Last time.

That’s how Singaporeans say both “on a previous occasion” and “in the old days.” As in, “Last time I saw her, she was wearing an emerald-green Moschino dress that accentuated her clavicle,” as well as, “Last time, Singapore lawyers also used to wear wigs.”

There’s a photo of me wearing a wig on my desk at the firm. It’s made of white horsehair, fringed with several rows of frizzy curls (the wig, not the photo). I’m also wearing a black robe with wide, open sleeves and a sort of flap over the left shoulder, the garb of an English barrister.

It’s made by Ede & Ravenscroft, I said, handing her her tea. They’re the queen’s robe makers.

“You graduated in England?” She blew lightly on the tea before taking a sip. I’d left the door of my office open and could feel the eyes of the rest of the firm searing into the back of my neck.

No, I laughed. I had the picture taken during a holiday in England just before my final year at the National University of Singapore’s law school. I’d been visiting friends who were graduating as barristers and thought it fun to get myself snapped in their ridiculous getup as well.

She raised an eyebrow.

It’s ridiculous, I said, shaking my head. We stopped being a colony over forty years ago, but Singaporeans who study law in Britain are still in thrall to the “tradition.” (In hindsight, I am annoyed that I felt compelled to illustrate this observation by making quotation marks with my fingers.) I guess it’s an understandable impulse, I continued, like visiting Disneyland and buying a souvenir T-shirt. But they soon learn we have to be who we are.

As she lowered her cup, my eyes followed the lipstick she’d left on the rim. The Singapore legal profession did away with wigs ages ago, I added. They’re simply too hot for our tropical climate. In Singapore, pragmatism invariably trumps sentiment.

“But you still wear suits,” she replied, picking up the photo frame and turning it over slowly. She ran a long, tapered finger over some lettering on the frame’s back. “Made in China,” she smiled, placing the photo back on my desk.

I remember my scalp tingling. It’s funny the details that stick in your head.

The strangler fig begins as an epiphyte, when a seed germinates in the crevice of another tree. Its roots grow downward, enveloping the other tree. At the same time, its branches grow upward toward the sunlight above the jungle canopy. In time, the host tree perishes, and the strangler fig comes to support its own weight. The ghostly remains of the original tree fall away, leaving a hollow core at the heart of the strangler. The strangler is doomed to this parasitic quest, drawn to engulf and overwhelm the other.

Bernard had observed one such tree over the course of his childhood. It grew in a remnant of old forest near the bus stop, where he took a bus each morning from Bukit Panjang to school in Bishan. In the early-morning darkness it looked especially sinister, its roots descending like the tangled beard of an ancient pirate. Bernard was a short but fierce boy — Chilli Padi was the nickname his schoolmates gave him — a boy who was afraid of nothing, who gladly fought kids twice his size, and won. Yet the sight of that tree would unsettle him. When he was in Secondary One, parts of the original tree still clung to life, occasionally green shoots would sprout. But by Secondary Four it had given up the fight.

He had grown up in Bukit Panjang. Wedged between the Mandai catchment area and the northern edge of the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, it still had fragments of jungle, slowly drying out, and soon to be bulldozed no doubt, but for a while it was at least sanctuary for monkeys and birds. He compared trees by their reproductive strategies — particularly appreciating the Kapok trees for their seed pods bursting with fluffy fiber, the berries of the Tembusu that attracted bats at dusk, but perhaps most of all the Saga trees with their curling pods, twisting ever more tightly till they split open and discharged their jewel-red seeds. These were majestic trees, relying on their own strength and ingenuity.

The strangler fig offended him by its sneaky behavior. It depended on, made use of, and ultimately destroyed another.

The strangler fig is not the only possessor of this parasitic habit. Some women have it too. Chancing upon the right man, the more vibrant and sturdy the better, she draws him to her embrace. Her tendrils caress and soothe, tightening imperceptibly yet irresistibly. The victim, unsuspecting at first, is charmed to be the object of such obsessive attention, until, too late, he is trussed up, his breath squeezed out. The gently deepening deprivation of oxygen lulls him into unconsciousness, as she takes from him the keys to his condo and his car, and of course all of his credit cards.

Bernard felt that he had spent his life struggling free from the embrace of women. Perhaps it was too dramatic to call them strangler figs, but certainly there were times when all his energy was being sucked from him. First there was his mother. After his father’s death when he was just a boy of seven, she had identified his potential and driven him on, through the Gifted Education Programme at Raffles and onward to an army scholarship to study engineering at Cambridge.

Her constant refrain was the need to make the most of his time. Every spare moment should be spent reading or doing homework. Even meals were a distraction — she cared much less about how anything tasted than about whether it would provide the right energy boost at the right time for his studies. When he was in primary school she had warned him about his habit of loitering along the way to and from school. Once, exasperated by the fact that he had not taken her warning to heart, she told him that at dawn and dusk he must be especially careful, for in the shadows of the trees there would lurk female spirits, with long black hair, in long white gowns, and they watched for little boys who lacked purpose, who idly kicked stones at a street corner or missed their bus because of some foolish daydream or other.

When Bernard got married he thought he had found an equal, a partner in life, but his wife, who had pretended disdain for material things all through their courtship, was soon complaining about how low his army pay was compared to friends of theirs who worked for banks or in the legal profession. Even after he left the army and became chief executive of the energy regulator, as well as a member of Parliament for the ruling party, she was unsatisfied, and urged him to push to become a minister. Great pay, great status, she said. When he explained that what he really enjoyed was meeting people, trying to find answers to their problems, she told him he was wasting his time — no one would really be grateful to him anyway — and he should focus on impressing the PM instead. Sometimes she made him angry, and he would feel like striking out, but he kept himself in check. One can strike a man, but never a woman. The same boy who had without hesitation fought schoolmates upon any slight or insult had been unfailingly polite to his mother, to teachers, and in time to the women he dated. No matter how much his wife provoked him, Bernard kept quiet, carried on.

Whatever one does with the time one has, it passes. This morning Bernard had looked up from his phone and was startled by his own reflection in the mirror — how little hair he had was the first thought. But then, before self-pity overtook him, the second followed, the uplifting sight of his flashing white teeth, the crocodile smile that had proved so useful to his rise, first in the army and later in politics. People were disarmed by it. Charmed by him. And he had led a charmed life, in most respects.

The message on his phone was unexpected, a shock, but he would survive. Perhaps it was the chance of a lifetime, to change the pattern of others taking advantage of him. Today he would act from love. And he would find his reward in that one true love.

Perhaps because his father had died when he was young, Bernard had taken to heart the advice Polonius gave to his son Laertes: accept censure while not judging others; listen more and speak less; and above all, be true to himself. This had served him well. It even gave him the patience to endure his wife.

When Bernard first became an MP, the ruling party had a viselike grip on power. Promotion to minister was mostly about one’s academic credentials and connections — being a minister was mostly about making decisions that were sound in economic theory that could then be implemented by an efficient, well-paid civil service. But it had all become so much harder when the people suddenly, unexpectedly, discovered that they could in fact vote against the ruling party without the social order collapsing, and that just maybe speaking up might not be met with a knock on the head but an apology and an offer to do more and better — to keep bus fares low, to provide more hospital beds, to limit the entry of foreigners.

Everyone and anyone wanted things done for them, and done for them now. They complained about anything and everything. To make matters worse, there was an apparent conspiracy of the heavens over the past three years — flash floods, MRT breakdowns, sex scandals — all conspired to make it seem as if there was nothing the ruling party could do right.

Many of his parliamentary colleagues resented the new situation. It was not the premise on which they had entered politics, which was meant to be a simple career progression — more pay, more status, as his wife had put it. They did not like the new orders to be on time for functions, not to keep people waiting, to be more approachable.

But the new national mood suited Bernard. He started a Facebook page. It quickly generated more “likes” than those of any of the ministers. He had taken to Tweeting too, and soon had many followers. He spoke his heart. He was true to himself. In the real world, he started to meet with citizen groups that had previously been ignored. Of course, it was not easy. Everyone wanted change in how things were done: Conservationists wanted a block on development. Hotels wanted more leeway to hire foreign staff. Gays wanted whatever it was they did behind closed doors to be allowed, to be legal. And if change did not happen — then the ruling party was to blame. But at least as an ordinary member of parliament, he had more freedom than a minister — to convince people of the merits of government policy, while not being entirely bound by it either. And people liked him, they truly did — his lack of ostentation, his modesty, his simple, open manner. He lived by the words of Polonius.

His wife, though, still nagged him. She felt that now was his chance to become a minister, given that it was precisely his EQ, his people skills, his popularity, that the party needed in these challenging times. For her, whatever strength he had was an opportunity for her to ascend. He was the tree she had found to be her scaffold. She badgered him to attend the right functions, and accompanied him so she could smile and flirt with the right people, who might support a promotion to the Cabinet for him. But he had long since come to feel that she did not love or care for him beyond the status he conferred on her, the network he gave her access to. At times, he felt as if she was truly intent on strangling him, choking him, her thumbs firmly against his windpipe as he gasped for air, although of course the pressure would never be enough to kill him, at least not until she had used him to get exactly where she wanted.

The message on his phone was from Evelyn, the woman he had let into his life six months before.

Evelyn was different from all the other women he had known. She loved him, of that he was sure. Loved him for himself. Not only did she love him, she did not depend on him. At last he had found his match, but in the best possible way. For the first time in a long while, he felt excited and purposeful about his life, and about the possibility of a new life with Evelyn, a new beginning.

