Every morning before dawn, Siew Lan wipes the
same cracked Formica counter at her late
father’s kopitiam, pouring kopiO for men who
still call the street “Kampong Gelam” even as
the HDB blocks rise behind them. She’s
twentythree, no family left but the aunt who
runs the char kway teow stall next door, and
every month the landlord raises the rent by ten
per cent—until the notice arrives: demolition
for the new MRT interchange.
The British officer’s ghost doesn’t walk—he
lingers in the floorboards. During the
Occupation, he buried tin boxes of prewar
sovereigns under the café’s hearth, thinking the
Japanese wouldn’t dig where a Chinese family
cooked. He never came back. But the soil
remembers.
Siew Lan’s neighbour, Pak Hassan, the Malay
hawker who taught her to stir teh tarik with
three fingers, gets evicted next week. He’s
eightytwo, his stall a relic of the old kampong,
where Chinese, Malay, and Indian families shared
curry puffs and prayed to different gods but
never locked their doors. He can’t afford the
new stall fee.
The rule: no one digs past the third plank
beneath the charcoal oven. Not since 1947, when
a boy who tried to steal the coins came out
screaming, eyes white as dried sardines,
babbling about “the spirit that eats promises.”
The police buried him in a pauper’s grave. The
café stayed closed for a year.
On the night before the bulldozers come, Siew
Lan pries up the plank with a chisel wrapped in
rags. She finds three tins. One full of coins.
One empty. One wrapped in a scrap of batik—
stitched with a single phrase in Jawi: “Jangan
ambil apa yang bukan milik kamu.”
She takes only the coins.
That same night, the char kway teow stall
catches fire—not from gas, not from careless ash.
The wok explodes. The charcoal turns to ash in
seconds. The smoke smells like burnt pandan and
saltwater.
By morning, the landlord is gone. The eviction
order torn. The HDB board calls it “structural
instability”—a lie.
Pak Hassan gets his stall back. Free rent.
Forever.
Siew Lan keeps the coins. She puts one in the
cash register every morning. The rest she buries
under the new tile, where the oven was.
No one else knows.
But every dusk, when the last customer leaves
and the streetlamps flicker on, the air behind
the counter smells like jasmine and wet earth.
And the coins? They never run out.
They only grow heavier.
