Tekong Nights

Chapter 1 – Tekong Nights

The island didn’t sleep so much as simmer. Heat kept its promises even after midnight on Pulau Tekong, rising off the parade square in a pale wavering that made the distant floodlights tremble in place. A generator muttered behind the cookhouse like an old uncle clearing his throat. Crickets worked the edges of the dark. The sea, close but hidden, breathed in a slow, salt-stained measure that crept under the skin and stayed there.

Aleem’s boots squeaked when he shifted his weight. He could feel the sweat cooling under the No. 4 collar, a damp ring where fabric met neck, a faint itch that would turn to a rash if he scratched. Rifle slung, he adjusted the strap so the barrel wouldn’t knock his thigh with each paced turn of the sentry’s box. Two steps, pivot. Two steps, pivot. The rhythm found him without asking who he was or why he was awake. That was the first mercy of the army: even when your mind was loud, your body had a timetable.

“Bro.”

Kai’s voice slipped in from the shadow where the light didn’t quite reach. He was a soft shape of helmet and grin, a pair of eyes that had learned to smile as a second language. He nudged the toe of his boot against Aleem’s as if they were boys in a school canteen and not men being fed to a machine designed to turn boys into something that could carry a field pack for twenty-four kilometers.

“Your turn almost done?” Kai asked, scratching his cheek under the strap. “I got something to show you.”

Aleem glanced at his watch. The glow of the face made his eyes sting for a blink. “Five more,” he said. “What is it?”

Kai produced his phone from a plastic waterproof bag with a flourish, a magician conjuring comfort out of a Ziploc. “You need it,” he said, voice more careful now, reading the slope of Aleem’s shoulders. “Your brain like… very noisy these days.”

Aleem huffed a laugh that wasn’t funny. “I’m fine.”

“Ya ya.” Kai waved a hand. “Everyone is ‘fine’ on this island until they start talking to the mozzies.” He tapped the screen. A thumbnail sprang up: a stage washed in pale light, nine shadows arranged like a breath drawn across silk.

“AURORA9,” Kai said, as if that explained anything. “You confirm never see before?”

Aleem shook his head. He knew names of footballers, a list of guitar chords, the price of a secondhand bicycle on Carousell. He did not know this.

“Okay,” Kai said, slipping into the coaxing tone he reserved for stubborn recruits and burnt onions. “Just listen. You don’t need to like. You just… listen.”

The first bars were soft enough to be mistaken for the night itself. A clean piano phrase, a string of notes that didn’t jostle one another for attention. The camera cut from crowd to stage, the way a hand moves from cheek to shoulder. The curtain of light lifted, and the nine stepped forward. Eight of them shimmered like the promise of morning.

The ninth moved like the morning had no need to prove it was morning.

She wasn’t in the center. The center rattled. The center was where you made promises and shouted them into a room so they could bounce back and crown you. She was two paces off, in a line that made more sense when you looked with the part of the eye that remembers dance without ever learning it.

“Who’s that?” Aleem asked, forgetting to pretend indifference.

“Aoi,” said Kai, pleased as a teacher whose student had landed on the correct answer not by guessing but by seeing. “Minami Aoi. Main dancer. Japanese. Ballet last time, I think.”

On the screen, the camera did her the favor of a mid-shot that ignored the glitter and listened to the body. Her weight shift was as quiet as a thought arriving. Aleem realized he had been holding his own breath to match hers, a split second stolen before the chorus and returned with interest after the turn. It was not dramatic. It was precise–not to kill feeling but to make room for it.

The chorus opened like a window in a room where people had been polite for too long. Aoi didn’t kick. She didn’t claw the air. The thing she did was smaller and therefore larger: a softening of the knee that let the body fall into the count the way water chooses a path and then pretends it never considered doing anything else.

He heard himself exhale. The night exhaled with him. Even the crickets, demoted to percussion, agreed to rest on the off-beat.

“You okay ah?” Kai murmured, not unkind. “You look like you found God.”

