In 1952, Tiong Bahru’s concrete blocks still
smelled of wet cement and dried fish, but the
real ghosts lived in the hollows between floors —
the ones the British left behind when they
packed their khakis and called it progress.
Every dusk, Siew Lan, temple volunteer since age
fourteen, placed three steamed buns on the
crumbling altar of the abandoned kopi
shopturnedshrine, where Malay, Chinese, and
Indian spirits still gathered under the
flickering kerosene lamp. The rules were simple:
feed them once a night, never speak their names,
and never let the offering go cold. The first
rule kept the dead quiet. The second kept the
living sane. The third kept the blocks standing.
She did it because her mother once whispered,
“If you don’t feed them, they feed on your
dreams.” Siew Lan never forgot. She wore the
same faded blue sari every night, the one with
the frayed hem her aunt stitched with red thread
— a charm, not a fashion. The buns came from Ah
Ma’s stall in the market, the same one that sold
curry puffs to Japanese soldiers during the
Occupation, and later to NS conscripts who still
called it “the good old days.” Nostalgia here
wasn’t memory. It was currency. And the ghosts
were the bank.
Then Lim Mei Lin, her childhood friend from the
same kampong, came at midnight with tears in her
eyes and a tin of preserved pork in her hands.
Her brother, a conscript who’d just returned
from Malaya with a limp and a silence deeper
than the sea, was dying — not from fever, but
from something that crawled out of his dreams
and ate his breath. “They say if you give the
ghosts something they want,” Mei Lin whispered,
voice raw, “they’ll take what’s hurting you.”
Siew Lan shook her head. No names. No bargains.
The rules were not suggestions. They were the
mortar holding the HDB flats together.
But Mei Lin slipped the pork onto the altar
instead of the buns.
The next morning, the first bun rotted overnight
— blackened, oozing, smelling of burnt incense
and saltwater. By noon, Mrs. Tan from Block 47
woke screaming: her husband, dead since ’45,
stood at her window, holding a bowl of his own
pickled radish, asking for seconds. By dusk,
three more spirits appeared at windows, doorways,
stairwells — not hungry. Angry. Hungry for more
than food. For memory. For names. For the
stories people refused to bury.
Siew Lan went back alone. She took the rotting
pork, burned it in the alley behind the shrine,
and placed three fresh buns — one for each
spirit, one for Mei Lin’s brother, one for the
silence between them. The lamp flared once, then
went out. When the dawn came, Mei Lin’s brother
walked out of the hospital, whole. But the buns
on the altar? They never aged. Never rotted.
Never disappeared. And every night after, when
Siew Lan placed them down, the air thickened
with the scent of tamarind and sweat — the smell
of a nation learning to forget, but the ghosts
refusing to let go.
She still feeds them. Now, the buns are always
warm. Always there. And sometimes, when the wind
blows right through Block 23, you can hear the
murmur of a hundred voices — not asking for food.
Asking for their names back.
