In 1987, Ah Beng — real name Tan Kim Seng,
exRedhill Gang, now a scrapmetal peddler with a
limp from a botched debt collection — walks back
into Block 217, Taman Jurong, where his father
vanished during the 1965 riots. The block is
halfemptied by HDB’s new upgrade, but the lift
still groans like a dying kampung dog, and the
void deck smells of old kaya toast and burnt
joss paper.
His father didn’t die in the riots. He was
buried alive under the concrete foundation of
Block 217, because he refused to hand over the
family’s last heirloom: a tin box of NS medals,
stolen from dead recruits during the Japanese
Occupation. The medals weren’t metal — they were
carved from temple bells, blessed by a Chinese
spirit medium and a Malay bomoh together, and
the rules said: any man who wears one without
earning it, the dead take his voice, then his
breath.
Ah Beng never believed. Until he found his own
NS medal — the one he earned in 1982 — missing
from his drawer. Then his neighbour’s son, a
fresh recruit, came home mute, eyes glazed,
clutching a medal that didn’t belong to him.
He digs under the old water tank in the basement.
The concrete cracks open like old roti prata.
Inside, dozens of medals — 1940s to 1980s — hang
from rusted nails, each tied to a thread of
human hair. One by one, they glow when touched.
The dead don’t want money. They want proof.
Proof that the boys who died for a flag they
didn’t choose — British, then Japanese, then
Singaporean — weren’t forgotten. But the living?
They trade medals for rent, for NS deferments,
for promotions.
The building’s ghost isn’t one spirit. It’s the
collective: a Malay nurse who buried her
brother’s medal under the toilet, a Chinese
teacher who stole one to pay for his daughter’s
school fees, an Indian cook who sold his to buy
a radio so his wife wouldn’t cry alone. They
don’t haunt. They collect. And they’re running
out of space.
Ah Beng takes his father’s box. The moment he
lifts it, the lights in Block 217 flicker — not
out, but backward. The TV in flat 5B turns on,
playing 1963 newsreel footage of the first NS
conscription. The air smells like burnt rice and
camphor.
The next morning, 17 NS men from the block
report their medals gone. The army says they
were lost. The Ministry says it’s “a minor
administrative anomaly.” But in the void deck,
three new medals dangle from the old laundry
line — one from 1942, one from 1957, one from
1987. Each with a name scratched in Singlish:
“Loh Pek Seng — no pay, no medal, no shame.”
Ah Beng burns the box. No screams. No ghosts.
Just the smell of wet kaya toast again.
That night, his own NS medal reappears — but now
it’s cold. And when he touches it, he hears
nothing. Not a word. Not a whisper. Just the
quiet of a man who finally learned: some debts
aren’t paid with money. They’re paid with
silence.
The building doesn’t change. But the medals do.
And the next conscript to walk in? He’ll find
his name already on the line.