Aleem wanted to say no. He wanted to say he was an adult man with a field pack full of ration biscuits that tasted like humility and the dry scribble of a letter from his mother that smelled like home and disinfectant. He wanted to say he had conducted himself properly through a breakup that had arrived not like a car crash but like a calendar reminder–we are wrong for each other, and I do not know how to say it without hurting the good thing we once were.

Instead he said, “It’s… quiet.”

“Exactly!” Kai’s relief was comic. “Finally you get it. Quiet, but not empty. Got space.” He tapped the screen, as if to point at the negative space between Aoi’s wrist and the rest of her. “She dance like she pay attention to air also.”

The song ended without insisting; it simply arrived at the place where it could put its hands down. The roar of the crowd did the thing roars always do–pretend they had been here from the beginning, not called in like a favor at the end.

When Aleem handed the phone back, he felt like someone had adjusted a painting he’d walked past every day and finally hung it at the right height.

“Keep,” Kai said, pushing the phone into his palm again. “Tonight you take it. Later return. I got the link queued, can repeat. Good for night watch. Better than counting mozzies.”

“I can’t–”

“Can. Or else I show section IC you almost cry.”

Aleem didn’t almost cry. He put the phone in his pocket with its Ziploc coat and did the next two minutes of sentry duty in a room inside his head furnished by a stage he had never stood on. The pivot of his foot at the line painted on concrete matched the pivot of her ankle on the glossy stage, and the generator’s complaint thinned into a note that could have been a string section if you were tired enough and needed it badly enough.

When they swapped posts, Kai took up the rifle and the perimeter, and Aleem took up the bench under the shade of a tree that had not asked to be named. He put one earbud in and let the other dangle, the better to hear the footsteps of the sergeant if the sergeant decided to inventory their sins.

He played the clip again.

He did not look at the crowd shots this time. He watched the counts the way other men watched stock prices. He found the loan of breath before the pre-chorus, found the place the body rests because the music has decided to carry more of its own weight for a bar. He saw the way Aoi planted each foot not to conquer territory but to measure it.

The island simmered. Sweat worked its way under his watch again and then, because it had been witnessed, forgot to be a complaint. Somewhere on the other side of the block, a boy talked in his sleep, the bilingual lilt of a dream negotiated between two languages. A moth battered itself to pieces against the light outside the cookhouse. The sea breathed.

And in the space between Aleem’s ribs where his ex’s last message had been sitting like a lemon seed, something that was not forgiveness and not forgetfulness and not stoic endurance but felt like room unfurled.

The breakup had done him the small favor of being unembarrassing. Nadia had timed it for a Saturday, away from booking-in crowds and ferry queues. They met at a hawker center that had refused to go air-conditioned, the fans creaking like a chorus of aunties. She came with a folder of things he had given her and a line of script that had cost her sleep to deliver.

“We’re kind to each other,” she said, pushing the folder across, “except when it matters.”

He had known it was not one mistake that had brought them here and not one conversation that would take them apart. He had not cheated or lied or done things that movies knew how to punish. He had done the small cowardice of making his silences do the work that his words refused to learn. She would ask what do you need? and he would answer with a joke turned into a hug into a soft silence that looked like care and smelled like fear.

“I’m going in soon,” he said, as if the army were a forgiving god that could absorb the blame.

“That’s also why,” she said, and the relief of the sentence made him very briefly hate her and then, as quickly, hate himself for being the kind of man who made women relief themselves by leaving. “You learn to survive harder nights there, I think. But not with me.”

He had nodded at all the right places and realized later, on the ferry to Tekong, that he had been agreeing with a weather forecast, not a person. Rain: probable. Wind: moderate. Love: not advised.

There had been no scenes, no trashing of gifts, no public performance of the private decision. He had packed his bag, stored her notes in the same old shoe box where he kept his O-level certificate, and told his mother only that they had decided to focus on their own things. His mother, who had once ridden the MRT from Jurong to Tampines just to deliver a bag of jackfruit she decided he needed, had said, “Okay,” in a voice that knew how to keep griefs from touching one another and making a mess.

