Every dawn before school, 14yearold Ah Beng

sweeps the cracked marble floor of the abandoned

Kwan Im Temple behind the old hawker stalls, his

bare feet brushing ash from last year’s Ghost

Festival incense. He doesn’t pray. He listens.

The temple doesn’t creak — it sighs.

The British banned spirit rituals after the

Occupation. No joss sticks. No paper money. No

drumming past 9pm. The law was written in red

ink on every HDB noticeboard: Disturbing the

Resting Dead = 5 Years Penal Servitude. The

police still raided kampong shrines in Geylang,

dragging away old women who whispered to shadows.

Ah Beng never told anyone he heard them. Not the

ghosts — the screams. Thin as wet paper tearing.

A mother calling for a child lost in the 1942

bombings. A soldier begging for his boots back

from the Japanese who stole them before

execution. He’d find the source: a crack behind

the broken Guanyin statue, a loose tile near the

incense altar. He’d press his palm flat, hum the

lullaby his grandmother sang in Hokkien, and the

screaming would stop — just for a night.

He didn’t know he was mending.

One rainy Tuesday, the temple’s east wall split

open during a monsoon gust. Inside, the bones of

three Chinese labourers, wrapped in rusted

sarongs, tumbled out — unburied since the 1945

purge. The town council ordered them burned. The

police said it was “hygiene.”

Ah Beng waited till midnight.

He carried the bones to the temple’s underground

cellar, where the old priest once hid refugees.

He laid them in a circle. He didn’t chant. He

didn’t burn paper. He pressed his forehead to

the earth and sang — not the lullaby, but the

wrong tune his father had whistled before he

vanished into the 1947 riots. The air thickened.

The walls wept black dew. The bones glowed like

wet charcoal.

The next morning, the wall was sealed. No cracks.

No smell.

The council sent men to inspect. Found nothing.

But the temple stopped sighing.

Ah Beng didn’t return to school.

They found him at dawn, curled beside the altar,

one hand still pressed to the floor. His lips

were blue. His pockets held three folded paper

cranes — not Chinese, not Malay, not Indian. The

kind made by children who lost everything and

still believed in quiet endings.

The temple stayed silent.

And for the first time since 1942, no one in

Chinatown dreamed of screaming.