Out and than In

Public Transport is a curious entraption. A manner in which we could travel but in the same bend in the tracks we could be captured by sensations. I was on the train in an absolute blur, my head foggy from weariness, body fatigued from doing a different shade of nothing and my mind tuned out. The journey started mechnaically, I boarded, I stood and perceived nothing. Than a group of school girls come on. It was as if the TV came on, blaring too loudly. The sound echoed around me. I remained outside the noise. A constant reverberation of all sorts of sound, nothing that was clarion, a cacaphony of sounds, of sounds rushing around me, desperate to be released from the sealed train carriage. It was as if the sound was a passenger and I an outsider. The immediate connecting bus that I took through me into absolute silence. I seemed at peace with soundlessness. A respite from the obtrusive impersonal noise that besieged me previously. Than a man, cleanshaven, hair neatly parted, crinkled in the face, too young to be an ancient relic of colonial masters but too old to be born into a Singapore without the knowledge or experience of them. He sat beside me and noted I was in the army. It soon comes to pass that he had just retired from the army, he came back to Singapore out of nostalgia, for he lived here previously when his father was a captain in the Imperial British forces. The conversation we had was the only one that seemed to be happening in the bus. He eventually hands me a slip of paper with his number and oxfordshire address and says to look him up, when I go over. The bell rings, I shake his hand and I alight. This time I was involved, two participants and the rest all outsiders. Curious isn’t it? How one go out and than in, on public transport?