Bus · Ritual
Whichever Bus Arrives First
Wednesday afternoon. Print shop closed early for a water pipe repair. I stood at the bus stop outside Chinatown Point with an EZ-Link card and a rule: board whichever bus arrives first, stay until the terminal, come back by MRT if the return takes too long. No checking routes on the phone. No veto power.
The 143 arrived four minutes before the 61. I tapped in and climbed to the upper deck because heat is easier to tolerate with a view. The bus turned toward Orchard in a sequence of stops I half recognised — hospitals, shophouses giving way to taller glass, the city rearranging its height as we moved.
Riding without a chosen destination changes what you see. You notice the uncle who always gets off at the same stop with the same blue bag. You notice how the air-conditioning fails over the rear axle. You notice your own reflection in the window superimposed on streets you would never walk for fun.
At a red light a kite — small, red, on a short string — crossed the road at rooftop height. Paper caught on wind. I watched it until the bus pulled away. The passenger beside me slept with his mouth slightly open. Trust, I thought, or exhaustion. Maybe both.
The terminal was a depot I had never visited — buses nosing into bays, drivers walking with rolled newspapers. I got down, stretched, bought a bottle of water from a vending machine that hummed too loud. Total ride: fifty-one minutes. Return by MRT took twenty-two. The asymmetry felt correct — outbound slow, inbound efficient, like a kite let out and reeled in.
I do this maybe once a month when an afternoon opens without structure. It is not adventure. It is a bus taken at random, a loose thread pulled to see how long it runs before the knot. The city looks back at you differently when you did not pick the number on the sign.
Halfway through the ride a school group got on — uniforms, laughter, one boy reading a comic with his feet on the seat until his friend kicked him. They got off before Orchard. The bus emptied gradually until only three of us remained for the last stretch. I watched shopfronts slide past — tailors, clinics, a florist closing for the day — each one a node on a map I was not following.
At one stop an auntie boarded with a folding trolley stacked with vegetables. She chose the seat opposite mine and nodded once, the nod of someone who rides this line often enough to treat the upper deck as an extension of her kitchen. We did not speak. The bus hummed. Dust motes showed in the slanted light through the window — the same kind of suspended detail I notice on five-foot ways, only moving at thirty kilometres an hour.
I got home with no story except the kite and the sleeping man and the depot vending machine. That is enough for a Wednesday. Not every drift needs a landmark — sometimes the ritual is the point, and the point is simply: you boarded first, you rode to the end, you came back. Next month I may take a different number and a different terminal. The rule stays the same. The city answers differently each time, which is why the ritual has not gone stale.