It happened on a night during the Christmas holidays.

Here in the West coast of Singapore, there's a group of merchants who make the rounds of the housing blocks every weekend about two months before Christmas week. They put up temporary tents and lay their wares, occupying every spot available; the sidewalks, the basement of the housing blocks, the alley between the blocks... a roving flea market as you would have it.

You will find a whole variety of stuff sold in that market... local food, ornamental plants, pirated CDs, VCDs, DVDs, kitchenwares, clothes, trinkets, make-up, imitation perfumes, funny hats, sensible caps, and what have you. And people flock to it, whether purposefully or for lack of something better to do, in droves.

Jay wanted to buy some DVDs and I wanted to look at the kitchenwares... typically us... hehehe. So we agreed to meet at a spot and went our separate ways. I arrived at the spot earlier but I didn't mind. There was so much to look at, the crowd itself was a spectacle... I was after all just a 2-month old resident. After a while, I felt Jay was taking a bit long and so I started watching the crowd more carefully. I almost got dizzy watching people coming from and going to all directions. And then I saw him, a black blotch towering over a sea of faces... not the eyes, not the face, not an inch of skin... and I knew it was him.

How do you pick out somebody in a crowd, with not so much as a crop of hair to identify him with?

It happened on a night during the Christmas holidays... I realized I knew him by heart.