After the 1950 kampong fire swallowed his

family’s attap roof and the last of his father’s

gambier harvest, Ah Beng — once a gang enforcer

who collected protection from Chinese clan

associations and Malay fishmongers — died

choking on smoke, not bullets. His body was

buried in Choa Chu Kang’s unmarked row, but his

spirit stayed, because the British colonial

conscription office still had his name on the NS

ledger.

The world had changed: after 1948, the British

passed the Emergency Ordinance that bound all

male Chinese and Malay youths to compulsory

labour for the war effort — but when

independence came in ’65, the new state kept the

rule. Dead men who never served? Their souls

were tethered to the Ministry’s ledger. No

karmic peace. No ancestral worship. No food left

at the altar. The state collected dues even from

the grave.

For seven years, he haunted the old NS

registration hall in Outram, now a damp HDB void

deck. He moved chairs. He doused kerosene lamps.

He made the 1972 conscription notice flutter

onto the doorstep of every eligible boy in Tiong

Bahru. Parents wept. Boys ran. No one knew why.

Then, in ’73, a boy named Lim Kok Seng — son of

a HDB cleaner, cousin to the last surviving

teastall owner at the old Pasir Panjang market —

found the faded draft notice under his pillow.

He didn’t run. He walked to the abandoned office.

Sat. Waited.

Ah Beng appeared — not as a wailing spirit, but

as a man in threadbare khaki, boots cracked from

walking 12km to the depot every dawn. He didn’t

speak. He just held out a rusted metal tin.

Inside: seven dried curry puffs. One for each

year he owed.

The boy took it. Ate one. Offered the rest to

the air.

That night, the HDB block lights flickered — not

from faulty wiring, but from a thousand ghosts

exhaling at once. From Bedok to Jurong, boys

woke with the smell of kaya toast and old sweat.

Their parents whispered: “He paid.”

The Ministry never acknowledged it. But next

year’s NS callup forms? No more “DECEASED”

stamps. Just a small note, typed in old English:

“Dues settled. Rest in peace.”

Ah Beng’s spirit didn’t vanish. He just stopped

haunting.

On the first day of every Chinese New Year, a

single curry puff appears on the doorstep of

every HDB flat with a son who did NS. No one

knows who leaves it.

But everyone knows: the state never forgets. And

neither do the dead who were too kiasu to die in

debt.