Has neighbourliness gradually become a concept that is foreign and abstract to the contemporary city dwellers? Drawing evidence from my own personal experiences, it appeared alarmingly so, but I'm afraid mine might more be the exception than the rule, perhaps a watered-down episode of the infamous Joo-Chiat neighbourhood squabble.
It all started with the initially welcomed occupation of the apartment situated directly opposite my unit by a China couple and their daughter. Before that, the block was sparsely populated and my parents discredited it as an insecurity rather than appreciating it as a form of tranquility. Their concerns were not unfounded though, since there were reports of a molester being sighted in nearby blocks and instants whereby my father caught a pair of lover kissing at the staircase on my level and discovered cigarettes butts along the corridor. These had prompted my father to make several calls to the neighbourhood police post to request for the strengthening of patrol around my cluster of flats. Naturally, when someone actually moved into the opposite house, we felt relieved. At first, conversations bridged and the relationship could be said to be neutral, if not harmonious. Never did we foresee that the neutrality was ephemeral.
The stalemate was sparked off when the wife deliberately hung a curtain veil over their metal door frame, a brazen move to prevent people from looking into the interior and as interpreted by my cynical mother, an implicit message to my family that we were busybodies, stealing glances into their apartment if chances permit. No doubt my grandmother, being old and with nothing constructive on hand to do, might sometimes look in that disputed direction to salve her boredom but it was definitely nothing close to provocative. Anyway, my mother overheard the couple bickering over the hanging of the curtain, and it was clear that the husband possessed a higher EQ.
The repercussions presented themselves in the mild souring of the relationship, with conversations unheard of for a few months to date and intentional avoidance of each other in the narrow corridor. Despite this isolate case, the commonplace meeting up of neighbours in void decks and children playing with one another indiscriminately spells hope of the existence of neighbourliness in this increasingly callous world.
scribbled at 1:02 PM
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