He had met her unexpectedly, at a meet-the-people session with his constituency. She was not a supplicant, of course, but a fresh volunteer — something that had become rarer after the debacle of the last elections. Her blunt, offhand manner captivated him, as did her long black hair and tanned athleticism. When he offered her Lipton’s tea or instant coffee from the pantry, she had made a face, leaving him speechless for a moment before her laughter told him she was teasing.

Afterward, he pulled out her file. One child, husband a doctor. Her eyes, gazing steadily back at him, were the last thing he saw before sleep overcame him that night. The next morning he had a plan, and his secretary telephoned her to ask her to call him. She did, and once he had her mobile phone number, he started WhatsApping her. Restrained questions, seeking her views on constituency and national matters.

He had prepared himself for a rebuff, but she was more than responsive. He was surprised how quickly she seemed to open up to him. They started with policy questions and political challenges, but were soon turning to more personal topics. It was not long before she was attending all of his constituency meetings. In between consultations they laughed and chatted together. Their WhatsApping grew more frequent, more direct and intense. Conspiratorially, she warned him of the perils of monitored communications, and he knew she was as interested in him as he was in her.

At last they had lunch, at a little French restaurant. Three hours of flirting disguised by earnest discussions of what the government should or should not be doing to win back popular support. He lost count of the number of times her hand had lightly rested on his forearm, drawing him toward her, how often she had used the index finger of the other to make a little tapping motion in midair, both emphasizing a point and quickening his heartbeat.

Lunch was soon followed by late-night drinks. They gazed into each other’s eyes. This, he knew, was a relationship that was truly special.

The sex was good. Perhaps he had missed it for so long that he did not know any better, but he felt both fulfilled and truly triumphant. He had an apartment in River Valley that was between tenancies, and this became their sanctuary.

She asked for nothing from him, although along the way he occasionally sought to impress her, to offer her snippets of information or gossip that would keep her captivated. He realized that he probably needed to be more careful. Possibly, something he had let slip about measures the government was considering to cool the property market had tipped her to sell an investment property sooner than she had planned, but surely what he had done was not strictly illegal, and even if illegal was hardly likely to be detected. His tips were unsolicited, of that he had no doubt. He felt so comforted by her, so loved by her, that this was surely small recompense, no different from the necklaces from Tiffany & Co. that he bought for her, necklaces that she appreciated so much and never once asked for.

The risks were worth it. This was his one true chance at love, and for once he did not care about work, or being sensible, or what the world might think. Evelyn was the love of his life. Mostly it was light and luminosity, but at times the hunger for her burned so strongly that he could think of nothing else.

He became determined to possess her completely, for them to become one.

Her WhatsApp today had not been her usual Monday-morning chirp. It had been different, and simple. Pregnant. Really sorry. Don’t know what to do. Had to tell hubby. Mad as hell but wants to see you. Will you meet him?

The first word thrilled him. He had indeed possessed her. They had indeed become one. But why was she sorry? Did she doubt him? Doubt his strength or resolve?

It was excitement that gripped him. Not fear or anxiety. Elation even. Bernard was never afraid of a confrontation, or a fight, with another man. He would talk to the husband. Explain that he had not meant to act dishonorably. But now that he and Evelyn were so very much in love, it was too late for niceties of honor. The husband must give way. Bernard would take responsibility for Evelyn and their baby. It was a sign that his life must change. He would resign, get a job in the private sector. Perhaps they could even move elsewhere — Hong Kong? Shanghai?

Yes, he WhatsApped back without hesitation, I love you. Then a moment later, Don’t worry. And then finally, I’ll take care of it. After another minute he called, to tell her he loved her and they would find their way. He wanted to meet immediately. He was surprised when she asked him to meet her husband first, but decided she must have a reason. He must do as she asked.

Mark was the husband’s name. He suggested the visitor’s center at the dairy farm entrance to the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. We can walk together, he said. Green is very soothing, and I think we both need to keep calm.

Bernard had seen pictures of him, but Mark was still surprisingly big. They shook hands and then started to walk. Mark turned off the open path, up the slope toward Bukit Timah Hill, and soon they were alone together, Bernard following Mark. It was cool beneath the forest canopy. Even the light had turned green, filtered as it was by the dense leafy layers. Mark was right, it was peaceful, calming. Then Mark stopped, turned, and looked down at Bernard. The disparity in their height suddenly felt menacing. Bernard glanced around, wondering if he had made a mistake to venture up this trail.

As if reading his mind, Mark smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Bernard, I’m not going to hit you. Not that I don’t feel like doing so. There’s nothing I’d like better than to bruise your pretty face. What would your constituents say to that, eh?”

Bernard looked off to the side. Let the man rant for a while. He was obviously hurt. But he couldn’t possibly think that Bernard had been the first, could he? Evelyn had told him there was another before him, though she had not loved that man in the way she loved him. And certainly she did not love Mark, whom she had married too young, when she wanted above all else to leave home, to escape her father, a domineering man who had bullied her mother and alternately spoiled and disparaged young Evelyn, until she lost confidence in herself, only regaining it when she finished university, started working at a private bank, met Mark, and left home.

After a while, Bernard spoke. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I had not realized... I thought you were more...” he searched for the right word, “...relaxed. I would not have, you know, pressed my suit, but now, now that we are where we are, well, you must understand, we love each other, I mean, she loves me, not you...”

To his surprise, Mark was laughing. “Oh, you are a funny fellow. She loves you, not me. Oh yes. Poor me, lucky you.” Mark grabbed his shoulders. He brought his face close to Bernard’s. “Look, man, love isn’t real. All that’s real is power and money. Don’t you of all people know that?”

Bernard could see the sweat on Mark’s stubbled chin. But his eyes were not so much angry as cold, as if this was a situation he was familiar with, and this a routine he had practiced before. For once Bernard was unsure, and it made him uneasy. He had expected anger, hurt, shame, the stock reactions of the cuckold. But this was something else.

Mark released him and turned away. On the uneven ground, Bernard almost stumbled, but then recovered. With his back to Bernard, Mark was talking quietly. “I do have photos. Much better than those of Anwar. Really quite professional, I’d say. But it won’t come to that, will it, Bernard? You like your life, how everyone has to speak politely to you, pretend they agree with you. Big-shot MP, yes? You don’t want to risk any of that, do you?”

Bernard could not bring himself to speak. He had to pacify the man, promise whatever he asked, and then find Evelyn. Evelyn could get divorced, he could get divorced too, they’d find happiness together, a new life with the new life growing within her. He would resign. His office meant nothing to him, not compared to love and happiness.

“How much are you worth, Bernard? Not much of a salary these days, I suppose, but how many sweet deals have you been cut into as an MP? Let’s see — ten million, give or take? And I’ll just take one million. Ten percent. Not a lot, I suppose, considering how expensive it is to raise a kid these days. You’ll still have plenty. And then normal life can resume for you.”

“How do I know you won’t just come back for more?”

“You don’t.”

“Can I think about it?”

“I understand, you want time to talk to Evelyn. She’s in love with you, she’ll save you. But here, take this.”

Bernard took the piece of paper. Details for an account at a bank in the Cayman Islands.

“You can talk to anyone you want, just make sure that one million dollars goes to this account by Friday. Otherwise, you’ll see yourself online by Saturday.” Mark pushed past him and headed down the slope. “I hope we don’t have to meet again, so have a good life, Bernard. Have a wonderful life.”

Bernard had not known what to do until that moment. And perhaps he still did not know the right thing to do. But he was a chilli padi by nature, and Mark’s words were fighting words. One thing about the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve is that there is plenty of loose granite lying around, it having been a site for multiple quarries, now disused. Another thing is that in the midafternoon on a weekday it is deathly quiet. And the quarries are deep and filled with water. There’d be at least a week before the body was found, and in the meantime, Bernard would have liquidated what he could and he and Evelyn would be thousands of miles away. How happy she would be to get free from that monster! And he too would be happy — it was escape for both of them. Fulfillment too.

He had never been in an interrogation room. Where was the two-way mirror? The TV shows had those, but it was absent here. Where were the air conditioners? He had heard so much about those. Six, they said, at full blast, and they would wet you first. There was only one humming here. Perhaps the rooms with the many air conditioners were reserved for political prisoners. There were no cameras either. Wouldn’t it be better to have those? To record everything a suspect said? And then he smiled. They could say whatever they wanted. A video camera couldn’t lie.

He looked down at his hands. They had not handcuffed him and had let him rest them on the cold edge of the table. Perhaps they felt sorry for him. He was an old man, after all. The faceless officers who found him had been young, a sergeant and a corporal, barely adult. He had done everything they asked, resisted them in nothing. He had held his hands out to be cuffed — not meekly, but as a man who knew he had broken the law, though did not believe he had done wrong.

That was an hour ago. Perhaps more. He did not know. They had taken his wallet, his belt, his phone, his door keys, the keys to his cab. He let his eyelids droop — not closing them completely, but enough to shut out the fluorescent light and leave a slit for him to see the dull gray of the tabletop before him and his own elbows, jutting thinly beyond the fraying short sleeves of his shirt. He was not cold, he was not hungry, he did not need to piss. There was nothing to distract him. He put his hands together, left fingers over right, the tips of his thumbs touching, hands forming a circle, as he had been taught at the meditation center. He could meditate.

