After the firestorms of ’45 and the long silence

of ’65, the new HDB blocks in Tiong Bahru didn’t

just house people — they housed echoes. The

concrete swallowed sound but not grief. Every

night, the lifts groaned with voices no one

spoke. The walls wept damp where children used

to play. No one said it aloud, but everyone knew:

the war didn’t end. It just learned to wait.

Mr. Lim taught OLevel Physics in a rented room

above a kopitiam, his chalk dust mixed with the

scent of kaya toast and burnt coffee. His son,

Wei Jie, vanished during NS training in 1963 —

not in battle, but in a barracks fire no

official report would name. The government gave

a medal. The family got silence. Mr. Lim kept

teaching. He graded papers by candlelight. He

never cried. He just counted.

Then the ghosts started showing up.

Not as shadows. Not as whispers. As students.

Silent. Uniformed. Holding pencils made of bone.

They came after midnight, when the last real

pupil left. They sat where Wei Jie used to sit.

They wrote answers in Malay, Chinese, Tamil —

all at once. They never asked for help. They

only waited for him to mark.

The world had changed. After the Occupation, the

British left. The Malays left. The Chinese

stayed. But the dead? They never left. They just

stopped being ghosts. They became part of the

system. The new rule: if you teach the dead, you

must remember them. Not in prayer. Not in song.

In memory. One memory per lesson. One name. One

detail. One heartbeat you give up.

Mr. Lim marked their papers. He wrote “A+” on

one. He remembered Wei Jie’s laugh — how he

snorted when he ate too much char kway teow.

That night, the lights in Block 78 flickered

green. The air smelled like burnt incense and

durian peel.

He marked another. Remembered the way his son

tucked his shirt into his shorts, even in the

rain. The next morning, three old women from the

void downstairs stopped arguing over toilet

paper. They smiled. They went quiet.

The third ghost came with no paper. Just a name

scratched into the desk: Puan Aminah, 1942. She

didn’t want marks. She wanted to be seen. Mr.

Lim touched the scratch. He remembered her voice

from the kampong days — how she sang Malay

lullabies to Chinese babies during the

Occupation. He gave her that memory.

The next day, the lift in Block 78 stopped

between floors. No one rode it. No one dared.

But when the sun set, the doors opened. Inside,

a single chair sat facing the mirror. On it, a

thermos of teh tarik. Steam rose. No one drank

it. No one needed to.

Mr. Lim didn’t teach anymore. He just sat. Every

night. In the same chair. Marking nothing.

Remembering everything. The ghosts didn’t come

to learn. They came to be remembered. And the

world, broken and rebuilt, now required it: to

teach the dead was to die a little each time. He

didn’t seek revenge. He just gave what the

system demanded.

On the last day, the wall behind his chair

cracked. Not from damp. From pressure. A name

appeared, carved in old Malay script: Wei Jie,

1948–1963. Beneath it, a single line in his own

handwriting — he didn’t remember writing it:

You were my best student.

The lights went out. The thermos emptied. The

chair stayed warm.

The block didn’t sleep. It breathed.