Like a magnificent tortoise, my aunt, the long-time Singaporean activist Constance Singam, ambles towards us carrying a walking stick of mahogany and brass. The long, windowless hallway is bathed in her light. She has an aura. She radiates. She has grown in the years since I last saw her, before the pandemic, before a new generation. A life lived in writing and activism is carried on her broad shoulders, the hopes and dreams and burning rage of thousands of women etched in her creases and cracks, her gait slow and sure-footed as if connecting to the solid earth beneath these thin layers of carpet and concrete and plastic, calling forth something deeper, something that can be felt by our very soles when we work the manmade knots loose.

It is the first time she is meeting my children. When the elder one sees this grandaunt, she shyly presents a new cup wrapped in hand-drawn paper, an offering reminiscent of a time before, when I could linger over breakfast at her nearby apartment. In those days, we would wake up late, yarn the morning away, having appam and putu and endless cups of coffee, the colour of her skin, sweetened with condensed milk, the colour of mine. The languorous breeze would blow, and perhaps one side of the building would have moments of rain and the other not, steam rising off the slick pavement below, the hum of traffic near by and the incessant bickering of a jackhammer making the ground shake as the MRT train line kept being built. This cup my daughter has given her has flowers and butterflies, a handle that rounds in on itself, a sturdy base.

• Tags: Issue 34, Robert Wood, Singapore