By Philip Holden

Mind the Gap
Ratna Damayanti Taha
Epigram Books (2026) / 279 pages / SGD 27

In the last decade, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize has added an important dimension to the literary scene in Singapore. Singapore novelists as varied in topic and style as Rachel Heng, Balli Kaur Jaswal, Amanda Lee Koe, Jemimah Wei and most recently Yu-Mei Balasingamchow have now achieved deserved international prominence, working deftly with a network of MFA programmes, agents, festivals and social media across borders.

Epigram's Prize has fostered a different, and complementary, type of writing. Many of the novels longlisted or shortlisted for the Prize are first books, and they are often specifically Singaporean or Southeast Asian in their settings and address to their readers. Novels such as Sebastian Sim's Give It Up for Gimme Lao or And the Award Goes to Sally Bong summon a local audience in a different manner from internationally published fiction: there's less need for glossing for an outside audience, and greater opportunity for layered references, satire and incisive social critique.

Ratna Damayanti Taha's Mind the Gap, the 2026 Prize winner, parallels Sim's engagement with the local. The novel begins in the 1990s with its protagonist, Nora, a student at Raffles Girls' School. The narrative traces her life story, through an internship and then work at the Settlement Times newspaper, into marriage to Indra, a civil servant and erstwhile political candidate for the governing Socialist Action Party. Nora becomes involved in opposition politics, takes a decision to postpone her career to take care of children, and then makes a recommitment to social action in the present as the narrative ends. The novel shares a feature of Sim's work: an incisive humour which views features of Singapore everyday life through a distorting lens to defamiliarise them and ask readers to look at them with fresh eyes.

Some of these inflexions are barely noticeable: SAP for PAP, Warta Harian for Berita Harian, The Daily Line for Today. Others are more obviously satirical: Ratna has a lot of fun in playfully distorting the acronyms which are so much a feature of Singapore life. Deeper engagement comes from references to past political events: the barring of four tudung-wearing girls from primary schools in 2002, or the opposition winning its first GRC in the 2011 General Election. In the latter, Aljunied GRC becomes Pachitan GRC, and Pachitan is restored to the MRT map, memoralising a lost Javanese kampung near Kembangan, and it is the Minister for Communications, not the Senior Minister, who states that opposition voters will need to "atone" for voting against the ruling party.

Easter eggs abound for those who are keen to search for them. Teo Tze Feng, the deliciously stereotypical successively HR manager, director and "Senior Consultant (Diversity & Exclusion)", and finally NMP due to his "corporate diversity thought leadership" bears a striking resemblance to a voluble former NMP who is active in social media. The progressive Settlement Times editor who encourages Nora has the initials "BH".

Humour, however, is only part of the reader's journey of discovery. The double sight of Mind the Gap comes from its narrator's position as a Malay Muslim woman from a working-class background. Making this observation isn't intended to reduce the novel to a singular voice: Nora's perspective is not necessarily that of the author, and Nora herself notes that in journalism, she doesn't "want to be a voice, full stop": rather, she only wants "to write".

Yet Nora's central consciousness inflects the novel in important ways. Malay culture surrounds her in family life and in language and in food, while she also negotiates with the way in which racialised identities are managed by the state and the normalising forces of community. As a Muslim, she prays, makes a decision to wear the tudung, and finds in Islam a means of guidance in a troubled world. As a woman, she pursues a career and follows her ideals, while negotiating with and inhabiting the roles of mother and daughter to ageing parents. Mind the Gap doesn't pull its punches on discrimination and othering – whether through "melanin", "name" or "accent". Yet the novel also expresses hope in the everyday multiculturalism of neighbours on an HDB corridor, or the respectful responses of ordinary citizens from all communities to Nora's questions as a journalist.

As its title suggests, Mind the Gap has a central, governing metaphor: Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system, which grows with Nora, from "only two lines, clean and limited" in the 1990s, to "twist and loop" with new lines a decade later, and then, from 2020 onwards, dissolving into "a tangle of colours and acronyms". These three stages of system, with their attendant maps, mark out the three parts of the book. As a metaphor, the MRT must do a fair amount of heavy lifting in the novel: like the lines themselves, the figure of speech becomes tangled, and the reader must work to untwist its different strands.

