I lost one community, only to find another

Last week, I drove to my old home, a condominium in Upper Thomson Road. I am not quite certain why I did so since, as expected, I was not allowed onto the premises. But, like one visiting a dear friend in his last days, when there is little to say and so much to remember, somehow it was the physical presence that mattered.

For a few minutes, I stood outside the gate, looking up towards the 25th-floor apartment that was my home for a little more than a quarter century. Then, as a nervous-looking guard approached, I turned on my heel, re-entered the car and drove away.

The tarpaulin cladding the contractors were setting up around the main tower was reaching ever higher, like a shroud being pulled up. Soon, the building will be lowered, to be replaced in time by a new structure.

It brought to mind a time when I stood in the magnificent chapel at North Carolina’s Duke University, watching preparations for a wedding start just after a funeral had ended.

A stab in the heart

The condominium I lived in, Thomson View, was put up for tender in early 2024. Its collective sale was finally completed in October 2025.

As a tenant, I had no say in the decision.

But I know several residents who had sellers’ remorse upon finding that alternative dwellings were unexpectedly expensive and cramped – or simply felt miserable at leaving the tall-ceilinged apartments and the cooling winds from MacRitchie Reservoir that blew through their homes.

For the luckier ones on the top floors such as me, the unblocked panoramic views from Changi Airport’s old control tower all the way to Woodlands at the other end were a special treat.

I have spent endless evenings just absorbing the view, a drink in hand – transfixed even when thunderstorms raged and lightning struck the building, sometimes knocking out the electricity.

But buildings are more than space and views. They are a community.

You feel a certain responsibility when your neighbour eight floors below mentions her son is considering journalism as a career, and could you help? You do, although he happily found alternative employment in San Francisco.

With one’s own children grown to adulthood, the lads upstairs become a point of special affection. So, the sound of balls bouncing becomes not so much a point of irritation as reassurance that the Goh boys – biblically named Samuel and David – were doing what children their age ought to be doing, which is to be joyful in play.

Oranges and pineapple tarts were exchanged on Chinese New Year. On Deepavali, the four-year-old next door, Chinese-Singaporean, went to school decked out in Indian clothes.

And of course, there was the landlord, Peter Foo – more precisely, the landlord’s father.

What can one say about a gentleman who not only encourages his tenant to learn golf, but gives him his first set of clubs. Then takes him to the expensive country club across the road for the initial games of what turned out to be an enduring tryst at being one of the world’s least efficient earth-diggers that ever walked a golf course.

Also, the petrol station attendant across the road who became a friend after he asked me if I was a “true-blue Singaporean” and I deadpanned, “No, true-brown Singaporean”.

To give it all up, and move, as we eventually had to this January, was a stab in the heart even as I was happy for the gains that presumably came my landlord’s way.

Nothing seemed right – at first

After a search of several months, we had found new digs. Although it is across the road from my old office, Times House along River Valley and Kim Seng Road, I approached the new home with a measure of resentment and reluctance.

Nothing seemed right.

The place was too warm, hardly had a view, and the maintenance charges seemed prohibitive. Several friends live nearby but I felt no desire to reach out. I moped.

A few days later, Arjun Samtani, a fellow resident whom I have known for some years, invited us into his home for a welcoming meal, then asked if I would speak at his 80th birthday celebrations a few weeks later.

I obliged gladly and didn’t have to exaggerate when I described him as a brilliant accountant, a big-hearted soul who gathered up all his friends, and an incurable romantic who spouts Urdu poetry given a half-chance.

Upstairs is a French family, with a pair of toddlers. Happy children. A floor below lives Google, one of the best-behaved golden retrievers I have met.

Maybe things weren’t so bad after all.

I began exploring the neighbourhood, stepping out before sunrise, and discovered ample pedestrian space – an under-appreciated blessing in Singapore – and multiple enjoyable routes.

I noticed that I walked longer distances as the days passed; along the riverfront sharing the morning with otters, treks all the way to the Hindu “Chettiar” temple in Tank Road, and sometimes, a turn down Oxley Road – and wry amusement that for some inexplicable reason one didn’t want to pass too closely to the street’s most famous address even so many years after its owner shuffled off his mortal coil.

Soon, some faces got more familiar, and you nodded a greeting – a neighbour you recognised, fathers in condominiums along Robertson Quay salving their guilt about long hours spent in the office by putting the kids on the school bus while mum presumably slept in.

Rock pigeons and roosters which have no fear of approaching humans, asserting their right of way. An attractive young woman dashing out of one of those co-living spaces in night clothes, stopping to blush at her own reflection in a shop window, before darting across the street. On weekends, a stop at the kopi stall for a cup of hot Milo.

And then, spent and yet exhilarated, you slump into a chair in your condominium’s entrance lobby to let the cross-breeze cool you off as you check your overnight messages, only to feel a gentle pressure on your knee.

It is Google, out for his own constitutional and asking to be petted. In a single sniff of my shoes, he has divined the paths I have travelled that morning, and which of his friends had been out that day before him.

Sleepy children and doting fathers. Friends Fui Howe and Nina from across the road who uncomplainingly fetch you to weekend golf across the island, or, like Arjun, ease you into a new start. Security guards who call out a greeting as you stride by.

Sadness at losing one neighbourhood to gladness in being accepted so heartily in another. In the fading embers of fond memory, joy at renewal. Rather like the wedding that followed a funeral at Duke.

The old neighbourhood isn’t lost entirely; my family still shops at Thomson Plaza and our long-time family doctor in Upper Thomson still heals us with words of reassurance as much as medicine. But the old days of driving on a whim to park roadside near Lower Peirce Reservoir, to gaze upwards and drink in the beauty of the canopies of trees meeting overhead, are gone.

Instead, I have a temple, a river, otters, rock pigeons. And Google.