The first week on the island had been a collage of indignities that no longer felt like personal insults after the third blister. Sleep arrived like a thief. Hunger arrived like a tax. There was comfort in being told when to stand, when to sit, when to clean the rifle you had not learned to love but were now attached to by law.

Nights were the problem. Lights out dropped a blanket on the room and made every private thought louder, every mosquito a prophet. The bunks creaked as if they had been promised something and were not receiving it. Boys breathed the way boys always have when they are trying not to be heard wanting something.

Aleem had counted tiles. He had listened to the wind saw at the window bars. He had made lists of things he could name without thinking–bus routes, his father’s three favorite jokes, the taste of chili from four different prata shops–and none of it made the nights shorter or kinder. Sleep arrived, but it arrived like a school bell dismissing you to a class you didn’t want.

And then a boy standing at the lip of the parade square handed him a stage like a bowl of water.

In the following days, the ritual took shape with a soldier’s ruthlessness for routine. After last parade, after the hall had cooled from the day’s heat and the sergeant’s voice had finished its last lap, he would borrow Kai’s phone under the pretence of checking football scores. He would walk the corridor to the far end where the light from the stairwell made a triangle on the floor, the geometry of quiet. He would lean against the wall where the paint had been repainted so many times it had grown a skin that seemed more human than plaster.

He would watch Aoi move.

He did not learn steps. The army was already teaching his body to obey. What he learned was breath. The loan and the return. The way you could make a decision one count earlier than anyone else and it would look like fate rather than effort.

On the ferry back to Singapore for weekend book-out, piers lifting and dropping like someone’s blood pressure, he would stand by the railing and let the wind press salt into his lips. He practiced the breath without the video–two counts in, hold, three counts out–until the city appeared not like a destination but like a body of water deciding to hold itself together.

His mother noticed before he told her anything. “You sleep deeper,” she said, scooping rice into a bowl as if rice were the thing that would keep him from floating away. “Face last time like long queue at clinic. Now like… morning after rain.”

He made a noncommittal noise while burning his tongue on her dhal and thought of how to explain a girl he did not know dancing a song he had not heard before last week and the way his own breath had learned to occupy his lungs again without asking permission from a grief he hadn’t even named.

He didn’t explain. He did the dishes. He collected his laundry and folded it with a deliberate neatness that ought to cheer a mother but instead made her narrow her eyes and say, gently, “Don’t make your heart into cupboard.”

“At least cupboard got shelves,” he said, and she smacked him lightly with a dish towel because he had asked for it.

Field camp came with its own gospel of discomfort. The island turned its pockets inside out and shook out the insects, the sticky heat, the sudden wet of a storm that had not been on the schedule. The ground was either greedily dry or vindictively mud; the sky could not be trusted. Men learned to stand with their toes gripping the earth through boot soles, a posture that read as readiness and was really the avoidance of sliding into something that smelled like the inside of a neglected sink.

On the second night, when the grooves of the day had bitten softly enough into him to leave marks, Aleem lay for a while inside his basha, listening to the nylon tremble at the edge of a wind that might not turn up. His section snored and snuffled and turned over in unison like a school of fish changing their minds, friction singing through the ghillie mat. He closed his eyes and tried not to let his mind play the clip of Nadia’s mouth forming the words except when it matters.

He didn’t play AURORA9 in the field. No phones, no signal, no video. He played the breath instead. He borrowed the beat he had seen Aoi borrow and spent it on arriving softer at the place his mind was trying to escape. Counting without a sergeant, arriving on time without a timetable.

He slept. When he woke to the sergeant’s foot thumping the ground near his head, the sky had decided to try on stars.

“You all look like expired tau huay,” the sergeant said, voice a mixture of affection and threat. “Up. Move. Water parade.”

