It’s become a common occurrence these days in Singapore to be rained upon. Without fail, every late afternoon, just as the crows are getting ready to curl up to sleep, the skies will open up and kaboom, buckets of water will pour from the sky.

(Picture: Clouds build up in the Singapore skyline)

Just before that, lightning will split the sky and thunder will roar in the distance like someone is really, really mad at us.

Do I recall it ever being so wet in Singapore these monsoon months?

Not in recent memory but then my memory ain’t what it used to be, as country singer Jason Aldean sings in the video below.

We’ve had floods in Singapore but of course, not as bad as what we are seeing in images from Bangkok. It’s kind of surreal, an entire city waterlogged or sogged for months. Parts dry, parts wet, parts inundated – life disrupted.

Growing up, I recall loving the rain because each time it rained, while the area where I lived would always be flooded, our house was always spared.

That’s because our house situated in a Malay “kampong” was built on stilts so water rarely came into the house, it just sloshed around under us. And when the rains stopped, we as children would treat it as our swimming pool.

I remember thinking how clever people were to build houses like these because they knew that in the tropics, stilts were a good idea. It kept the area under the house cool and that’s where we as children played, my father read his newspapers in a hammock and chickens were free to roam.

And it also meant keeping your things above water.

Today, the house I grew up in is no longer. We had to move out a long time ago because the owner wanted to redevelop the area and today, the Malay “kampong”, which was our haven during the May 13, 1969 racial riots because we were among friends and fellow Malaysians, has been replaced by high-rise flats and condominiums which keep us apart rather than a part of something bigger.

The area still floods like it used to except this time, there are no stilts, only basements and people complain about their cars being damaged.

I was told by a friend in Bangkok that before, the rice fields of Ayutthaya helped absorb the water flow from the north. Factories which have replaced the fields do not absorb, they only spew. Somewhat simplistic thinking but perhaps there is truth in simplicity.

Don’t get me wrong. I still love the rain but I am just looking at it with new eyes these days because it appears in our rush to urbanise, we forgot one fundamental – water has to go somewhere.