Going home - to a foreign land?

At Singapore’s Golden mile bus stop… Char siew Pau!!!!!!!! I was desperately craving for it. I had almost forgotten its taste. All hail Char siew pau!!!!!!!

I was so happy to see the smart tag, and the toll booths. The north-south highway?! Wow it is the north south highway! Smooth flowing roads, wow I miss those. A far cry from the bumpy pot-holed (roller coaster like) roads of India

As I went home using the LRT (wow… gasped, it is the LRT!!), there was a person reading the malay mail… Ah the malay mail!! Its appearance looked so different from what it was one and a half years ago.

Finally after so long I am surrounded again by my fellow countrymen, familiar faces passing by. I was once, no longer the centre of attraction of prying eyes or shaking heads who rarely meets a Chinese in their uniform country of uniform race; no more ‘tempeis’ in and out of my life.

Still I can’t help it but feel that I had come back to a foreign land. Just not used to the idea that all the ‘tempeis’ are gone. One after the other, things had changed so much – alterations which I hear only through ‘skype-ing’ dad, now I see for real. One and a half years had spiced up the all the sights that I’m used to as if time had progressed a hundred miles ahead, leaving me behind.

I had waited for dad at the LRT station to bring me home, expecting a dark blue car to be parked at the same spot at the side of the road, near the stairway I’m supposed to use. I was searching from the top, separated only by a railing, and scanning the moving cars to check if he had arrived first.

He was there already, only that, I didn’t notice. The car was new and no longer blue. A grey car with a different registration number greeted me. I didn’t bother to look at that car. I thought I arrived at the station first and had to wait.

But when I walked down the stairs my dad was already there. What was he doing alone? Where was his car? I thought he was supposed to drive me home.

Only when mom stepped out of the grey proton ishwara, I began to understand.

“Dad!! You changed your car?!!”

I advanced forward to bury them in hugs, the first after a whooping one and a half years