The door swung open. The old man looked up. There was a guy in the standard civil service attire — white long-sleeved shirt, sleeves rolled up, dark pressed trousers, formal shoes that made no noise when he entered the room. He had a clipboard. Another man dressed just like him followed, and a uniformed officer closed the door behind them.

“Mr. Tan,” he heard the first man saying as he sat down. He nodded. He looked at the clipboard. There was some kind of form on it and they had already filled in his particulars, recorded probably soon after his arrest. They went through the items and he nodded or murmured yes to all their questions.

His name, Tan Seng Hock, his national registration identity card number, the particulars of his taxi driver’s license. His address at Block 533, Avenue 5 in Ang Mo Kio. Not his home, just a room he rented. His landlady was probably in another room just like this one with another pair of officers. He hoped she was all right. She was probably not taking this well at all. She had teenagers, two boys, one thirteen, the other fifteen. Still too young to be left on their own without a mother — or a father. He had tried, in a way, to be a good role model for them, to take them out like a father or uncle would have, helping them with their math homework. He had slept with their mother, but only once. She had asked him for money after that. Not money for sex, she was quick to add. But pocket money. The kind due to a girlfriend, a woman you fucked, over and above the rent. He said he could not afford a relationship like that. He knew where the money went. There was a Singapore Turf Club betting shop not far from their block, across the MRT train tracks, close to the Courts furniture place. She had left it at that and never brought it up again. Or mentioned sex again. He did not think so well of himself to ask. Besides, the rental was cheap and there were the boys to think about. He did not need a quarrel. Peace, that was all he asked for.

“Mr. Tan,” the first officer began again. The old man looked up. He already knew what the question would be. “Where did you get the gun?”

“It was in my taxi. I was cleaning the taxi. My last passenger vomited in the back.”

“Can you remember when?”

He nodded. How could he ever forget the night he found his gun? Half a year ago, on Christmas Eve. He had been driving at night, something he did not like doing, but he knew it would be busy. Besides, the boys didn’t want to do any more math homework. His last passenger was a white man he picked up at Clarke Quay; he had driven him to the man’s condominium on the East Coast, the Bayshore.

“Can you describe him?”

The old man shook his head. The passenger was tall, had brown hair in a short, stylish cut, and was dressed in a tight shirt and jeans. But he could not put a face to that memory. All white men looked the same to him. They only varied in height and body fat — and how much hair they still had left. He looked like any drunk white man, although he seemed quite steady when he got into the taxi. And it was six months ago. All he remembered was the man telling him he needed to puke, but there was no place to stop on the expressway and he had vomited shortly before the turnoff to his condo. The passenger had been apologetic and had given him a fifty-dollar bill and told him to keep the change to get the cab cleaned. The old man could still remember driving all the way home to Ang Mo Kio after that, his windows down, the sour stink of the puke still fresh in his mind. Tequila probably. He had found parts of a worm when he took out the mats. And the gun under the front passenger seat. The old man had dropped the revolver and it made a loud thud on the floor of the cab. He did not remember how long he spent just staring at it, listening to the wind rustling like spirits through the leaves above him. With the puke on it, it looked like a stillborn child and he did not dare to touch it at first. Then, without thinking, he dropped a wet cloth on it and picked it up. He realized his mistake as he wiped the muck off it. Any prints would have been wiped off too. And sitting there in his hand, with his prints, the gun had made itself his.

“I wrapped the gun in the wet cloth,” he told the officers. “I put it on the front seat and I cleaned the cab.”

“Why didn’t you call the police immediately?”

Why didn’t he? After the initial shock, the initial fear, he continued furiously cleaning the cab, trying to get the damned stink out and knowing it would be days before the smell completely left. But he was also suddenly alert, completely aware of the thing that now sat in the passenger seat. And the longer he waited, the less willing he became to make that 999 call, even though he knew it was the only sane thing to do. What if its owner came looking for it? Would they kill him for it? But how would they find him? Every fare had been a roadside pickup. There had been so many — and many had been short trips. Anyone could have left it in any cab. And he realized after a while that he was looking for a reason not to call the police.

After cleaning the cab, he had sat down in the driver’s seat and cleaned the gun very, very gently, wiped off all the puke, then carefully felt around it until something gave a little, then unlatched the cylinder and let it fall open. He still had not put his finger on the trigger or his hand around the grip. There were five chambers and four were filled. He tilted the gun slowly and the bullets slid out, clicking against each other as they dropped into his open palm. Four of them. He lay them on the passenger seat and continued cleaning the revolver.

With the bullets out, he felt safer with his gun. He spun the cylinder then snapped his wrist sideways to close it — just as he remembered from the movies. He put his hand around the grip, touching lightly on the trigger, pointing it at the floor, and a little red spot of light appeared between his feet, between the accelerator and the brake. He jumped — then realized it was just a laser spot, just like the laser pointers he had once used at training sessions when he still had his old job as maintenance supervisor. Before he had been replaced by a foreign talent from China willing to do the same job for less money.

“Did you know it was a police gun?”

No, he had not thought about it. His gun was all black and he vaguely remembered police guns having some sort of wood grip. His had black rubber. He shook his head. He had not even known that police guns had laser sights. All he had been thinking about was how he was going to keep it concealed at home and when he was out. There was nothing in his room that could be locked — not the drawers, not the cupboard. Until that moment, he’d had nothing worth securing. He dropped his takings into a cash deposit machine every morning before he began to pick up fares. He did not even own a watch. There was a clock on the dashboard. He had a cheap Nokia phone, the kind sold at petrol stations, and an M1 plan that cost just ten dollars without caller ID. He had three shirts, two pairs of trousers, four pairs of boxers, three pairs of socks, his money pouch, and a flight bag from a long time ago, when he and his former wife had gone on a Chan Brothers tour to Malaysia.

But his little gun changed all that. Now there was a secret to protect. Something to hide. Something that was truly only his, not shown to the rest of the world. The first week was difficult. He tried his best to act normally. His gun replaced the cash in his pouch. He began to carry the cash in his pockets, tied up in wads with rubber bands. Not that there was enough to make a large bulge in his pants, he said. The second cop smiled.

The first one nodded; he saw no humor in the statement. “The officer who was issued that gun is dead,” he said. “He was a narcotics officer. When we found his body, we could not find his weapon. His killers must have taken it from him.”

The old man felt the blood leaving his face. “You don’t think I killed him, do you?”

The cops stared at him and said nothing. Their faces were blank, expressionless. There had only been four rounds in the cylinder. Had he managed to return fire only once? Or did they kill him with his own gun?

“No, I found the gun. In my taxi.”

“You have no criminal record. You are not linked to any of the suspects,” the first officer said.

“I wouldn’t have hurt...” the old man began, then stopped.

“So why did you keep it?”

“Singapore isn’t safe anymore,” he said. Two cabbies dead already in the past year. Their killer or killers had asked them to drive out to some remote place in the night, and there, had cut one’s throat, stabbed the other, before making off with their money. Two lives for the meager sums that the drivers had struggled all day to collect. He shook his head. “We’re just not safe anymore.” His tone was accusing — he did not have to say the police were not doing their job. It was there, just in his tone, and the second officer looked away.

“So you kept it for protection?”

Protection? How else was he to defend himself? Against someone stronger — younger and fitter — and determined to kill him? Or if there were just more of them? With his gun, he had a chance. Four chances.

“Suntec City,” he said. If these policemen were honest, they would blush, he thought. But they did not. “Suntec City,” he said again.

Three drunk, young white men had beaten up an old cabbie at a taxi stand while white tourists in the line cheered them on as if they were in some underground fight club. Two Chinese men — local men — had gone to help the cabbie and wound up getting thrashed by the white men, to more cheering from the foreign white trash in the taxi line.

“Singapore is safe,” he spat, “if you’re white and rich.”

“We caught them and one of them is in jail.”

The old man shook his head. The fucking police had let them go. Let them go on bail. Two absconded. Was that the plan? Didn’t they know the white cowards would run? They had not even bothered to investigate at first and the initial arrests had only been made after people on the Internet got involved, identified the men, and made a police report. And what had that fucking investigating officer said? Wah, you guys very free. Can do better than the police.

“We’ve dealt with that officer.”

The old man sneered. His peace was gone and the original gentleness with which he had viewed these two men in front of him was also gone, replaced by the anger that had been slowly corroding his insides until he’d found his gun. So yes, he reckoned that he and other Singaporeans could damn well do better than the police.

“Do you know how serious your offense is?”

Offense? He had not killed any precious white “foreign talent,” although he had considered it. There were only so many times he could drive by, refuse to stop to pick them up. There were only so many times he could stop, pick them up, take their condescending shit, take their scanning his cab for a NETS machine, and, seeing none, tell him they had no cash and ask if he had NETS. How many times had he driven to a cash machine — and have the fare never return to the cab? How many times had he been promised — Hey, uncle, I’ll pay you tomorrow. Just give me a call. Or pick me up again. I’ll make it up to you. White man’s honor. So superior. And when he had called? A quick cut, no reply.

In the past, he had put up with it — it was an occupational hazard. People did that. Not just white expatriate types, but also local kids who never intended to pay their fares, making a game of leaving the cab quickly after he had stopped to drop them off. But over the years, the anger had grown and slowly eaten away at him. He had tried meditation. Since he did not like driving at night, he would go to a meditation center at Jalan Besar — a dingy place in a rundown prewar building at the corner of a traffic junction, above a bunch of dirty motorcycle repair shops. He had tried to find peace there. To find forgiveness for himself and others, to remember that all were one. But any peace he found would quickly disappear like incense smoke when he got into the cab and returned to the streets.

