Our block still has the original tiles on the landing between the fourth and fifth floors — deep green, slightly glossy, chipped at the corners where removal trolleys turn too tightly. Newer blocks use neutral tones; ours keeps this one stubborn band of colour like a belt on a plain dress.
I notice them on Sundays when I take the stairs for exercise and pretend the extra flights count as virtue. By the fifth floor I am less virtuous and more honest about wanting the lift. Still, the green landing is a pause point — a place where the window lets in corridor light and you can hear someone's television through a ventilation gap, muffled and intimate.
The tiles were fashionable once, I assume. My neighbour Mrs Lim says they remind her of her mother's kitchen in Malacca — not identical, but emotionally adjacent. We stood there one morning discussing grout lines while she waited for her grandson's tuition teacher. Architecture becomes biography if you stand still long enough.
Town council maintenance repainted the walls around the tiles last year but left the green intact. I felt disproportionately relieved, as if a friend's face had been spared unnecessary surgery. There is talk every few years about upgrading lifts and common areas; I hope whoever decides remembers that small faithful surfaces matter to people who climb these stairs daily.
Children use the landing as a secret base during hide-and-seek even though hiding places are obvious to adults. Teenagers record dance clips against the green background because it reads retro on phone screens. Delivery riders lean bikes against the railing and check addresses. The landing is a public room with no furniture, governed by unspoken rules: speak softly, do not litter, leave space for elders passing through.
Once I dropped a bag of onions on the turn; they rolled down two steps like pale bowling balls. A stranger helped gather them without comment — the kind of wordless help I associate with HDB living at its best. We stacked onions back into plastic and went separate directions. I remember the green tiles more than the onions.
Cleaning aunties mop here with vinegar smell and efficient impatience. The gloss returns for a day, then dulls again under shoes. I like the cycle — polish, use, fade, polish — better than permanent shine that forbids touch.
On rainy afternoons the stairwell air is cool and smells of wet concrete and someone's fried ginger. I stand on the green band and read a page from whatever book is in my pocket. It is not a library, but it behaves like one if you respect the silence.
If we ever move, I will miss this landing more than the view from my kitchen. Views are replaceable. A particular green underfoot at a particular turn is not. I write that knowing how sentimental it sounds, and I do not take it back. The chips at the corner have grown slightly longer this year — evidence that furniture and feet keep negotiating the same narrow curve.