By Zubaidah Nazeer

LAST Sunday night, Ms Uum Umiroh (right) said she was plagued by dreams of a crying baby.

She did not understand why.

The 24-year-old Indonesian maid from West Java had started working in the Hillside Drive semi-detached house about a month ago.

She told her friends about her dreams the next day when she met them at the old age home where she takes her employer's mother for therapy sessions twice a week.

What the other maids said shocked her. One of them knew the Indonesian maid who previously worked for Ms Umi's employer, and said she had been pregnant for seven months.

She claimed the maid, Kirun (not her real name), had given birth in a toilet in the house, then killed the baby and buried it in the garden.

Ms Umi said: 'The maids told me it was the ghost of the baby haunting me. I was shocked, but I also thought they could just be teasing me.'

Later that day, while trimming grass in the garden, she smelled something foul. Remembering what her friends had said, she related her fears to her employer, Ms Patricia Goh.

She had met Kirun after arriving at the house on 6 Jun and got to know her there. Kirun left Singapore on 22 Jun after her contract ended.

Ms Umi has left her own baby in the care of her parents to come to work in Singapore. She said her husband died in a car accident a year ago when she was six months' pregnant with their first child.

She claimed Kirun told her about having an abortion. 'A week after I got here, she started telling me more about herself. She said she had an abortion after being pregnant for three months,' said Ms Umi, who had asked Kirun about her boyfriend.

'A week after this chat, I saw her taking post-natal jamu (herbs) and asked her if she was pregnant. She just shrugged and denied it.'

She was concerned about Kirun spending time with her boyfriend.

'She told me he would give her $10 after they saw each other. She told me they had sex,' she said.

'I told her she was crazy because if she got pregnant, she would get kicked out of the country. I also told her not to do such indecent things since she has a husband and two teenage children back home.'

Kirun told Ms Umi that before she met her boyfriend, a Bangladeshi, she was seeing a Myanmar national.

SEEING OTHER MEN

Ms Umi suspected Kirun could have been seeing other men too.

Kirun told her she was able to meet the men while waiting for the therapy sessions at the old age home to end.

The aborted baby had been fathered by the Bangladeshi boyfriend. Ms Umi did not know when it happened.

She said: 'Three days before she left Singapore, she took me out to meet her Bangladeshi boyfriend. He asked me to be his girlfriend after (Kirun) returns home but I told him no.

'I was shocked about the buried baby. I had some suspicions about her being pregnant but never thought she would have gone so far as to kill one.'

On Monday, after the police dug up the bones, Ms Umi wrote an entry in her diary, titled 'Tragedi Singapore (Tragedy Singapore)'.

She wrote in Bahasa Indonesia: 'I cannot believe that someone as nice and hardworking as (Kirun) would go down so low as to do this'.

Ms Umi gave The New Paper an Indonesian handphone number that Kirun had given her before she left. Calls to the number went unanswered.

This story was first published in The New Paper on July 25, 2008.