The Man Among Many Men

While travelling down the old roads of Balestier, I met a band of men, too many men for the back of a tiny pick-up truck. Three had the olive skins and thin noses and eyes of the Nepalese, or Vietnamese, or Chinese. The rest were Indian.

They were unmoving. And behind the silence of my car window, they were quiet too. The wind never so much as ruffled their thick, black hair. All of them had thick, black hair. But there was one man sat on a little crate, his back straight like a king - he wore a crown of fresh white towel. He wore a crown of unearthly cleanliness beside their muck-filled, sand-blown canvas clothes.Perhaps it was a gift from his young, new wife as he left the village, to wipe his beads of perspiration when her hand wasn't there. It was the first thing he bought after he exchanged his worn leather shoes for boots on this foreign land; he needed comfort, but he needed conviction of his new life here too. It was carefully chosen from his plywood cupboard at home where everything was free from dust, sniffed deeply first the smell of the washboard before it was rolled up and packed. It was a present from his new employer, a fair-skinned, fat local who wanted to clear the perfunctory hurdle so he could bring forward the brown, brown sand.

Perhaps it was a crown, as the man stared at his kingdom in the spaces between buildings, between cars, between grains of sand.