What We Talk About When We Talk About Walking

Vinita Ramani

For a teenage immigrant who had moved to Singapore in 1991, walking was a transformative act, a way of avoiding a heavily mediated landscape by skirting its periphery and only partially accepting the consuming monotony of where I lived. I trudged up the bumpy hills along Yishun Avenue 4 and Ring Road, Bad Religion and Fugazi blaring on my Walkman. The hills converged and ended in a little plateau where I’d sit and map imaginary landscapes onto suburban sprawl. I continued along these hills until the undulations ceased and the landscape sank back into tarmac. 

Teenage crushes prompted some of these walks as well. I often circumambulated the apartment block that I lived in to see if I could spot the twenty-something guy – a James Dean-esque ah beng – who lived on the ground floor with his family. Although Yishun claimed me again, I knew I could always walk out of its clutches into the viaducts and rolling hills of my mind and picture James Dean waiting when I walked back home. Unbeknownst to me at the time, there were probably thousands of other teenagers who had undergone a similar ritual – the urban pilgrim chanting punk rock mantras or mourning the love they’d never declare.

The north yielded itself to such bouts of random and feverish walking. Until 1996, Yishun was the last stop on the MRT. If you lived anywhere beyond that then, you would have to walk to the bus interchange and get on a bus for the second part of your journey home. I had a friend in high school whose family had lived for years in a black-and-white colonial-era house up on a hill somewhere in Woodlands, which was only accessible by the (then-TIBS-owned) 856 bus. After school, we’d get off Yishun Station and hop on the 856, alight at a stop with no discernible nearby landmarks and scramble up the hill to get to her house. 

We didn’t know it then, but a proposal to extend the MRT line to Woodlands and further along the northern rim of the island had been proposed in 1991, with construction beginning in 1994. By 1997, the cluster of houses my friend lived in within Woodlands was demolished to make way for HDB apartment blocks and eventually, Causeway Point shopping mall. My friend and her family had to relocate. Our perambulations ceased, and with it, the opportunity for a parallel imaginary realm that she and I had created in the jungles that were her backyard. 

As Merlin Coverley writes: ‘...repeatedly denied access, his progress resisted or curtailed, his movements closely monitored and recorded [...] the stroller, the stalker, must turn his back and strike out for the perimeter.’[i] Obviously, Coverley hadn’t been to Singapore. So what was my equivalent of his ‘perimeter’? Or, what was my version of Iain Sinclair’s delirious journey on foot along London’s ‘orbital’ M25 motorway, a journey that involved monthly walks ‘through the unloved and often unregarded landscapes of London’s outer limits?’[ii] Apart from small pockets of farms in the northern area of Kranji, there is no countryside to retreat to in Singapore.

But when I inched up the mud trail near Bukit Drive for the first time last year and glanced around I sensed something like an answer. Of course, this was no bucolic countryside for wayfarers who detested the city. Neither was this a carefully plotted tarmac path with manicured gardens and pleasant scenery for the casual weekend cyclist. This was something functional and political – a railway line connecting Malaysia and Singapore – that had metamorphosed into a green corridor, at turns splendorous and ramshackle. 

Here, finally, was an unintentionally subversive space. Snaking from Woodlands in the north to Tanjong Pagar in the south, this green corridor was an indiscernible geographical phenomenon, indiscernible precisely because it had always been there – a rambling trail beneath the weight of tracks and chugging trains. Birthed by a colonial ordinance act leasing 217 hectares to the Malayan railway, laden with a history of delicate political negotiations and periods of deadlock between Singapore and Malaysia post-1965, its raison d'être was now open to interpretation by those who used it. This was a liminal space, and as with any such space in Singapore, its liminality had a limited shelf life.[iii]

Inside this space, I wanted to re-enact the walks I embarked on in the 1990s, but this time without the fury that prompted them. I decided to walk from the Bukit Drive entry point (near Bukit Timah Nature Reserve) of the green corridor to 25 Sungei Kadut Avenue, the location of the Sri Arasakesari Sivan Temple – considered an anomaly in the middle of a dense industrial area. 

