The road by my house is special. Walking down it you will find, scratched into the concrete, a series of crisscrossing lines marked with the icons of footsteps, appearing once about ten metres before the site of the old metal bus stop, and again at the gates of the now-disused secondary school. It is not hard to find them: they look like dance instructions. If you stay around you can see them being used. Walking down the sidewalk from east-to-west (or, indeed, the same from west-to-east) one proceeds as one does on any road in Singapore, keeping left; but approach the old bus stop and one must change sides, keeping right. Then, not more than five metres later, before the school gate, one must switch paths again. It is a series of maneuvers so quick together that even the fastest sprinting salaryman or last-minute market shopper must slow their pace to match. I myself have tried it all my life; I do not see the fuss. In that I share the opinion of many of my fellow older residents that the markings are not necessary at all, that the young are merely too quick on their feet, and the precise navigation of arbitrary inherited rules is exactly that which makes great our nation and culture, and cements us as upright individuals.

So it might come as a surprise that even my older peers, who have lived here since the park was a canal and the fields were dull graves, do not know the origin for this tradition, only that it has been repeated by their mothers and grandmothers before them, perhaps even from the time before the canal and before the graves. Such a time is unfathomable to me. I suspect, through long hours spent in the library archives, that its origin is really more recent than any of my fellows let on. The road appears to have been a main thoroughfare to the graves' central temple starting around the early 1900s, no doubt packed with rickshaws and processions of mourners and bullock-carts transporting the dead; no doubt that the trains of competing wakes often bumped into one another, given the high concentration of funereal services that dot the industrial park ahead, and the neighbourhood's long association with death. Opposing clans must once have collided in these jade-capped hills, each refusing to give way to the other, and today's markings are the result of their spatial dispute. Another theory (one I have kept mostly to myself, though it is irresponsible as a historian) posits a more subversive origin: local villagers, subverting the efforts of early planning authorities, deliberately switched paths to confound those early roadworks, leaving path dependencies in the wet concrete that have persisted to this day. Whichever way it is, we seem to have completely forgotten.

Yet the path still remains. To its credit, its markings are easily understood by even our newest residents: young bankers, Chinese study mummies, enigmatic Indian expats, piano teachers, property agents, freshly-married couples with one-point-one-four children. Each, walking by and seeing the signs, will find their feet dragged into the proper direction, perhaps owing to the admittedly-tactile persuasions of the carved-out concrete. It is a sure sign of how successful these people have been at assimilation into our culture. Every time I see one of these newcomers do that little turn with their feet, a well of joy surges in my heart. In this respect perhaps the markings are not so bad after all. Maybe generations after me will point towards this as a groundbreaking example of grassroots urban design. Or maybe they will forget it all, as we have forgotten so much in this city, as we have forgotten our tongues, our hands, our bricks, our futures' pasts. It is not up to me to decide.

Only once, in recent memory, has this inviolable custom been violated. Last June, old Mrs. Teo, on her way home from work, did not sway her feet from their path at the markings outside the gate. She swerved hip-first into a crowd of schoolgirls, faded leather flats and all, tumbling with a thud at the side of the road, sending mimosa leaves a-folding in her wake. She broke her hip that day in three places, and was in the hospital for months. Some say she hit her head too, because when questioned about it, old Mrs. Teo refused to answer why she had tripped. Instead, she merely held up her jade-braceletted left hand, whose fingers were twitching and bending, twitching and bending (just like those mimosa leaves, in fact), grasping at something that none of us could ever hope to see.