What's inside
Under Nur's bed, in a two-bedroom HDB flat in Toa Payoh, there's a Khong Guan biscuit tin. Metal lids with flower prints. Inside: stones, buttons, pieces of sea glass, a nut, a myna feather, and something that looks like a bottle cap but that Nur treats like jade. Every object has an exact place inside the tin. Aminah, his grandmother, never touches it. She knows that order belongs to Nur and that moving it is like breaking something.
The first stone in the collection is gray with a white vein, smooth to the touch. Nur found it on Changi Beach at age five. Aminah wanted to leave and Nur wouldn't move. He was looking for more. She waited twenty minutes until the boy decided one stone was enough for that day.
Pangolins have no teeth. They grind their food with small stones they swallow, like a bird's gizzard. In Nur, this has become something else: a child who searches for objects on the ground with the focus of someone who knows something down there hasn't been found yet. At recess he looks at the ground while the others play. When he finds something he likes, he pockets it in his overalls without comment. At home, he washes it under the tap and puts it in the tin alongside the others.