Having spent a month walking through jungles and villages to see temple ruins in Java, I had also become conscious of the fact that ruins left a lot to the imagination and enabled private and pluralistic expressions of awe. I rarely went to Hindu temples actively in use by those who practised the religion because of their interpellative power. Unlike my heady circumambulations in Yishun or the aimless roving around ruins in Java, in a Hindu temple, I circled ‘god’ piously. I would enter them and almost unconsciously know what I had to do. Now, I wondered how I could alter the walk and whether the walk itself could be the ritual performance instead, particularly in the already intensely mediated landscape that made up the green corridor. Unlike my adolescent years, I also wanted the ritual to work in reverse – to be keenly conscious that ‘however visionary and unearthly the imaginary landscape becomes, a material geography lies beneath [...]’[iv] I didn’t want to walk to get away. I wanted to get away and walk.

If you look at the Overview Map of the old railway[v], the green corridor is apportioned into eight overlapping rectangles from north to south. Each rectangle covers a suggested section for a walk. From the iconic Bukit Timah railway station to Holland Road, the corridor turns and moves in an almost perpendicular direction away from the busy Bukit Timah and Dunearn roads, escaping a mix of landed property, upscale condominium housing, and the perpetual hum of SUVs and luxury cars travelling in either direction. It is, in a word, pristine.[vi]

When I first discovered the corridor I gave in to an irrepressible urge – I took photographs that deliberately excluded any structures or signs that would reveal the landscape as contemporary Singapore. There were no road signs peeking at the edges of the frame. There were no signs of construction. The ubiquitous cranes and condominiums looming overhead, as high as (or higher than) the canopy of the secondary forests were carefully excised from each shot. I had done the same in photographs of the Hindhede Quarry – there, the communications tower of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve had been cut out.

I wasn’t trying to create a photoshopped idyll. I had seen and hated the advertisements for new condominium housing projects with their acres of untouched forests and wealthy pale-looking racially ambiguous ‘residents’ floating in an infinity pool. There were no people present in my photographs. There were animals, insects, flora, and fauna instead – it was a primordial Singapore, older than Singapura, older than Singapuram, as it would have been called in Tamil during the Majapahit era. 

However, this isn’t possible on the corridor from Rail Mall to Sungei Kadut Avenue. The material landscape that exists here is unmissable because so much of it is plainly, defiantly ugly and for once, I wanted to take it all in instead of cropping chunks out. So I called a friend to join me, and we headed off. Before this, I had walked the stretch from Bukit Drive to Rail Mall on my own, enjoying long stretches of forest cover and quiet before drawing closer to the MRT construction on Upper Bukit Timah Road and the sound of continuous stomping and rumbling overhead.

An uninterrupted stretch of green, the corridor heading in this northerly direction runs parallel to the road almost the entire way and again, from Rail Mall to Hillview (in the western part of the city). But the new MRT line construction along this vast stretch has made it virtually unrecognisable. You know where you are once you see the sprawling grounds of the Ministry of Defence building to your left, an unchanging fortress-like concrete landmark. Competing aesthetically with the imposing MINDEF building is a condominium high-rise called ‘The Linear’. Obviously constructed with the surrounding landscape in mind, it looks like a nondescript industrial building with a surfboard perched on its roof. People live in it.

The first (and only) temple in this section of the corridor is the Sri Murugan Hill Temple. Out back in large pens my friend and I saw a peacock and a peahen (the peacock is the ‘vahanam’, or vehicle, of the presiding deity Muruga). The peahen, clearly used to people, stared at us for a while before letting out a mournful series of squawks. [vii]

As we approached the halfway mark between Rail Mall and Sungei Kadut Avenue, we arrived at Ten Mile Junction, the boring mall undergoing a face lift to become Junction 10 (it also has a sibling: Junction 8 in Bishan). My friend, a coffee enthusiast, insisted that we explore the front end which was already in use, a row of shops operating alongside each other that already exists everywhere else. He needed a kopi-o at the Toast Box; I got an isotonic drink. We’d walked just over 3 km but it felt a lot further under the blazing sun. The back end of Ten Mile Junction is covered in tarpaulin and scaffolding, shooting up to your right obscuring the sky. Behind it, an albizia tree’s picturesque canopy towers just as high, making lichen-like patterns overhead. It’s like a diaphanous veil, obscuring the mass of construction work and breaking up the blue monotony of the tarpaulin into weird patterns. This kind of thing keeps happening on this section of the corridor – the ugly and the idyllic, always one atop the other or side-by-side.

