The Microcosm of the 117 Bus

To be fair, buses are a bit unloved in terms of being a respected mode of transportation. They’re slow and lumber on forever, almost aimlessly in nature, across lands forgotten; smothered by the taxi or the train, they’re too fast for it to even try and catch up. They don’t attract much affection from the exterior too; a fat hunk gobbling gas as far as the eye can see, often attracting interesting clientele on their short hops about the massive city.

However, that’s precisely why I find them endlessly fascinating. They are containers—sizable on the human scale, bacterial on the face of the earth—nonetheless, a hive for one to wind down and detach from the outside world. The speed is perfect, because it’s slow enough to be enjoyable on its own, but never quite long enough to savour any individual thing. “Nothing Gold Can Stay”—so why make it disappear sooner? In our hustle and bustle that we call daily life, many-a-times we couldn’t make ourselves slow down and relish the beauty of life, with the hauntings of the Earth constantly lingering above our heads.

The 117 certainly is not the most glamorous bus route in the world. It hobbled begrudgingly along the backwaters of Singapore, almost a sarcastic joke about the bygone era of the rainforests and the kampongs and the carefree days. That is if they’re considered backwaters at all. It gets a decent amount of patronage in actuality, which is very surprising considering the anaerobic areas the route plies. It zigzags between 2 satellite towns, through a large seldom-used airfield, and is filled with aerospace workers on their daily commute. Just some white-collared and briefcased fellows, living normal life normally. It seems that no one ever rides the whole length, for people have their own ideas and thoughts running through their heads telling them to go someplace sometime, doing what’s right for them. I respect that, but for me, there are some things that have to be left to chance. We don’t have the word on the places we go, the creatures that we become. Who does? Perhaps a higher being, perhaps the doings of modern urban ecstasies, perhaps the unfaltering rhythm of spacetime, perhaps a lucky bus driver, some route planners, and a large machine on some asphalt.

I find it oddly tranquilising to not think about my destiny, to put it outside of my control temporarily. Many of us, including myself, have been brought up to take responsibility for our own lives. I don’t see this as inherently bad—I myself try to live this way. But maybe we just need relief, to go gaze at those long-gone RAF days, to go look at an empty sky free of high-rises and artificial light. Many of my friends wonder why I spend so much time on trains and buses. Honestly, I don’t know myself. The universe is strange in that it hides our own thoughts from ourselves. Maybe this is a spiritual endeavour, not of escape but of discovery, something that I can’t explain? I think no one is able to explain it.

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I left home one day without really knowing where to go or what to do. It was an average Wednesday, sky blue beyond what the eye could see, kids going to and from school, people in their suburban cities, going from work and running errands. A completely normal day.

The sprawling planned community named Punggol on the northeastern shore of Singapore island was truly the epitome of utopian town planning. Everything was brand-new, shiny, and accessible; the trains whizzed to your doorstep, and gone was the streets of ago, with roads being bequeathed “Edgefield” or “Meridian”. This is the poster-child of the HDB system decades in the making. What of course came with it, was isolation. The thought of living “behind” everyone geographically, closer to Malaysia than to downtown, is very real, and clear in everyone’s minds. At the bus interchange where I boarded, everything seemed sparse—the complex was laid in the midst of green grass, and the station, confirming that there are spaces in a land-scarce nation that seemingly will never be used. The line-up of buses was not impressive. The routes were simply thin intra-town connections to the airport, other neighbourhoods, the distant reaches of the community… In such a flashy place, can we even withstand buses?

The 117 was at the bottom of the pond in the list of disgraced bus services. Its berth was alienated at the far corner of the interchange, exceedingly difficult to find. This emo corner seemed to be destined for this bus, trawling the difficult, hippie corners of the island, which seemed to be smeared over by the establishment. However, this island’s buses have one thing in common: the journey started normally enough. It bulldozed through the central thoroughfare, with absolute determination and direction. All around were square buildings and square plots, designed with precision to mitigate urban heat islands, congregate amenities, and make transportation easy. It was a beacon for sustainability, but something seemed missing. As the last gleaming rays of the afternoon sun struck white concrete, green sidewalks, and schools, a thought struck in my head.

Do I like Punggol? It is very hard to answer. Looking beyond the photogenic development though—is it fit for everyone? We all have our utopias and dystopias, and however insane or illogical for these things to actually happen, we still need to know what we want. Actually, the way we define our homes is what defines us as people. Should we yield culture to progress? Can we forsake our identities for a better standard of living? I perfectly enjoy good city planning, and Punggol is a wonderful, sustainable solution for Singapore. The Singapore of now must be completely unrecognisable even 60 years ago. An interesting thing one of my teachers said: she believed that Mainland China could learn from Taiwan’s more successful cultivation of traditional culture (which I believe is true and justified), but on the contrary, what has the mainland gained for itself and people in science and technology? What is so foreign about contemporary Taiwanese society, without mobile “APPs” and novel gadgets doing everything for you. What attracts and repels the two odds? Abstract culture is something very subjective, and I cannot allow my personal opinion to influence yours. I guess we can only balance; survival is reliant on science and philosophy, and we have to never forget the whole picture.