Until his gun came — and suddenly he was calm, knowing that if he really wanted to, he could kill every one of them. At first it was just the white trash. Then it was the Singaporean women — the sarong party girls — the unofficial prostitutes that made Singapore a kind of sexual Disneyland for these white bastards. He did not mind actual call girls — they were making an honest living, just like he was — it was legal in Singapore anyway. But not the local women who thought only the white foreign trash were good enough for them, who actually thought them superior to local men simply because they were white and had expatriate paychecks. His list grew — but as he included more stereotypes, from obnoxious mainland Chinese to lecherous Indian nationals to bitchy Singaporean women to increasingly primped-and-preened local men as bitchy as their female counterparts, the greater his sense of calm grew too. They could behave as they wanted. Knowing he could kill them was consolation enough. That sense of power, of control, was good enough reason to risk everything he had — not much — to keep the gun. It calmed him and it made him smile, which really was good for Singapore’s tourist image. And we want to keep attracting the white trash, right? Smile, Singapore. He smiled — as a “taxi uncle” he was Uniquely Singapore too. His gun had made him a better man. Love all, serve all.

And he had never threatened a fare with the gun. Or killed a fare. His gun had never come out of that pouch. He had never brandished it in a threatening manner, never made a show of it to a passenger. No one had ever known he had it.

He thought of Ah Huat, who did not mind showing off a little, to those in the know. Ah Huat had a tiny wooden coffin in his cab. About four inches long, carved in a Chinese style, with the graceful sweeps and arcs that differentiated it from modern Western caskets. He had it in the glove compartment most of the time. But at night it rode on the dashboard, his silent passenger, the thing that watched his back because so much can go wrong at night. The thing that watched his back, and any passenger who understood would be fairly warned.

Those who understood would know that in that little scaled-down coffin was the bone of a dead child — somewhat difficult to come by now because of cremation, but more common in the days of burials and when child mortality was still high. That bone, in its coffin, kept the child’s spirit with the owner. Both were bound to each other. Both were master and servant. Ah Huat had inherited that coffin from his father, and so now the child spirit that once followed his father, followed him to do his bidding — on the condition that Ah Huat took care of it. Ah Huat sometimes made a show of it, in the way that Christians sometimes liked to say grace loudly in public.

When he ate, he would order two meals. Or two cups of coffee. He would pay for both, but consume only one. Those who did not understand would simply think he had been stood up, probably by an inconsiderate child or an unfaithful mainland Chinese girlfriend only interested in him as a meal ticket or for his Central Provident Fund savings. Those who understood knew he was feeding his child spirit — and the waiters who knew would keep their distance from the apparently uneaten meal, to clear it later when it was safe.

And that was why Ah Huat never let a fare sit in the front passenger seat: it was already occupied.

The old man thought about his gun in the pouch, tucked in the side pocket of his door, the zipper facing up, ready to be opened quickly. Always there for him. He reckoned it gave him the same kind of comfort the child spirit gave Ah Huat. Both were dangerous, but Ah Huat and he were steady men, not prone to violence, not reckless, with no vices. When they met for the occasional meal, all three of them, Ah Huat sometimes talked about his child, about how it sometimes helped pick winning numbers or helped him get back at someone for some injustice. Better than any of his living kids, he said. The old man had heard these stories often enough and did not need to compare notes. He had his gun, and it made him feel safe. Security was good to have in old age. It was like a life insurance policy, though, a one-time-use thing. He would have to die on the road. He could not afford to survive a serious accident. While Ah Huat could call on his child spirit repeatedly, the old man knew his gun had only four shots, and if he ever had to use it, it would be all or nothing.

He knew the time had come when he got home late, after driving all day, to find the front door splashed with paint and the pale, bled-out face of a recently slaughtered pig hanging from the flimsy metal gate. His landlady had finally hit rock bottom. She had borrowed money from loan sharks — and defaulted on the payment. It was something she had said she would never do. There were enough neighbors with experience to serve as fair warning.

“I paid,” she had insisted when he went in to find her and the two boys cowering in a corner of their room. She and the younger boy were crying and the older one was trying his best to comfort them. “I paid, I paid. They gave me a loan I did not ask for,” she said.

He had eyed her dubiously. “Didn’t ask for?”

“No, they just put it in the bank. I didn’t even know.”

This was new to him. An unasked-for loan, in the form of a bank deposit, followed by a demand for repayment — and interest, of course. “Didn’t you even think about why you had so much money?” He found it hard to believe that, hard up as they were, she would not have noticed the extra cash.

“I thought you put it in,” she had said. “I thought you put it in for the boys. I never used it.”

“Then you can give it back. You give it back tomorrow.” He had looked at the boys and nodded to them. “I will take care of you, don’t worry.” The older boy nodded back but the younger one was still terrified. He reached out to pat his head. “Uncle will protect you.”

They came the following night.

They had announced their arrival with yelling and hammering at the door. He opened up to speak to them and pay them, and to his horror found that they had lifted the flimsy old gate from its hinges and now stood facing him with no barrier between them. It had been a simple matter of removing a few retaining pins — an old trick that contractors used when they wanted to convince people to “upgrade” their gates.

There were two of them, and in the narrow corridor already crowded with potted plants and now a dismantled gate, they had to stand one behind the other. They looked so ordinary. The one in front looked like anyone he could have met in the building, a man in his thirties or so, not so tall, but stocky. His face was pale and flabby, like the pig’s head on their door the previous night. Pig Face.

The one behind was much younger, taller, and slimmer, like any teenage punk with dyed hair, piercings in his earlobes, and tattoos — pretty ones he probably thought made him look cool. The old man knew what actual Triad tattoos looked like. The boy was just a punk. It was strangely quiet, as if all the neighbors had gone into hiding.

“Pay,” the first collector had said. “Don’t waste my fucking time.”

The old man had nodded and took out the wad of cash from his shirt pocket. The collector snatched it from him, removed the rubber band, and began counting. His beady eyes were angry when he looked up again.

“Fucker, you trying to waste my time, is it? This is not enough.”

“That’s everything you put in her account.”

“I didn’t put. My boss put. He tells me to collect how much, I collect. This is not enough. Interest?”

The old man had said nothing. He merely shook his head.

“That means you still owe my boss.”

“She owes you nothing,” he said. Then more deliberately: “Tell your boss to fuck off. And if he tries that again—”

“Try what again? What are you going to do? You fucking useless old man, what are you going to do?”

He had already known the outcome of this exchange. He had heard enough stories. Loan sharks, like every other Singaporean, really wanted permanent passive income. A dividend they could collect forever from a small initial investment.

“You think you can fucking protect this woman, those boys? You’re a fucking old man, you got no fucking balls anymore, what are you going to do?”

He would have let an insult go, but not a threat to harm the woman and the boys. He was losing his calm, his peace. Then, to make his point, Pig Face slammed his palm into the old man’s chest and he staggered back. Pig Face had stepped across the threshold into the flat and the woman screamed. The old man recovered his balance and reached behind his back for his gun, tucked into the waistband of his loose trousers, hidden under his shirt. Pig Face saw the movement and thought the old man was going for a knife.

“I also got,” he spat, and drew out a knife from his back pocket, but even as he began to open the blade, he saw the tiny, glaring red light and quickly backed toward the door. “Run!” he yelled.

The teen with the dyed hair, piercings, and tattoos bolted down the corridor. Pig Face stumbled as he turned around. He tripped over the bars of the metal gate that they had so recently taken down and landed heavily on the ground. The old man loomed over him, the gun in both his hands, that wicked red eye glaring down at the guy.

“Please,” the collector had whimpered. “They made me do this. I owe money also. I can’t pay. They made me do this. I have a family.” He slowly got up.

The old man watched him, following him with his gun, tracking the collector’s face with the red laser dot. He knew it was the end. His gun was no longer a secret. And life as he knew it was over. One chance, and he had been forced to waste it on these punks. The collector turned around as he lowered his gun. The old man felt the anger and the heaviness return as the collector moved down the corridor as quickly as the pain would allow him.

Only one thing to do. He squeezed the trigger. He heard the bang and the echo as the sound ricocheted around the surrounding blocks, he heard the collector yell as the bullet hit him in the butt, he heard the woman and the boys shouting, the neighbors screaming in fear. The whole world had erupted in sound, but he heard only a calm silence in his own soul.

The collector struggled down the corridor, groaning from the pain and trailing blood, and the old man followed, the red laser spot on his back the whole time. He got to the stairs, fell down a flight, picked himself up, stumbled painfully down all three floors, the old man just behind him, as if seeing a guest out. It was a good feeling, to usher someone out this way, usher out all the bitterness, all the anger, all the frustration, all those feelings of helplessness. He had not felt so good, so strong, so powerful, in a very long time.

The collector reached the ground-floor lobby, right next door to the now empty and dark People’s Action Party branch office. Downstairs neighbors had rushed toward the sound but screamed and ran when they saw the old man’s gun.

