Row Twelve

Chapter 2 – Row Twelve

The air-conditioning hit first, a long cool at the base of his neck that felt like forgiveness. Singapore Indoor Stadium held its weather like a promise; beyond the glass doors and ticket scanners, the world folded into one temperature, one hum. From the upper ring, an usher’s voice floated down in polite loops–“this way, block 114… row twelve to your left… enjoy the show.” The concourse smelled like popcorn and hairspray and the vinyl sweetness of new merchandise.

Aleem stopped just inside to let his eyes adjust. He had seen pictures, maps, fancams shot from angles that made the stage look either too close to be real or too far to be kind. But the bowl itself was a surprise: steep, intimate, a pair of hands cupped around a secret. He and Kai stood there for a second like two boys at the edge of the swimming complex, ready to be water again.

“Row twelve,” Kai said, checking the printout with the same solemnity he used for ration counts. “We really did it.”

Aleem nodded. He’d told himself all week not to make the seat a talisman. He had learned on Tekong that superstition didn’t stop the rain. But the number felt right in his mouth. Row twelve: not VIP, not nosebleed. Close enough to see breath, far enough to see the whole.

They followed the letters, the carpet dark as a held breath. The steps down had a bounce that made Aleem feel he was walking on the word prepared. Around them, fans moved with the choreographies of anticipation: girls braided one another’s hair with small elastic bands arranged on a wrist like candy; a father hoisted a child wearing a beat-up cap that had learned other stadiums; a couple in matching shirts negotiated the truce between a lightstick and a cup of iced lemon tea that would absolutely not survive the first chorus.

Zara texted: I’m at 210 with the others! if you see my hand, it’s the one waving like a mad person. A second later another text: Eat your dinner! I brought curry puffs.

Kai grinned. “After the show, ah. If eat now, later the chorus shake out everything.”

They reached row twelve. The seats were the color of old sweets. The stage was not a rectangle on a screen but a fact with depth: a main platform, a runway that pushed into the standing pen like a question that wanted more time, two side wings that looked like they were waiting to become air. Screens slept above, bright even when still.

“Eh,” Kai said, voice lower now that the room itself was speaking. “You okay?”

Aleem sat, placed his hands on his knees, and let the noise pour into him. Soundcheck murmurs seeped through the structure like water through the walls of a fish tank. Crew in black moved in straight lines that only looked casual if you didn’t know what it costs to make casual happen. A camera operator took a test pan along the runway. On the left wing, someone taped X marks to the floor with the seriousness of surgery.

“I’m okay,” he said, and was surprised to find it true. The old heat of Tekong was a memory; the breeze that lived in this bowl touched his jaw, cool and practical. He watched a rigger in a harness clip and unclip himself along a truss fifteen meters above men who would spend the night cheering, then leave without knowing his name.

“Good seat,” Kai said, doing the mental math of sightlines. “From here you can see the breath also.”

Aleem took the lightstick from his tote and turned it in his hands the way you check a tool before using it for the first time. He had thought the plastic would feel silly. It didn’t. It felt like a small, deliberate decision to be part of an organism for a few hours. Around them, the light gathered in pockets, a constellation not yet asked to shine.

They had made a day of it. MRT to Stadium station, escalators arranged like sold-out optimism. A brief detour through Kallang Wave Mall where Zara and three other cousins had done an inventory of snacks as if this were a picnic requiring strategic planning. Photos under the big AURORA9 banner, the first attempt too stiff, the second too willfully goofy, the third honest. They had bought one pack of photocards each–“only one,” Aleem told himself, already losing the argument in a future he could see–and laughed when Zara’s pull made her collapse like a footballer after a goal. “It’s my bias,” she wailed into her own sleeve, joyous.

At the merch booth, a volunteer with a lanyard and the voice of someone on their third hour of being helpful had said, “If you’re buying the tour book, please check the print quality before you leave.” People obeyed. It felt like a community that liked being told how to behave.

Back in the bowl, pre-show music slid across decades at a volume polite enough to be company. The screens ran trivia, rehearsal clips, an animated version of the AURORA9 logo blooming and unblooming like a patient flower. When the countdown clock appeared in the corner–a small dot that read 15:00–the cheer rose, tried itself on, fell back into conversation.

