Preface

Dad often spoke of the time when we were living in Neil Road located in Tai Seng vicinity, a place known for notorious gangsters. I can't seem to recall no matter how hard I try.

For my beginning, I knew of only a gang of boys, a band of brothers, who managed to find amusement in the unlikeliest of places in an unlit elevator, along quiet corridors, muddy, murky drains, on mischievous pranks of the highest order.

Block Thirteen was a playground for the sons of its residents. Situated in a now quiet and run-down estate of Singapore rises lankily and lazily a tall building, once the crowning glory of a newly industrialized country.

This was life then, our lives, my life, for I was one of those boys, crazy and lanky as the building we lived in, our arms and legs too short for our bodies, our spectacles ridiculously large, our pants equally appalling. Yet we knew not that our silly affections would go out of fashion one day, ridiculed by our children, we lived in that moment, for that moment.

One may wonder why I wish to tell my story. It is not, as may be assumed, because of nostalgia, which is a weak sentiment only possible at reunions, or in the dead secret of the night. I ache for the past. I miss it from time to time. I am telling this to share a history, my story.

This is my story, our story peculiar to our little group only. I think.