The fish eagle catches an updraft on its outstretched wings, momentarily becoming invisible in the glare of the sun, before diving to emerge from the glittering sea with a wriggling fish in its talons. The group of tourists collectively gasps at the display, raising phones and squinting at the cloudless sky. Their photos will be overexposed, the majestic alabaster sweep of the raptor’s wing indistinguishable from baby blue sky; the act of preservation distracting them from the bird itself.
Cheng Boon counts the tourists; there are fourteen of them. Fourteen is not a good number; nothing with four is, it sounds like death. Thirteen of them are making noises of appreciation at the wildlife, sweltering under the punishing afternoon glare; one even looks to be unpacking a drone. He sighs and hurries over, the buzz of the drone will frighten the birds. This far from mainland Singapore, with its skyscrapers jousting with the sky, the sounds of humanity are a distant inconvenience for the birds and the crabs of Pulau Semakau. The fourteenth guest catches his eye; the man is about forty, hair prematurely thinning, with the same sun-blasted, salt-scoured complexion that Cheng Boon wears—brown, vellum-like skin that transcended race, all being equal on the sea. The man, like Cheng Boon, is of the tides, even if his faded Metallica t-shirt (a knock-off, the band’s name misspelt) and shorts do not distinguish him from the crowd.
The tourists are corralled to the displays showing the sanitised history of the island, and its glorious role in the city it orbits. Semakau is a landfill, stitched together from two islands, cradled by a diaphanous underwater membrane so that the ash of Singapore’s effluvia doesn’t leach into the sea; against all odds, the birds and the reef creatures have returned. All it cost the country was two villages. Yes, all the villagers moved out and were resettled into government housing, he told an inquisitive teenager. There were a few on this trip, probably doing research for a school project. They nodded at the generosity of the government, the provision of flats with running water and electricity in exchange for the stilted kampung homes in the village of Pulau Semakau. Those new flats were cages of glass, and concrete, and steel. They gently suffocated the spirits of Cheng Boon’s father and grandfather; men of the sea who coaxed a living out of the reefs in the shallow waters about Semakau, and who didn’t care for the open sky replaced by smooth ceilings, or the breath of the South China Sea replaced by the dull whir of a ceiling fan.
He would have told them that the village of his youth was a small and perfect thing, but what is a small and perfect thing compared to the growing appetite of a nascent mega-city? That appetite was all it took for them to murder a village. This is not the story that the groups come here to listen to, not when they have the sparkling sea before them and the shining city behind. No, they want this thread of the story to be pure and clean, to leave with pictures for Facebook and Instagram, and peeling sunburn to show off in their air-conditioned offices and classrooms. Cheng Boon ushers the group back to the waiting boat as a barge comes by with the day’s complement of ash from the incinerators on the mainland. Semakau is an open grave for his boyhood village, and it is still being buried, handful by handful, barge by barge, with funereal ash. He counts the group one last time before he starts the boat. Thirteen. He smiles and leaves a trail of diesel tinted smoke on the water as he returns the group to civilization.
It is forbidden to navigate his small boat between the container ships and tankers plying the southern ports on the southern coast of Singapore. His boat could vanish under the bow of one of those behemoths, be split in two without their crew noticing, be drawn in by the gravity of their mighty propellers and sliced to ribbons. Yet he does it anyway, a minnow amidst whales. In truth, Cheng Boon could have read the waves on a moonless night, feeling the currents merely by the tug on the bow of his tiny boat. Unlike the modern craft he piloted earlier, with its air-conditioned cabin and plush seats, his own boat is a rickety thing of wood, with brittle tires hung around the gunwales to cushion against jetties or other craft. From the jetty, he can see guttering candle flames on the island. Government officials would have tutted, said something about grass fires and handed out a fine from a booklet in triplicate, but Cheng Boon is on no such mission.
Away from the mainland, with the dark of the sea on all sides of the beach, without the glare of electric lights, the sky, with its dusting of stars, felt so close that Cheng Boon could have reached out and touched it. Leaving the mainland for the islands never got old, not for a child of Semakau. He hoists a bag over his shoulder, bottles sweating through the thin canvas, and starts the short hike to the lights on the island.
The man from before has laid out a selection of offerings on sandy ground, illuminated by a semi-circle of candles. Betel nuts, mangoes so sweet and full of juice that there are streaks of sticky fluid dripping from their bases, fragrant flowers and wooden bowls of yellow rice. In the centre, a larger flame on a small metal platter burns, aromatic gum reducing to dark ash.
“I thought I left someone behind,” says Cheng Boon.
“I think you knew you did,” responds the man, bare to the waist now, sweat running down his back.
“I am Cheng Boon,” says Cheng Boon, extending a hand. The stranger takes it. “Affendi,” he says.
Cheng Boon offers Affendi a bottle of water and sits on the ground. The other man takes it gratefully; it has been a long day under the sun.
“Terima Kasih, abang,” says Affendi. Thank you, brother.
“There has been no keramat ceremony here in many years. Were you from this island?” asks Cheng Boon.
“No, I am from Johor.”
“Far from home then. Why would you come to respect my village?”
The other man was silent, the light from the candles casting upwards shadows on his face, the heady smoke from the burning gum resin teasing both their noses. He takes a handful of the sandy ground and lets it trickle out of a closed fist and the wind kisses it on its way to the ground, scattering the sand all the way up the beach. “To make the island, your country bought parts of mine, the flat bottomed boards scraped it from the rivers and the beaches next to the sea. Men came to chase us from our kampung, and they took the ground from beneath our houses.”
