It’s that time of the year again.
A month long of ashes flying all over the place. A month long of obnoxiously loud getai singers bawling whistle-register notes at the top of their lungs till 10pm every night. A month long of the odour of burning hell-money and jasmine-scented joss sticks infusing the country.
Yep. Those who observe the Hungry Ghost Festival will know what I mean. Personally, I don’t observe the Hungry Ghost Festival, because I don’t believe in ghosts and such.
A short introduction of the Hungry Ghost Festival to those who don’t know: It takes place during the whole of the Chinese 7th month. People believe that the gates of hell will open, and then the spirits are released to wander around for a month. Normally, people will leave food offerings out for these ghosts to appease them, usually on the side of pavements or roads, so that they don’t drag the live people down into hell with them when they return. People will also burn “hell money”, which is basically just paper that will turn into currency for the ghosts to use in the underworld. How much hell money you burn for your ancestors is sort of a measure of how filial you are. Another version I heard from my friend is that these ghosts are people who had been uncared and unprovided for when they were alive, and so these food offerings are to “provide” for them and appease them, so that they do not disturb the living.
It’s considered taboo to step on any of the offerings or hell money ashes left on the roadside. People say that if you do accidentally step on any of those, just apologise and move on, or you will fall sick, or get possessed, or something. Even though I don’t believe I will get harmed, I still tend to avoid stepping on anything in order not to seem disrespectful. To date, I do not remember ever having stepped on any offerings, joss sticks or ashes.
Anyway, story time.
This just happened last week. I was walking with my sister to a nearby shopping mall. There were two ways to get there. One way was through a hawker centre (look it up – it’s a must to visit one of these and try the food if you ever come to Singapore). The other way was through an open parking area. Normally we walk through the hawker centre because it’s nearer. But during the Hungry Ghost Festival, most of the hawkers will set up little shrines in their stalls, plus one big collective one just outside. As a result the collective fumes of the joss sticks are almost unbearable for both my sister and I, who have sensitive respiratory tracts. And so to avoid lung destruction or death by suffocation, we took the other path – through the open parking area. Nice, clean air.
Since there were cars driving around looking for parking lots, we stuck to the pavement. It was an uneven one, with plenty of loose bricks and cracked tiles which the government somehow never replaced, but years of living here had taught us never to lose our footing. We could easily navigate the pavement with our eyes closed.
Then my sister suggested an idea.
“Let’s see who manages to walk the longest distance on the pavement edge without falling off,” she said.
It was one of our favourite childhood games. I had always done this just for fun as a child, way before we were taught how to use balancing beams in gym. My mom wasn’t thrilled at an unstable four-year-old being allowed to wobble on the rough cement edge of a pavement, but my grandpa encouraged it – he said it helped to hone my balance skills. Anyway, I digress. I quickly agreed, and we started.
I went slow at first, putting one foot in front of the other cautiously. I certainly didn’t want to trip and fall on those loose bricks! But then I turned around and saw my sister behind me, quickly catching up to me. “You suck,” she taunted. “Why are you going so slow?”
“Hey, this isn’t a race!” I argued. “It’s a matter of -“
She didn’t let me finish. “You suck, you suck you suck,” she chanted in a singsong voice, and started moving faster and faster towards me. Not wanting to lose out, and not wanting her to crash into me on the narrow edge, I picked up my pace. Laughing and teasing each other, we half-ran about three-quarters of the length of the pavement.
Then it happened, as I knew it would. In an effort not to bump into me, she had tried to halt her footsteps, but somehow failed. Then she had tried to widen her stance, but her ankle hit a loose brick that was sticking up from the ground. Arms flailing wildly, she descended not-so-gracefully upon the rough, merciless cement waiting for her.
My first response was to gloat and tease. “Who’s the sucker now?” I yelled in my excitement, doubling over with laughter. “Get up and stop being so stupid. I have a plaster in my bag, I think.”
She stood up slowly, and the first thing I noticed wasn’t her skinned knee, nor was it a slight graze upon her elbow, but a huge patch of mashed-up huat kueh (a sort of steamed Chinese cupcake) on her butt, which she immediately started brushing off.
My eyes went wide.
“You fell on an offering,” I gasped, slightly horrified.
