Every dawn before 5am, Tan Keng Huat empties
last night’s leftover nasi lemak into a red
ceramic bowl, adds crushed lemongrass and a drop
of his own blood, then leaves it on the
12thfloor stairwell landing. The ghosts there—
children who drowned in the old kampong canal, a
woman who jumped after her husband was deported—
eat it. He knows. He sees the steam rise
different. Not white. Grey. Like burnt joss
paper.
He’s not a charlatan. His grandfather taught him:
when the land remembers suffering, and the state
erases it, the dead feed on quiet offerings. The
British left the kampongs to rot. The Japanese
took the men. The HDB built over the bones and
called it progress. Keng Huat doesn’t believe in
gods. He believes in what the walls whisper when
the wind hits the corridor wrong.
The Ministry of National Development’s new
“Clean Living Initiative” bans all ritual
offerings in HDB estates. Notices plaster every
lift lobby. “Superstition hinders progress.”
Enforcement squads with clipboards and thermal
cameras start patrolling at midnight. One night,
they catch him. Not with incense. Not with
talismans. With a halfeaten rice ball. Still
warm. The officer picks it up with tweezers.
Smells it. Then looks at Keng Huat’s hands—
darkened with turmeric, cracked from grinding
herbs all day.
The rule bites: no spiritual residue on state
property. Even if it’s just food. Even if it’s
mercy.
Keng Huat is fined $500. His herbal stall at the
Tiong Bahru market is shut for “public hygiene
violation.” His son, freshly drafted into NS,
gets called in for “ideological review.” The
unit next door—where the old woman who used to
leave salted fish for the spirits—vanishes
overnight. No one talks. Everyone stares at
their shoes.
On the seventh night, Keng Huat doesn’t go to
the stairwell. He goes to the rooftop. He kneels.
He places three bowls. One with his last bottle
of ginger wine. One with a cooked egg, peeled by
hand. One with a single strand of his grey hair—
cut with scissors he’s kept since 1957, when the
British left.
The wind doesn’t stir. The streetlights flicker.
The thermal camera above the water tank blinks
off.
At dawn, the bowls are empty. The hair is gone.
On the ledge, a single red thread—tied in a knot
only a grandmother would tie—lies beside a dried
lily. The Ministry’s next inspection comes. The
camera stays dead. The officers leave without
opening the door.
Keng Huat walks to the market the next day. His
stall is open. The sign still reads “Tan’s
Herbal Tonic.” No one asks. No one offers. But
the old Indian woman who sells chendol now
leaves a lump of gula melaka beside his jars.
The Malay uncle who runs the coffee shop slips
him a banana leaf packet of roasted peanuts. No
words. Just food. Just quiet.
The ghosts are fed. The system doesn’t know. But
the block remembers.
He still wakes before dawn. Still makes the bowl.
Still leaves it on the 12th floor. But now, he
doesn’t look back.
