Nur.

Nur and his grandmother Aminah were coming back from the hawker centre along the path through Toa Payoh Town Park. It was around eight at night. The boy stopped dead and pointed toward the base of a tree, where a street lamp lit up a stretch of path that nobody usually notices. A pangolin was crossing. Wild, adult, with its scales gleaming under the orange light.

Nur and the animal looked at each other for fifteen seconds. Aminah didn't see it until the boy tugged her hand. By then the pangolin was already moving into the undergrowth and disappearing without a sound. Nur didn't sleep that night, but that time it wasn't his usual habit of waking: something had stayed on. He was five years old.

The next day he drew a pangolin for the first time. Aminah kept the drawing.

What's interesting about the drawing is that Nur doesn't draw much. He's a child who collects stones, who climbs the frangipani in the void deck to look at the street from two meters up, who smells things before touching them. But that day he sat down with the pencils and drew something he'd seen at night, on a path, for fifteen seconds. Aminah found it on the kitchen table at lunchtime, the tip of his tongue poking between his lips — the same concentration he has when he sorts his box of stones under the bed.

It wasn't a beautiful drawing or a hidden talent. It was a record. Something that had happened and that Nur needed to put somewhere other than just his head. The drawing ended up in a drawer in Aminah's bedside table, among old photos and a Nokia phone that doesn't turn on anymore.

Since then he looks for insects on the ground. He goes still when something moves in the plants. Now and then he looks out the window at night, from the eighth floor of the HDB, as if he's waiting for it to come back again.