Pocong Sighting

At 2 a.m. today, I did something completely uncharacteristic—I picked up a fight with Ery for no good reason. I had no idea then why I did it, and still don’t. Convinced that I was going to die due to a ruptured heart, and certain that my pink and purple-walled room is not my ideal suicide scene, I got out of bed and took a walk to the mailbox. This was a bad idea. You see… my area is what Malays would term as keras.

Further, a few weeks ago, a neighbour’s dad had died while he was outstationed in the Philippines. He was a middle-aged man, always with a crooked smile and a halo of cig puff. An ol’ makcik had mistakenly knocked on our door one afternoon asking my sister, “Ini rumah ___? Jenazahnye dah sampai?” and that was how we first came to know of his sudden demise.

The night of his death, coincidentally, Nara saw a pocong. Nara was in the kitchen when she noticed a silhouette by the window, and wondered why it was garbed in white from head to toe. “Maybe it’s a makcik in white tudung,” she figured until she felt it. She felt the thumps, the goosebumps, she saw the ‘makcik’ hopping down the corridor only to stop exactly at our front door. And then there was nothing. It was the dead dad enshrouded in kain kapan!! We suspect that since he died in a foreign land, and in a not so pretty fashion—a gory workplace accident—his soul is wandering aimlessly, looking for its ‘home’.

I had chucked away this disturbing sighting since then but last night while I was getting rid of all the junk mail, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something getting up from the beaten-up sofa someone had dumped at the void deck. Could it be the deceased's favourite sofa? The one he fell asleep in whilst reading the papers? Maybe I was hallucinating. I just had that feeling, that something was there and it’s attracted to my fear. And as I took the lift up and passed the corridor of the deceased, there was this empowering whiff of ciggie smell that wasn’t there minutes ago.