Lorong 23

The eyes stared blankly toward the busy road, hungry. How they gripped me.

As I walked past, the chilling scene held my gaze. In a food centre, it is a usual sight to see tables filled with youth, families, friends, engrossed with eating and chatting over cheap fare.

In that food centre, nearly all were elderly men. Elderly men clad in singlets, old-school sunglasses, smoking lazily with a single cup of coffee instead of food on the table, all sitting with their chairs faced toward the open road, silent, as if they were all watching a movie in a theatre, instead of turning their chairs inward toward the tables for conversation. In the tables which were engaged in conversation, would be a young lady from mainland China clad in skin tight attire talking animatedly.

“This is the heart of Geylang,” my friend working in the social enterprise helping drug addicts and the fringe community in the area told me. “This is what it is in broad daylight. The old men are married, but they are poor and lonely. They want company so they sit here all day and wait for some from noon onwards. When the prostitutes come around 5pm, they buy them drinks and a feast, even though they are poor and have starved and survived all day on only a cup of coffee… Once, an elderly man confided in me that it was better to sit there than to go home and face their wives and children, whom they feel no longer love them. They sit here because they are lonely. “

Lonliness. It is the poverty of the rich. Compared to the slums of India, we are, no matter how needy, still comparatively well-off. Our truest poverty lies within ourselves. The poor in India are starving for food, but we here are starving for love, too.

One night as I was attending a gathering at the social enterprise at our city’s red light district, I was talking to a male friend on the streets when a stocky man plainly interrupted our conversation, confronted my friend and shouted out, “Thirty dollars, you want or not?” as he pointed to a woman in a black mid-drift and short skirt.

Thirty dollars for a quickie.

I thought of the many men who thronged the streets looking for a moment’s thrill, for some company, to fill some insatiably empty void deep within their souls.

So that afternoon as I walked past the food centre, the hungry eyes hooked upon mine and sized me up immediately. The eyes searched me from crown to toe and followed me even as I turned my back. I dare not smile back lest they quote me a price. I argued with my friend who works there that dressing-wise, I am clearly a different species- why would they mistake me for paid company? He said, “Oh, there are the housewifely kind who offer their services around here. People go for that too. These are the angry wives of philandering husbands who turn to the streets to get back at their cheating spouses.”

“I see.”

Geylang, our city’s red light district. The fluorescent lights light up the consuming darkness of the hearts of men. It is crowded, but each heart, lonely; it is raucous, but each heart, silent; it is dirty and grimy and despised by those who self-righteously proclaim their divorce from such filth.

But Geylang is not the only place which is so. After being exposed to general surgery, internal medicine, orthopedics, family medicine and emergency medicine, I’ve finally stepped into the psychiatric posting of my medical curriculum. People from all walks of life enter the hospital, searching desperately for some meaning, some glimmer of hope, some love. Deep inside, beneath the mania, psychosis or depression, they are all lonely, too.

But don’t many more of us suffer from the disease, too. Many of us are lonely, empty and searching. It is only that we use our shining careers to deflect our hidden lonliness. But how long before we become exposed?

Maybe we’re not that different altogether. Perhaps, we too, are Poor.

So as God has called us to love the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the one taken captive (Matthew 25:34-46), we too must remember to love not just the obviously needy, but our friends, colleagues, acquaintances and family. And that, very often can be more difficult. For while it may be hard to love the poor, it is harder to love those only poor in the inside, and more challenging still to love those who won’t even admit their poverty.

I am learning. Our poor and hurting neighbours are not far away in a rural land, but all around us, beneath our own roofs. I am learning how I’ve fallen short, and how I must love and serve them more deeply.

Geylang. More than just the stories of migrants, fringe communities, drop-outs…

… it could very well tell ours and our neighbour’s story too.