Nur.

Nur lives in a two-room HDB flat in Toa Payoh, a mature neighbourhood of Singapore, eighth floor. The flat smells of pandan and jasmine rice. He shares it with his grandmother Aminah, who is sixty-seven, has knee pain, controlled diabetes and a patience that isn't easily exhausted.

Aminah took Nur in when he was two. His mother, Siti, left him meaning to get back on her feet and come back. That was four years ago. Siti calls every couple of weeks from Johor Bahru, across the Strait. Sometimes she sends money. To Nur, his mother is a voice on the phone and a photo on the bedside table. He doesn't ask about her.

The first months were difficult. Nur didn't speak. At three he still wasn't forming sentences. Aminah took him to the polyclinic. They found nothing. "Give him time," they said. At three and a half he started speaking in two- or three-word phrases, always softly, and he hasn't changed much since. He speaks little, mixes Malay and English like any Singaporean child, and when he doesn't understand something he tilts his head and blinks slowly — as if the information reached him through another channel.

What Aminah discovered early is that Nur communicates better with smell and touch than with language. She brings the food close and Nur nods or shakes his head before saying anything. She places a hand on the scales at the crown of his head to calm him (steady, gentle pressure — it works better than any sentence). She sings to him in Malay before sleep, though what really helps Nur drop off is the smell of the coconut cream his grandmother rubs between his scales every night. Bath, cream, Aminah's hands, silence.

Nur, Sunda pangolin, has keratin scales covering his head and arms. They're the colour of sand with a rosy tinge that darkens towards the crown. Underneath, the skin is soft, sensitive, dries out in the air conditioning. Aminah has put him in long-sleeved shirts since he was a baby, and she still chooses his clothes: a pastel-pink-and-white striped tee in fine cotton, and light-blue denim dungarees with gold snap buttons. The clothes come from the neighbourhood market. They mark neither class nor tribe.

The scales are pure keratin — like human nails. They have no medicinal properties. None. That false belief drives the trafficking pushing the species towards extinction: the Sunda pangolin is the most trafficked mammal in the world, critically endangered according to the IUCN. But Nur doesn't know that yet. What he knows is that his scales draw attention. On the school trip to the pool, undressing, some classmates were startled. One said: "You're like a lizard." Another asked if it hurt. Nur went still. He swam — Sunda pangolins swim well — but he didn't take off the towel until he was already in the water.

When he's afraid, Nur curls up. Literally. Foetal position, arms over his head, rolled into a ball. Pangolins do exactly that: they curl so tightly no predator can open them. It happens to Nur in class sometimes. The first month of school, a substitute teacher asked him to read aloud. Twenty-five children watching him. Nur looked at the book, looked at the children, and curled up on the chair. The substitute tried to touch him and he let out a dull whimper — not a cry, something more like a door closing. Miss Chen, his usual teacher, arrived and led him out to the corridor, calmly. Since then, Nur reads softly to Miss Chen while the others do another activity. Aminah knows that when Nur curls up in bed, you don't touch him. She sits close, sings softly, and waits. Nur uncurls on his own. He always does.

Nur's sense of smell is his way of being in the world. Sunda pangolins locate their prey — ants and termites, exclusively — by smell, not by sight or hearing. In Nur that becomes a boy who smells everything before interacting. Food, clothes, people. He can identify which hawker-centre stall each smell comes from without looking. "That's Uncle Lim's mee goreng," he says with his eyes closed.

He eats little and slowly. Sweet, mild flavours. Nothing spicy, nothing hard and crunchy. Soft kaya toast, very sweet teh tarik, tau huay, mee siam with little chilli. His favourite food is the kuih lapis his grandmother makes: thin layers of sweet dough coloured with pandan. Nur helps with one layer — the green one — every time Aminah cooks. They don't talk while they do it. Nur concentrates with the tip of his tongue poking between his lips.

Pangolins have no teeth. They grind their food with small stones they swallow, like a bird's gizzard. In Nur, that has become a collection. Under his bed there's a Khong Guan biscuit tin full of stones, buttons, pieces of sea glass, a nut, a myna feather. Each object has an exact place. Aminah never touches the tin.

The first stone is grey with a white vein, smooth to the touch. Nur found it on Changi Beach at five. Aminah wanted to leave and Nur wouldn't move. Twenty minutes crouched in the sand.

At recess, Nur looks for things on the ground. When he finds something he likes, he tucks it into the pocket of his dungarees without comment. At home, he washes it under the tap and puts it in the tin with the rest. If he ever lost that tin, something would break.

Sunda pangolins are semi-arboreal. They climb with strong claws and a prehensile tail — the tail bears the body's whole weight hanging from a branch. They change roost every night, using between five and twelve different shelters within their range.

In Nur that's a boy who climbs everything. The shelf, the door frame, the structures in the playground. In the void deck of his block — the covered ground-floor space where neighbours socialise and children play — there's an old frangipani. Nur climbs up to a fork two metres off the ground and from there he sees the street, the lights, the void deck. Aminah no longer tells him to come down.

And then there's the contradiction: Nur climbs trees without hesitating, but freezes on the escalators in the shopping malls. The natural heights are his. The artificial ones, no. In the flat — the eighth floor of an HDB — he never leans over the balcony. In the frangipani he's at home.

