The rain stopped twenty minutes before my train reached Bishan, but the covered walk under the flyover still smells like wet concrete and the drainage channel running along the side is full.
I take this route even when it is not raining because the flyover creates a corridor of echo that makes my footsteps sound like two people walking, and I have grown fond of the company even though I know it is only acoustics.
The path is wide enough for two abreast but at this hour I mostly have it to myself. A cyclist passes with his light on steady rather than blinking. The graffiti on the pillar is old enough to have faded to the colour of the stone. Above, traffic mutters without showing itself, which is the flyover's particular gift — you hear the city without being inside it.
When I first moved to this block I found the underpass gloomy. Seven years later I read the gloom differently: it is shade in the afternoon, shelter in the rain, and at night a lit tunnel where the lamps cast long rectangles on the ground. The MRT exit is visible at the far end like a bright mouth.
Halfway along I always slow down without deciding to. There is a bench on the void deck just beyond the flyover where an auntie sometimes sits with her marketing trolley, but tonight the bench is empty and the concrete is still beaded with water. I do not sit — I am close enough to home that sitting would feel like stopping a sentence one word early.
The walk takes perhaps four minutes if I do not slow down, six if I do. I know the cracks in the pavement by feel. A cat crosses from the grass verge to the bin enclosure without acknowledging me. The lift lobby ahead has its air-conditioning spill into the corridor, cool against the warm evening.
This is the part of the commute I would miss if I started taking a taxi. Not because it is picturesque — it is not — but because it is the buffer between the public day and the private evening, and buffers matter when you live in a block where your neighbours can hear your television through the wall.
I think of the flyover as a roof that belongs to everyone and no one. It marks the boundary between the station's hurry and the estate's slower rhythm. By the time I reach the lift I have usually stopped thinking about whatever the office wanted from me, which is the closest thing to a purpose this walk has.