Aleem let his eyes walk the stage without hurrying. He traced the runways, imagined how weight would travel across them, where the cameras would find faces, where the music would ask for stillness. He could not say he wasn’t nervous, but the feeling was less please let it be what I hope and more let me be worthy of watching well.

“Wah,” Kai said suddenly, pointing. “They installing the fans on the side. Good. Last time other concert blow confetti into my Milo.”

It was a small thing, the way the crew moved–tight turns, hand signals, the dance of a hundred quiet decisions. Aleem found his chest loosening on their rhythm. The lesson of Tekong had been that someone was always making the world safer for you–by building fences, by setting timetables. The lesson of this room seemed to be that the world could also be made kinder by people whose job was to decide where light fell.

The clock slipped past 10:00. More seats filled, the hum thickened. A girl two rows ahead practiced a fanchant under her breath, syllables not quite words until they were. Two boys in their thirties, office pants betrayed by sneakers, argued tenderly about which encore song qualified as a masterpiece. A group of Japanese fans held up a cloth banner neatly lettered in two languages; the strokes were so clean that Aleem felt the relief of a room where even love had penmanship.

“Later,” Kai murmured as if strategizing for a raid, “if they do the ment, you don’t shout at the wrong place. When they drink water, you shout. When they say ‘we love Singapore,’ you scream like you applying for PR. When they talk about hard times, you keep quiet.”

Aleem smiled. “Teacher.”

“Your exam is the bridge,” Kai said. “That soft part. You must pass.”

The lights dimmed slightly–a rehearsal of darkness. The room tried the cheer again, louder this time, as if reminding itself of its own settings. On the corner screen, the clock went to 02:00 and then quietly vanished.

It was not silent when the lights dropped; rooms like this never are. But something like silence gathered–an attention that felt less like a held breath than a shared one. A VCR rolled: blue-black scenes of city nights, girls walking through frame like thoughts remembered mid-sentence, the AURORA9 logo emerging from a wash of color. The sound pressed against Aleem’s ribs–not the kind that flattens you, the kind that admits you.

Then the panel of gauze lifted.

Nine silhouettes rose with it, not obediently but inevitably. The first beat did its fast, fashionable work. The second measured the room for softness. By the third, Aleem found the lines he had come to find–there, two paces off-center, not announcing and therefore impossible not to see.

Aoi.

Her weight rested in a corner of the music that made sense to Aleem’s bones. He had been practicing breath, not steps, and so his body recognized the moment her body asked for air and the music said okay. It was an exchange so small that if you tried to point you would miss it. You had to arrive with it.

In row twelve, he felt the room begin to move like a living thing. The lightsticks learned their job. The fanchants found their precision. A small girl behind him tried to sing harmony and discovered the usefulness of silence. A boy somewhere to his right started crying five seconds too early and then laughed at himself for the rest of the verse.

The chorus opened. Not fireworks. A widening.

Aoi did the thing he had seen on the screen, but here it made the air different. The knee softened; the shoulder line declined to brag; the turn arrived just after it could have, making time feel hospitable. It wasn’t restraint for show. It was a kind of trust placed in the music and, by weird extension, in the room. Aleem’s body answered with a breath he had not known he was withholding until it left.

He had expected to be aware of himself–as a man in a seat in a stadium paying money to watch strangers be better than most people at something you couldn’t do. Instead, he felt like the kind of person who keeps his voice the exact right volume in a library and is thanked silently by people who will never learn his name.

Between songs, the stage reset with efficient care. The girls took sips of water, checked in with each other, ran a hand along a hip where a mic pack might sulk. The screens showed close-ups that avoided cruelty. The cameras refused to turn exhaustion into spectacle. When the second VCR came and the room took the chance to rest its collective throat, Aleem felt his own mouth curve at a joke in the video that had been written for teenagers and accidentally landed in the part of him that still wanted to be picked first for football.

“Good show,” Kai whispered, as if that required confirmation.

