Our floor corridor holds six pots — not a rule, just a count that settled over time. Two belong to the family beside the lift. One heavy ceramic pot with frangipani is Uncle Rahim's, though he asks the auntie three doors down to water when he travels. Two small basil pots sit outside #02-94, smelling sharp on hot afternoons. Mine is the sixth, a modest money plant in a blue bucket that has outgrown three trellises.
Watering happens in rotation nobody wrote down. I know Uncle Rahim's pot gets the blue watering can on Mondays because his granddaughter leaves it outside his door on Sunday night. The frangipani leaves perk by Tuesday. The basil pots hiss when the auntie mists them — a sound like a kettle beginning, not finishing.
Corridors are shared tiles with private habits. You learn the boundaries by what appears and disappears: shoes, umbrellas, a folding chair during the school holidays. The six pots are the floor's green tally — proof that someone is home, someone is tending, someone will notice if a leaf yellows on the wrong side.
Last month the money plant leaned toward #02-96 — my unit — as if it preferred my light. I rotated the bucket twice before accepting that plants vote with their stems. The auntie laughed when I told her. She said her basil did the same toward the window near the stairwell. We agreed the corridor wins all elections.
Once a pot cracked during a storm when the wind found the gap near the parapet. Uncle Rahim swept soil without being asked. I held the broken ceramic while he fetched a replacement tray from his storeroom. The corridor was clean before dinner. Six pots became five for a week, then six again when he repotted the frangipani smaller and lighter.
I write about this because neighbourhood is often counted in noise — doors, televisions, footsteps. I want a record of the quiet version: water on soil, leaves turned, a watering can returned to the correct door so the next person knows the tally continues.
If you live on a floor with corridor plants, you know they are diplomacy in green. Six pots between us, six small agreements about who fills the can, who notices wilt, who sweeps when something spills. Not dramatic. Not permanent front-page material. Just the kind of list I mean when I say ChuaCrime counts a week's worth of small things.
