The Front Seat Upstairs
It took us a year of riding Singapore’s buses to understand that we were never going anywhere fast. We were learning how to stay.
The rain had started somewhere around Toa Payoh.
We were on the upper deck, in the front seat, the one with the wide glass and the view down the road. A boy in a white school uniform sat across the aisle with his palm flat on the window. He was following a single raindrop with one finger as it ran down the glass, losing it, finding another.
Below us, umbrellas bloomed along the pavement. Black, floral, one bright yellow. The wipers on the lower deck swept back and forth, but up here there were none. The world just blurred and cleared, blurred and cleared, as the bus pulled away from each stop.
The boy got off two stops later. He didn’t look back at the window. Someone else’s hand would be on it by tomorrow.
We stayed in that front seat long past where we needed to go.
It was the first time the bus had felt less like transport and more like a place.
Five Digits on a Pole
Before we knew the name of the stop near our block, we knew its number.
Every bus stop here carries a five-digit code, printed small on the pole and on the shelter sign. We learned ours from the app on our first week, typing it in each morning to see how far away the bus was. We said it to each other the way you’d say a password. What’s the code again?
The name came later. It was named after the block across the road, which was named after the street, which was named after something that had stood there long before the flats went up. We never found out what.
There is something humbling about learning a place by its numbers first. It is how a newcomer reads a city. Codes before stories. Routes before people.
But we stood at that stop so many mornings that it slowly gave up its details. The crack in the bench. The auntie who sold kueh from a small cart on Wednesdays and Fridays, her pandan layers wrapped in clear plastic and lined up in rows. The bird that nested in the shelter roof every March.
By the second year, we no longer typed the code. Our thumbs did it for us.
A city starts as a set of numbers. If you wait long enough at the same stop, it turns into a neighbourhood.
Seats Available, Standing Available
The app showed us something we hadn’t expected. How full the bus was before it came.
A small indicator next to each arrival time. Seats available. Standing available. Limited standing. We learned to read it like weather.
In the morning rush, the first bus would often come in packed, a wall of office shirts and backpacks pressed against the doors. The app had warned us. And the next one, four minutes behind, would show seats.
At first we pushed onto the full one anyway. We were used to cities where you took what you could get, where waiting felt like losing.
Then we watched the locals. Many of them simply stepped back. Let the crowded bus go. Checked their phones, sipped their kopi from a plastic bag with a straw, and waited four minutes for the one with room to breathe.
It seemed like such a small choice. But it said something about how people lived here. The system was reliable enough that you could trust the next bus would come. So you didn’t have to fight for this one.
We started letting buses go. Not always. But often enough to notice how different the mornings felt.
The Card Went Into the Phone
We arrived with an EZ-Link card, bought at a station counter on our second day. It lived in a wallet, then in a phone case, then in a jacket pocket we forgot to empty.
Over time, it changed. The card moved into the phone. Then our bank card worked just as well. One tap at the reader by the door, one tap at the back on the way out.
What stayed with us wasn’t the technology. It was how the fare worked.
You paid by distance, not by bus. And if you changed buses within a short window, the system treated it as one journey. The fare carried over. It remembered you were still going somewhere.
We thought about that more than we should have.
Back home, every connection felt like starting over. A new ticket. A new charge. Here, the city seemed to understand that people rarely get where they’re going in a straight line. That a trip to work might need two buses and a train, and that this was still, in some quiet way, a single movement.
On the bus, we met the city between stations, the quieter places a train carried us past.
The fare remembered we were mid-journey. It took us longer to remember that ourselves.
The Bus Captains
Nobody here called them drivers. They were bus captains.
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We found it a little grand at first. Then we watched them work.
There were four operators running the routes by then. SBS Transit, SMRT, Tower Transit, Go-Ahead. Different uniforms, different colours of bus. But the captains seemed cut from the same patience.
One evening near Bukit Merah, a man in a wheelchair waited at the stop. The captain stopped, stood, and lowered the ramp at the middle door. He did it without hurry. Nobody on the bus sighed. A woman shifted her shopping bags so the space was clear. A teenager moved from the folding seat without being asked.
The whole thing took maybe ninety seconds. Then the captain sat back down, closed the doors, and pulled away.
We thought of the cities we’d lived in before. How often someone would have checked their watch.
There was another captain on a route we took on Saturdays. He said good morning to every person who boarded. Every single one. Most people nodded. A few said it back. He didn’t seem to mind either way.
We started saying it back. It became part of our Saturday.
A Curry Puff at the Interchange
The interchanges were where the routes came home.
Ours had a small bakery near the berths. It wasn’t anything special. Fluorescent lights, a glass case, trays of buns that had been sitting a while. But the curry puffs were still warm in the late afternoon, flaky and heavy, the potato filling faintly sweet and peppery, a slice of boiled egg tucked inside.
We’d buy one each and eat it on the bench by our berth, oil soaking through the paper bag.
Around us, the interchange did what it always did. Buses pulling in, emptying, filling again. A grandfather holding a grandchild up to see the big numbers on the front. Two cleaners sharing a packet of rice on a step behind the pillar, talking quietly in a language we didn’t speak.
The bus came. We folded the bag and dropped it in the bin.
It was never a meal worth writing home about. But on the evenings when work had gone badly, or when home felt very far away, that warm curry puff on a cold metal bench was enough.
Some comforts don’t need to be good. They just need to be there when you arrive.
The Last Bus Home
The night we remember most was a farewell.
A friend was leaving Singapore. Her posting had ended, the way they do. We had dinner at a zi char place in Geylang, a long table under bare bulbs, a fan clacking overhead. Salted egg squid. Hor fun in thick gravy. Too much beer. Someone gave a short, clumsy speech. Everyone laughed in the right places and went quiet in the others.
It was nearly midnight when we walked to the stop.
We caught the last bus of the night. The upper deck was almost empty. A security guard asleep near the stairs, his cap tipped over his eyes. A young couple at the back, whispering. The air-conditioning hummed. The city slid past, mostly dark now, the hawker shutters down, the HDB blocks lit in scattered squares.
We took the front seat. The same one, or one just like it.
Neither of us spoke for a while. We were thinking about our friend, already packing. About how this would be us one day. About how the bus would keep running this route long after we’d gone, and how it wouldn’t notice.
There was something almost comforting in that. The bus didn’t need us. It would carry the next people, and the ones after them.
We had only ever been passengers. Everyone is.
What We Carry Now
We still choose the upper deck when we can. Still drift toward the front seat, if it’s free.
The card is in the phone now. We know the codes of a dozen stops by heart. We know which routes run late and which ones skip the long way. We know which interchange bakery keeps its curry puffs warm, and which captain says good morning.
We do not know how long we’ll stay in this part of the world. We never do. The posting will end, or the lease will lapse, and one day our stop will be someone else’s stop. They’ll type in its five digits on a first nervous morning, not knowing yet about the kueh cart or the bird in the roof.
We hope they let a full bus go by once in a while.
We hope they find the front seat upstairs on a rainy afternoon.
For now, the routes still carry us. Through the wet streets and the bright interchanges, past blocks that have started to look familiar, toward a home that feels more like home each year, even if it may never fully be ours.
And some evenings, riding up front with the city blurring and clearing in the glass, we put a palm against the window the way that boy did.
Just to feel where we are. Just for a little while.
