Nur.

They were walking back from the hawker centre through Toa Payoh Town Park, already dark, when Nur stopped dead. He was five. He pointed with a closed fist, without a word, and it took Aminah a moment to see what he was already staring at: at the base of a tree, under a streetlight, a pangolin was crossing the path. Wild. One of the few left in the city. They looked at each other. Fifteen seconds, maybe less, the boy and the animal both still, and then the undergrowth swallowed it without a sound. Aminah never got to see its tail.

Nur didn't sleep that night. Not out of fear — he stayed awake the way he always stays awake, looking out the window, but with something turning over inside him. The next day, on a sheet of paper, he drew a pangolin for the first time. Crooked, with too many scales, but a pangolin.

Years later, if he ever tells it, he tells it like this: "There was another one. Like me." And that's it. He doesn't explain what he meant and no one asks him to. His kind are few and growing scarcer, more scattered every year, though he still doesn't have the words for it. That night he knew it for fifteen seconds and then forgot, which is how five-year-olds know things.

At Changi Beach, one Sunday, he found the first one. Grey, smooth, with a white vein running clean across it. He slipped it into his pocket without showing anyone. When Aminah wanted to head home, Nur didn't budge: he stayed crouched, looking for more. She waited twenty minutes on the sand, her knees complaining, and never rushed him.

That stone now sits at the exact centre of a Khong Guan biscuit tin, under the bed. It's the start of everything else. After it came buttons, a piece of polished sea glass, a nut, a myna feather he found on the void deck. Every object has its place, and the place never changes.

What he does with every find is always the same: he washes it under the tap, slowly, dries it on his shirt, and smells it before putting it away. Nose first. The Changi stone, he says, still smells of the morning he found it. No one else notices. Aminah, who has learned to read him, knows that when Nur starts sorting the tin, something from the day has weighed on him and he's setting it down, piece by piece, somewhere it can't get lost.

Nur calls Aminah Nek. She's his grandmother, sixty-seven years old, with bad knees and blood sugar she keeps an eye on, and she's the centre of everything. She gets up at half past five. She sells kuih at the corner shop downstairs. She darkened the room so he could sleep during the day, let him climb the furniture, never forces a schedule on him. Nur always walks one step behind her, holding the edge of her sarong between two fingers. No tugging. Just to know she's still there.

When the world gets to be too much, he curls into a ball: head between his knees, arms wrapped over the top, and he's gone for anyone. The strange part is that Nek knows before he does when he's about to come out. She doesn't touch him. She's learned that touching him only makes it last longer. She sits nearby, in the same room, gets on with whatever she's doing, and waits. Sooner or later the boy unrolls on his own. Always on his own.

He couldn't explain how she does it. It's like the smells, or the stones: it just happens. If you ask him what's the best thing about his home, he doesn't say Nek, because six-year-olds don't say things like that. He brings her a glass of water when she coughs, stands there until it passes, and that's all he knows how to say.

The gesture comes from his body, not his head. Loud noise that won't stop, too many people staring at once, an adult raising their voice, a change of plan with no warning, or hunger — any one of those and Nur shuts down. In a chair he shrinks into himself. At home he crawls behind the sofa, into a gap no one else fits, or pulls the sheet clean over himself down to his feet.

It isn't a tantrum. He doesn't cry or shout. He makes himself small and waits for the world to turn its volume down. The old word from his people, the one that named what they are, means exactly that: the one who rolls up. Nur does it literally, and at home no one argues with it.

What others find hard to understand is that there's no drama inside the ball. He's safe in there, counting his breaths, smelling the wool of the blanket. He comes out when he can, not a minute before. Aminah learned not to reach in — she tried it once, back when he'd just arrived, and the boy let out a dull moan she's never wanted to hear again. Now she sits and waits. She's better at that than anyone.

First month of Primary 1. A teacher covering for Miss Chen asked him to read aloud. Twenty-five children turning to look at him. Nur looked at the book, looked at the children, looked back at the book. And curled up in his chair, right there, head against his knees. The substitute tried to touch his shoulder to get him up and he let out the moan again. It was Miss Chen, coming back down the corridor, who took him outside calmly, without touching him, speaking very softly.

Since then he reads, but only for Miss Chen, in a low voice, with her sitting beside him. In class some kids started calling him Ball, because of the habit. It isn't said with real malice; children name what they see. Nur doesn't protest. He inhabits the nickname the way he inhabits almost everything, without arguing.

