At 52, Raju stops collecting his NS pension to
clean the cracked terracotta altar behind Block
47, Pasir Ris — his grandmother’s last gift
before the stroke took her tongue. The shrine
had no name, no plaque, just a tin roof leaking
rain onto seven porcelain bowls filled with
burnt joss paper and old kueh. He never believed.
Until the coughing started.
Every night at 3.17am, the air in his 4room flat
thickens like kaya spread left too long in heat.
The TV flickers static even when unplugged. His
neighbour, Mrs Lim from 47B, whispers she hears
children singing in Malay — but her grandson
swears it’s just the aircon. Raju doesn’t tell
them he dreams of bare feet on wet concrete, of
a man in torn khaki pressing a rusted coin into
his palm. The coin bears a chipped chrysanthemum
— Japanese army issue.
He digs under the altar’s foundation after the
monsoon flood. Finds a rusted tin box. Inside: a
folded letter in Chinese script, a child’s red
hair ribbon, and a ledger with names — 1943,
1944, 1945. Not just names. Numbers. Payments.
300 dollars per soul. Paid in rice, in fish, in
silence. His grandmother had been the medium who
collected the debt. The spirits didn’t want
peace. They wanted their dues settled before the
land turned concrete.
The rule: no one speaks of the dead who were
buried without rites. Speak their names, and
they walk. The second rule: if you inherit the
altar, you become the debtcollector. No
exceptions. No appeals. No police. No relief.
He walks to the old kampong marker near the old
Kallang River, now swallowed by the MRT line. At
dawn, he burns a new joss paper bundle — not for
ancestors, but for the names in the ledger. One
by one. He doesn’t pray. He doesn’t weep. He
places each burnt slip into the river’s concrete
drain, where the water still runs thick with
silt and memory.
That night, the coughing stops. The TV stays
dark. Mrs Lim knocks on his door at 8am. She
says her grandson finally slept through the
night. “Funny,” she says, “he said he dreamed of
a woman in a blue sari, giving him ice kachang.”
Raju nods. He doesn’t tell her the sari was his
grandmother’s. Or that the ice kachang was the
last thing the Japanese soldiers gave the
children before they vanished into the jungle.
He locks the altar. The shrine is gone now —
buried under new tiling, under the HDB’s latest
renovation. But every morning, Raju leaves a
bowl of chendol on the balcony. Just one. Always
at 3.17am.
The debt is paid.
The ghosts are quiet.
And the melancholy?
It never left.
It just learned to wait.
