It’s 3.08am at a bus stop in Beach Road.
While a drunken man hails a cab in the distance, bundles of newspapers are being unloaded from a lorry.
This marks the start of the day for Mr Rathnakumar Chokkalingam, 64, a second-generation newspaper vendor of 42 years.
Mr Kumar, as he is more commonly known, cuts open the bundles containing five of SPH Media’s broadsheets – The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao, Berita Harian, Tamil Murasu and The Business Times.
He says that during the heyday of newspaper production in the 1990s, he and four of his part-time workers would distribute some 1,800 copies of newspapers in the Beach Road area.
But now, with dwindling subscriptions and high certificates of entitlement and fuel costs, he has downgraded from a van to a motorcycle, occasionally getting help from his 34-year-old son and another part-timer to deliver about 450 copies a day.
The Straits Times sets off with Mr Kumar at 3.20am, trailing him on a motorcycle.
His first stop is an office building. Then he heads for two 7-Eleven convenience stores, where he makes his deliveries and takes back unsold papers from the day before.
Next, he stops at the Fairmont Singapore hotel, where he passes 20 copies of the papers to the bellboy.
He points to the luggage trolley at the front porch as he laments the fall in print sales in recent years.
“In the 1990s, I would load the trolley with 400 copies and the bellboy would wheel them in to be delivered to guest rooms,” he says with a little sigh.
Hopping back onto his motorbike, he heads to Raffles Hotel and then Esplanade MRT station. He then makes his way back to the bus stop to take a second load.
Mr Kumar says being a newspaper vendor is about more than just making deliveries – it is also about building friendships with customers, something he cherishes and considers important for the trade.
His good relationship with one hotel enables him to leave his stock there while he makes return trips to load up. And an office building lets him store unsold stock from convenience stores at a staircase landing, which he recycles every three weeks for cash.
On why he chose to be a newspaper vendor, Mr Kumar says: “It was one of those trades where you could see cash in your pocket very quickly.
“Unlike other jobs where you’d have to wait till the end of the month for a cheque, we vendors collected delivery fees straight from customers on a weekly basis.”
A newspaper vendor now earns between $200 and $700 a month, on average.
Earnings aside, newspaper distribution runs in his family.
As a 12-year-old in 1971, Mr Kumar would help his newspaper vendor father make his deliveries on foot around People’s Park in exchange for sweets and drinks.
As he grew older, he started helping out more often before school, making deliveries on his bicycle.
While his brother eventually took over his father’s business, the very Beach Road route that Mr Kumar now plies once belonged to his uncle, with whom he worked after completing his national service in 1981. He took over the route that same year, after his uncle retired.
Mr Kumar delivers newspapers to places such as offices, private and public residences, places of worship, schools and hotels.
Time flies in the early hours. At 5.15am, Mr Kumar starts to make his way up a public housing block in Crawford Lane.
Like clockwork, he brisk-walks up and down a labyrinth of corridors, placing the newspapers in front of residents’ doors.
“I meet them once a month to collect delivery fees, and several of them have told me their worries of rising delivery rates,” he says, referring mostly to seniors who still depend on the print media to get the news.
Asked if he feels like a messenger and a link to the outside world for them, he agrees: “I felt this even more during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many of them were stuck at home, relying on me to get the news.”
He heads back to the bus stop to load up again before completing the last round of deliveries at around 6.45am.
A bit later, over coffee and toast at Mr Kumar’s favourite breakfast spot, this photojournalist tells him that he has covered about 22km, according to a distance-tracking phone app.
“It’s tiring – not as easy as people think,” he remarks.
He is quick to say that he still loves his job.
Before parting ways, he says with a giggle: “When my wife was in labour with my second son, I booked her a cab and opted to go to work instead.”