At 14, Mei Lin took over her mother’s nightly
rounds at the abandoned kampong shrine behind
Block 43, Tiong Bahru — not for piety, but
because the old folks said the stone kept the
ghosts quiet.
The British had pulled out, the Japanese left
their scars, and the HDB flats were still wet
with cement when the first families moved in.
But beneath the new concrete, the land
remembered. The shrine’s stone, carved with a
faded kueh lapis pattern, was no decoration — it
was a latch. When touched by a volunteer’s bare
hand at dusk, it hummed. Not loud. Just enough
to make the children stop crying.
In 1957, the Housing Board bulldozed the last of
the kampungs. The shrine was sealed under the
new stairwell. Mei Lin kept volunteering —
sweeping ash, lighting joss sticks under the
fire escape, whispering to the dark. She knew
the rules: never bring food inside, never speak
the names of the lost, never let the stone go
cold.
Then the power cut lasted three nights.
The stone went silent.
By dawn of the fourth, old Mr. Tan from 43C
forgot his wife’s face. He stood at the lift,
holding a plate of kueh bangkit, asking for “the
girl with the braid” — but his wife had died in
’43.
The next night, three toddlers in Block 43 woke
screaming — not from nightmares, but from
remembering faces they’d never seen. A Malay
auntie from 43B started speaking in Hokkien,
reciting names of Chinese ancestors she never
knew.
Mei Lin climbed down the service ladder into the
sealed shrine. The stone was warm. Cracked.
She pressed her palm to it.
Memories flooded her — not hers. A woman in a
cheongsam, carrying a baby through the 1942
bombings. A Malay fisherman singing to the tide
before the Japanese took his boat. A Sikh
soldier burying a tin of sugar under a banyan
root, whispering, “For the child who’ll eat it
when the world is kind.”
The stone wasn’t just a charm. It was a vessel —
woven from the first souls who died here,
holding their last breaths so the new ones
wouldn’t drown in forgetting.
She took the stone to the rooftop at midnight,
under the waxing moon.
Beneath her, the block slept.
She laid the stone on the concrete.
Then she took out her mother’s red thread — the
one she used to tie joss sticks — and tied it
around the crack.
At first light, the humming returned.
Mr. Tan remembered his wife’s name.
The toddlers stopped crying.
The Malay auntie sighed, said, “Ah, so that’s
why I always liked sweet potato cake.”
No one spoke of what happened.
But every night since, Mei Lin walks to the
stairwell, barefoot, and presses her hand to the
wall.
The stone still hums.
And in the HDB blocks, the old ones sleep.
And the new ones dream — not of war, or loss, or
loneliness — but of sugar, and song, and hands
that held them before they were born.