Broken joss sticks lay strewn all over, crushed by her weight. Cake lay mashed up into the ground, mingled with the molten wax from the candles that are so hard to remove when the offerings are over. A dismal-looking shou tao (a kind of peach-shaped bun usually eaten during birthdays, to represent long life for the birthday person) lay hunched up in the corner where the pavement and the road met, entirely squashed up with the filling more outside than inside. Luckily the candles had already been snuffed out by the wind, so my sister did not sustain any burn injuries.
We were at a loss on what to do. On one hand, we didn’t believe in ghosts, and so we weren’t frightened by the prospect of possession or whatever. On the other hand, a few passers-by had already seen her fall, and we didn’t want to seem disrespectful. Should we clean up the mess? Should we apologise? If so, to whom? The people, or the “spirits”? To the devotee who put these things out? If so, who and where was he? These questions flashed through my mind in a split second, and then not knowing what else to do, I grabbed my sister and ran as if my life depended on it.
//
The next day was a beautiful Saturday morning. Not your typical storybook sunny morning with azure blue skies and all that, but a comforting one, with rain beating against the windows and mild thunder every now and then. It had a comforting beauty of its own. I laid cosily in bed for a few minutes, listening to the soothing sounds of nature. Then I looked over at my sister in her own bed.
I could already tell she wasn’t feeling so well. Her face was extremely pale, and she was sweating despite the cooling weather we get so rarely in this hot devil’s armpit of a country. She could barely sit up without the whole room spinning, and her temperature was sky-high, she said. I got worried. She has the strongest immune system in this whole family, and yet…
I hopped out of bed to rummage for some Panadol and water, and told her to pop a couple of pills and rest. The pills would do their job.
Something didn’t feel right, though. As much as I tried to convince myself that it was just an ordinary fever, that she would be well again in a couple of days at most, something deep down inside of me knew it wasn’t. That something knew it had to do with the previous day’s accident.
But that’s all rubbish, I argued with myself. It’s just some food left on the pavement by some superstitious people for the crows and ants to ravage eventually. It can’t be for actual spirits. They don’t exist!!
But how do you know they don’t exist? the small voice shot back. Just because you haven’t seen them doesn’t mean they’re not real!
I had enough and spent the next few hours alternating between checking on my sister and drowning out the small voice at the back of my head with full-volume music through my earbuds.
//
Sunday came and went, and still the fever showed no signs of letting up. If anything, it had gotten worse. Getting worried, I asked if she was well enough to at least walk to a nearby clinic. I don’t remember how, but somehow, she managed to drag herself out of bed and go down to the clinic with me. Even the doctor looked worried. He said she looked extremely dehydrated and asked if she was drinking enough water.
“She’s been drinking plenty,” I said. “Goes through a 1.5 litre bottle within 2 hours. If that’s not enough I don’t know what is.”
The doctor looked skeptical. “All riiight…continue to stay hydrated then. Here’s your prescription…”
We went to bed after the visit to the clinic. I desperately hoped that she would recover soon. Most of all, I hoped it was only an ordinary fever. I wouldn’t want it to be anything else.
//
I was woken up out of my sleep by a hand shaking me. Squinting up through heavy eyelids, I saw the silhouette of my sister. “What do you want?” I grunted, a little annoyed. “It’s, like, 3am. If you want water, I left the bottle on your bedside table.”
“It’s not that,” she whispered, even though there was no one else in the house to wake up. “I…I had a bad dream.”
At first, my annoyance grew upon hearing the statement. “So I suppose you want to come and cuddle in bed with me and hope that I can protect you, like the grown-ass woman you are?” I retorted.
“No…it’s not that. Sorry for waking you up. I…I just…” She broke down sobbing.
Slightly alarmed now, I felt a twinge of regret. “Hey, what’s going on? What happened? What did you dream?”
For a while, she sat on the edge of my bed, her body racked with terrified sobs, unable to explain what happened. I waited patiently while rubbing her back soothingly, waiting for her to come round. Finally, the sobs quieted. She shifted position to make herself more comfortable, and started recounting her ordeal.
//
“I was in a cave,” she began. “I was with an exploring team, checking out the caves in a mountain. We’d just stumbled upon a huge one, with many bats hanging from the ceiling. We were discussing the possibility of setting up camp inside there.