The collector was weeping as he lay on his side, his face drenched in sweat and tears. “Please,” he begged. “Please.” It was a face the old man recognized. It was the face of everyone he had ever known — and everyone who had ever hurt him. It was a white man’s face, an Indian national’s face, a Chinese national’s face, a sarong party girl’s face, a new urban male’s face, a teenage punk’s face, his ex-wife’s face, her lover’s face, his former boss’s face, his representative of Parliament’s face, the pig’s face on the gate, all leering at him in unison like that goddamned Smile, Singapore poster. He had to get rid of all those faces.

He put the gun to his own temple, smiled at a terrified neighbor, and calmly pulled the trigger. There was a click. And then he understood what it wanted him to do. Everything was clear now. He lowered the gun again, put the little red dot on the collector’s face, and squeezed the trigger three more times.

Ah Meng knew how it would end even before they appeared.

The nibong poles would have long been in place, a wooden labyrinth designed to attract and confuse. He imagined their hearts racing, surges of blood pumping through, adrenaline pulling them further into the buttery blackness, panic steering them along the rows of columns. They would sense then that it was too late. Even so, there was nothing left to do but swim, just keep swimming. It carried reassurance, even if false. By the time the nets closed in, snuggling them together in a tight slippery ball, there was no more point in trying.

This was stupid daydreaming, Ah Meng’s mum would say. Fish so stupid — where got brains to think? The woman had a point. And the truth of that was what kept the family in business. Not good business, mind you — fish farming was becoming far more practical and lucrative than kelong fishing these days. But to start a new fish farm — expensive, lah. Maybe when Ah Long came back from Queensland with his atas business degree then they could discuss. For now, with the kelong that Kong Kong set up years ago, the family managed to catch enough each month to pass the time. Not good, not bad. Just can, lah.

Just can. That was what Ah Meng’s days were, one flowing into the next. His only relief came one Sunday. Ah Meng was squatting on the jetty after a late breakfast smoking a cigarette, trying to see how long he could pull on it, how long he could get the ash to last before it fell off in one long tube. He was getting better at it — almost reaching one and a half centimeters now! — which made him feel a bit proud, lah, even if no one noticed or cared. Life on the kelong is just like that, he had learned in a year. If you don’t notice the small things, there’s nothing to notice at all.

Monsoon season had just started, which was both okay and not so okay for fishing. Sometimes the stormy waters pushed flotillas of tiger groupers and cobia into the kelong traps. But some days all he and Siva hauled in were nets of shrimp and tiny crabs. No matter how many of those you caught — no point, lah. The Chinese restaurants only paid big bucks for large fish — nice nice one they can display in fish tanks.

Ma had just scolded him for squatting and smoking like a samseng the week before, when she suddenly showed up again in her new secondhand Corolla to spy on him. It was true that Ah Meng never used to do it until he started copying his army mates. But once she scolded him, aiyoh, he found himself doing it all the time. He couldn’t understand his mother sometimes — she always said she came by without calling first because she happened to be in the neighborhood. But hello, Ah Meng was her son — wouldn’t he know that she lived in Faber Crescent, all the way on the other side of the island? Sometimes Ah Meng couldn’t believe how toot she thought he was. He wasn’t smart like Ah Long, lah — can go university in Australia all. But she should at least know that he wasn’t stupid. After last week, Ah Meng started really enjoying squatting on the jetty smoking. He liked imagining the look on his mum’s face if she pulled up in her Corolla at that exact moment. The thought of that made each puff all the more shiok.

Spotting the girls made him get up though. There were two — one big, one smaller. Skinny beanpoles with long pale legs. The big one had a long tidy ponytail; the little one, one of those Japanese doll haircuts. Even before they got close, Ah Meng could see how pretty they were. He could tell they were sisters — same button nose, same slightly crooked smile, same cheeks the color of young dragonfruit. They even walked the same, each turning out her feet just slightly. Watching them stroll down the pier toward the jetty, slender legs purposely pushing out from their matching black Adidas shorts, Ah Meng imagined them as birds. Were birds as stupid as fish?

They must have come from the village hawker center — each clutched a clear plastic bag of sugarcane juice jabbed with a neon pink straw. From their slippers, Ah Meng guessed that they lived close enough to walk. He tried to recall if he’d seen them before — he didn’t think so. Girls weren’t that common on this jetty so he was sure he would have noticed. A little farther away, yes, near the government holiday chalets on Strawberry Hill or closer to the canoeing and windsurfing joints in Changi Village. Sometimes at night, you might see the Malay ladyboys pop up and loiter a little, some of them looking for a break from walking, some just looking for a good spot for their clients, lah. But mostly all you saw on this jetty were the morning fishermen and the few kelong oldies left. And Ah Meng.

If he wanted to see any chio girls he usually had to take the bus to the Bedok town center. If he felt in the mood for atas girls then go Clarke Quay where the high-class clubs were, lah. But the girls there were a bit scary for him. None of them usually wanted to talk to him. Actually, the ones in Bedok also usually ignored him. They could probably tell immediately that he didn’t have anything. No car, no Tag Heuer, not even a credit card. He hadn’t had a girlfriend since before the army days. Once he got posted to Pulau Tekong for three months of artillery training, his girlfriend dumped him for a neighbor who’d already finished his army duty — he would actually be around to bring her out and didn’t have a toot-looking shaved head anymore. It had been so long since Ah Meng had seen one pretty girl, much less two. He sucked hard on his cigarette.

How to play this?

He flicked his cigarette out into the water and lit another, steadying himself against the railing as he leaned back on one foot, hoping he looked a little like Tony Leung in one of those moody Shanghai movies. He got no hat or gangster suit, lah, but can still act a bit. When the girls got close enough, he turned his face away, narrowing his eyes as he peered out at the water. It hadn’t rained yet so it was still that time of day when the air in the village tasted like moist salt. The girls’ footsteps were so light, the way they walked so high class that he heard no sounds of slippers flapping against their heels. He could feel his heart walloping his chest. He blinked and looked farther out, focusing on his kelong in the distance. The small platformed house in the slender strait that sliced a passage between Malaysia and Singapore was barely visible, encircled with an uneven skyline of tall nibong stilts. All was quiet — good. Siva and his two boys were off on Sundays, so if anyone was actually puttering around on his kelong, that means sure got trouble.

“Is that your boat?”

Slowly he turned around. It was the smaller one.

“Yah,” he said as casually as he could. The small one was smiling slightly; the big one stared at him blankly. He wasn’t sure what to do.

“Is it expensive?” The small one again.

A very Singaporean question, he thought, noting that she must not be very smart to imagine that his beat-up wooden boat might be expensive. It was fairly large, yes — big enough to transport nets and basins of fish — with a small sheltered section lined with painted benches. Ma had come up with the brilliant idea of kelong tourism a few months back, until she discovered how much cash she’d have to sink into fixing up the place before people would actually pay to come for a chance to check out “one of Singapore’s last real-life working kelongs!” Not to mention the boat they had was so old and lau pok that Ah Meng couldn’t see anyone wanting to risk even minutes on it.

“Er, no. This one very old one,” he replied, desperately trying to think of something better to say. He took another long drag.

“Do you give people rides?” The bigger girl this time, smiling at him along with the little one.

Ah Meng wasn’t supposed to — lawsuits, Ma had explained. Better don’t risk anything funny. So even when his army kaki gajiau-ed him for evening joyrides, promising to bring a nice bottle of Black Label if he agreed, he always said no.

“Sometimes,” he said, quickly adding, “but only if the weather’s nice.”

“It’s nice today,” the big one said.

That was true. Though the rains hadn’t come yet it was bluish out. Even the sun was up in full force. There was nothing left to say, so Ah Meng tossed his cigarette into the still water and gestured for them to follow, leading the girls down the neat walkway to the boat.

Since it had been their idea, he thought they would be more excited about seeing the boat up close. From the looks of it, though, the excitement was all his. He hoped they couldn’t tell. The small one peeked closely at the vessel before letting him take her hand to help her onto the boat. But the older girl simply stepped on, settling in next to her sister on one of the two slender benches. Ah Meng was thankful that he had spent the morning hosing down the boat and Cloroxing everything so the deck smelled more like the sashimi section at Cold Storage than the aunties’ fish stalls at the wet market.

“Why doesn’t it have a name?” the small one asked as he leaned over to cast off. “Usually boats got name — right? Always painted on the side?”

Ah Meng had never considered this and had no answer. “I can maybe name it after you,” he said. “What’s your name?”

The small one looked at the big girl, who shrugged.

“Yan — Xiao Yan,” the little one said, smiling. “And she’s Ling Ling. You can combine them and call it Yan Ling?”

She sounded so earnest Ah Meng suddenly realized how young she probably was. And her sister probably not much older. He felt a twinge. But it had been so long. And it’s not like he really had anything so bad in mind. He just wanted to be friends. And it occurred to him that since he was only twenty-two, the age difference wasn’t terrible. Hell, girls his age were meeting and fucking guys twice their age! In just a few years these two girls would probably be doing exactly the same. Those guys they would be fucking were much older than Ah Meng was now!

Ah Meng was sick of it. If a guy is just trying to make do, who can blame him? Isn’t that what the government wants? His mum wants? For him to show some initiative? Fuck care, lah.

“Tell you what — if I can find some paint on the kelong I’ll even let you paint it on the side,” he said.

Both girls got excited. “Kelong?” Ling said. “We’ve never been on a kelong!”

This was easier than he’d thought.

“Okay, lah, since you two so nice, maybe I can take you there,” he tossed out, ducking into the cabin to start up the boat.