At night, Nur shifts position in bed constantly. Aminah finds him each morning in a different spot: upside down, on the floor by the door, curled up on the rug. She's stopped making the bed. She puts on a clean sheet and lets Nur build his nest. Sometimes three pillows and a cushion. Sometimes nothing. The one constant is that he never wakes where he lay down.

The Sunda pangolin is strictly nocturnal. It starts moving at dusk and peaks in activity between midnight and four in the morning.

Nur gets up at half six because Aminah wakes him with a hand on his forehead, in whispers, never with light. It takes him ten minutes to sit up. At seven, kaya toast and teh tarik. At twenty past seven they walk to school, five minutes. At half seven the day begins.

Nur survives the morning. Well, survives is a lot to say — he tolerates it. He functions from ten onwards. In maths he's surprisingly good: the patterns hook him. In science, when the topic is animals or plants, he transforms — he raises his hand, answers in full sentences, adds facts he learned in the park. In language he's slower.

At two, Aminah picks him up. A forty-five-minute nap — the one hour of the day when he really sleeps. Then homework, free play, climbing. At five they go down to the void deck. At seven, dinner. At eight, the coconut-cream ritual. At half eight, an attempt at sleep. He drops off around nine. He wakes at eleven and looks out the window until one. Sometimes he goes down to the empty void deck. Aminah knows but doesn't stop him: the void deck is safe, and Nur at that hour is the animal he was designed to be.

Singapore has one of the most competitive education systems on the planet. The schedules are rigid, the pressure starts in Primary 1. For a nocturnal child who speaks little and arrives at school half asleep, the fit isn't obvious. Can you learn well at eight in the morning if your body has been awake since midnight? Miss Chen has found a way: she lets him sit by the window, doesn't force him to speak in public, waits. Nur respects her. School, not always.

His world is small and concrete. Aminah is the centre. Nur doesn't say it, but he shows it: if his grandmother coughs, he brings her a glass of water without a word. If he loses sight of Aminah at the Toa Payoh market, he doesn't shout or cry: he stays still where he is until she comes back. He grips the edge of her sarong with two fingers. He doesn't pull. He just keeps the contact.

Uncle Razak, retired, fixes bicycles in the void deck. Nur sits and watches him work in silence. Sometimes Uncle Razak lets him hold a nut.

Mei, a classmate, comes over with drawings. Nur looks at them, nods, and sometimes gives one back the next day. It's the start of something.

And then there's [Mansa](/animal-kinhood/mansa/), an African bush elephant who lives in Maun, Botswana. Eleven thousand kilometres. They're pen pals. Nur's school takes part in a letter-exchange programme and Nur was paired with a child from Maun. Mansa sent him a drawing of an elephant in colour. Nur replied with a flat stone tucked into the envelope — Aminah had to explain at the post office that yes, the stone went inside on purpose. Mansa sent back red sand from the Okavango in a little bag. When Nur sent her a drawing of a pangolin, Mansa answered: "You look like a pineapple with legs." Nur didn't understand if it was a joke. Aminah explained it was affectionate. Nur answered with a drawing of an elephant and the line: "You look like a rock with a hose."

Mansa writes long. Nur writes little but draws a lot. The letters take weeks.

One Friday night, Aminah asleep on the sofa. The phone rings. Nur looks at the screen. It says "Siti". He doesn't know how to answer — he's never done it on his own. Six rings. Silence. Nur stays with the phone in his hands, looking at the dark screen. When Aminah wakes and asks, Nur says: "Mum called." Aminah calls back. Siti doesn't answer. She doesn't call again until two weeks later.

Since then, when the phone rings, Nur stays still and watches.

On Aminah's bedside table there's an old phone with photos of Siti. Nur sometimes picks it up when he thinks his grandmother isn't looking.

On Sundays, Aminah takes him to Toa Payoh Town Park. The pond with turtles, the ants on the path, the bench where Aminah waits. Nur spends an hour pushing his fingers into the damp earth, smelling the hibiscus leaves, watching columns of ants with a concentration he has for almost nothing else. The wet earth of Singapore smells different from the dry — sweeter, denser — and Nur knows it without anyone having taught him.

In Singapore, wild pangolins cross roads at night. There are citizen-monitoring programmes. NParks records sightings in reserves and urban parks. They are one of the few wild mammals that survive in a city-state of six million people. "Pengguling" in Malay means "the one that rolls up". It's the origin of the word pangolin.

Nur doesn't know his species is on the edge of extinction. He doesn't know that a million pangolins were trafficked between 2000 and 2019 for scales that are pure keratin, identical to human nails, with no medicinal property whatsoever. He doesn't know that an adult pangolin's tongue can be twenty-five centimetres long and is anchored to the sternum, not the jaw. He doesn't know that in Javanese folklore the pangolin symbolises passive resistance: the one that wins without fighting, by curling up.

What he knows is that one night, at five, he saw another like him cross a path under a streetlamp. That they looked at each other for fifteen seconds. That the animal disappeared into the undergrowth without a sound.

And that the next day he drew a pangolin and his grandmother kept it. The drawing is still in a drawer of Aminah's bedside table.

> **Canonical quote:** Six years old, a biscuit tin full of stones and a grandmother who doesn't rush me. I unroll when I want to, and she knows it before I do.