The first element of MRT as metaphor is as a proxy for social and economic development. Although Nora's life at RGS is "messy", the map in the 1990s has "a hint of innocence". The promise of the developmental state and its accompanying meritocracy is still there; its routes are predictable, just as Singaporeans follow a story in which "cause led cleanly to effect: the Primary School Leaving Examination to Junior College to university to job". There are few transfer points, and these are "marked by uncertainty"; if areas and neighbourhoods are "skipped over", this isn't readily apparent, and the overall impression is that "everything" still seems to be "going somewhere".

A decade later, the system has become intensified and is now marked by "arrogance". In contrast to the clear path of the early years, we now have "a country in motion, always arriving, never arriving". People "look past one another", folding themselves into corner seats. If each Singaporean has a possible path marked out for them in life, each also moves in time with a "learned choreography" of restricted social mobility. "Most knew, by now," the narrational voice tells us, "that not all routes were for them." In the present, the system has grown "bigger, but not kinder". Its map is "no longer a promise" but rather "a warning".

The new lines have gone deeper underground, into a social landscape of ever denser bureaucratic complexity. "You could now reach every part of the island," readers are told, "except perhaps, yourself." In a sense, the map indicates the realisation of earlier promises: the achievement of the "prosperity and progress for our nation" that the Singapore Pledge aspires to. Yet Mind the Gap suggests that such progress has not been accompanied by greater happiness, but rather by forms of spiritual and social involution.

The second element to the MRT metaphor is expressed by the title of the novel. Mind the Gap as a title refers to a specific incident early in the novel, in which Nora's friend Hana's foot becomes stuck in the gap between platform and MRT carriage. After Hana has been rescued, Nora looks at the gap again and is curious about its appearance as "a space between two solid things" that normally goes unnoticed, but that can cause harm if one missteps.

The idea of the MRT gap is presented in a further way in Priscilla Wong's striking cover. Here the gap is within the MRT carriage itself. We see what appear to be two women from above, sitting opposite each other on the MRT, with the view cropped so that we can see only their feet and hands folded in their respective laps. One crosses her legs, has light skin, an expensive-looking watch, a tailored pantsuit, and formal court shoes; the woman who sits opposite her seems tenser, and has a darker skin tone, wears a baggier dress, is without a watch and wears white canvas plimsolls or sneakers. The seats they sit on are green, but the space between them is red. Again, there's a gap here that some might notice, and others might not, a fissure that opens up in the social order, or in the story of progress that we tell ourselves. As Nora notes, it is also a gap that one may at times choose to step over.

Finally, the MRT metaphor often enables the characters to move from their physical environment into interiority and back. On a couple of occasions, Nora sees herself as a reflection in the doors or windows of the MRT, and, through this alienation, reflects on how she is seen by others. When she and Indra are estranged, they pass each other in different trains at a station; each acknowledges the other, but they depart on different routes. At the end of the novel, after an election in which Zaki, one of Nora's former mentees has won a Single Member Constituency, she and Indra take an MRT ride together, sitting side by side, with Pachitan as the next stop. If they still live in a "world in transit", they at least share a common track.

If there's a flaw in the novel, it's perhaps that some of this metaphor-making, and indeed the schematic relationships between characters that supports it, is a little too rigid. Nora is a fully realised character, navigating hardships and dilemmas: she lives through a miscarriage, the death of her father, and a series of refusals to be co-opted by structures of power that would reduce her autonomy. Mind the Gap is particularly good at showing, through her, how a sense of efficacy and agency can be eroded by taking on a social role of care, and also how it can be recovered. Yet at times Indra seems to be simply a foil to Nora, continually compromising his beliefs to find a "way to stay at the table" that Nora feels is "rigged".

Readers are carried through, however, by the energy of the narration, and its concluding optimism. If social structures seem ever more convoluted and difficult to navigate, Nora's and Zaki's actions, and Indra's ultimate refusal, all show how the expression of agency in various forms is still possible.

In a discussion of her novel at Wardah Books in September, the author pointed to a poem by Nora's father-in-law, Arief Aditya, that is read out in a scene in the novel, first in Malay and then in English translation. The poem reflects the discourse on the tudung as being "backward" and "shackled by the past" and lets readers, in their discomfort, see it for what it is. The gap that we all should be mindful of, the novel ultimately suggests, is the distorting mirror that fiction holds up to the world in which we live. In the displacement, doubt and discomfort that stories produce in us lie the possibilities of reflection and change.

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