Et Sequitur Magazine

Et Sequitur Magazine, Issue 13

Issue 13 (Spring 2025)

Convergence at Dhoby Ghaut

By Ibrahim Abdulhakeem

(cover art by MaximoSoria via DeviantArt)

Dhoby Ghaut station buzzed with its usual chaos—an intricate ballet of hurried commuters, distant train arrivals, and flickering digital signs. In the midst of the madness, Aisha stood still, her worn sketchbook clutched tightly against her chest. It wasn’t so much the crowd that she noticed, but the silence she carried inside. The station’s noise, its movement—these things always felt so familiar, so loud. But to her, there was a deeper quiet, one that no amount of rush hour energy could touch.

Weeks earlier, she had come to the station for a reason she couldn’t entirely explain. Maybe it was the need to find a place where time felt like it paused for just a moment. Maybe it was just because the world outside had become too heavy. Aisha had been struggling with her poetry, trying to capture something elusive in her words, but nothing had been working. She wasn’t sure anymore what she wanted to say, or why she’d even been trying. That day at Dhoby Ghaut, she didn’t expect answers, just an escape.

But there, amidst the predictable rush of commuters, she saw him—a man seated on the bench near the farthest platform, sketching furiously. His pencil moved with such rapid intent, as though he were trying to keep pace with the very pulse of the station. His eyes flicked from his sketchpad to the passing crowd, capturing what seemed to be an impossible amount of detail in a short moment. He didn’t notice her watching at first, and Aisha found herself drawn to him—not just because of the energy in his work, but because he had something she’d been missing: conviction.

Eventually, she couldn’t help herself. “You’re capturing the chaos beautifully,” she said, her voice hesitant but genuine.

The man looked up, startled at first, then offered a small smile. “Thanks. It’s not easy. But I think there’s a rhythm in all this,” he gestured toward the frenetic crowd around them, “if you know where to look.”

That was Daniel. He didn’t explain the rhythm—he just made it apparent. There was something about the way he saw the world that she wanted to understand. Aisha had always considered herself a poet, someone who used words to make sense of the world’s noise, but his art spoke to her in a way words couldn’t. She was used to finding meaning in phrases, in carefully chosen words that formed a greater picture. Daniel, on the other hand, found meaning in shapes, in angles, in the way light hit the rough edges of a hurried man’s face. It wasn’t the stillness in the chaos that interested him; it was the movement, the feeling beneath the surface.

They exchanged names, and after a few minutes of shared silence, punctuated by the occasional train rumbling through the station, Daniel suggested, “We should do this again. Same time, same place, next week. There’s something about this spot... I think we could discover more, together.”

For the first time in weeks, Aisha felt a spark of inspiration. She agreed, smiling more fully than she had in a long while. They parted ways, and Aisha returned to her small apartment, sketchbook in hand, thoughts swirling.

But the next week, Daniel wasn’t there. Or the week after that. Day after day, Aisha returned to the same bench, trying to see the station the way he did. She drew the faces of the commuters, their fleeting expressions—an older woman clutching a shopping bag, a businessman glancing anxiously at his watch, a young couple sharing an earbud. She tried to find the pulse in their hurried steps, but her pencil hesitated. Her lines were tentative, almost apologetic.

In the beginning, she hadn’t been sure why she’d come back to Dhoby Ghaut—whether it was for inspiration or for closure. But now, the bench had become more than a meeting place; it had become a place where she needed to understand something about herself. She wasn’t just sketching anymore. She was confronting the parts of herself she hadn’t realized were still waiting to be expressed. The problem wasn’t the station, she realized—it was her. She was afraid of committing to the art, afraid that if she drew it wrong, she would have no words left to explain it.

Weeks passed. Each visit to the station, though familiar, felt increasingly hollow. And yet, she couldn’t stop herself from going back. The world around her remained unchanged—yet she was different.

One evening, after a particularly frustrating week, Aisha decided to search for Daniel. She visited nearby art galleries, hoping that he might be showing his work somewhere. The search wasn’t methodical, more of a wild hope, but it led her to a small, intimate gallery tucked down an alley, almost hidden from the bustling street. The exhibit on display was titled Urban Rhythms. Aisha recognized the style immediately—sharp, frenetic, the interplay of light and motion in every line. There, in the center of the gallery, was a series of sketches she had seen only in her memory, each one more alive than the last.

Her heart clenched.

She approached the curator, her voice barely a whisper. “Do you know the artist? Daniel?”

The curator’s face softened. “Daniel… yes. He passed away recently. A heart condition. He was so young. This exhibit is a tribute.”

The world blurred around her as the words sank in. Daniel. Gone. The suddenness of it felt unreal, like a punch to the gut. She thanked the curator mechanically, but her thoughts were miles away, her steps heavy as she walked out of the gallery.

By the time she found herself back at Dhoby Ghaut station, the usual chaos seemed quieter. She sat on their bench, the empty space next to her like a constant reminder of the conversation that would never happen, of the sketches that would remain unfinished. But this time, she didn’t feel lost.

Aisha opened her sketchbook and began to draw. Not the commuters, not the chaos. She drew moments. The tired mother helping her child hold onto a railing. The elderly man with a cane, struggling to catch his breath. The silent connection between a passerby and the stranger who helped her retrieve a dropped book. This, she thought, was where the rhythm lay—not in the speed of the world around her, but in the way it all moved together, one step after another.

She didn’t sign her name this time.

Instead, at the bottom right corner of the page, she wrote something else.

Daniel.

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