That time of the year again

The surest sign that the Chinese 7th month Hungry Ghost Festival has arrived is not the chilly wind that brushes your face and arms while you hurry home in the quiet of the night: It's when you visit the hawker centre and see tables set up along the side-walkways, with elaborate set-ups consisting of a potpourri of altars and ash-filled urns cluttering the table. Before you even set foot on the hawker centre, the scent of burning incense would have already been detected from afar. And, depending whether you grew up in a family or in an environment where practices such as burning of incense and making offerings to Chinese deties or ancestors are a familiar sight, you may either walk on with ease, feeling not the slightest discomfiture, or you may hurry your footsteps while trying hard to bear with the noxious smell.

The first day of the festival starts only tomorrow, yet the atmosphere of the hawker centre has already discernibly transformed: there's a certain subdued liveliness, and a certain air of quiet calm seems to have descended on this mortal marketplace. Or perhaps this could be attributed to the thinning afternoon crowd - a common scene in our hawker centres - which has clearly caused your attention to rest firmly on the preparations by the hawkers for the first day of the 7th month. There are people busy setting up the tables that would hold the altars, urns and a constant supply of offerings (consisting of both cooked food and fruits) for the entire month. Others, including passerbys, respectfully take their turns to light up joss sticks offered to spirits or as prayers for Chinese deties - but you aren't really sure about that, and neither are you very bothered by your ignorance. Although a Chinese yourself, you look upon such practices and beliefs as mere traditions that have endured and been passed down for generations.

Instead, other trivia piqued your curiosity. You recall that on those tables that would be around for the entire month, who provides and replenishes the joss sticks and food that never run out? Can anyone just pick up the joss sticks, light them, say a prayer and stick them into the urn? Who takes charge of emptying the urns? What happens to the food that are being offered on the tables? It's just amazing that the Chinese are simply able to put aside many differences and commit themselves to the tasks necessitated by the occasion. Save for the Muslim stall holders, almost every store owner who is a Chinese would dutifully join the rituals. Especially because they are businessmen, ensuring that incense and food are offered - as appeasement? - is something that needs to be carried out piously.

On your way back home, you walk past a shop that on most days would not even have caught your attention. Its small store space and unattractive goods make it a perfectly inconspicuous shop in the area. But this time, you bothered to take a closer look, and you realised the shop has risen up in importance during this period. Cartons of goods stacked haphazardly outside it informs you that its goods are in high demand and sales, most probably brisk. Then you realise why: this is one of the few surviving shops around that sells the items the Chinese use for making offerings during important occasions; incense, red candles, paper money and various other items could all be found here. Again, you can't help but wonder just how does the shop owner survive in this trade. Sure, there aren't many such shops around and competition therefore isn't cut-throat. But these items are not like foodstuff and other daily necessities which people buy frequently. One can only guess that the shop owner possibly still makes enough to get by. And now is the period to make a lot of sales to compensate for quieter times.

Night has come and almost instantly, everywhere in the neighbourhood there would be some pious individual - some, families - burning incense and paper money. It's an all too familiar sight for someone who lives in public housing estates. At the fringe of the grasspatch that meets the concrete drains, candles and joss sticks alike sprout up all over. The flame flickers in the wind, which carries and fills the air with the waft of the burning incense. The surroundings are shrouded in a mild haze and the smell of burning joss sticks permeates the air, giving some an uneasy feeling.

But for you, everything's just normal. Such are the things you've grown accustomed to living in a Chinese-dominated society and in the HDB heartland. After all, you've even engaged in these practices when you were younger, believing and fearing many of the things that your elders told you in hushed voices. However, as for now, other matters preoccupy your mind: the cleaners are going to have a hard time the following day clearing up the ashes and left-overs of the incense and candles.