Early days in Singapore

Coke can cannot, Pepsi can ... can .. can ? The shrill heavily accented female voice brought me back to reality. I quickly tried to regroup myself. I was in a what I came to know later, in a food court in Singapore. I had ordered a fried rice (the closest to some Indian food I could find) and then went on to splurge on having a coke in a can ! My teenage years had gone by adoring and yearning for The Coca-Cola and here I was... about to buy one ! 75 Singapore cents.. less than Rs.20 (the first thing you do when you go to a foreign country is to start converting it in your currency). ... did I not tell you to remind me to get even with my uncle?

Ghanshyam dutifully picked me up from the Singapore airport at 4.30 pm, 24 hours later than my scheduled arrival. He was a 3rd generation Indian Singaporean. He got me to the company accommodation .. a nice sprawling 3 bedroom house. However, the room furnishing and the neighboring locality was none better than that of my house back in India. Only later I would come to know that my new home at Dorset road was right in the middle of "Little India" in Singapore. A home away from home. I was the sole inhabitant of that house and it seemed eerie to start with. As I lay down the suitcases in one of the biggest bedrooms, we discovered a landline phone. I asked Ghanshyam what the local number was. He then punched in a few buttons on the phone and his pager rang ! Eureka !! He managed to get my number in a few clicks .. he had paged himself ! Pager was a new thing for me as it was just about making its entry in India in '95. I would have been selling these same pagers for Motorola had I stayed behind instead of opting for Singapore. Thus, this was my first brush with advance technology and I was looking forward to many more. He left soon after but guided me to a nearby local eating joint.

The concept of a food court is quite unique and yet very compelling. The resources are shared and yet each stall dishes out a different fare. It's co-opetition at its very best. India got to see this concept only after the advent of malls in the late 2000s.

So Coke can cannot, Pepsi can can .. can? Not just the accent but the lingo itself was so unfamiliar. I somehow muttered under my breath.. can ! Any can would do, who cares .. !! It was only a few days later that I would realise that can actually means .. ok. What she meant was that she does not have a Coke can but would a Pepsi can do instead. Hilarious and etched in my memory for ever.

Singaporeans indeed had a very funny way of talking. The 1st thing that you would notice is the use of the word .. lah ! Lah is probably the closest equivalent of what we use as .. yaar. Literally each sentence ends with a lah.

No lah .. it's not like that lah

You know lah ... !

I went to this restaurant lah and they had this amazing food lah !

Don't be like that lah !

I found it very funny the way Singaporeans used to talk. You bump into someone and the 1st thing he will ask you is ... so how ? Now this so how could entail anything from the rising sun in Japan to the impeachment of Clinton in the US. Years later, I realised that we Indians esp from the North have the same habit to say ... aur bolo. That is quite open ended too.

The dinner was a brief affair. Fried rice for S $2 and Pepsi can for 75 cents was very reasonable is the least I could say. Though, the aunty asking me if I could have fish in my veg fried rice left me heavily confused. Not a true vegetarian myself, I had opted for a veg meal after seeing ducks, snails, crabs and a few unidentified insects on display at the various food outlets. That a few years later Singapore taught me to eat any kind of meat is a different story. I also realised that Chinese are notoriously totlas (lisping problems) ! They can't pronounce R even if their life depended on it. The lady insisted on serving me Flied Lice... how disgusting !

I had no idea on the cost of living in Singapore even when I took up the job and was not even sure if my salary of S$1500 would last me a month. But I had 6 months of essential supplies and a free accommodation so considering the cheap dinner, I knew that I could scrape by. Trudged back home and that's when the reality of it all sunk in !

Here I was... doing exactly what I wanted to do. All alone by myself. I had landed at 4:30 pm and few hours with Ghanshyam and dinner later I was back home. Only now the house was waiting to haunt me. Isn't this what I wanted and craved for? The walls felt as if they were caving in and I felt so alone in this big miserable world. A sheltered kid for over 20 years, I had only been out of Mumbai once to Bordi as a school picnic and once to Mysore for a company event.

For the 1st time in my life I was hopelessly alone. In the months to come, Kishore Kumar  (sad songs), Jagjit Singh and Pankaj Udhas became my best friends. Chithhi aayi hai continues to give me goose bumps till date and is easily a song that I can identify with.

What one takes for granted... our friends.. our relatives... and our own family... the very people that you grew up with and took the liberty of taking for granted and wanted to run away from... suddenly become so invaluable ! It was not even a day and I was already missing the nagging voice of my mom to have dinner and being admonished for being a lousy lout by my dad. Being home alone .. was simply not my cup of beer !

