Just hours before he died in a fire at his Serangoon flat, a 68-year-old man stopped to offer a few words of encouragement to his neighbour’s son.
“Don’t worry, you be a good boy, and you will achieve good things in your life,” he told the boy on Tuesday (Sept 1) morning.
They would be the last words Siti Aisyah Abdul Rahman, 46, remembers hearing from the elderly neighbour she had known for about eight years.
Later that afternoon, a fire broke out in his third-floor unit at Block 8 Lorong Lew Lian.
The man was found unconscious inside the flat and taken to hospital.
Speaking to AsiaOne, Aisyah said the loss was difficult to process, given how frequently they had crossed paths over the years.
“For the past eight years, almost every day I see him and we acknowledge each other,” she said.
“What makes me more sad is that today, this morning before I left for work, he actually acknowledged me.”
‘At first I thought it was incense burning’
When Aisyah’s mom, Zaitun Idris, first smelled smoke outside her Serangoon flat, she thought someone nearby was burning incense.
But when the 72-year-old stepped out of her unit at Block 8 Lorong Lew Lian, she saw thick smoke filling the corridor.
That was when she realised a neighbouring unit was on fire.
“I screamed, ‘tolong, tolong! fire, fire!'” she recalled.
As the blaze intensified, Zaitun said she could hear the 68-year-old occupant struggling inside the third-floor unit.
“I hear the pakcik banging, struggling, then fire start to come out of the unit,” she said.
She also heard popping and crackling sounds coming from inside the flat.
“I got scared. My children told me to evacuate,” she said.
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