After the bombs stopped falling, the British
left, but the land didn’t heal — it swallowed.
The HDB flats rising from kampong ruins didn’t
just house people; they housed echoes. Every
floor, every stairwell, hummed with the dead who
never got to enlist. No one spoke of it. But the
conscripts knew. If your name appeared on the
wall beside the lift, written in dried blood and
chalk, you were marked. You’d vanish before your
callup date. No one came back.
Ah Beng had once run the Kallang River docks
with a bamboo cane and a rusted revolver. He
didn’t fear the Japanese. He didn’t fear the
cops. But when the new regime came — the one
that drafted every Malay, Chinese, Indian boy
into the National Service, whether they’d fought
for Britain, Japan, or nothing — he tried to run.
He hid in the voids between HDB blocks, stole
ration cards, slept in abandoned void decks. He
thought he was free.
Then his name appeared on Block 43, Level 7,
beside the broken water tap.
Not scrawled. Not painted. Signed. With his own
thumbprint, smudged and still wet, beside the
ink. His full name. His ID number. His blood
type. The same ink that had soaked into the
floorboards of the old Japanese barracks during
the Occupation — the same ink that had turned
the walls of every HDB block into a ledger of
the missing.
He went to the void deck that night. No one else
was there. The air smelled of wet concrete and
burnt joss sticks. The streetlights flickered,
not from power shortage — from something
watching. He pulled out his old cane. He broke
it against the wall. He screamed into the dark.
Nothing answered.
The next morning, the sign was gone. The wall
was clean.
But his name was on the enlistment roster. He
reported. He was issued a rifle. He was sent to
Pulau Tekong.
On the third night, his squad heard him
whispering in Malay, Chinese, Tamil — all at
once. They found him kneeling before the latrine,
pressing his forehead to the porcelain. His
fingers were blackened. His tongue had split
into three. He couldn’t speak. Only sign.
They buried him the next day. No funeral. No
notice. His file was sealed.
But in Block 43, on Level 7, beside the water
tap — the wall is wet again. And the chalk is
fresh. Someone’s writing a new name. The ink
drips slow. The thumbprint glows under moonlight.
The HDBs are still building. The NS rolls keep
turning. And the ghosts? They don’t need to die
twice.
They just need to sign.
