Chinatown
We had just rented a shophouse in Chinatown. The place looked very glamorous after the renovations. We were the first few tenants to move into the street, having secured the location from the owner.
After the facelift given by the Urban Renewal Authority, the area was reborn in shades of pastels. Karaoke lounges and restaurants serving authentic Chinese cuisine lined the street, and the place bustled with activity all day and all night.
The owners of the shophouses were trying to make full use of the place by renting it out for commercial uses. After shifting to our new premises, business was not that good. Two key-partners of our company had left and labour turnover was increasing.
I could not pinpoint what was exactly wrong with the premises, but everything was nice. Our office was right besides a restaurant. On our left, a medicine hall sold all kinds of herbs and strange animal parts.
Six months down the road, it started with the calligraphy centre that was three shops away from us. On that particular day, a lot of policemen hung around the area. We were told that one of the partners had emblezzed a couple of million dollars and had fled from Singapore. After a month, the place was deserted.
The next shop to be affected was the one besides it, a restaurant. Everyone knew that business was bad. Some feng shui enthusiasts claimed that the restaurant was standing at the corner of a cross-junction and that gave the business bad luck. It was a matter of months before the owner of that restaurant also was declared bankrupt.
There was one matter who used to work at that premise. One fine day, by coincidence, we had the chance to meet up at Chinatown food centre. He informed me that he was retrenched and was looking for a job.
When I offered him a job in our office premises, he flatly refused the offer, because he did not want to work anywhere near the premises at all. I pestered him for an explanation, and he reluctantly revealed to me.
He told me that in the evenings, some of the waiters had felt that a heavy man was walking on the parquet floor. The shophouses were three storeys high. Sometimes, when you are on the first floor, you can hear a heavy person walking on the second floor. When all the waiters rushed up to the second floor to find out who it was on the second floor, the walking noise would have stopped and then it would come from above, on the third floor.
One of the waitress actually had a glimpse of the spirit. They had coined a term for it, calling it datuk. She was seated at a table and folding napkins with her back against the wall when she felt the wall move. A sudden chill shook her. She turned around and saw, a huge black shadow, of five feet plus in height. A complete black shadow of a human form, it walked out of the wall in the middle of the restaurant and walked around the restaurant, touching the tables, chairs and walked towards the kitchen.
Hearing this, the boss of the restaurant consulted a medium. The medium, after all the prayers, told the restaurant owner that the datuk lived on the premises. He explained that there used to be a tree in the compound that there used to be a tree in the compound behind and the datuk used to reside there. The medium told the restaurant boss to move his business. He had tried his best in coaxing the datuk to leave, but it had refused to budge.
The boss refused to listen to the medium and consulted with another experienced medium. This one took a lot of money and made a small altar for the datuk. He promised the boss that the datuk would not disturb the place anymore.
But they were all wrong.
The manager had the workers keep the restaurant spick-and-span. No matter how, every time the health officers came for inspection, they will find cockroaches and lizards all over the kitchen. In a matter of months, somehow or rather, the whole restaurant went bankrupt as customers would be angry when there will be blackouts at nights-every night, not once but many times that spooked all the customers.
I did not know whether to believe this waiter or not. A month later, I had a chance to meet two, old ladies. They came to my office premises, claiming to be former owners of the dilapidated shophouse before it was taken by the Urban Renewal Authority.
Over a cup of tea, they revealed to us that after our office premises, the rest of the shophouses were actually funeral parlours in the olden days. In fact, the land opposite the Jin Rickshaw Building had been vacant for so many years because no Singapore developer would purchase the land because in the olden days, there were many major funeral parlours on that piece of land.
In the olden days, thousand of coolies would leave their hometown and come to Singapore to work. Many a time they would work until old age. Coolie work was harsh in the day. By night, most of them became opium smokers, drug addicts. What they had earned during the day went to their living expenses and food, leaving little for their puny savings.
But every one of them saved enough for their funeral expenses. A few weeks before they know they were about to die, these aged coolies would go to the parlour and lie in their own coffins, waiting for death to come.
Many people believed the souls of these people are not at peace yet, and this was why many shophouses at the premises lost a lot of money, and some say still do.