The girls got up and followed him, watching and saying nothing as he put the throttle in idle, jiggered the gearshift into neutral, then turned the starter switch, cranking the engine for a few seconds before feeling it catch, throwing the floor beneath them into a thick trundle. Yan stumbled backward but Ling reached out so quickly to grab her that Ah Meng had no time to react.

As they left the jetty, Ah Meng wondered how he might impress them. Using one hand to steer — a move he was now glad he had practiced every day — he guided the chugging vessel toward the kelong. The ride wouldn’t take long, five minutes at the most. The shortness of it stressed him out. Ah Meng felt as if this was his moment to make an impression. He wasn’t sure what they had in mind but it probably wasn’t a rickety platformed house surrounded by smelly nets of fish.

“You see that island over there?” he said, pointing toward the larger of the two that he glimpsed through the door of his dank room every day. The girls nodded. “That’s Pulau Ubin.”

The girls remained silent. Ah Meng tried to remember anything he might know about Ubin.

“It’s haunted,” he said. Yan and Ling looked bored.

Ah Meng decided to circle the kelong to buy a little time. He tried to remember an old story he’d heard from some of the fishing uncles in Changi the one time they invited him to join them for beers at the hawker center.

“I know it looks like nothing but trees and jungle, lah,” he said. “But Ubin actually quite interesting one. Years and years ago there was nothing there. But then three animals from Singapore — a frog, a pig, and an elephant — decided to challenge each other to see who could swim across and reach Malaysia first. Whoever didn’t make it would turn into stone. In the end they all also cannot make it, lah — the elephant and the pig turned into stone in the same spot, becoming Pulau Ubin. The frog was a little bit further from them and became Pulau Sekudu — Frog Island. You see that small one over there? The big rock in the middle looks like a frog, right?”

Ah Meng exhaled as softly as he could. He felt his heart chugging harder than the boat. This was the most he’d said to any girl he didn’t know in a long time.

Something must have worked though — the girls went to the window and stared out. Ling was pointing, whispering and nudging Yan to look at Sekudu. The little girl said, “Wah!” and giggled softly. Ah Meng felt a burst of pride. He’d made her laugh!

The boat passed the nearest kelong to Ah Meng’s, giving him a new thought. What if the boys over there were out and about? If they saw the girls on his boat, susah lah. People around here were damn fucking gossipy. With nothing happening every day, any small new thing — wah, people talked and talked about it for weeks.

He sped up as he passed. Let them think he was rude for not waving today.

The girls had returned to his side and were watching him steer. In silence, he circled his kelong and pulled to a stop at the landing. He gestured to them to stay in the cabin while he tied the boat to the kelong dock, jumped off, and tightened the connection, then waved to them to come out. Ling helped Yan off the boat before getting off herself.

Ah Meng looked around, squinting hard to gauge how clearly he could see into old Tan’s kelong across the way. All seemed quiet over there — the boys must be on the mainland. Oh yah — day off.

Feeling much better, he led the way, wending down the slatted path that zigzagged around the series of sunken pools outlined with tall poles. A breeze was coming through now. He peered behind him; the girls were walking hand in hand, carefully treading in his footsteps. Yan seemed a little scared and was moving slower than Ling.

“Don’t worry,” he said, stopping and turning to face them. “People never fall in one.”

“But if fall in, then how?” Yan asked.

“Not good, lah,” he said, squatting down by one of the pools. He felt around for something to show them what he meant, patting his pockets and pulling out his pack of Salems. Ah Meng held a cigarette up for the girls to see.

“Inside here, ah,” he said, pointing to a square of water, “got many many fish. Especially today — we holiday today, mah, so don’t bring them to town until tomorrow. These fish, ah, anything also eat one. Small fish, each other, anything you throw in also they take.”

Ah Meng threw his cigarette into the water and a violent vortex bubbled up. He imagined the swirl of fish below shoving and nipping at each other, trying to reach for what might be new food. The girls were giggling now.

“Do it again!” Ling said.

And so he did. Even if ciggies had become fucking expensive, he was sure this would be worth it. He flung the second one a little farther out. Even he was laughing along with the girls now.

Ah Meng glanced over at them — Yan didn’t look scared anymore. He realized this was the happiest he’d felt in a very long time. He had been thinking recently about how ironic it was that the infamous Changi prison, where British prisoners of war were kept during the Japanese Occupation and now home to dangerous criminals, was so close to his kelong. Yah, sure — those guys in there now were prisoners. But hallo, so was Ah Meng! What kind of life was this at the kelong? He was supposed to do it just for two years, until Ah Long came back from uni. But from the way Ma had been talking, it seemed as if she was happy to have him take care of business on the kelong for good. Save money what — no need to hire a new kelong manager all. Kani nah. Just thinking about Ah Long coming back and getting to sit in some air-con office, planning the family business’s future while Ah Meng sweated his balls off at the kelong, made him want to vomit blood.

Ah Long had recently sent Ma some picture of a girlfriend — some small-small, cute-cute Singaporean girl who was studying business in Queensland also. Ma was so excited, asked Ah Long to make sure to bring her home for Chinese New Year. Of course Ah Long could meet girls like that, lah — Ma send him away to study all. But Ah Meng? Put him on the kelong, how to meet girls? All the action he got most nights was hearing Siva in the room next door whacking off. When Ah Meng first started on the kelong Siva at least tried to be a bit quiet about it. But now, after a year, the guy damn not shy one. Ah Meng heard each long grunt through the thin wall between them.

Now, though — who was the winner? Ah Meng looked over at Yan and Ling, both of their faces bright, upturned, almost glinting in the sun. He shook his head and smiled at his fortune. Just wait till Ma saw these two. When they were a little older, perhaps.

“Come,” he said, getting up and starting back toward the house. “You girls hungry?”

The Merdeka Bridge became Edward’s home after the killing. He spent hours on it watching people go by. Nothing in this lonely city was his anymore; even the sky was different. But the water flowing gently under the bridge provided solace. The sound of the small waves, heard only when traffic disappeared, the gentleness of the ripples, those were the only things that reminded him of home. The home he left after the killing — or suicide, as some called it.

He knew better, the kill was neither a simple murder nor a suicide. But no one would understand that; they couldn’t. They did not love her like he did; you had to love someone to the degree he did to understand why it had happened.

At the moment, though, he felt bad at having said something to the young woman — Ms. Ana, as he liked to call her — who had been running by him on the bridge. He saw her almost every night. She ran around the same time. Normally, she would stop and speak to him but today she seemed distracted; she even tripped and fell. He could see she was bleeding. He offered her a hand and was hurt when she recoiled. He was tall for his fifteen years, really tall for a Chinese kid. His time on the streets showed in the dirt caked in his ears. He had pulled several tufts of hair out of his head after finding lice crawling down his forehead and into the small, festering sores on the sides of his cheeks.

He knew what she was thinking; his friends told him: Homeless man wants my money.

He did not want her money; he liked her.

“Ms. Ana, it’s me, Eddie,” he offered, “Don’t you remember? You gave me ten dollars last week.”

“Yes, of course I do. How are you? Did you eat something?” Ms. Ana asked, wiping her chin with the edge of her T-shirt.

He smiled. “Yah, three times! Thank you.”

“How do you feel today?”

“My friends, Ms. Ana, they are back. They went away and now they are back. I don’t know why. I say to them to go away. Tell them to leave me alone, Ms. Ana, tell them to go away,” he said, beginning to weep.

Gently, she sat down next to him and gave him a hug and then reached into her sock and pulled out a twenty.

“Keep this, Eddie, eat something.” He smiled at her.

“The jacket you gave me keeps me so warm, Ms. Ana. It is so cold out here at night sometimes. The jacket is so warm.”

“Come tomorrow, I will bring you some more clothes, but now I have to go.”

Eddie tried showing Ms. Ana his friends. No one could see them. It made him so mad. They constantly talked to him. Never let him sleep. His brain tried to stop them from talking. But no, they knew better. They knew how to sneak up on him when no one was looking. Yah, they were sneaky, those friends.

He held onto Ms. Ana’s hand as she stood up. She was so kind and warm. “Can you stay with me for a few more minutes?”

“I have to go, Eddie, I have to go,” she said, tugging at her hand.

Let her go, Eddie, she won’t stay. Your hands are ugly, filthy. You smell. Let her go. She belongs in a different world.

Truth was, he was hungry; he could not stand too well, his head was spinning. He let her hand go and she turned to run and then stopped and came back to him.

He looked up at her surprised that she had returned so quickly. She bent down and gave him a gentle hug, then quickly turned around and ran off.

Most of the people he met could not get away from him fast enough and she had given him a hug.

Be careful, Eddie, she may want something. You should watch her.

Eddie pulled some more hair out; his friends were definitely back. The mean one had not started speaking yet. It was just a matter of time.

Look around you, Eddie, you don’t belong here. These people have perfect lives, big houses, shiny cars, lots of money. And they have good families. Not like yours. Their families care. They don’t run around and let the kids fend for themselves.

Don’t listen to him, Eddie. He is a goondu! She was a good woman, your ma. No, you tell him to stop, now. You wouldn’t be in this shit if you listened to me and not him.

Two older aunties were walking by now — Eddie watched as they moved carefully to avoid him. He felt lousy. He hated being on the streets. It was pathetic. He was homeless even though he had a home. He did not want to go home — the warmth of it reminded him of his mother. He did not want to be reminded of her. He missed her. No, he was better off outside.

