Every night at 11.30pm, Ah Ma lights three joss
sticks by the seventhfloor stairwell of Block 47,
Tampines. The smell of sandalwood clings to the
concrete like old sweat. No one else dares go up
there after dark—not since the three children
from 703, 704, and 705 vanished without
footprints, their slippers still by the door,
their schoolbags full of unfinished exam papers.
The Housing Board never explained. The police
said it was “accidents of the mind.” But Ah Ma
knows. The land remembers.
Before the HDB towers rose, this was Pulau
Ubin’s edge—a kampung where Chinese, Malay, and
Indian families shared one spirit altar under a
banyan tree. When the government cleared it in
’51 to build flats, they buried the altar
beneath concrete. The spirits didn’t leave. They
waited. And when a child’s name was spoken too
loudly near the seventh floor, the old ones took
a soul to balance the disrespect.
Ah Ma was the last medium of the kampung. Her
mother taught her to sing the names of the dead
into betel nut shells, to feed them with rice
and salt under moonless nights. After the
clearance, she was forbidden to practice. “You
bring bad luck,” said the new neighbours. “This
is modern Singapore.” But she kept the ritual.
Quiet. Secret. Until her granddaughter, Mei Lin,
began sleepwalking to the stairwell, mumbling
words in a tongue no one taught her.
On the third night Mei Lin stood at the edge of
the seventhfloor landing, barefoot, face turned
to the wall where the altar once stood. Her
palms pressed flat. Her breath fogged the paint.
Ah Ma didn’t shout. She didn’t cry. She lit the
joss sticks. She poured rice into a cracked
porcelain bowl. She spoke the old names—not to
summon, but to return. The wind didn’t stir. The
lights didn’t flicker. But the wall cracked—just
a hairline fissure—where the altar had been
buried.
At dawn, Mei Lin woke in bed, shivering,
clutching a single yellowed photo: three
children in kampung clothes, standing before a
mossy stone altar. Behind them, a woman in a
faded cheongsam—Ah Ma’s mother—smiling. The
photo had never existed in their flat. It had
been lost in ’52.
That afternoon, the Housing Board sent men to
repair the stairwell’s damp patch. The workers
broke through the wall behind the seventhfloor
landing. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, they found
three pairs of small slippers. And beneath them,
a carved stone tablet—old, cracked, inscribed
with names in three scripts: Chinese, Jawi,
Tamil. No one knew who had buried it. No one
dared touch it again.
Mei Lin never sleepwalks anymore. But every
night at 11.30pm, she sits with Ah Ma by the
stairwell, and together, they light two joss
sticks—one for the lost, one for the living.
The curse is broken. The land is quiet.
But the tablet remains. And the seventh floor
still smells faintly of sandalwood.
