She wakes on a thin mattress in Block 43,
Geylang, the ceiling fan creaking like a dying
rooster. No recollection of how she got there.
No memory of speaking Malay. Only the scent of
kasturi and burnt joss paper clinging to her
skin. The year is 1961. She returned from London
two months ago — daughter of a Britisheducated
doctor, raised on grammar books and Oxford
commas, now enrolled in Raffles Girls’ School
under the new national curriculum. Academic
pressure is a live wire: if she fails her
midyear exams, her scholarship vanishes, her
father’s reputation crumbles, and they’ll be
sent back to a Malaysia that no longer wants
them.
The first whisper comes at 3:17 a.m. — not in
English, not in Mandarin, but in the soft,
rolling cadence of Kedah Malay. “Kau ingat?”
It’s coming from the wall behind her bed. She
presses her ear to the plaster. The sound stops.
Next night, it’s louder. “Kau bakar rumah kita.”
She doesn’t know what it means. She doesn’t know
why her hands shake when she writes “kampong” in
her history essay.
The second rule bites when she tries to report
it. The school nurse, a Chinese woman from
Penang, shuts the door. “Don’t talk about things
you can’t see, girl. You’re not in the kampong
anymore.” The third rule bites when her
neighbour, an old Peranakan woman who sells kueh
lapis under the block, slips her a folded piece
of cloth — inside, a lock of black hair tied
with a red string. “Your mother gave this to the
spirit before the fire,” she says, voice like
dry leaves. “You forgot. The spirit remembers.”
She starts dreaming of a wooden house with a red
door, a stove where curry puffs steamed beside a
burning Quran. A girl in a batik dress — her own
face, but older, eyes hollow — pours kopi into a
tin cup and says nothing. The next morning, her
history teacher marks her essay “A” but writes
in red: “You wrote ‘Malay as the mother tongue’ —
yet you write as if you never heard it. Why?”
She finds her father’s old trunk. Inside: a
faded photo of her, age six, standing beside a
woman in a kebaya, both holding a lantern for
Hari Raya. Behind them, smoke. The caption in
her father’s hand: “Before the fire. Before the
silence.”
The whispers grow into voices. They name her:
“Siti.” Not her English name. Not her Chinese
name. The name she was given in the kampong
before the fire that killed her mother and
burned the house down — the fire the British
authorities blamed on “unregulated religious
gatherings,” the fire that forced the family to
flee to England.
On the night before her final exam, she walks
alone to the old site of Kampong Glam — now a
concrete bus interchange. She digs with her bare
hands under the asphalt where the well once
stood. Her fingers hit something cold: a brass
bell, rusted but intact. When she rings it, the
air shatters. The ghost of the girl in batik
appears — not as spectre, but as flesh. She
speaks in perfect, aching Malay: “You forgot us
so you could pass. So you could be someone else.
”
The girl doesn’t cry. She picks up the bell.
Walks back to her HDB flat. Places it under her
pillow.
In the morning, she writes her exam. Her
handwriting is steady. Her essay on “The Role of
Language in NationBuilding” ends with: “A people
who forget their mother tongue do not build a
nation. They build a silence.”
She passes. Her scholarship stays. Her father
smiles.
But when the fan creaks again at 3:17 a.m., she
doesn’t cover her ears.
She whispers back — in Malay — “Aku ingat.”
The house exhales. The bell rings once.
No one else hears it.
But the ghost doesn’t leave.
And neither does she.
