed out but thinking about homework after closing whichever restaurant I was working at.
Eventually, they got around to constructing a shelter across the bridge covering the blue sky and bright afternoon sun. Then they evicted the tenants from the 3 blocks of flats bordering the large car park. Then they boarded up the car park for Selective En-Bloc construction.
And then I moved away. And in less than 5 years, my parents would have moved away too.
I was walking back to my parents’ from Holland Village yesterday afternoon through the labyrinth of ongoing construction where the car park used to be, with half completed 40-storey HDB flats looming over me, casting a deep gloom over the area where we once looked up into clear skies through the large trees in the sprawling car park, where my father and I once sprinted through on our way home in the rain from the swimming pool. The trees are all tagged and numbered, standing on the peripherals of the construction site, mute witnesses to the change that is taking place over the land, looking all sad and forlorn. I stepped onto the bridge and realised how in constructing a shelter over the bridge, they had effectively triggered off my claustrophobia. I looked down at the railway tracks and noted that where laid huge stones which we used to jump over on the tracks is now find gravel, and there are no longer any huts or little farms along the tracks. Everything is now clean, pristine, and completely devoid of human presence.
I swallowed hard, looked down, and hurried home along the bridge.