Tanvi Dutta Gupta, San Francisco-Singapore-India
Kilometer markers: 5 km / 6 km - 6 km / 5 km (Golf course to Ranger’s station)
5 KM / 6 KM
It’s when you have to leave briefly that you realize how the concrete traps the sun, how the buildings toss the heat back and forth. How the people—you—slowly rotate within the microwave of the city, plucked and left to cure like pork jerky. So it strikes harder when you re-enter, taking the path past the lake into the trees. The way the coolness hits your cheek with physical sensation. This isn’t just hiding from the sky: the dark green leaves let the heat flow off like water. The vines exhale vapor and pull the hard hotness from the air. All the edges soften.
So far, I have walked with at least ten people who have told me MacRitchie doesn’t feel like Singapore. To me, this is all that feels like Singapore. My skin slick, the branches thick. Nothing to nick me but rocks and the rock-still gold of the whip snake’s eye. I slip into its embrace. The slit at the centre like a keyhole; here, I feel whole. My body held by breeze. With deep breaths, I swallow it. Mouth open, I wallow in it.
5.5 KM / 5.5 KM
Can you keep a secret? I gave my first kiss away here. In the rain, our hands tight in each other’s, his mouth opened to mine, and I thought, I didn’t know this was possible. And I knew after all the years in the forest where fewer people came, where benches stayed dry, where the large trees grew for you to hide behind. For a moment I sensed it was wrong to use the forest in this way, a tool rather than a place. But it faded quickly. Later he told me I can’t remember anything about the forest and I was sad because there were parts of MacRitchie I had wanted to share. I remember that sadness every time I walk past that bend in the path now.
My glasses fell off somewhere in the haze of lips and fingers and hair. They must still be there, metal and shattered glass cutting the leaves. Another line on the list of things I’ve lost in the forest.
6 KM / 5 KM
I will recite the names of plants even if there’s no one to tell them to. Listen: these are prayers you never forget. The simpoh air, the terentang, the macaranga, the giant mahang. Here, this plant has ants that live in its hollow body; they’ll come out if you tap it; they’re called heart-gaster ants, you will look for love wherever you go. And this plant has flowers as pink as the palm of your hand and the flowerpeckers land on it and suckle so delicately it makes you want to cry. And with this plant, there, at the corner of the path, if you see it you know the forest has died once and been resurrected regardless, come back up to surround you, ground you, find you.
Tanvi Dutta Gupta is a second-year student studying biology with a concentration in ecology at Stanford University. Her poetry has received awards from the National League of American Pen-Woman and her essays have been published in China-India Dialogue and Current Conservation, among others. Right now, she lives in San Francisco and misses the rainforest.
