She wakes in the attic of a shophouse that no
longer exists on any map, fingers curled around
a brass compass rusted shut, its needle
trembling like a dying insect. The air smells of
damp joss paper and burnt coconut husk—Kampong
Kallang, 1957, before the land was sold, before
the state came with chalk and blueprints. She
does not remember her name, only the weight of
the compass, and the whisper in her bones: The
spirit lines are broken.
Every night since, she walks the overgrown paths
where kampong houses once stood, guided by the
compass’s faint pulse. It only moves when she
nears a tai seng—a spirit trapped by misplaced
earth energy. Last week, it led her to the well
behind the old Chinese clan temple, where a boy
in a torn school uniform wept silently, his body
halfsunk in silt. He had drowned in 1943, during
the Japanese curfew, when his mother hid him to
save him from conscription. The water had
swallowed his name, and now his spirit could not
move on because the land’s chi had been severed
by colonial surveyors who drew straight lines
through ancestral graves.
The compass won’t point to her own grave. That’s
the rule: a feng shui master who forgets her
past cannot rest until she restores what she
broke. She doesn’t know she once advised the
British land office, sold the rights to sacred
ground for a silver watch and a promise of
safety for her children. She doesn’t remember
how she buried the compass under the durian tree
to seal the breach—and how, in her grief, she
erased herself.
Tonight, the compass flares hot against her palm.
It pulls her to the last standing kampong shrine—
a crooked wooden stall, now a rusted HDB
electrical box. A Malay family lives there now,
their son just completed NS. They leave rice and
oranges on the concrete slab every Hari Raya.
The compass trembles. The spirit lines are not
broken. They were replaced. The boy’s ghost
isn’t the only one. Dozens—Chinese, Malay,
Indian—lie buried under concrete foundations,
their names lost, their offerings forgotten. The
wealth gap didn’t just divide money. It divided
memory.
She takes the compass. Uses her bare hands to
dig under the electrical box. Finds a tin box
wrapped in oilcloth. Inside: a faded photo of
her daughter, smiling beside a new HDB flat in
Tiong Bahru. A receipt for a down payment. And a
note in her own hand: For the land to heal, the
soul must forget.
She does not cry. She does not speak. She takes
the compass and smashes it against the concrete.
The ground shudders. Not with thunder. With
sighs.
In the morning, the HDB crew finds the
electrical box cracked open, wires tangled like
roots. The new tenants say the boy’s ghost
doesn’t visit anymore. The woman who lived in
the attic? Gone. No one remembers seeing her
leave.
At the hawker centre, a woman in her sixties
buys kaya toast and weak tea. She looks at the
HDB block across the road—Block 43, Kampong
Kallang—and for a moment, her eyes glaze over.
She doesn’t know why. She just knows, deep in
her ribs, that something important was buried,
and now it’s quiet.
The compass is dust. The land breathes again.
The memory is gone.
But the children who play under the flats now?
They never get lost. Not even in the dark.
