The sun sets as dawn breaks

It has been a while since I last took the effort to welcome the new day. The haze filtered sunrises of late have been somewhat subdued and rather uninspiring. One sunrise that I did manage to catch was on the morning of Hari Raya Haji, as the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha is known to us in Singapore, at what has become one of my favourite spots to welcome the day in Singapore, the water’s edge where the former Kampong Wak Hassan once was. The show of colours that accompanied the sunrise were not one of the more spectacular shows that I have observed at the spot. It was however one that was unusual – the cloud laden sky that might have provided the canvas for a dull pink and grey painting did instead find itself decorated with a purple hue at first light, with pockets of gold in places where the clouds had parted.

6.25 am, 26 October 2012.

7.09am, 26 October 2012.

In the glow of the light of the rising sun, I am for a brief moment fooled into thinking that I had found myself in the world that once. I see the silhouette of a man standing by a net. It is not the net of fishermen however that I see, but one of the modern world to keep us from a part of the sea wall which is in imminent danger of collapsing. The sea wall is perhaps one of the last that’s standing in the area to remind us of that world that once was, its resistance against not just the forces of the environment but also of the winds of change, proving somewhat futile. The winds of change do in fact seem to be blowing in the direction of the area – a large part of undeveloped land to the south of the former kampong has been placed behind hoardings – possibly being cleared for the beginnings of the huge sea of grey that is to be Simpang New Town, a new Housing and Development Board (HDB) estate planned for the area that will stretch eastwards to Sungei Seletar (Seletar River).

It is not the nets of fishermen that we now see.

The sea wall at the former Kampong Wak Hassan is collapsing.

The land which has been placed behind hoardings was for a while a wild and partly wooded area. Cleared out at the end of the 1980s, it had been a piece of land in an area dominated by rivers that ran through it, the swamp land around the coastal and estuarine areas, fish ponds that were carved out of the swamps, kampongs, rubber plantations and coconut groves. It was one hidden from most of us and one that I have very little knowledge of, except for the stretch on the northern coast where Kampong Wak Hassan was, eastwards to Tanjong Irau at the mouth of Sungei Simpang.

A once beautiful area seen which is now being cleared for possibly what is the beginnings of the HDB’s new Simpang estate, 1 April 2012.

My first encounters with the piece of land were in the mid 1990s. It was not more than a barren piece of land then, land which had just been cleared and levelled of the undulations that had once shaped the landscape that was then used for military training. Each encounter was one that required a bumpy passage, which, when seated at the back of a 3-tonner, often meant inhaling an unhealthy dose of dust that the trucks threw up.

A different mood on a misty morning, 28 August 2012.

My brief encounters with the piece of land in more recent times had been happier ones. Besides it being a wonderful place to catch the varying moods that accompany the brightening of the new day, it also is a piece of greenery in which I could find great peace in. I am greatly saddened that as with another place not so far away that I had enjoyed celebrating the new day in, it may never again be.

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The last time ever I saw your face

In a Singapore that is changing too fast, it is not only places from the distant past, but also places that we have become acquainted with in more recent times to in more recent times, that are disappearing all to quickly. One such place is a little corner of the new Sembawang, a mostly residential neighbourhood that has risen out of the ashes of parts of what had been Chong Pang Village. The corner was an area that had for a while been left undeveloped with a few mature trees on it, silhouettes of which against the backdrop of the break of day to the east, made for an especially pretty sight. It will however, not be the silhouettes of trees that we now will see, but that of bulldozers that uprooted the trees at the end of the last week, silhouettes that will, as were those of the trees, be all but temporary – the dark shadows cast by a cold grey industrial building will all too soon dominate the once pretty view. And when those shadows are cast, I will be glad to have seen the corners as it once was, for it will not be the shadows or the cold grey structure that I see, but that of my memory of it in its former glory.

The fire in the sky, 18 February 2012.

Sunrise, 28 February 2012.

Sunrise, 10 March 2012.

Sunrise, 19 May 2012.