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These were the thoughts in my head leaving town. The 117 bus was still quiet and unassuming, as travel between 2 modestly-sized satellite communities in the north was low. The bus then arrived at Jalan Kayu and made a right turn, and I knew the scenic ride had begun.

As if this would be considered remotely scenic by most standards. The vast stretches of the airfield and landed properties were quite strange, even “funky”, with street names such as ‘Piccadilly’, ‘Maida Vale’, and ‘Edgware Road’. It felt so foreign; London is so repellant to private airfields, and Oxford Street was never meant to be sandwiched between a runway and a 3-lane avenue. How far must home be for those RAF boys—to allow them to see Hendon, Northolt, or Croydon in the tropical heat, to allow me to gaze at what they saw from a bus that wasn’t red. What does being far removed from home feel like, and what does it feel like now?

Humans seek belonging—culture, relationships, and even family. We desire companionship so much so that a moment of solitude can often be refreshing. Sometimes we settle into routines; churning out one [ink.] article after another, boarding the 117 at the same bus stop at the same time every day. Will this endless labour ever translate into belonging though? Finding home and acceptance is never easy. Disturbances come and go, gravity contorts and repels those planetary masses. Do we just settle in for brief peace, writing these essays for [ink.] with little to no value? We’re also isolated from faith, from value, cut off from many facets of identity. Many of our writers like Bryan and Sophia will understand, growing up nowadays is far more different than before.

We are so insignificant in the fabric of spacetime. Within a bus, we have no dictum over our paths; on this planet, we have no authority to shift Earth’s orbit. Humanity is meaningless to physics—human civilization is isolated from others and itself, separated not with light-years but parsecs, not with walls but with guns. Alone on a bus, riding alongside barracks for soldiers far away from their homeland, it seemed I was destined to wander, and let gravity play its game. Wandering to such distant corners of a compact city, isn’t there something beyond those random decisions, something that I’m not aware of deep inside every wanderer’s heart?

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It seems the 117 truly is a microcosm, one that speaks to your heart and opens it. The sun set over the strait, on a dam on the far side of the city, it felt like my destination was nearing. I felt like I belonged on the bus for once, where my wandering would take me to a destination. However, I only landed in a larger conurbation, where high-rises retook the empty skies. This one was older, larger, organic and more complex, more austere in the eyes of the population. In other words, stranger.

A mother and child boarded the 117 bus. The child had thick glasses and looked no older than six, and the mother was young, head full of hair, and optimistic. We pulled aside at a bus stop.

“What does the sign on the bus in front say?” The mother asked. Another bus was berthed a metre away from the front of the 117.

“Um…let me adjust my glasses…can’t see,” chirped the child.

“Thank you for giving way, it says.”

The mother did not reprimand the child. The buses were so close that one could brace themselves to prepare for a crash.

“Hey, look at the side of the bus. What does that say?” The mother asked again.

The child deliberated. “Every…journey…matters? Yes! Yes!”

The mother’s face lit up for the slightest bit. She continued playing this game for a while, sometimes with success, sometimes with a lot of struggle. The child seems to have enjoyed it beyond the squinting and the guessing; perhaps it is a regular ritual on any bus they board, or the mother just decided to play on a whim. The sky gradually darkened as the 117 bus pulled into a town centre alongside the train, and the mother and child got off a little outside the town. I was alone once again.

How poorly does that child see? It was a shock to see nearsightedness still being such a rampant issue still to this day. We have already implemented countless programmes and support initiatives to prevent and curb nearsightedness, but this problem has still entrenched its roots deep in society. So why do we continue to stare at those mobile phones and computers? The world might not be as interconnected as we think, as much as we imagine it to be that way. Social media in many ways keeps us apart, locked into a false reality and ignoring what is on the outside. Video games are corporate tools, capitalising off of our time and money, turning our souls into robots. We do this to ourselves for the dopamine, for short-term gain. Pain is an emotion best served long, and the aspirin is right there at our disposal.

Have I finally found the answer? Buses are an antidote to Snapchat, a video game for a video game. The world unfolds before your eyes, and you sit back and relax. But once you’ve soaked in all the scenery, the end result turns out to be much very rewarding. A sample of contemporary society is contained in a single vehicle with a single destination, with one-of-a-kind paths for everyone to follow. Those quirks of life and issues in our community, they have an opportunity to be magnified, to be heard. Those nonsensical tufts of thought that you’ve read through painstakingly, they are absolutely nonsensical, yes! But who cares if you let those thoughts drift! Mindfulness and observation can lead to great discoveries.

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So, go take your own journey. Hop on a train to where you haven’t been, ride a bus that’s going towards depths unknown, or just take a walk to dig up those murky corners. It doesn’t matter where you go or what you do—no two journeys are ever the same. You might be bestowed a revelation, or you might experience nothing at all. Your heart steps on the accelerator, and there’s no stopping anything.