Cheng Boon nods. The growing city had to be fed, and it ingested man and earth alike. “You are orang laut, then.” Sea people.
“Yes, but after the boats scraped sand from around us, the rivers washed away the mangroves. The whole area habis already.”
“I am sorry for your loss. When I was a child here, we traded with the orang laut from the straits up north. Mud crabs and catfish from the rivers for squid and snapper from the sea. Haiyah, now everything also need passport.”
“Only men need passport,” says Affendi. “Wind and wave no need passport. When men gone already, wind and wave will still be here.”
“Then why you still here?”
Affendi turns to look at the space beyond his small offering ceremony. “Last time when I go back to the old swamps and rivers, our ancestors gone already. Mangrove gone, ancestor gone. My father was the bomoh for our people; no ancestor, no business. At least I go to school, got Form 6. After school, I found the company that owned the boats, company man said the sand was sold to Singapore. I tried the easier places first. Marina. Changi Airport. Now, I’m here.”
Cheng Boon feels an affinity with the spiritualist from Malaysia. They were both people left behind, those who could not get onto the giant unstoppable vehicle of progress, who instead got mangled under its wheels, and in their middle age, could only see it pulling away in the distance, with the rest of the country on its back. “Then our villages died the same way. They moved us from here to flats on the mainland when they needed this island. Our ancestors are here too.”
“Do you want to see?” asks Affendi.
Cheng Boon is confused; there was one child in the village who had the sight, but seeing ghosts had its own costs, and the child was always hollow-eyed and sickly. “I don’t have that skill.”
“I can help, but only for a short while.” Affendi leans towards the candles and burning resin, blowing out the fire on the gum gently and raising a smattering of ash and embers. He presses his thumb into the ash and walks over to where Cheng Boon is seated. There are no night birds or crickets on the island, no sound but the rhythmic lap of waves on sand. Cheng Boon closes his eyes as Affendi smears warm ash over his eyelids, and then another smear on his forehead. When he opens his eyes again, he sees them all.
They glow gently in the dark, the remnants of the village of Pulau Semakau. Cheng Boon can recognize some of them, older aunties and uncles, but echoes of their former lives. He could almost see the village of his youth, houses of wood perched on stilts, with sloped roofs of zinc. The houses were all around the tide line, at times the sea would even lap at the front doors. But the structures were long gone, only the people remained, some aged, some young, neither fully of this world or the next. Here too were strangers from across the sea, dressed in simple sarongs, carrying the tools of fishermen: nets, hooks for boats, traps for crabs. Affendi’s people. His people. Both here on the island, lost spirits. The ghosts are gathered around Affendi’s ceremony, drawn by the sweet smoke and offerings. It is clear to Cheng Boon that despite the circumstances of their lives and deaths, the two groups know each other in the hereafter. They exchange cordial smiles and greetings as they assemble around the only two living people on the island.
“Thank you. For showing me,” says Cheng Boon, and the wind is cooler on his cheeks for the tears that it dries. “It’s been a long time since anybody has offered anything to the spirits here.”
Affendi makes as though to clear off the ceremony, but Cheng Boon stops him. “Let them stay a little longer,” he says. And they sit for a while longer, in the company of spirits.
“You know, Chinese believe that we can burn offerings for the dead, and the riches will be transferred to the afterlife,” says Cheng Boon.
“Some of my people believe that things that are respected and loved have spirits.”
The two of them look to the jetty.
The boat has been in Cheng Boon’s family since before he was born, though little enough remains of the original. Panels have been ripped out and replaced, the engine has been overhauled. But it was his father’s boat, and now it is his. Both men worked to empty a large plastic can of fuel about the deck. The two men stand knee-deep in the calm sea, watching. Cheng Boon should have felt something when he sees the flames licking the deck, spreading along the salt-infused wood and burning blue and green with the flaking paint. The boat is the last thing of his village that he owns. The sole physical link to his youth and roots. But he will continue bringing tourists here, continue telling them the sanctioned history of the island. He glances away from the fire, and looks at the other man, a stranger to him until hours ago, but now siblings in an old, nameless grief. What common name can there be for the depredations of the many on the few?
“Look,” says Affendi. The fire has bitten deep into the boat, the frame is crumbling into itself, and soon it will start taking on water. But there is still a little of the magic of the ash in his eyes, and Cheng Boon can still see the ghosts, both of his villagers and Affendi’s, all the peoples of the sea. Like the two men, the ghosts are knee-deep in the water. There is something happening to the boat, even as it burns and fractures into the water—there is a shadow of it left, a ghost of a boat, and the old spirits are already beginning to clamber aboard.
“We will get into trouble for this tomorrow, you know,” says Cheng Boon.
“So kesian that your old boat caught fire when you came back to check on the island to find a lost tourist, very hardworking,” says Affendi.
“Thank you for letting me see them again.”
“Thank you for the boat. I wonder where the ghosts will go?”
There was no changing the past, not for either village. The present serves too many the way it is. There is no atoning for a past denied. The future, now the future is malleable. There can be peace for the dead, a way for the ghosts to take to the waves again. No restitution without sacrifice; a debt had to be paid. Cheng Boon had never been far from Semakau, neither in his youth nor when he found his job. But he has something new now. A new story, for tomorrow’s tourists, maybe. About a ghost ship, crewed by spirits from Singapore and Malaysia alike, plying the waters. Cheng Boon smiles and waits for the sun to rise on a new day.