Marketing

We popped out to the market at Geylang Serai in the late afternoon for a tea & curry puffs and to buy some rice to take to Melaka next week (apparently there's more variety available in Singapore). There we ran into Ashraf, who used to run a prata shop in Katong and whom we came to know quite well a few years back. We hadn't seen him for quite a time since that shop ceased operation. It seems he now runs a weekend stall at the market (selling drinks) as well as another on one of the ITE campuses during the week. He introduced us to his wife of three years, who came over from India. Slight embarrassment ensued from the fact that we regularly buy tea from another stall nearby and, again, have got to know the stall holder there well, so we ended up, happily, drinking two cups, one from each - having to convince Ashraf not to serve us for free. When we first got to know Ashraf he struggled to communicate in Malay - I don't think he'd been very long in Singapore then - and now he happily converses in both Malay and English.

This is the Singapore I love, of the slightly run-down markets, which create a common space for a commerce of something that goes a bit further than mere commodities. It's this version of trade through which, I suspect, civilisation grew. I'm reminded of the fact that outside the first mosque in Medina a market grew up, and was seen as something of a natural extension of the communal space. Islam has never attempted too rigid a distinction between the different worlds we necessarily occupy. Rightly. A commerce, of sorts, of the invisible with the visible.