To the Memory of the Dishes That Never Return

The stall is empty when I arrive.

It is a corner unit at Tiong Bahru Market, second floor, where I came to photograph a plate I had been thinking about for weeks. A dry mee pok, simple and dark with vinegar, served by an old man who used to fold the noodles into the bowl like he was tucking something to sleep. The metal shutter is down now. A laminated sign hangs crooked behind the grille. The handwriting has faded at the edges.

I stand there longer than I should.

Around me, the market keeps moving. Trays slide. A kettle whistles two stalls over. The morning light falls through the high windows and lands on the closed counter, on the empty hook where his ladle used to hang. Some frames disappear before you think to make them.

I had photographed almost everything here. The chwee kueh steaming under cloth. The kopi poured from a height. But not him. I always thought there would be another morning.

I think about how often I do this. I wait for the better light, the quieter crowd, the day when my hands feel sure. And the stall waits too, until one morning it does not.

A woman beside me orders her breakfast and does not glance at the closed unit. To her it is simply a gap in the row, a space where something used to be. But I keep my camera lowered and look at it the way you look at a chair someone has just left.

The thing about hawker food is that it lives in repetition. The same broth, the same fold, the same morning, again and again, until you believe it will always be there. A recipe is a kind of promise that no one signs. And when the hands behind it stop, the dish does not move to another stall. It simply ends.

I lift the camera once and photograph the closed shutter.

It is not a good image. There is nothing to taste in it, no steam, no gloss, no hands at work. Just grey metal and a faded sign. But I keep it, because it is the only proof I have that something was here.

The light shifts. A trolley rolls past, its wheels catching on the floor grooves. Somewhere a bowl is set down on a table with that soft ceramic knock I have heard a thousand times.

I think of all the dishes I never photographed. The ones I tasted once and meant to return to. The stalls I walked past because I was tired, or in a hurry, or sure of tomorrow.

We photograph the food to keep it, but the keeping is always partial.

I buy a bowl of mee pok from another stall before I leave. It is good. It is not his.

I eat slowly, the camera resting in my lap, and let the empty corner stay in the corner of my eye. Some things you photograph. Some things you only remember. And some things teach you, gently, not to wait so long next time.