Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple

This guide to Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple in Singapore starts with the lime-pit labourers who built a small shrine to Kali along Serangoon Road in 1855, far from home and working brutal kiln shifts, and calls it Soonambu Kambam Kovil, temple at the village of lime. It follows Bengali labourers who raised a proper wooden temple in Tamil style in 1881, and the statue of Kali shipped from South India in 1908 to stand between her sons Ganesha and Murugan. During the Japanese Occupation, the temple opened its doors nightly to vagrants and the displaced, as air raids shook the city outside.