Story 4: Good Morning Eden Grove
65 Eden Grove: Morning is a story of family missed and not missed. Ah Tee is a one-boy neighbourhood watch. From his grandma's cool dark shop, he watches and waits for his aunts to go to work and for the funny old man with his fishball sticks.
Today, we follow Ah Tee’s observations of his neighbors.
We arrive amidst the fast flying morning traffic of Upper Serangoon Road, and just like Ah Tee, we note the heat is starting to set in. This is going to be a hot one. We brace ourselves with a cup of teh, prata and gravy - obvious choices to beat the heat.
The streetcars and mile markers of Ah Tee's boyhood are long gone, so we start with our first and by far the easiest marker we have found in our stories - Ah Tee's home at 65 Eden Grove. We stand, we look, we linger long enough to take a few photos of No 65, and long enough to see the front window curtains move: a bewildered resident peeking out at the two ang mohs taking a selfie in front of their house. "Strange, lor." A mystery they'll save for the family meal tonight.
Following Ah Tee’s landmarks, we walked midway down Eden Grove, then to the cool shade of Sunshine Park for a spot of sitting; it's just us chatting, cooling our feet on one side of the park and a man silently practicing his TaiChi on the other.
"Auntie Mary lived...in a small housing estate that strangely bore no fancy name such as Sennett Estate or Serangoon Gardens or anything like that, names of estates that sounded nice to Ah Tee."
Leaving the pleasant sounding streets we pushed on through the heat, below Eden Grove, down to Jalan Labah Merah and its sister roads at Ayer and Manis, spying a few wonderful old houses discretely hidden behind lush tropical gardens, and their new neighbours, all pose, all front, consuming every square inch of their block with concrete and angles, rather yielding a tree for a tile.
I can't help but think the neighborhood would have been an oasis of quiet when Ah Tee roamed the alleys. Today, the residents have already left for work or school, leaving a very quiet, very hot neighborhood.
With the heat sinking down on us, we drag our feet back to Upper Serangoon Road, first stop a bottle of cold, cold rhinoceros water. In this heat, even dragons need to rest in whatever shade they can find.
Suriya Indian Food and Cool Cafe Egg Prata $1.60 Honey Prata $2.20 2 x Kopi $2.00
Balik Kampung 2A People and Places, edited by Verena Tay 56 Eden Grove: Morning by Sonny Lim