The Singapore-Malaysia railway line began operations on 1 October 1923, a few decades before the two areas decided to break apart to form their own countries. Even if you are not conscious of this as you walk along the roughly hewn trail, it is impossible to ignore the simple fact that everything around it has changed, while the track’s route has remained untouched for almost 90 years. This is important, because it gives you a peculiar vantage point from which to regard the landscape. On the corridor, you’re always behind or in-between things. At Chua Chu Kang and Woodlands roads, the level crossing for the train has disappeared. But when you cross Chua Chu Kang Road to get to the corridor on the other side, people in cars would turn and gawk. From where they are sitting, it looks like you are randomly wandering into a sea of lalang grass that has parted for you, a sweating Moses, only you are going nowhere. Though we technically did have an end point in mind, it wasn’t vital to get there. Sinclair talks about ‘drifting purposefully [...] allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself … noticing everything.’[viii] The tropical heat helped. It slightly stultified deeper conversation but heightened the desire to determinedly trudge along. We were drifting purposefully.

As we approached a couple of sections along Woodlands Road, we discovered that the corridor is mysteriously bisected. Realising that we couldn’t get across a drainage canal, we decided to abandon the corridor. We looked to our left and saw that a narrower drain next to the corridor had emerged, and we found a landmark – a makeshift shrine in the scrub with a fat laughing Buddha and elegant Taoist deities in beat-up white porcelain, shielded from the elements by a roof made out of corrugated metal. Close by, a metal plank led us across the drain back into the scrub and the corridor. We ended up under the KJE highway and, coming out the other side, I saw a Woodlands I didn’t remember – row after row of towering HDB apartment buildings in shades of cream and white hovering ominously over pedestrians.

I thought of all the people crammed in them going about the business of the day – hanging up their laundry, eating a breakfast of bee hoon, going to the wet market, watching television. I also thought back to the puzzled drivers in their cars and felt a peculiar sensation. Here was the entire pulsing humdrum of daily life – we’d passed the KJE highway, a Hindu temple, and several LRT trains which looked like little toys slowly making loops above us, as they took people from Senja to Phoenix and Bukit Panjang. And yet, we hadn’t encountered all that many people at all. The corridor felt like a strange conduit, or a wormhole, in that we could pass from one area to another, each one wildly different, and the fact that even amidst all that we were left completely alone as we walked and meandered. 

We were experiencing the environment in a very physical way – sweating, climbing, cutting across, watching, and stopping at any time, at any juncture. But this wasn’t like walking in the heart of the city. Robert Walser’s writings on walking mention the ‘vertigo-inducing power of the crowd [...] the aimless, undirected energy which can benumb the senses, leaving the walker disorientated and overwhelmed.’[ix] Walser summarises the enervating effects of walking in the city: ‘I was swaying. Everything was swaying. All the people walking here had plans in mind, business [...] The crowds were seething with energy. Everybody thought himself out in front. Men, women floated by. All seemed to be making for the same goal. Where did they come from, where were they going?’[x]

Walking in the central and southern districts of Singapore induced the same feeling. But Walser proposes a kind of manifesto for ‘a life in slow but constant motion, at a gawker’s  pace.’[xi] In the corridor, certainly in this section, while far from idyllic or quiet, his proposition seemed possible. Out here, it’s as though everything would pass through you, yet nothing touched you.

As we continued walking, the Sri Arasakesari Sivan Temple appeared quite suddenly to our right – once again, a gopuram peeking above the tall lalang grass and scrub. At this point we’d hit 6.99 km; we had to get off the corridor, loop around the canal and onto Sungei Kadut Avenue to get to the temple entrance. Sungei Kadut is an industrial heartland – there’s nothing here but row after row of factories and parking lots for excavators, bulldozers, and loaders. The temple is an oddly serene piece of real estate and largely serves Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus.

