A Crashed Car. A Lucky Number.

The bang was so loud that I thought something heavy had been dropped on a building site. We were near Bencoolen and went to look. A Mercedes had run into the back of a bus. Its bonnet had folded up and the airbags had gone off. Ambulances arrived afterwards. A crowd quickly gathered to see what had happened.

There is a Singapore habit that gives a scene like this an unexpected second meaning. Someone else’s accident can become a reason to hope for a windfall. You do not even need to know who was at fault. You need the number plate.

Some people note down the numbers of vehicles involved in accidents, then use those digits for 4D. The lottery uses four-digit numbers, from 0000 to 9999. A car’s plate can supply a ready-made combination once you leave out the letters. The digits on this Mercedes were 2525.

That is the part I find strange. The same four digits can belong to a very bad afternoon and a hopeful little slip of paper.

When bad luck starts to look promising

People find lucky numbers in all sorts of places: dreams, dates, or a combination that keeps turning up around them. A car accident adds a more unsettling idea — if something bad has happened to a number, perhaps something good must follow.

Researchers recorded that belief in interviews with older gamblers in Singapore. In their 2017 study, a car’s number after an accident was one example of misfortune being read as a sign of luck to come. It explains the thinking, although it does not tell us how many people share it.

The draw itself has no memory of the accident. Every four-digit combination has the same chance of being drawn. But a number with a story attached to it can feel different from one picked at random.

I can understand a birthday feeling lucky. What I find harder to follow is looking for luck in somebody else’s wrecked car. The owner has just had a terrible experience with those digits. Someone else might write them down and hope they work out better for them.