Singapore seemed electrified, fizzled, the wailing brightness, smacked itself against the screens of cars, the grotesque tragedy of not being allowed to live in this micro paradise permanently. My dad had seven sisters, six of which resided in Kuala Lumpur and my mother had cousins in Singapore. Being from a Punjabi, Sikh background, Singapore was like an Eastern Pandora’s Box I would open throughout my childhood and life. Away from the bleak and featureless Isle of ‘Queen Lizzie’ and the cultural constraints of familial life as a young South Asian girl/woman. Everywhere were rippling wet foreheads, domes of moisture and fluid dripping sticky down torsos, inside shirts and soiled petticoats. It had been my second home for a long time, I adored riding the air conditioned and immaculate monorail, smelling the exotic diets of the indigenous people wafting through the carriages. There were solid jade blockades of greenery and phosphorescent, vertigo inducing buildings rising towards the heavens. Everywhere seemed to sizzle and boil, this kind of shimmery and frustrated heat made you exhausted, even before you had reached your destination. There was a stampede of too sultry days and a lurid light in the coming days. I noted the solid blockade of jade green trees where everything sizzled. The climates apparent problem was it glimmering heat. My mother’s family had emigrated to Singapore from Malaysia some decades ago and owned a string of compact sugar cube like flats. This was a cosmopolitan city, a cultural hot pot of many different races including Punjabi (my family), Tamil, Indian, some Malay people, but a largely Chinese population. In Singapore’s China’s Town I would find a secluded spot to peruse the shops and restaurants. Cooing at the jewel tones and imperial and oriental architecture. Wedging myself in an intimate restaurant watching the supremely flammable dishes being brought out to slobbering customers on steaming platters. I usually ordered gallons of ‘ Oolong’ and Jasmine tea, and just people watched, I was on good terms with the owner and would order dim sim: dumplings, sauces of variant colours, bite size ‘wontons’ that were crêpey and translucent creams, noodle rolls and egg tarts. Sometimes I would consumed all the delicacies and other times I would nimble on them. Sometimes the people that I would observe would be glossy as a photo or they would seemed dulled and sullen of youthful or glittering with curious eyes. They could have an old innocence or a young innocence it did not matter about the age. So many colours, honey melon yellow, razor blade silver, garnet brightness, vulva pink just vivid. I recall the white day, the sun was spawning its rays into the sky and they bounced off ruinous buildings that had opulent histories. I wore a dress that was a shade of blood burgundy, with amazing black crystal encrusted ankle boots that showcased my elongated limbs that people said seemed to go on forever. I was not accustomed to the sparkling humidity. You could see the sunburnt injuries of the sun inflicted on my mother’s face. The heat smacks you in the eyes, liquefying your innards, brain and all. Frying your genitals. I also had consumed seafood that day, in Singapore at a food stall, it was cheap there, it was fried some sort of Stingray washed down by sugar cane water, then some star fruit with drizzled honey and an Asian Beer. I remembered the juicy slice of orange dawn that had met me at the end of the evening. How to decipher this jewelled hotness on the magnesium white sands of Sentosa Island’s Siloso Beach, where I had fried my body for some many summers to a chocolate hue. The cyan water seemed to be carbonated and the fizzy waves would slush along the beach leaving in its wake seaweed and occasional dead jelly fish and shells. It was a long sheltered beach, when I was eight and we would have any celebrations on the island I would be dressed in a short Chinese silk jacket and white pleated skirt, we would eat food and set off firecrackers and get ‘ang pow’, money in red envelopes from our Punjabi and Chinese relatives, interracial marriages were not as uncommon as some may think in South Indian culture. Sentosa meant ‘peace and tranquillity’ in Malay, which originated from the Sanskrit term meaning ‘contentment’. I never really knew this, what was more disturbing was when it was a British Military base once and a Japanese Prison of war camp it used to be referred to as ‘Pulau Blakang’ which in Malay means ‘Island of Death Behind’. Maybe there were lots of hungry pow (prison’s of war) ghosts driven by such impassioned emotions ambling and dawdling along the beach. I felt this shrill chill, as I sensed their animalistic and ancestral eyes boring into me with a kind of deviant glistening shine. Almost in their sad damnation they were not venerated any more by their relatives. There was reclamation of the land from the sea and seventy percent of the island was covered by rainforest with monitor lizards, screeching monkeys, rainbow bright parrots and vanity driven peacocks.