Singapore was supposed to be way advanced in technology. Back home, I was selling Black and White TVs at Onida and my colleagues were busy with round 21 inch  CRT (round tubes) while Singapore boasted of flat screen 32 inch ! 4 generations ahead !! I was so much looking forward to that. But the wings were clipped the moment I switched on the TV. Only 5 channels? 1 Chinese, 1 Tamil, 1 English, 1 English news and 1 sports ! India by then already had 100+ channels thanks mainly due to the advent of cable TV. Singapore just had 5. No cricket even. Over the period of next few years David Beckham, Zinedine Zizadne,  Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Michael Schumacher found a new fan. Sports was restricted to football (huge fan following for EPL), basketball and Formula 1. It was only in the late 1999 that cable TV came in form of Singapore Cable Vision and few months after that Zee Tv was available. Missed watching the India v Pakistan cricket world cup 1996 quarter-final & the famous Venketesh Prasad send-off. That India won was a balm for the tormented mind. Remember, no TV broadcast, no internet to have ball to ball updates and no radio commentary and yes, no sms ! Had to wait till the end of the match to call a friend in India & get the result.

To make an international call, you needed to buy a calling card. Much similar to the plastic credit or debit cards that we have today. It used to have pre stored value of S$ 5, 10 or 20. 50 cents per min from a local calling phone to call India. Calling from what we knew as a PCO except that it's unmanned. Initially, I used to buy a $5 card and dutifully call my parents every Sunday evening. The trouble with that was you see the time wind down from 2:30 secs on the phone and last 45 secs was used up to say that the phone will get disconnected and that I will call the following Sunday. Slowly I switched to S $10. Almost 2 years later mobile phone changed all that. I could call at any time or day and not worry about the call getting disconnected. It also helped that by then I was earning much better than when I had gone there first. Mobile phones also changed one more thing. The art of writing letters. I used to write pages and pages of letters every week to my parents and friends and very eagerly wait for their replies. Later when I had a room mate we used to fight as to who will keep the letter box key. We used to be so eager for the letters that we did not want to wait till the other comes home.

Possibly for the 1st time in my life I was staying the night alone. The shadows of the tall trees making weird shapes in the bedroom did not help the matters. Sleep was an elusive property, the ones I could not buy in the SOBO of Mumbai. I got used to it within a week given that my only other option was to prove my dad right that I would not last and come back within a month. Another week later I was joined by another guy from Mumbai, Manoj. He was in some way related to the owners of my place of work and he tried his best to tell me what the relationship was but till date I can't figure that one out. Not that I was interested in the least.

Manoj was a typical Sindhi if you know what I mean. Apologies, for generalizing and making a stereo typical comment. We had a community swimming pool nearby. They charged S $2 per entry. Since we had nothing much to do over the weekends with nothing much on TV, we decided that we should go to the pool every Sunday. The pool opened at 7 am. Our friend used to park himself there at 9 am. I was never an early riser and not too fond of the water anyway. I used to go around 12 noon just to loiter around. With a 115kg frame, he would actually look like a whale and behave like one too. I wish I had saved those pics with his swimming trunks on.

"Paisa vasool karna hai yaar" he used to say. The look on his face and the tone of his voice, immediately made me stop multiplying all the expenses by 25. (S$ currency exchange rate then). Earn in dollars and spend in dollars became my immediate motto. He left the pool at 6 pm ! If I thought that the 1st time was an aberration, then I was wrong. My fears were proved true every week after that. Including his purchases for grocery which included an hour long travel by bus to save some  $. Kiasu is the term coined by Singaporeans for this. Most of the Singaporeans are Kiasu and they would probably admit to it. It means buying something cheaper which you would not want anyway or not needed to go to the lengths that you went to.

The first thing that strikes you about Singapore is its cleanliness esp. if you happen to get there from a country like India. Mumbai airport was no better than a railway station back then. Upon deplaning, its almost as if the plane doors have opened up to a different world. Singapore airport was the swankiest place I had seen till then. Even now after traveling around the world, it remains one of the best airports that I have seen. It took me almost 2 hours at the Mumbai airport to clear immigration & customs (and things haven't changed 20 years later) and it took me just 15 mins to collect my bag and step out. I had a feeling as if I forgot to do something or I was doing something wrong. How could things be so easy & fast ? We Indians are simply not used to it. Since the time of getting admissions to Jr.Kg, we have been ingrained to stand in long queues. As my taxi breezed through the traffic, the spotless roads dotted with a canopy of trees on either side of the highway, was a sight to see. They say "first impression is the last impression", for me it has made a lasting impression. On my first day itself, Singapore made me feel so welcome.

That night, I was shedding silent tears. You can't go back home now I told myself. You can’t prove everyone else right. I can survive. My first day at work beckoned me the next day and I wanted to be 100% ready. It was drizzling and the trees continued to dance and then just like that I screamed out aloud ...

"Ready or not, world, here I am !!'