On the seventh day of the lunar new year, I found myself in front of the Kuan Yim Temple on Waterloo Street, with the aunties in their wide straw hats selling blushing lotuses in red and pink. The air was tinged with the burning of ashy-tipped joss sticks, a perfume sharp and soft and familiar all at once. Inside, the great hall chattered as the devout kneeled in front of the Kuan Yin statue and shook containers of bamboo fortune-telling sticks. I was tempted – I am always tempted – to give it a go, but I fear I will not know what to do with the information.

I moseyed along to Sim Lim Square, instead, where I knew fate held for me a new digital camera. “I want to go back to the Kuan Yim temple later,” I said to Mowmy while the Song Brothers shop uncle wrote me a bill, and there must have been something in my voice the good man mistook for piety. “I give you special price,” he said, looking up. “Screen protector and extra battery,” he said, and here he tapped invitingly on the no-name battery he placed on the glass countertop. He wordlessly typed the figure 20 into his calculator and spun the display round to me. “No need lah, uncle, no need, no need,” I said, for I wanted neither an extra battery nor to take advantage of ill-gotten gains by name-dropping the goddess of mercy.

By late afternoon most of the flower-sellers in front of the temple had packed up their carts, though the ice-cream-sandwich man was running a busy trade among the hanging chrysanthemum garlands. My mother practices her own brand of Buddhist Catholicism, but she lit a pair of joss sticks all the same, and raised them to the sky. She was one among the crowd still milling, praying, hoping.