Manila

Last night.

We sat down to have dinner... and the lady who cleared our table walked away with a limp. I must have seen her because it occured to me that she is not old enough to be limping that way. Her legs were bowled and her hips jutted out in an awkard manner - for not a very heavy looking body, she seemed to be bearing an incredible amount of invisible weight. Curious why, I looked at her face again and saw what I missed earlier. That her smooth wrinkle-less skin which extends from her forehead, across her entire face and down to her arms were actually 'scars'. Burn scars!

An old man joined us at our table later... he was carrying one of those ubiquitous pink plastic bags - except that he had fashioned it into a shoulder bag. The plastic bag was fastened to a canvas shoulder strap by a couple of safety pins. He had with him, a plate of fried noodles. Fried plain noodles. While in my impression he smelt strange, his hair and nails were clean. I looked at the big one, the big one looked at me and we continue eating our sticks of satay with gravy, mutton soup with rice and sweet corn dessert without saying anything.

After our meal, we got up to walk for a bit. The small one had wandered off towards the back of the building thinking that we were going back to get the car. We followed him, and found, resting in a dark corner... somebody, with half a bag of aluminium drink cans sitting beside him/her.

Too much for one night.

I blurted out to the big one, " DO YOU KNOW WE ARE DAMM FORTUNATE?"

We didn't set out to see poverty and you could argue it was not proverty we saw. That we simply saw a previously injured person who has a job cleaning tables, a person who is having a simple meal and a person who is trying to make some extra money collecting cans. Regardless, I felt like how I felt travelling in Manila and seeing people make their homes on the street, under the roofs of flyovers and sleeping with the cars and traffic making their way past their heads, just only barely.

Except that I was not in Manilla last night.

I was in Singapore.