That day he learned something he can't put into words but that orders his whole life: not every adult is a safe place. Miss Chen is. The substitute wasn't. He tells people apart by how they smell and how they approach, and that distinction is, to him, as clear as cold or hunger. The substitute smelled of strong industrial cleaner. He never trusted her after that.

The Khong Guan tin is non-negotiable. Aminah doesn't open it — it's the one rule Nur has imposed in the house, never spoken, only defended with his whole body the time she went to clean under the bed. Inside, every object in its exact spot: the stones by size, the buttons kept apart, the myna feather laid across the bottom.

And here the boy turns strange in a way even he doesn't understand. He never leaves behind a stone he's chosen. Never. Whatever goes into the tin stays forever, and losing even one thing distresses him in a way he can't name, something that climbs up his chest and closes his throat. Aminah found this out the day a button of Nur's slipped down the drain grate. Half an hour with his fingers pushed between the bars, not quite crying, not giving up.

There's another thing, smaller. He keeps a felt-foam kuih that Aminah sewed him as a toy when he was very little. That scrap of foam has smelled of nothing for years. Nur brings it to his nose anyway, every time, just in case the smell comes back today. It doesn't. He smells it all the same.

At school he's "very attentive but not very participative", according to Miss Chen, and both things are true at once. In science, when it's time to observe bugs, he's the best in class: he can stand in front of a line of ants for forty minutes without getting bored, watching where they go in and where they come out, while everyone else has already lost interest. At recess it's the same — while the others run around, he's crouched by a crack in the playground.

The problem is the hour. School starts at half past seven, and at that hour Nur runs on half power, eyes half shut, because his real time is the night. He wakes up properly around eleven. He watches out the window until one. Sometimes he goes down to the empty void deck, where there's an old frangipani tree he climbs without fear — two metres up and perfectly calm, even though on the eighth floor he never goes near the balcony. He truly sleeps during the two o'clock nap.

The daytime doesn't disagree with him; he's simply made for another hour, the small hours, when he truly wakes up. The school doesn't know it, and doesn't need to: Aminah signs the forms, talks to Miss Chen, and quietly covers the mismatch with patience.

One Friday night, with Aminah asleep on the sofa, the phone rang. Nur looked at the screen: it said Siti. His mother. She's lived in Johor Bahru, on the other side of the Strait, since he was two; she calls every couple of weeks. Nur has never answered alone, he doesn't know how. Six rings. Silence. He was left holding the phone, watching the screen go black again. When Aminah woke up, he told her: "Mum called." She called back. Siti didn't pick up this time.

Since that night, whenever the phone rings, Nur goes still and watches. He doesn't rush to answer. He waits.

There's another kind of distance that does work for him, and it's a strange thing that it's the longest one. At school he was paired up to write letters with a boy in Maun, Botswana: Mansa, an elephant. Mansa sends him drawings; Nur writes back by slipping a flat stone into the envelope. Once Mansa wrote that he looked like "a pineapple with legs", and it struck Nur so funny that Aminah heard him laugh out loud on his own, a rare thing for him. The friendship with Mansa works precisely because there are eleven thousand kilometres between them and no one asks him to start the conversation. For him, distance is sometimes what makes affection possible.

Before touching anything, he smells it. Food, at length, with his eyes closed. Clothes. Whoever comes near him. He recognizes Aminah by the pandan and coconut oil before he even sees her walk in. At the hawker centre he plays a game of guessing which stall each dish came from without looking, and he gets it right — "that's Uncle Lim's mee goreng" — and the mee siam stall owner makes his less spicy without being asked, because he already knows him. He tells wet earth from dry. His verdict on almost everything fits into two words, said very quietly: "Smell nice."

He eats little and slowly, soft and sweet flavours, chewing with his gums. He helps Aminah with the kuih lapis, one layer at a time, the green one, the pandan layer, the tip of his tongue peeking between his lips. They don't talk while they do it. There's no need: his language is one of smells and hands, and there it works perfectly.

He still sleeps badly, still curls into a ball under the sheet, still wakes up to watch the night. He's still the quiet boy who belongs to Mrs Aminah. And somewhere in his chest he keeps those fifteen seconds under the streetlight, the time there was another one. Like him.

> **Canonical quote:** I unroll when I want to, and Nek knows before I do; she sits close, she doesn't touch me, and she waits for me to come out on my own.