SINGAPORE WILDERNESS

I stood over her, curious. She was large and yellow, crouched in a corner behind the swimming pool; the first ‘wild’ creature I’d seen in the city since arriving.

      Later, I sat on the lit balcony of the 11^th floor apartment my daughter and her partner are renting. The air was humid after monsoon rain. I scanned the landscape-a mixture of Gotham City and a Cubist painting -mountains of high-rise flats and futuristic office blocks.    Something was missing and it wasn’t Batman.

       I listened and looked up at the balcony light. No flying cockroaches, no whining mosquitos, no killer bees or Kamikazi moths. This was tropical Asia. I didn’t get it. Yet the part of me that didn’t want to be bitten or stung, rather liked this new experience-for a while.

     ‘They spray everything here,’ my daughter told me as we sipped our G & T.  ‘They’re afraid of Denge fever.  Last week, they injected clouds with chemicals so it would rain before the Grand Prix-they can’t afford to chance it during the event- it would be a financial disaster.’  

      ‘How do you cope with it?’ I asked. ‘It’s challenging,’ she said. ‘But, there’s a new development, ‘Gardens in the Bay,’ we haven’t seen ourselves. Do you fancy it?’

       We took the boat down the cleaned-up Singapore River, past the statue of Raffles, the First Governor of the Island, a wild-life enthusiast.  A plant that only flowers once a year, the ‘Rafflesia’ was named after him. On we floated towards the modern development of Marina Bay, with its metallic arts complex and Eden-type project with cool houses.  Against the backdrop of the financial quarter stand ‘Super trees’- huge metal constructions towering over the gardens. Climbing plants threaded into the artificial ‘trunks.’ While in close-by Indonesian Kalimantan, I thought, deforestation marches on, raping the rainforest.

       ‘Where does interfering with nature stop?’ I asked. ‘Man-made rain, man-made trees, gassed insects. When will they start making artificial insects, beetles and bees that will replace the natural species they are so keen to destroy?’

      ‘Perhaps ‘they’ already have,’ my daughter said.

       Back at the apartment block, I looked again at the large yellow Cricket by the pool.

      ‘How did you survive?’ I asked her.  There was a deafening sound. ‘They’ were testing the sirens in case of a nuclear war.  But she stayed perfectly still and kept her escape plans to herself.