The boy sat in Block 123, Bukit Panjang, his
fingers tracing the faded paint on the wall. The
HDB flat had been his home since he was twelve,
when his father’s factory job collapsed and they
were moved from the kampong. Now, he was
seventeen, a scholarship student at Raffles
Institution, and the only one in his cohort who
still believed in ghosts.
He had failed the midyear exams. Not by much —
just 5 marks short of an A. But the ghost in his
room had been watching. It appeared every night
after he studied, a shadow with hollow eyes that
followed him until he passed out from exhaustion.
He tried telling his mother, but she laughed.
“You think I don’t know about those stories?
You’re too smart for ghosts.”
The cheating incident happened during the final
trial. His classmate, Li Wei, had slipped him a
note during the math paper: “Use this. No one
will know.” Inside was a tiny vial of liquid. He
didn’t know what it was, but after swallowing it,
the questions became easier. Too easy. When the
invigilator caught him with the vial, the school
called in the authorities.
The rule was clear: any form of academic
dishonesty would result in immediate expulsion.
But the principal, a man with a face like a
ledger, offered him a choice. “You can stay, but
you’ll have to prove you’re not a cheat. And
you’ll have to face what you’ve done.”
That night, the ghost returned. This time, it
wasn’t just a shadow. It was a figure — tall,
dressed in a torn school uniform from decades
ago. Its voice echoed like rustling paper. “You
took what was never yours. Now you must return
it.”
The next morning, he found a book in his locker —
The History of Bukit Panjang, published in 1964.
The cover was cracked, the pages yellowed.
Inside, a chapter titled The Scholar’s Curse. It
spoke of a boy who had stolen an exam answer
from a teacher, only to be haunted by the spirit
of the original scholar, who had died in the
Japanese Occupation. The curse had lingered
through generations, waiting for someone to
break the cycle.
He returned the vial to Li Wei, who had no idea
what it contained. Then, he walked to the old
HDB block where the first scholar had lived. The
building was long gone, replaced by a highrise.
But beneath the new concrete, he felt the weight
of history.
At the end of the year, he passed his exams
without help. The ghost never came back. The
principal said nothing, but the scholarship was
renewed.
In the end, he kept the book. It was the only
thing that reminded him that some debts could be
paid, even if the world had moved on.
