By Mark Crimmins

From the window seat of a crowded coffee shop playing saxy jazz, you watch the intersection. Wearing a grey robe, straw sandals, and John Lennon sunglasses, a funky monk leans against a green municipal handrail and speaks into his cellphone. When he hangs up, he straps on a multi-coloured helmet with a yellow sun visor, climbs onto a small Kawasaki concealed by some roadside hedges, turns onto Claymore, putters up to Orchard, and turns left, heading south down Orchard Road towards Tangs, the department store. As he glides south, he passes the entrance to Orchard Towers, on the broad sidewalk in front of which stand three clusters of young South Asian men, nine men in one cluster, six in a second, five in a third. Near the men, two brightly dressed Filipinas, with two Malay men, use a municipal utility box as a bar, four cans of Coca Cola sitting on its flat gray top, where six other soft drink bottles, empty, already stand. Above the sidewalk across from you, a huge billboard poster for The Great Beer Race Challenge ('Singapore's first ever!') asks a question of all who read the ad: "Will you run for beer?" In the form of an oblique answer, a fit young couple in white togs, running side by side, jog past beneath the billboard.

Below the poster, a section of second-floor wall has been knocked out of the west face of Orchard Towers to create a small outdoor patio for the Jamboree Bar and Cafe. The patio's bar counter, looking directly down onto Claymore, only has room for three sumo wrestlers, five big men, seven small men, or, conceivably, nine very narrow men indeed. Behind the bar, two small tables sit four more. Perhaps because it is possible to smoke on this tiny cut-out bar twelve feet long and four feet deep, a crazy assortment of people perch there, changing places often and interacting with each other during the slow-moving minutes of this sleepy Sunday afternoon. Next to the bar is a poster for Country Rock, beneath which are two guitars, their necks crossed into an X, the body of one guitar a Stars-and-Stripes flag, the body of the other a Confederate flag. Above the Jamboree Bar's patrons is a painted sign: "I love this bar!" From your observatory across the street, reading the balcony bar like the panel of a comic, the painted sign seems like the thought bubble of the patrons below it.

Down on Claymore, like a front row box for the opera buffa performance on the balcony stage, a roofless Designated Smoking Shelter is partitioned from the sidewalk proper. Inside it, smokers, singly and in groups, stand about inhaling and exhaling. Two tiny solar panels are mounted on top of the smoking shelter's pillars. The smokers, through the clouds of smoke they emit, look up at the revellers on the balcony, who in turn look back at them over their foaming jugs of beer. Falling over drunk, two masseuses stagger out of Orchard Towers and onto Orchard Road, head up to Claymore, turn right, and make a beeline for the smoker's shelter. One masseuse jabbers incessantly into her cellphone while the other equally incessantly kisses her neck, shoulders, and arms. Six feet from them, an astonished municipal worker in a green fluorescent vest watches the two girls, one hand on his left hip, the other lifting a cigarette to his mouth.

A tourist bus stops just past the smokers and disgorges onto the street two columns of schoolchildren in electric blue shirts and bright orange baseball caps. The columns wriggle their way along Claymore past the smoking shelter, beneath the bar gallery, towards Orchard, where they turn left and merge with the six hookers in floral dresses who have just walked out of Orchard Towers, the circles of young men speaking with great animation, and everyone else: affluent shoppers heading down Orchard from Orange Grove Drive; young batik-clad tourists in flip-flops; couples with arms full of designer shopping bags; a nuclear family in four floral print shirts; and a squadron of muscled young Aussie men on motorised mini-scooters, who zip through the sidewalk crowds like pike swimming through a shoal of minnows. Farther down Orchard, from the white concrete and glass balconies of the Singapore Hilton, guests peer down at the scene on Orchard Road like museum visitors studying anthropological dioramas.

But now, suddenly, you are drawn into the world you watch. Two Chinese ladies in their 60s sit on either side of you in the only remaining window seats. Noting the ranks of these printed words marching down your little notebook's page, the one on your left turns to you and lets out an exclamation: "Oh my God! Your handwriting is beautiful!" She grabs your notebook and leans across you to show her friend, who takes it from her and flicks back a few pages, finding an earlier chunk of writing scribbled in cursive handwriting. She turns from the cursive script to the machine-like print and back, tapping a page with a red fingernail, and speaking across you to her friend: "Look! He has two personalities! See – one is more traditional like this" – she points to the cursive scribble. Then she turns to a printed page. "But the other is very modern – it writes like a computer!" "That's right!" her friend says. "Oh my God! You're right! He has two completely different personalities! One is creative! The other is scientific! His creative personality is traditional. His scientific personality is modern!" And now she turns to you. "We're right, aren't we?" You laugh and chat with them for 15 minutes. When they leave, you turn your attention to the intersection where the seer has become the seen.

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