Aleem nodded without looking away. He practiced the discipline of staying with what was happening instead of running ahead to what this might mean for the rest of his life. He had learned on Tekong that the way to get through the next kilometer was not to imagine the medal but to pay attention to the ground.

The first ment arrived early, a choice he liked for reasons he only later articulated. It let the room and the stage agree on the terms. One by one the members spoke: gratitude, jokes, a promise to do their best. The Singapore-specific lines were crowd-pleasing and properly pronounced; someone had done homework with a patient teacher. When Aoi lifted her mic, the room leaned not to hear but to listen.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, simple. The English sat well in her mouth. “We will try to make tonight…gentle and exciting.” She smiled with the right amount of self-awareness. “Is that possible?”

“Yes!” the stadium shouted, because hope is a skill.

She glanced towards the side stage, eyes tracking something–maybe a crew hand signal, maybe a timing cue–and when she looked back her gaze skimmed the middle rows, the way you check the horizon to see if the weather has kept its agreement. For a half-second, Aleem’s row lived in the path of that gaze. It didn’t stop. It didn’t need to. It was enough to feel included in the sweep.

The show unfurled with the logic of a well-made playlist. Big, then small. Laughter at a silly prop, then the precision of nine bodies in a grid so clean it made your teeth ache. A mid-tempo track that asked the audience to clap on two and four, a request that Singapore did not always honor but tonight graciously attempted. A ballad sat them down on stools at the end of the runway, close enough that Aleem could see the way sweat learns to be dignified under stage light.

He kept passing his own small tests. He saved his voice for the parts that asked for it and let silence make the compliments that volume couldn’t. He listened for the bridge that Kai had called an exam.

It came three-quarters through, the song that had found him on a phone in the dark and had turned nights from flat to navigable. Quiet Bloom. The first verse was pretty, the pre-chorus persuasive, the chorus wide. But it was the bridge that told the truth: instruments thinning to a gentle heartbeat, melody bending not to show off but to return breath to its owners.

“Now,” Kai said into his ear, but Aleem was already there.

Around them, the stadium did something he had not seen outside videos of other cities trying something and halfway succeeding. Singapore, a nation that loves instructions, obeyed a whispered rumor that had been fed through group chats and cousin networks and the slow efficiency of friends with printers. Lightsticks went low. Voices stayed. The sound that rose was not a roar but a choir, untrained and therefore perfect.

He didn’t sing loudly. He matched pitch and let the line sit where it wanted in his chest. The girls didn’t ask for the mics to drop; the sound engineer did it anyway, trusting the room. For eight bars, the stadium carried the bridge like men carry a wedding chair: careful, celebratory, trying not to trip.

Onstage, Aoi’s head tipped, the small tilt of someone feeling the air behave differently. She didn’t clutch her chest or dramatize surprise; it registered in the way her shoulders released a notch and the corners of her mouth opted for gratitude over glitter. The camera, to its credit, cut wide to show the mass of it instead of harvesting tears.

“Pass,” Kai whispered, and Aleem smiled because we had passed.

The last run of songs took the house back to excitement with the kindness of someone waking you up with coffee instead of a horn. Confetti appeared exactly when it would be least annoying. Fireworks did their brief, legal best. The encore costumes were low-effort high-charm, the kind that made you think of a sleepover where everyone looks their best because they forgot to be impressive.

During the final ment, one of the members mischievously asked if anyone had come alone. The chorus of yeses made the room laugh at itself in a fond way. Aoi, catching on, added in soft English, “Even if you came alone, you are not alone now.” It should have been trite. It wasn’t. The room had the receipts.

They bowed, nine shadows pooling and rising as one. The band did a flourish like a thank-you note. The houselights came up as if to say, gently, you may go home now.

People always moved more slowly after an honest show. They gathered their things like they were leaving a picnic, not a spectacle. Strangers offered to take photos for one another with the same competence they had used to arrange the lightsticks for the bridge. The ushers stood aside to let a few last selfies happen by the rail. A crew guy unclipped a cable and made it behave.

Aleem stayed seated until the row shook itself into standing. He looked at the stage without trying to hold on to it. He had learned by now that trying to keep a moment by clutching it was the fastest way to damage it.

