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Today as I was walking up the stairs from the HDB void deck to the turnstile gate to my condo, I saw a little Indian boy standing on the top step. For some reason, he scared me. He wasn't just standing there. He wandered, leaning on the rusted green railings, swaying up and down the platform as though he were moving and yet not. As I walked past him he went to the edge of the top step and posed like he was about to go down the steps, but as I waited, he never did.

And so I took out my doorcard and tapped the sensor-thing with it, then pushed the turnstile open a tiny bit so that I could let myself in. But since my bag is about as big as I am I turned around to find the Indian boy squeezing in through the turnstile gate with me. His eyes were sunken, and at the same time, they were huge. Or maybe it was just the eyebags under them.

"Which block do you live in?" I called, softly at first, as he walked away from me.

He turned around in the darkness. "...Here."

"No, I mean which block."

"G."

"Okay," I said, and left.

I don't know why I felt so strange. Or so scared. Or so pissed. Maybe it was because of how silently he did it, that normally people would actually ask if I could open the door for them instead of hanging around the top step like a tentative ghost. Maybe it was because of his face. Maybe it was because he was Indian.

But his voice, when I called out to him, reassured me. And his voice was most certainly Indian.