The market stairs near Bedok North rise in a short flight — five steps up, not ten, though I have counted them more than once because counting stairs is something I do when I am early and the market is still half-asleep. On 14 March 2026 I arrived before the vegetable uncle finished arranging his crates. Morning light came in low from the east, hitting the plastic awnings and turning them into pale lanterns. I stood on the third step with my notebook closed and watched the market decide to become itself.
Five steps is enough to change your height relative to the aisle. From the ground you are a customer waiting to be served. From the third step you are a person observing labour — boxes lifted, knives sharpened, water splashed across tiles. I do not mean observing as spectacle. I mean the ordinary work that makes a neighbourhood edible. The auntie at the poultry stall was talking to the fish stall auntie across the gap. Their conversation carried without reaching me as words, only as tone: familiar, unhurried, the sound of people who share a morning shift the way others share an office.
I bought nothing for the first ten minutes. Buying early feels like interrupting a ritual. Instead I wrote on the top step where the railing gives you something to lean against. The light was sharp enough to shadow the page. My handwriting slanted with the angle of the board on my knee. A habit learned in kopitiams and market corners: if you do not have a desk, you make a desk from whatever is stable. The market floor was wet from washing. The smell was green and metallic and alive.
When I finally bought kai lan and four eggs, the uncle weighed the vegetables without speaking and handed me the bag with a twist tie already applied — professional, silent, correct. I walked back down the five steps and the light changed because the sun had moved one notch higher. That is how fast morning proceeds when you are not inside a flat with curtains drawn. The MRT would be crowded in forty minutes. The park connector would fill with parents and strollers. For now the market belonged to workers and to people like me who pretend to belong by carrying a notebook.
At home I put the vegetables in the fridge and opened the window. The void deck below was receiving its first foot traffic — an uncle stretching, a child in uniform pulling on a bag wheel. I sat at my desk and wrote the market note in past tense because by then the morning was already past, already a sequence I could arrange. The shelf above the desk holds a jar I bought at that market years ago; it still smells faintly of dried chillies when the humidity rises. Objects keep places longer than memory does unless you write the places down.
Five steps up is not a journey in the grand sense. It is enough, though, to see the market from a slightly different angle — enough to remember that Bedok is not only the view from my window or the path along the reservoir but also this covered aisle, this light, this sound of crates sliding on tile. I filed the note before noon. The eggs went into an omelette. The writing habit continued: observe, walk, write, return. Nothing more elaborate than that, and nothing less honest.
