On the 15th of November, Mdm Ng will close her flower shop for good. She has been selling flowers for graves at a humble, red-and-white tent for the last forty years. Soon, the Styrofoam boxes that litter the establishment will be discarded, perhaps along with the simple gesture of remembering the dead with a bouquet of fresh flowers, as cheap, plastic flowers bury themselves into the mounds of grass.
Lim Chu Kang cemetery is a sprawling site crowded with headstones and large expanses of flat, grassy land. In 2017, the Government announced that forty-five thousand graves would be exhumed to make way for Tanah Merah Air Base to be built. There are notices with information about exhumation projects, detailing the procedures of reclamation of the remains of the dead, with a list of extended relations who are eligible to make the reclamation. It is a slow, laborious process—the breaking of the concrete headstones, the digging, the separation of the soil from the remains. Even locating the relatives would take time, with no computer system of databases to easily discover where the living relatives reside and whether or not they are living or dead, themselves.
It is no wonder that funeral rites have evolved to catch up with the rest of Singapore’s urban development. Who would afford the cost, time and resources for a six-foot deep burial? Who would keep the space vacant for the dead, when the living still need to be housed? It would be inefficient in comparison to cremation. At Mandai Crematorium, it is possible to cremate two bodies in an hour—processing at least fifteen corpses in one day. Collection of bones and ashes is available within a week. Technology has transformed burial rituals in one giant leap of progress.
What about grief? Does grief warrant a plot of land to return to over and over again? Does grief deserve a day, a week, a year, a lifetime, or even several generations? Or have the lack of physical remembrances forced our dead to exist in a permanent subconscious landscape? The older generation still call upon the dead in ceremonial procedure during the hungry ghost festival—the smell of ash permeating the streets, with offerings lining roadsides during the seventh month. Before the dawn of Deepavali, some families will spend hours in preparation of the favourite food of loved ones—laying out a mouth-watering buffet of briyani, dhalcha, prawn sambal and more on a banana leaves, in front of pictures of loved ones. Prayers are chanted for the blessings of the family and altars in the family home are lit up with oil-lamps and adorned with lavish decorations of garlands in memory of those who have gone. We create grandiose rituals of memory, with no place for physical memories to exist, but will the younger generation continue to conduct these rites?
And what of spirits? As I walked through the cemetery pathways in broad daylight, I was surprised by how tranquil it was. Nature was growing in abundance, flowers sprouting out from broken gravel and covering pathways with soft ground. Birds flitted from flower to flower, taking time to dip their beaks between the petals and sip on the sweet nectar. Some of the flowers had been left by relatives, probably bought from Mdm Ng’s shop in the morning, trimmed and cut by her tired fingers.
‘Lao, liao,’ old, already, she says, when I request to take a photo with her.
It would cost her two thousand dollars a month if she were to open up a modern flower establishment to serve the mourners at the columbarium, which had a high footfall rate, with the ageing population withering away and getting speedily cremated by their younger children and grandchildren.
There is no sentiment in her voice, as she repeats, ‘lao, liao’. Among the graves, there are bright, yellow placards left by John Aw, for ‘Maintenance and Exhumation Services’. There is no escaping the simple fact of human existence, that the living will go on living by whatever means of income or job necessary to make ends meet, even if we have to make vultures of ourselves. For forty years, Mdm Ng has made her money out of the grieving relatives who come to visit the cemetery. Her van is filled paraphernalia —from her walking stick, to her bottled water and Tupperware with dried food. She is no stranger to spirits, and deals with the judgement of her profession by hanging multiple protective prayer beads on her rear-view mirror. Despite this, she is not governed by spirit and emotional attachment, but by the laws of market competition—the bigger fish always eat the smaller fish. There is no sign of resignation as she takes her time to talk to her friend on the phone in the cemetery, hidden among her boxes empty of flowers. She gracefully steps away to make room in the market for the likes John Aw to rule the land for the time being. That is, until the exhumation process is completed.
"Forgotten"- A Writing Journey 