They stood in their rows like men who had agreed to be identical for a reasonable fee. Water sloshed. The sergeant watched their throats like a mother. Off to the side, a stand of trees pretended it had been here forever and not planted by men whose job was to make the island suffer less from being itself.

Aleem’s mind slipped, the way minds do when the body is working but the heart needs somewhere else to be for a minute. It slipped to a stage he had not stood on, to a girl who would never know his name, to a chorus that made space for the quiet between its own notes.

He did not decide anything. He did not make plans. He only learned, night after night, to breathe like a person again.

The first time he watched an interview instead of a performance, it was because the Wi‑Fi in the bunk had decided to become a man of leisure and the only thing that would load was a clip with subtitles already burned in. The members sat on stools, hair arranged like the idea of effortlessness. The host asked questions that made a polite circuit around their real lives.

Aoi spoke less than the others. When she did, her sentences were neat and precise, hung like shirts on matching hangers. But once, when the host asked about what they wanted from audiences, she tilted the mic away from her mouth for a second, as if to measure the size of the thing she was about to say, and then said it anyway.

“Sometimes,” she said, “quiet is also a gift.”

The others nodded, respectful, but Aleem felt something under the sentence. It wasn’t annoyance. It wasn’t the scolding tone idols sometimes used when they were trying to manage a room of people who mistook screaming for love. It was gratitude phrased as a request, the way people in Singapore ask for air-con to be less cold by putting on a jacket and sitting closer to the vent.

He replayed the line three times. The way she said gift, the slight bow her voice made around the f. He wasn’t a person who fell in love with sentences. He was a person who kept spare toothbrushes in case someone needed to crash on his sofa and remembered to put ice cubes in a cup for his mother’s tea because she preferred it warm, not hot. But this sentence tilted something inside him and let the light in at a friendlier angle.

When the video ended, he sat on the edge of the bunk and wrote the word quiet on an old field pack label with a marker that was losing its fight against history. He stuck it on the inside of his locker door next to the SAF-issued inventory list. Rifle cleaning kit. Mess tin. Torchlight. Quiet.

Kai peeked over his shoulder and made the face he used when moral support and teasing were legally required to occur at the same time. “Wah, you serious already.”

“Serious about sleeping,” Aleem said, which was defensible in court.

Tekong taught you the shape of your mind because it took away the shapes you borrowed from the city. There were no café corners to pose your thoughts in, no late-night buses to pretend were movie scenes about your own life. There was the square. There was the sea. There were the voices that rose at the appointed times and permitted you to rest and then insisted you move.

On book-out Fridays, the ferry terminal thrummed with a particular hopefulness, like a heart appreciating the weekend even before it had done anything to deserve it. Boys called their girlfriends and mothers and group chats with equal urgency. After a while, the voices blurred into one another and made a choir of relief.

Aleem learned which bench offered the best breeze and the least view of couples who were practicing the art of kissing like people who had paid for it in instalments. He learned the timetable of the bus that would put him closest to his block without making him share air with the kind of men who had decided everyone needed to hear their music. He learned the precise number of minutes it took to walk from the lift to his door so that his mother could open it as if she had not been standing behind it for the last two.

“Eat,” she would say, and he would, and then he would help, and then he would sit with her while a Taiwanese drama decided whether two people were going to injure each other in a way that could be fixed by a monologue.

In the quiet pad between errands and naps, he would put on his own earphones and scroll through AURORA9. He discovered that fandom was a river with many tributaries, some clean and some less so. He found the ones that loved without devouring. He learned the names of the nine the way you learn the names of a neighbor’s cousins–kindly and without ambition. He watched the rehearsals, the fancams that were more about feet than faces, the clips of them laughing like girls whose job had not yet made their laughter expensive.

Aoi continued to occupy the corner of his mind where the light was good. She did not drag the furniture around. She did not invade. She did not knock things off shelves. She occupied. Some days he forgot to think of her at all, which was proof that he was not sick. Other days, a line of movement would appear in his body without announcement, and he would find himself stepping off a curb with his weight arranged like a man who had learned to borrow air from a chorus.