Drenched in sweat, I headed to the bathroom, washed and changed, put the stick-on pottu on my forehead and emerged, ready for the rituals to interpellate me. Something had happened on the walk; nothing profound, nothing transformative, but something nonetheless. I’d walked here, without family, without intention, with nothing to pray for. The interpellative gesture no longer seemed oppressive or predictable. It was liberatory in its aimlessness.

Deep topography proponent Nick Papadimitriou criticises the two types of writing that generally seem to make up much of the literature about landscapes. To him, they are either narcissistic because it is all about the writer and her experience of the landscape; or it advocates a cause – let’s preserve the green corridor because it’s ecologically valuable – or in the case of politicians and tour guides, because it’s unique and saleable. I am disinclined to merely choose from one of the two options Papadimitriou offers the itinerant writer. What if the narcissism he reprobates is a stubborn inscription of oneself on the landscape through constructed narrative, against the tide of manicured destiny? We were merely adding another layer to the palimpsest that was the green corridor – no doubt, it would yield to us and remain there, even as everything around it changes and continues to change.

Author’s Note:

This essay in its original form was written in 2013. At the time, the Rail Corridor had just opened up. But it wasn’t designated as a ‘recreational space’, and neither was it cleaned up and demarcated as a ‘legitimate’ site for community hikes. At the time of writing, nearly a decade later, the Corridor itself continues to evolve, with ramshackle parts and other zones that have been ‘Singaporeanised’ in an effort to make it more accessible to the public. It also continues to invite walkers, wanderers, and explorers.

Vinita Ramani is a writer, editor, and occasional furniture painter. A third culture kid, she was born in India and raised in Bahrain, the UK and Hong Kong before settling in Singapore. She has worked as a journalist, a publicist for film festivals, and headed an NGO documenting the testimonies of genocide survivors in Cambodia. She currently resides in Singapore with her family.

References

[i] Coverley, Merlin: The Art of Wandering – The Writer as Walker. Herts: Oldcastle Books, 2012. p.210

[ii] Ibid, p. 210

[iii] Take for example, the statement made by Minister of State for National Development Tan Chuan-Jin on March 11th 2013: ‘URA’s plans for the Rail Corridor has been enriched by many ideas by many Singaporeans, many residents, students, professionals, interest groups and people who have surfaced ideas on how this can be developed so that we retain that element of community space. And that will be the next step as we master plan the Rail Corridor to see how we incorporate public feedback, and how do we, importantly, in response to the desires of many people, retain a continuous green corridor as a key planning parameter in the planning design of the Rail Corridor. This is a unique space not only just in Singapore, but in the world.’ [Emphasis mine] While this does give cause for hope, it also belies an almost wilful determination to categorise as ‘unique’ (for tourists), claim, sanitise, and develop the landscape, leaving nothing to chance, or to the imagination. See: 

http://app.mnd.gov.sg/Newsroom/NewsPage.aspx?ID=4321&category=Speech&year=2013&RA1&RA2&RA3 Accessed March 17 2013. Also see: http://www.ura.gov.sg/pr/text/2012/pr12-46.html Accessed March 17 2013.

[iv] Coverley, Merlin: The Art of Wandering – The Writer as Walker. Herts: Oldcastle Books, 2012. p.40

[v] The Overview Map by CY Leong can be found here:  <http://www.thegreencorridor.org/category/maps/> Accessed March 16 2013.

[vi] See: http://www.thegreencorridor.org/photos/ Accessed March 17 2013.

[vii] The temple has an interesting history involving a series of fires and forced relocation before it eventually ended up at its current location. See: <http://www.singaporehindutemples.com/templelist/SriMuruganhill/SriMuruganhill.html> Accessed March 17 2013
[viii] Coverley, Merlin: The Art of Wandering – The Writer as Walker. Herts: Oldcastle Books, 2012. p.209

[ix] Ibid, p.163

[x] Ibid
[xi] Coverley, Merlin: The Art of Wandering – The Writer as Walker. Herts: Oldcastle Books, 2012. p.166