You know it is easier to be outside, Eddie. The house will be full of her things and there, they... they will be looking for you... they know what you did, they will try to get you. You need to stay out of the house.

Eddie got up from the bridge and began to walk toward the lights of Kallang, away from the river, peering at the reflection of the setting sun as it glinted on the water.

A light breeze was rolling in. Luckily, Ms. Ana had given him the jacket a week earlier. It was gray and blue with the word Singapore on the back.

You know, Eddie, Ma would have loved your jacket.

No way, Eddie, she would be ashamed, you were her dream and now here you are wearing people’s garbage.

Eddie paused when he got to the bus stop. His hunger pangs had become an accurate indicator of time and they told him that Uncle Teo would be driving up soon in bus number 26 and Eddie would spend the next hour in its comfortable air-con before returning to the streets for the rest of the night. He thought for a minute about going home. But the house stifled him. Each time the phone rang, his heart jumped — maybe it was the police looking for him, or perhaps, just perhaps there was a miracle and his mother had come back. Neither ever happened.

The streets were better. No one knew him.

Uncle Teo opened the bus door and pretended not to notice that Eddie offered no fare — again. This was an older bus, one that wended a well-traveled route, and Eddie could always detect the familiar smell of dirt, sweat, and sometimes vomit lingering just beneath the scent of chemical sprays.

This is what being unwanted smells like, Eddie, get used to it. This is the rest of your life.

“Go to the last seat,” Uncle Teo casually said, “someone left a McDonald’s bag. Maybe inside got some makan.”

It was the same routine each night.

Maybe he poisoned the burger, Eddie. Who would want to feed you? You are such a waste of flesh.

No, no, Eddie. He loves you. You can repay him someday. Don’t listen to that man. You are a good boy, Edward. Eat the Big Mac.

Eddie clutched at his head. It was pounding, and the voices were getting stronger and louder.

He found the bag on a crackled cushion in the back of the bus and inhaled the two burgers; his first and last meal of the day.

If only Ma had told him the truth.

He stared out the window at the spectacle of purpose on the street. People were busy, had places to go, things to do, goals to accomplish. He’d had it all too until Ma’s rape. The rape changed everything. The voices, his friends, had shown up that day.

The day that changed everything was an ordinary day, a sunny one. After school, he had headed to the East Coast lagoon as usual, spending the afternoon helping tourists and schoolkids carry kayaks and canoes in and out of the water. The tips were good.

Eddie headed home only after the last of the canoes was put away.

On Monday afternoon the old man with the erhu was at the corner again.

In the soft shade of a tembusu he sat on a folding stool, the ancient battered instrument held upright. The knobby fingers of his left hand slid along the strings while his right arm worked the bow. A tight-stretched cobra skin fattened each long slow note before releasing it into the air.

Watching through sinuous heat shimmering up from the concrete, Ed was caught. Davey stopped also. He stared, let go of Ed’s hand, balanced for a moment on not-quite-steady toddler legs, then plopped down on the grass of the verge, never taking his eyes off the old man. Ed smiled and slid down against a mahogany tree. It would make no difference when they arrived at Ellen’s. They could stay here for now and drift on these melodies, alien and alluring.

The old man’s hands gained speed, racing, nimble as the macaques in the park; then they slowed, slipped supple and flowing, like the water in the Strait. The macaques had ruled the island once, dancing through the trees, screaming by the water holes. The Strait had washed the shores of island and mainland, tying them together as it held them apart. Now the few macaques left were confined to the reserve and the Strait was causewayed and ferried, narrowed by landfill and curbed by barriers. But the monkeys were still monkeys and the water was still water.

The music sounded sad to Ed. That was the minor scale, he knew. Probably these were not sad songs, just his Western ears that made them so. The old man did look sad, though. Because he was far from home? Or because he was old? Or because no one but Ed and Davey stopped to listen, and he knew Ed didn’t understand?

No one in Singapore stopped to listen, or stopped for anything. No one played music on streetcorners, either, and on a less out-of-the-way sidewalk the old man would’ve been arrested for interfering with the public progress, for distracting citizens from their daily rounds, for being unnecessary. But on this hot afternoon in Bukit Timah, no one other than Ed and Davey were on the street to be distracted.

Ed wondered if the old man lived here, in this sweet, treed expat enclave where Westerners dwelled to be reminded of home. He doubted he did, thought it more likely he traveled to this corner by bus, to other corners of the island also, other quiet empty suburbs where he could sit and play his quavering melodies in the damp heat. Maybe he lived with his family; maybe his daughter was a banker, his son-in-law a doctor, his grandchildren energetic high-achievers who ran off in their school uniforms in the morning, none of them with time for the old man’s music or his memories. Maybe, long ago, young and energetic himself, he’d come to Singapore from South China, from heat like this, and now he was old and an expat and he, too, wanted to be reminded of home.

Ed didn’t. Home was worlds, years, lives away. He didn’t miss it and he didn’t want to go back there, back to New York, back to winter slush and politics he had to pay attention to and buses that didn’t come. It was ten years since they’d left, since Ellen had called, so excited, the promotion had come through and they were headed to London. No more taxi drivers who didn’t know the way, no more slithery roaches, pretentious hipsters, brown smothering clouds drifting over from New Jersey.

“I think they have roaches,” Ed smiled, kissing her at the door that night. Her eyes had been glowing. “And I’m sure they have hipsters.”

“My God, what smells so great in here?”

“Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I thought I should learn the exotic cuisine.”

All through dinner she talked, making lists, assigning tasks. She would tackle this and Ed should follow through on that. He sipped his wine, enjoying her incandescence, her mad caroming. A month later they’d settled into a West London flat. “You’ve got to call it a flat now, darling,” she told him as she breezed out the door her first day.

Ed’s own clients were people he’d never met and they didn’t care where he was as long as their websites got designed, updated, and populated, a word that delighted him: as though each page were a tiny village, JoeJones.com, pop. 313. He methodically took care of them and then took long midday walks, as he had in New York, as he always had.

In their new suburban London home Ed saw himself as one of the islands revealed when the tide of commuters swept out each morning. His walks took him to the greengrocer, the locksmith, the fishmonger, islands also, each one craggy or forbidding or gentle, each one worth exploring. The cars driving on the left-hand side of the road he found interesting to watch, like choreographed dancers in a number new to him. He wondered whether England had no tornados because her traffic went counter-clockwise. He learned to differentiate the subtle variations of fog and rain and he liked the clinks when he jingled the coins that made his pockets heavy.

Ellen didn’t. The money exasperated her and she couldn’t get used to traffic coming from the wrong direction. The gray weather was draining. The cabbies never got lost but there weren’t many places, she found, that she wanted to go.

“New York made such sense,” she sighed over lamb chops and green beans one night. The chops were particularly good; Ed had made friends with the butcher, a fat man from Sussex. I’ve given ye the best ones, tender and tasty if ye cook ’em right.

“London,” Ellen went on, shaking her head. “It’s so... medieval.” Her response was to buckle down and work harder. Eighteen months later she called home one morning, an hour after she got to work, thrilled once again: they were going to Prague.

In Prague Ed liked the tensions between the past and the present, the red roofs, the smell of yeast and cinnamon from the bakery. He couldn’t master Czech but the baker spoke English. From Madagascar, the vanilla, she’s cost too much but nothing else worth having. Ed cooked chicken with onions and paprika. Ellen railed against the narrow streets and the traffic. In London, she said, it rained all the time but at least you could get around.

After Prague, Buenos Aires, where Ed paused in his walks to sit in cafés on wide boulevards. Try first without milk, señor, you drink Argentine coffee now. He grilled butter-tender steaks and Ellen felt nostalgic for buttoned-up Prague where ragtop cars didn’t pound out music twenty-four hours a day. Then Nairobi, to Ed a never-still metropolis of old jeeps, bright cloth, musical speech (Fresh pineapple! Come buy it! You can do much wid it!), and dark, glistening faces. He learned to make ugali from cornmeal and served it with roast goat. To Ellen, Nairobi was dust that made her cough, bottled water, failed Internet connections (in Buenos Aires the technology worked), and armed guards.

In Nairobi, she got pregnant. It was time, she said; they didn’t want to wait until they were too old, until conceiving was a chore and delivery a risk, did they? Ed thought perhaps she’d want to go home, at least to have the baby, but she was working on some major deals and so Davey was born in Aga Khan Hospital three months before they moved to Singapore.

Singapore astonished Ed.

Ellen’s colleagues envied the assignment because, they said, Singapore was Asia Lite. Not like being sent to Shanghai or Tokyo, with their illegible street signs, illegible menus, illegible manners. Everything worked in Singapore. Crime barely existed, the water was safe. Everything worked, and worked in ways you understood. Not that life was perfect. The trees were groomed and the sidewalks practically polished, traffic flowed — but be careful, they were warned: Singapore, it’s Disneyland with the death penalty. Jaywalking, gum-chewing, free-thinking: just watch yourselves.

Ellen didn’t care about jaywalking, or free-thinking either. She was happy to be an expat among expats, to mix only with other Westerners, to live as though she weren’t in Asia at all. The safe, clean, functioning Singapore was the one she came looking for, the one she found, the one that — for a time — pleased her.

Ed saw all that — how could you miss it? — but it wasn’t his Singapore. More than anywhere they’d lived, more than where they’d come from, Singapore instantly felt like home.