“Queue for merch later confirm long,” Kai said, already mapping the exits. “We cut through 112, then go upstairs meet Zara. She will shove curry puff into your mouth.”

“Okay,” Aleem said, standing, legs surprising him with their obedience.

On the way out, as they passed a safety barrier where a security guard had watched a thousand people remember how to be outside, a small thing happened that sat neatly in Aleem’s pocket without asking for ceremony. A crew member–a woman with her hair in the kind of bun that says it’s been a day–dropped a roll of gaffer tape out of a pouch on her belt. Before the security guard could stoop, a girl in a green sweater lifted it, handed it back with both hands and a bow stolen from bowing practice videos, and said in precise English, “Thank you for your work.”

It wasn’t a big moment. No one clapped. But the crew member smiled in a way that loosened something in Aleem’s throat. He imagined the night from her angle: not the songs, but the cables that had to stay obedient; not the faces, but the angles that allowed a spotlight to be a compliment rather than a complaint. He thought of Tekong’s men whose names he never asked who fixed a thing and made it look as if no one had ever broken it.

They joined the slow stream to the concourse. Zara intercepted them near a pillar like a soccer defender with compassion. “Eat,” she commanded, thrusting a warm paper bag into Aleem’s hand. “If you faint, I will blame AURORA, and they will cry.”

He obeyed. The curry puff was the kind that shed crumbs like blessings. Oil kissed his fingers. The taste made the show feel more like part of the city and less like a dream smuggled in from elsewhere.

“Good or not?” she asked.

“Good,” he said, and realized he meant the pastry, the night, the decision to come, the way his body had not tried to sprint ahead of the moment or trudge behind it complaining. Good like balanced.

They walked out under the big letters that had been arranged to be photographed and were now doing their job as exits. Outside, humidity had waited like a patient relative and reattached itself to their necks. The river near the stadium moved with the indifference of a thing that had seen other shows and would see more. The wind carried salt and the faint metallic smell of a concert’s aftermath.

Zara’s group peeled off towards the station, to send friends to the east-west line and the north-south line and the promise of showers. Kai checked the time and made a face at the idea of the crowd trying to all become train-shaped at once. “We walk a bit,” he said. “Let them go first. We breathe.”

They followed the path by the water, the stadium at their backs like a benevolent ship. People were laughing in low registers. A girl practiced a dance move while her boyfriend held her tote with a face that said I have chosen this life. Two aunties in matching floral blouses compared videos and decided whose had the better angle.

“I think,” Kai said, kicking at air and missing on purpose, “this one not bad. Like last time our section IC say, ‘you have done well for today.’”

Aleem grinned. He felt the kind of tired that makes sleep upright on a bus look achievable. But beneath it was a current, steady and soft, from having been part of a room that had learned to be gentle on cue.

“Next time,” Kai added, “we bring sign or not?”

“Maybe something for the crew,” Aleem said before he knew he was going to say it. The words sounded right as soon as they were out, as if they had been waiting at the back of his mouth. “Not for them,” he clarified, gesturing vaguely at the stadium, at the idea of famous. “For the people who make the light and sound. Like… I don’t know. ‘Thank you, crew.’”

Kai nodded, unsurprised. “Can. I help you print. But not too big until block the view. Later auntie behind throw sweet at your head.”

“Small. Clean letters,” Aleem said, already picturing the weight of paper in his hands. He imagined a neat type on white card, the kind of message that didn’t ask to be read so much as offered to be seen. He imagined a block of them, held by many hands. Not a stunt. A courtesy.

They stopped at the railing and looked back at the building. The lights on the outer shell had started their slow fade, the architectural equivalent of a show bow. Somewhere inside, a vacuum cleaner began its own performance. A security guard yawned with dignity.

Aleem pulled out his phone and opened the Notes app. He typed:

Thank you, crew.

He stared at the line for a while, added nothing, then created a checklist underneath it without being asked by any authority. Paper type. Font. How to distribute without making a mess. Ask venue about rules. Brief people nicely. No flash. Sing soft.

“Wah,” Kai said, reading over his shoulder. “You start a movement ah.”

