Receipt

.

The indignant-looking man was taking too long at the POSB ATM at Novena MRT station.

.

Waiting behind him was a middle-aged auntie with her Primary Two son in tow, her foot tapping incessantly as if to remind the man to hurry up with his transactions.

.

I was next in line, and was only queueing out of sheer desperation to inflate my wallet with ten dollar bills for random wanton purchases.

.

Ten minutes had passed. Ten long minutes. Some of the queueing crowds blurt out barely-audible Hokkien expletives, but the truncated truth was visible; we have low tolerance for people who hogged ATMs to do their other stuffs besides cashing out.

.

Not surprisingly, the man did little to pacify the anxious motley queue behind him; his deliberate nonchalance and sheer denial of the impending fracas at his rear was effectively dismissed by his self-occupied stance of egocentricity - he didn't care less about them, not a bit.

.

Things started getting pretty out of hand when this Sikh guy suddenly went out of his queue and decided to confront the man. Just as our turbaned friend was about to walk up to the front and give him a piece of his mind, the man, well, left.

.

In a bolt.

.

He didn't even give a cursory apologetic glance to the auntie, whose grimaced face looked like she could have burst her bladder and experienced incontinence just standing there waiting.

.

What he left, though, was his receipt.

.

In his hurry, the man had forgotten to collect the slip, which was now in the hands of the eager son of the Auntie.

.

What came next, though, was but a small anecdote that briefly accounts for everything our society has now become - a great divide, in more ways than one.

.

"Wah! Ma, that uncle just now has lot of money you know! See, seven-jilo-jilo-three-seven-eight-dot-three-five! Wah rich!"

.

$700,378.35. In the man's savings account.

.

The auntie looked at the receipt and momentarily stared in disbelief before snatching the slip from her son's grip and tearing it up into shreds.

.

In an uncaring world like this, I swore I read the auntie's mind loudly proclaiming that all the dollars and cents in the world will not make someone a better person than her, a factory operator in her work uniform, being a better mother to her young son.