Perhaps she moves too slowly now, or the world moves too fast for her. She enters the lift, a giant wheel turns and steel cables lower the mechanized box. The lift drops a black shaft, which exists at the heart of each HDB block. The country may be described, not as a place covered with blocks of public housing, but a topography where black vertical shafts, some forty stories tall, rise out of the ground like trees.

The Space Between the Raindrops