“Just… make the room a little kinder,” Aleem said, pocketing the phone. He felt no messianic thrill, no delusion of influence. He felt exactly like a man deciding to bring an extra water bottle on a hot day because someone would forget and it would be better if the forgetting didn’t turn into suffering.

They walked on. Ahead, a bus waited, engine idling like a cat. The driver leaned back with the posture of someone who has learned the value of their own chair. Aleem and Kai boarded, tapped their cards, found seats near the middle where the air was best behaved.

As the bus pulled away, the stadium slid across the window like scenery in a theater. The night outside arranged itself in layers: lights, then water, then the underpainting of a city that knows how to take care of itself in public because that is the deal. Aleem let his head rest against the cool glass. The rhythm of the engine turned the day into a series of agreeable facts.

He took the lightstick out of his tote and held it under his jacket so it wouldn’t bother anyone. He pressed the button once, then off again, like a habit he was deciding how to keep. He thought of the way Aoi had tilted her head when the bridge became a gift passed back up to the stage. He thought of the crew member’s small smile over the gaffer tape. He thought of the woman on a stool asking if a night could be gentle and exciting and the room saying yes.

By the time they reached the MRT, the crowd had thinned into people. Kai stood and stretched, bones sighing like old doors. “Zara texted, say next time she want to sit near us,” he reported, as if this were a logistical challenge on par with national defense.

“We’ll see,” Aleem said, grinning. “Maybe she will sit with the aunties who scream in tune.”

They parted at the platform with the ease of men who would find one another again without arranging to. Aleem rode his line with the stillness of someone who has done a hard day’s honest listening. He watched the reflections of strangers practicing their own post-show quiet–texting, leaning, holding tote bags with smaller care than usual because their hands had done good work tonight.

At his stop, he stood and felt his legs remember stairs without complaint. The lift smelled faintly of disinfectant and this week’s poster campaign for something earnest. The corridor to his door held the usual mid-level sounds: a TV playing a drama where someone was about to cook a revenge meal, a neighbor laughing at a video delayed by just enough buffering to add comedy.

His mother had left the chain on. When he tapped and called, “Ma, it’s me,” she opened, eyes doing the quick scan that measures sons and decides they are still intact.

“Eat something?” she asked, because mothers must always re-ask the obvious questions to maintain the rules of the universe.

“Curry puff,” he said, lifting the empty paper bag.

“Good. Wash, then sleep.” She looked at his face for the angle of sadness and found only the shadow of a day that had earned its fatigue. “Good show?”

“Good,” he said, and the word covered more ground than it needed to.

In his room, he put the lightstick on the shelf where his guitar picks lived. He took the ticket stub from his pocket and slid it under a magnet on the side of a metal cabinet that pretended to be a noticeboard. The magnet was a souvenir from a museum gift shop where he had once spent too much money; its printed bird looked like it might survive several reincarnations.

He sat on the edge of his bed and opened Notes again. The checklist waited, unjudgmental.

Paper type: A4 card stock, white. Font: clean, sans serif. Message: THANK YOU, CREW. Language: English large, Japanese small under. Distribution: print stack; ask ushers if okay. Timing: pre-show on seats? No littering. Collect after.

He added one more line and didn’t know why it made his throat feel the way it did.

Do it because quiet is a gift.

He locked the phone and placed it face down. He lay back and let the show replay behind his eyes, not the spectacular parts but the small things: the way Aoi’s shoelaces stayed obedient, the way the security guard’s shoulders dropped when the crowd behaved, the way the room had made itself soft for eight bars and discovered it could do it again.

He didn’t promise anything to anyone. He didn’t write a manifesto. He allowed a project to exist in the space where plans and prayers overlap and do not suffocate one another.

He set an alarm he knew he’d beat anyway. He turned towards the wall and let the city’s night noise braid itself with the bus engine still purring in his bones. He breathed in, counted, breathed out. He did it again. He felt the edges of the day draw in around the center that had decided to be calm.

Respect. Distance. Gratitude.

He repeated the three words without moving his mouth, the way you say grace when you’re not sure who to thank. Then he slept, not like a man escaping his life but like a man who had found the room inside it and decided to keep it.