"The ground here used to hold skulls," she said, tapping the mud with her cane. It left little holes in the bank, bleeding brown water with each thrust. "Savages, believe it or not. Right here in the condos some more."

I wondered how long we had been walking. "We should be getting back," I told her. "The buffet should be opening any time soon."

The sky was a deep silver, the kind of dusk I'd only seen in photos. The sun set late in this country. She grinned, pointing at the boats bobbing downriver. "They'll head back when the tide comes in. We'll go back then."

She led me down the river with her free hand, setting out landmarks as we went. At a place where the river forked, she prodded at the sand, uncovering a mass of bone-white springs. The bridge above us creaked with foot traffic and the occasional bicycle. I asked if this was another burial ground. "Don't know. I'm not an archaeologist," she laughed. "I just like old things. Wouldn't you?" Digging into the bush with my feet, I found other things, half-sticking-out of the sand: asbestos, beads, bleached toothbrush handles... the broken top half of a traffic light button, black paint chipped and faded to grey.

"I don't know," I said. "The way I see it, if someone didn't want these things, they threw them away. To bring things back, that's to disrespect their forgetfulness."

"You're not the first person to say that in this country," she frowned. "Though that's an one way to put it. Forgetfulness -- something to pay respects to."

We skirted the island, and finding nothing else notable, continued following the bank. Here, it bent right under the shadow of candlelit hotels. Scentless barbeques burned. From somewhere was the playing of an erhu, distorted. The buskers had moved upriver, along with the money, though that had been an age away, from a memory I could not presently place.

"You'd like it here," she said. "The theme changes about once a week. Used to be Japanese, then it was hawker-centre-fusion... now it's some kind of Spanish fish market."

"I suppose I've had a birthday here once," I said. I tried to calculate when. "How often do they change?"

"Depends on what the sampans bring in," she shrugged.

Under the ribs of the bridge, we passed bronzed men squatting on rice sacks filled with sand. She gave one of them a two-dollar bill, almost as crumpled and folded as the tongkang's sails on its face. "My grandfather was a lighterman," she explained. They smiled. I nodded back. We carried on our way.

Here the mud was deeper and softer. Even with our boots, mine and hers were soaked to the calf. In lieu of her cane, I offered her my arm. She grudgingly accepted. Together we trudged up the coast, past shuttered warehouses, jammed roads, fading car horns mixed with muffled Eurobeat. We passed dented rickshaws, beer garden umbrellas, old wooden signboards left leaning by the river. Suddenly, at a place where the river bent, she stopped and raised her cane.

"We've reached," she said. "It's all straight after the left -- you can see all from here."

She dashed ahead, half-stumbling in the mud. I squinted at where she pointed at. Here, the water rose to a tilt, passing as a thin sliver between the blocks in the distance. Something shimmered, which brought to mind something I had said before. I laughed, despite the river, stricken with the realisation of everything I'd knew: that we'd been here for a while, that we'd been here for a long, long time. And here we would be, in the centuries to come...