He did not tell anyone beyond Kai. Zara, his cousin, would have listened with the kind of gaze that turned men into better versions of themselves, but he wanted to keep this one thing free of translation. He wanted to be a person whose life contained a quiet he did not have to explain to even the kindest person he knew.

The nights flattened into each other and then, imperceptibly, began to lift. He slept longer. He woke with less violence. He still felt the cold outline of Nadia when he rolled towards the wall, but it was now more like the ghost of a piece of furniture he had sold than a wound. He smiled at texts that didn’t deserve it. He learned the fine art of the five-minute nap on a bench with one strap of a rifle looped through a finger. He stopped reading significance into the shape of clouds.

And he kept watching.

The clip that finally pushed him to say out loud, to himself, that he would go to a concert when he could, was not polished. A rehearsal video with scuffed floors and the squeak of sneakers that sounded like little mice of joy. Counts being called. The company of girls who had been taught to listen to one another’s breaths. Aoi in a hoodie, hair in a bun that made her look like the woman in a painting who has not yet decided whether to accept the letter.

At the end of the run-through, she bent to retie her shoelace. Simple. Ordinary. The camera didn’t even try to make it into a moment. But Aleem saw the way her fingers were careful with the knot. Not delicate, not rough–careful. The kind of care you spend on a thing you know you will use again because work is not an enemy and your body is not a weapon you can replace at NSC.

He closed the app and the locker and told the triangle of light on the corridor floor, “One day.” It wasn’t a vow. It was a plan nested inside a hope.

The first time he saw them live, it would be row twelve. But that was later. For now, the island persisted in being itself and therefore teaching him who he was when everything unnecessary was taken away.

On a Tuesday that started wet and decided to stay that way, the platoon was tasked with a route march that would have been respectable if not for the way the humidity turned respectable things into insults. Boots grated, feet swore. The sky hung lower, trying to read their thoughts. The sergeant asked them to sing and then, when the singing died and started to sound like a funeral for a joke, he let them be quiet.

Aleem fell into a rhythm that walked next to him like a friend carrying the other end of a table. He let his breath link itself to the count of his steps, to the holler of a bird that had decided the island was a lover worth scolding, to the rasp of strap against pack. The chorus of Quiet Bloom–he had learned the name now–arrived in his head, and he let it sit there, not as noise, not as escapism, but as a structure around which the morning could assemble itself without falling apart.

At the water break, Kai plopped down next to him and bumped his shoulder. “Later, after book-out,” he said, “we check the ticketing. They coming next month. Singapore Indoor.”

Aleem looked at him like a man who has just been offered a lift when he had resigned himself to walking. “Serious?”

“Serious,” Kai said, digging into his pouch for a cube of sugar and the story of how sugar is better than anything else when the world is a wet towel. “We go, we sit nicely, we shout only when appropriate, we clap like civilized people. You can even hold your breath at the right parts.”

Aleem laughed, and it made some of the men turn to see whether they had missed the joke. He hadn’t laughed like that since the day before the breakup talk, when Nadia had sent him a photo of a cat wearing a hat and he had replied with a picture of his father’s old karaoke VCDs arranged by key.

“Okay,” he said. The word landed with a weight he could carry.

That night, before lights out, he took a piece of scrap paper from his notebook–the one he had used to write down the serial number of a rifle and a shopping list for his mother that consisted entirely of words like brand and no, because she did not trust labels–and wrote three lines.

He didn’t light it like a ritual. He didn’t date it as if it were a treaty. He wrote it because words turned to air if you didn’t give them somewhere to live.

Respect.

Distance.

Gratitude.

He folded the paper and slid it behind the Quiet label on his locker door so the two words could keep each other company. Then he lay down on the thin mattress, turned his face to the wall like a man who had decided that his face could rest a little now, and let the island do what islands do to men who have agreed to spend the night on them.

The generator kept muttering. The sea kept breathing. The night did not ask whether he was healed. It only kept time.