Singapore Noir

After Prague, Buenos Aires, where Ed paused in his walks to sit in cafés on wide boulevards. Try first without milk, señor, you drink Argentine coffee now. He grilled butter-tender steaks and Ellen felt nostalgic for buttoned-up Prague where ragtop cars didn’t pound out music twenty-four hours a day. Then Nairobi, to Ed a never-still metropolis of old jeeps, bright cloth, musical speech (Fresh pineapple! Come buy it! You can do much wid it!), and dark, glistening faces. He learned to make ugali from cornmeal and served it with roast goat. To Ellen, Nairobi was dust that made her cough, bottled water, failed Internet connections (in Buenos Aires the technology worked), and armed guards.

In Nairobi, she got pregnant. It was time, she said; they didn’t want to wait until they were too old, until conceiving was a chore and delivery a risk, did they? Ed thought perhaps she’d want to go home, at least to have the baby, but she was working on some major deals and so Davey was born in Aga Khan Hospital three months before they moved to Singapore.

Singapore astonished Ed.

Ellen’s colleagues envied the assignment because, they said, Singapore was Asia Lite. Not like being sent to Shanghai or Tokyo, with their illegible street signs, illegible menus, illegible manners. Everything worked in Singapore. Crime barely existed, the water was safe. Everything worked, and worked in ways you understood. Not that life was perfect. The trees were groomed and the sidewalks practically polished, traffic flowed — but be careful, they were warned: Singapore, it’s Disneyland with the death penalty. Jaywalking, gum-chewing, free-thinking: just watch yourselves.

Ellen didn’t care about jaywalking, or free-thinking either. She was happy to be an expat among expats, to mix only with other Westerners, to live as though she weren’t in Asia at all. The safe, clean, functioning Singapore was the one she came looking for, the one she found, the one that — for a time — pleased her.

Ed saw all that — how could you miss it? — but it wasn’t his Singapore. More than anywhere they’d lived, more than where they’d come from, Singapore instantly felt like home.

He loved the damp heat, the daily rain, the bright and gray skies alternating, striping the day. The storms that blew through and scoured the air. The breathless young Singaporeans in the business of business; the expat community constantly churning, impermanent, strangers arriving and friends departing every day. Cultures mashing into one another in heady confusion: the swirling scents of curry, coconut milk, and coriander, the roast Cornish hen with fingerling potatoes in one café, the nasi lemak in the next, the chicken tajine a few doors down. Singapore had four official languages, but the one Ed loved was the unofficial one, the one everyone spoke: Singlish — in vocabulary, in grammar, and in syntax, a knotted combination of them all. In Singapore you could live your life in English, but Singlish was what the locals spoke, and the transplanted, the settled-in. Ed set out to learn it.

He also set out, as always, to learn the local cuisine. In Singapore that very idea was funny, because all recipes except the oldest Malay ones were immigrants and none were pure. He wrapped Davey in a quilted cotton infant sling and took him along to the markets, collecting the dozens of umber, ochre, black, and gold spices that went into curry, depending on whose curry you were cooking. He made pineapple tarts and oyster omelets, yellow egg noodles, coconut-stewed beef, and fish head curry.

Ellen started to drink.

“Singapore,” she sighed as they sat over the remains of vegetable dumplings and pork rib soup. She poured herself more wine. “At least in Nairobi when it was this freakin’ hot, it was dry.”