Every night after closing, Raju wipes down the
Formica counter of his latenight kopi tiam in
Tiong Bahru, the smell of charred kaya still
clinging to his sleeves. He doesn’t serve
customers after 11pm. The ones who come then
don’t order. They leave behind crumpled IOUs—
yellowed slips with Chinese characters and a
single thumbprint—on the sugar bowl. He picks
them up. He collects.
The world changed in ’47, when the British left
and the new state didn’t yet know how to breathe.
In that gap, the old spirits of kampong
ancestors slipped into the concrete, and the HDB
blocks became conduits. Debt didn’t vanish—it
transmuted. Unpaid loans from preindependence
traders, unclaimed insurance from dock workers,
forgotten school fees from immigrants who never
returned: these became spectral obligations. The
state ignored them. The law couldn’t touch them.
So the debt collectors became ghosts who walked
in human skin.
Raju was one of them. Not by choice. His father,
a MalayChinese tailor who vanished after the
1955 riots, left behind a ledger stitched into
his shirt. When Raju turned 18, the shirt burned
on his chest. The ink crawled into his veins. He
now sees the debts as glowing threads—each one a
name, a face, a last meal eaten alone in a
tenement room. He collects them by touch. A
handshake. A cup of tea left unfinished. A
child’s toy dropped outside Block 43.
Last week, he took a debt from a Malay
grandmother who whispered no words, only pressed
a cold kueh lapis into his palm. The thread
glowed blue—Malay ancestral magic binding the
debt to her late husband’s unpaid hawker stall
license. He didn’t charge interest. He just took
it. That’s the rule: no violence. No threats.
Only memory. The debt dissolves when the
collector carries the weight of the forgotten.
Tonight, he finds a new slip. Not on the sugar
bowl. Taped under his bed. His own handwriting.
His own thumbprint. Dated 1962. The amount: “All
I ever was.” The debtor: himself.
He remembers now—the night he swore never to
return to the kampong after his mother died in
the fire. He promised the spirits he’d forget.
He buried his Chinese dialect, stopped eating
his mother’s fish curry, changed his name to
sound more “Singaporean.” He built a life on
forgetting. The debt was never money. It was
identity. The world mechanism had always been
this: immigrant memory is currency, and
forgetting is default interest.
He walks to the old site of Kampong Bahru, now a
void where a new MRT station rises. He sits on
the concrete edge. He eats the last kaya toast
he brought. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t speak. He
lets the thread of his own past curl around his
wrist like smoke.
At dawn, the kaya toast is gone. The debt slip
is gone. The blue thread is gone.
The café opens. Raju makes coffee for the first
customer—a young NS boy in sweatstained shorts.
The boy asks for kopi O, no sugar. Raju nods. He
pours. He doesn’t charge extra. He doesn’t say a
word. Outside, the sun rises over Block 43. The
ghost debt is paid. The bittersweet lingers in
the steam.
