Nur.

What Nur sees at those hours no one else around him sees. The void deck cats. The hum of the air conditioning in the flats below. The ants crossing in a column at the base of the old frangipani where he climbs during the day. At night the frangipani looks different: the white flowers smell stronger and the bark feels different to the touch. Nur knows this because he's gone down to touch it more than once.

Aminah knows he goes down. She doesn't stop him. The void deck is safe, and at that hour Nur is where he's supposed to be — awake, alert, running on a schedule that doesn't match school or anyone else's. Forcing sleep doesn't work. It never works. Nur curls up in bed, pulls the sheet over his head, goes tense. Better to let him move slowly through the flat without turning on lights, those barefoot steps that make no sound on the tiles.

At half past seven in the morning, Nur walks into class half asleep. He sits by the window because his teacher lets him. It takes ten minutes for him to be present. At ten he starts to perform: math interests him, patterns hook him, in natural science he raises his hand if the topic is animals. But the first hour is a routine he survives with half-closed eyes and his chin resting on his hand.

Singapore has one of the most demanding education systems on the planet. Schedules are rigid. For a child whose best moment is between midnight and four in the morning, the fit with Primary 1 isn't obvious. Nur doesn't complain — he speaks little in general, mixes Malay and English in short phrases, and when he doesn't understand something he tilts his head and blinks slowly, as if the information reaches him through a different channel than words. But the mismatch shows: in the yawns at eight o'clock, in the clumsiness with which he holds the pencil before ten, in the way Aminah picks him up at two and the first thing Nur does is sleep a forty-five-minute nap — the only hour of the day when he really sleeps.