Living in the skies

So I woke up after a delicious nap on the living room couch, and found my mother perched precariously in front of my bedroom windows, furiously wiping and cleaning. She was washing the windows and the external window sill. You see, it was raining heavily before that. Her logic is that since all the window sills are wet anyway, it will be a good idea to wash them because the neighbour downstairs is less likely to complain if dirty water from washing windows unceremoniously drips down from upstairs.

Such is the fact of life in heartlander living. With layers of homes stacked one atop the other, chances are high that someone else's rubbish would end up on your window sill. It happened to me once. I heard a loud splash, and suddenly, a big splotch of dirt came flying down from upstairs, complete with dirty washing water. I shot the upstairs neighbours some expletives but no problem at all; I just took some clean water and splashed the splotch of dirt away. Of course, simple rules of physics tell you that what cannot go up can only go down; it's highly imaginable that the piece of dirt then landed up on the window sills of the neighbours downstairs. Soon after, I heard the sound of splashing water from the windows downstairs. Now, I hate to imagine what happened to the neighbour on the 2nd floor.

Occasionally, some things do go the other way. Like cigarette smoke, courtesy of your friendly neighbour downstairs. Complaints can be formally lodged by yelling to the culprit to stop his #$%^! smoking, or he'll die prematurely of lung cancer. Of course it wouldn't work. No matter; just apply the simple law of gravity and pour water downstairs. Maybe that will extinguish his cigarettes somehow. Needless to say, the culprit will probably respond with a string of very unpalatable names for you; and even though you will hate his guts, you will probably admit his Hokkien vocabulary is astounding. Things may come to a head when the friendly neighbours from downstairs come pounding on the door, threatening to call the police. No problem; just say "I don't want an Everitt I/II to happen here," and they will probably back off since nobody wants their names splashed in the Straits Times for feuding with their neighbours. And if all else fails, ALWAYS put yourself on the same boat as your neighbours downstairs and say that you get water splashing down from upstairs too. That's right, blame your neighbours upstairs, or at least insinuate.

With an increasing obsession to build taller and taller public apartment blocks, I cannot fathom the complexity of neighbourly relations in the future. And I hate to imagine the types of unidentifiable flying projectiles that might well end up on my window sill, or the window sills of the 2nd floor neighbours.

Talk about living it up in the skies.
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And I don't mean to sound macabre or disrespectful, but with some of the new columbariums looking somewhat like condominiums, high-rise living looks set to take off in the afterlife. Personal 'spaces' are neatly and orderly numbered and arranged, complete with block and unit numbers--a bit too eerily familiar. One can only say that since 80% of Singaporeans live in HDB flats, many people would no doubt see the sense of continuity there.

Let's hope though, that neighbourly feudings will stop then.