All of a sudden, a couple appears at the mouth of the cave. They seem to be shouting at us, trying to tell us something, that we shouldn’t go in there, and we should come out as quickly as possible. They were only a few metres away from us, and yet we couldn’t hear what they were trying to say.” She paused for a while, then continued.
“Just as suddenly as they had appeared, they disappeared. We shrugged it off and started to set up our stuff inside. I was helping a teammate pitch a tent.
The teammate told me to go grab a tent pole, so I went over to the bag where they kept the equipment. I reached in, felt around and took hold of what I thought was a tent pole.
But when I pulled it out, to my horror, it had turned from a tent pole into a woman. The same woman from the couple just now. Instead of looking like a normal person as she did just now, she had become this…this…” Here she broke down again, struggling to put into words the horror of what she had seen.
“She was a demon woman,” my sister said eventually. I didn’t want to probe further. How she could have known that the woman was a demon instead of just plain ugly, I didn’t know, but I didn’t want to upset her by asking. It was obviously too terrifying to recount, so I waited for her to continue.
“She stared at me, looked right into my soul, and at that moment I could feel her reading all my innermost thoughts, all that had ever happened to me since the day I was born, all the memories I had repressed in the recesses of my heart – she knew all of them. Just in that split second. And then – and then – “
“And then what?” I questioned, after half a minute of silence. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I must admit that night her recounting of her dream sent chills down my spine.
“And then I heard a voice – she didn’t open her mouth to talk or anything, but I just knew it was her voice – I heard her telling me, a warning. I don’t know if it was a warning or a threat, or…”
I couldn’t contain my curiosity. “What did she say?”
“She said, ‘First you show the utmost disrespect to my husband and I, you trample and mess up our sacred offerings, and then you come into my cave, my home, without my permission. Let this be the last time you do so. It’s a pity for me and a good thing for you that my husband is so merciful, or I would have had you the first time.’ Of course I pleaded with her, trying to convince her that I had no control of what I was doing in the dream, and…”
Here she started screaming and sobbing for all she was worth. For a moment I feared she would succumb to the hyperventilating. I ran for a plastic bag, but when I dashed back into the room holding it, she was strangely calm again. A sort of weird aura surrounded her, and she was sitting up with a kind of strength she hadn’t had since the fever. Her eyes looked glazed over, as if she’d just seen some sort of vision.
“So…what happened next…?” I asked cautiously, dropping the plastic bag and tensing every muscle in my body, ready for whatever unpredictable action my sister would do next.
“She opened her mouth wide, wider than any snake you’ve ever seen. And I caught a glimpse inside her gargantuan mouth, which seemed to swallow up all my surroundings, including myself. I saw…the Underworld.
I saw the millions and millions of souls being tortured, and I heard their screams. Their screams…I will never forget. Unlike any other sound that you would expect to come from a human. Guttural, echoing, mingling with the screams of millions of other sinners being punished for their crimes…The last thing I heard before I woke up was her voice saying that next time, if it happens again, I will join them…Tell me,” she added, gripping my shoulders with sudden fierce intensity and staring right into my eyes. “Tell me that I will be able to erase the memories. Tell me I can forget…Tell me how…their screams…their pain…” She trailed off here, her fingernails still digging into my shoulders, creating little crescent-shaped marks. Her eyes, plain and glazed over, stared right into the depths of my soul.
Then without another word, she marched right back to her own bed, fell down in it, and was instantly sound asleep. I suddenly realised that my own legs were shaking so badly I could barely walk back to mine.
//
She hasn’t been awake since. She’s not dead, but I can’t get her to wake up. No amount of shaking, calling, blasting music or movies at full volume, or anything, can get her to wake up. She’s now in the hospital under examination, but the doctor says there is absolutely nothing wrong with her. Even her temperature is normal now. The fever is gone. But she just won’t wake up and I don’t know what to do. I can’t decide if this is a case for the doctor or an exorcist.
Whatever it is, I really hope she wakes up soon. This is all my fault. I shouldn’t have grabbed her and run off. I should’ve just apologised like people say. It’s too late for that now, though. I can only watch and wait.
I never believed in spirits, but just because you don’t believe in them does not mean they are not there.
Be very careful.