He loved the damp heat, the daily rain, the bright and gray skies alternating, striping the day. The storms that blew through and scoured the air. The breathless young Singaporeans in the business of business; the expat community constantly churning, impermanent, strangers arriving and friends departing every day. Cultures mashing into one another in heady confusion: the swirling scents of curry, coconut milk, and coriander, the roast Cornish hen with fingerling potatoes in one café, the nasi lemak in the next, the chicken tajine a few doors down. Singapore had four official languages, but the one Ed loved was the unofficial one, the one everyone spoke: Singlish — in vocabulary, in grammar, and in syntax, a knotted combination of them all. In Singapore you could live your life in English, but Singlish was what the locals spoke, and the transplanted, the settled-in. Ed set out to learn it.

He also set out, as always, to learn the local cuisine. In Singapore that very idea was funny, because all recipes except the oldest Malay ones were immigrants and none were pure. He wrapped Davey in a quilted cotton infant sling and took him along to the markets, collecting the dozens of umber, ochre, black, and gold spices that went into curry, depending on whose curry you were cooking. He made pineapple tarts and oyster omelets, yellow egg noodles, coconut-stewed beef, and fish head curry.

Ellen started to drink.

“Singapore,” she sighed as they sat over the remains of vegetable dumplings and pork rib soup. She poured herself more wine. “At least in Nairobi when it was this freakin’ hot, it was dry.”

“I took Davey to the reserve this morning. We spotted a baby macaque in a tree. I don’t know which thought the other was funnier.” He told her this because she never asked anymore. Somewhere between Buenos Aires and Nairobi she’d stopped wondering how Ed spent his days. In Singapore she’d briefly become curious again, because of Davey, but it turned out baby news bored her. She cooed over Davey in the morning, once Ed had him dressed and in his high chair. She sang to him at night if she was home before his bedtime, though those early evenings slowly grew rare. She read parenting books, but not, as Ed did, to learn what to do, how to be a new person with the new person that was Davey. Ellen read to find out what Davey should be doing, what his accomplishments ought to be in this month, and this and this. She compared Davey with the child in the books — an average child, and shouldn’t Davey be more advanced than that? — and with the children she met, children of expats, of transplants, of locals. On weekends, before the midday heat chased her indoors, she’d walk with Ed and Davey in the Children’s Garden or to a breakfast of noodles at a hawker center. Davey’s chubby friendliness made the cooking aunties cluck and chuckle: what a buaya he was, a little flirt! Ellen basked in their adoration, but Ed understood: admiring Davey, they were admiring her. She was kiasu, Ed thought, cutthroat competitive, as she always had been. He used to admire her fire and drive, having little ambition of his own; but now that Davey had become her proxy, it began to trouble him. The aunties asked to hold Davey, which Ellen affected to think about and then graciously permitted — Ed always allowed it — and at first they tried to give him sweets but they soon learned that was only for weekdays, when Davey was alone with Ed.

Ed, enchanted with Davey’s first smile, his first tooth and first word, suggested on his first birthday that they think about another child. Ellen barked, “Are you crazy?” and went off to bed alone. Ed took a folding chair out onto the walk in front of the ground-floor flat and sat in the evening breeze. Ellen kept the air-conditioning cranked up high; Ed didn’t like it, living in a temperature Singapore never felt. Crazy? He considered. Well, maybe. Huat sio oreddy. The man’s mad.

Across another year Ed took Davey to the garden and the reserve, to the market and to other kids’ homes to crawl and then walk and then run around in a chattering tribe like monkeys. He cooked fried dough, sweet potato leaf stew, biryani, chili crab for holidays. He told Ellen about Davey’s day while Davey laughed and mashed his hands in his rice and Ellen nodded and floated farther away. At the end of the year she told him she’d found someone else and she’d like him to move out.

He wasn’t surprised. Though he wasn’t happy, he knew his unhappiness stemmed largely not from the loss of Ellen, long since lost, but from her insistence that they share custody of Davey.

“What mother would just totally give up her son?” she said, blinking.

What mother doesn’t know the names of his friends? Ed thought, but he understood. Ellen resisted Asia in Singapore, as she had Africa in Nairobi and old Europe in Prague, but still, this was about that most Asian of notions: saving face. Not with the cooking aunties, who would have mattered to Ed but meant nothing to Ellen; but among her colleagues. This ornament, this piece in the game that Davey was to her, it would make her look bad, cold-hearted, to give him up.

Ed didn’t protest, though, because he saw immediately how it would be and he was right. Ellen hired a nanny. A smiling Filipina named Maricor, who lived in the ground-floor flat three nights a week in the room that had been Ed’s office. Ellen made no adjustment in her life for Davey, still left for work early in the morning when the light was clear, and Maricor didn’t mind at all that Ed usually appeared an hour or so later, to go with them to the reserve, the garden, shopping at the market for spices and fruits. Ellen knew, and Ellen didn’t care, as long as Ed waited until she was gone so she didn’t have to see him, wasn’t required to make small talk and act as though they were still connected. They were, of course, because of Davey, who would connect them forever. But Ellen, as always, was eager to leave one life behind and begin the next.

Twice, on weekend days — weekends were always Ed’s, because, as Ellen explained, if she wasn’t working through a weekend she needed Me time — Ed and Davey ran into Ellen and her someone else in the Smith Street wet market. The someone, a boisterous Russian with a big smile, was a client of Ellen’s firm. He tickled Davey’s chin and seemed happily baffled by the noise, the bright colors of signs and stalls, the profusion of spices and fruits he called “foreign” and “exotic.” Ellen kissed Davey, smiled thinly, and steered her Russian away as soon as they’d exchanged enough substance-free sentences so that everyone could see she was perfectly comfortable in Ed’s presence. Watching her examine fine powders, peeled bark, and round berries in spice stalls, seeing her make purchases he was sure she had no idea how to use, Ed wondered if she was hoping to learn to cook. Ellen, he thought, cooking: none of their friends back in New York — or anywhere else — would believe it. But Singapore did strange things to you.

Ed settled into the new arrangement and found it not uncomfortable. The nights Davey spent at Ellen’s, Ed missed him, missed cooking his rice porridge in the morning and teaching him his new word of the day. Ed worked late into those nights, so his days were free for Davey and for Maricor, whose calm company he was coming to enjoy. Maricor had good English — one of Ellen’s criteria for a nanny — but Ed also spoke with her in Singlish, Maricor laughing with delight when he surprised her with a new phrase. Ellen had rolled her eyes when he’d used Singlish words: “It’s not a real language, you know.”

When he was hired by Hiroshi Systems, Ryu was offered a family apartment in Bayshore Park for himself, his wife, and his son. Relocated from Japan, they had little idea where they were, but the condo faced the sea over the East Coast and a cooler wind swept through the private roof garden where he and his son Tomiko grew pepper plants in pots and arranged a little Zen enclosure of white pebbles within a square of white tea shrubs.

At thirty-two, Ryu was viewed favorably by his cynical superiors, though he was never quite fully aware of the degree to which he was being groomed for more exalted responsibilities at the commading heights of Hiroshi Systems. He was given a company car and a Malay driver to take him every morning down to Orchard, where he stayed until late at night working at a seven-floor HQ decorated with silk scrolls and antique samurai swords.

More conscientious and puritanical than his peers, he rarely joined the raucous drinking parties that were held at Orihara Shoten or Kinki. He was never seen paralytic under a table chewing on a napkin or ramming yen notes into tassled hostess bras. He punctually called Natsuo an hour before he left the office to make sure that when he got home Tomiko was not yet in bed. He prized the hour that he could spend with his son, reading in bed or watering the shrubs on the roof, the seven-year-old following him around with a watering can. After he had put him to bed, he and Natsuo ate together in their ocean-view dining room and afterward, according to their mood, enjoyed an hour together in bed or watched old Zatoichi movies animated by the incomparable Shintaro Katsu. They were the same movies his mother used to watch.

Their life went on like this for six months. Natsuo’s mother visited from Osaka, and Ryu’s father visited from Hiroshima. They went to the movies in Orchard once a week while the Filipina nanny looked after Tomiko, and on Wednesday nights he took Natsuo to Gordon Grill for an English meal followed by a Baked Alaska, a dish so lavishly outmoded that it felt startling and arousing to them. Once a month they sat behind candles at Tong Le and peered out over the lights of a city they did not understand and never would. It seemed like a place they should be enjoying, but which they did not know how to enjoy. The most enjoyable, the most sensual thing about it for them, was the heat.

Natsuo worked part-time at a Japanese food consortium, and she had more hours to feel out her adopted city than her husband did. But that same enjoyable heat dogged her when she spent time in it and she too often felt her will sapped as soon as she hit the streets. During the rains, she went to the movies by herself and grew a little plumper on daily servings of kaya toast; she went to spas in five-star hotels and had her nails done after her massages and wondered if this was decadent or virtuous. There was no way of knowing. Whether or not she was a typical expat Japanese wife never occurred to her. It was the passing of time that was the great problem, the riddle with which she had to grapple. And then there was the buying of lavender-flavored Hokkaido milk and sake from Meidi-ya supermarket.

Ryu had little time to himself. One night, however, when he had finished work earlier than expected, he got into a cab on Grange Road and asked, as usual, to be taken home. While they headed eastward, the driver caught his eye in the rearview mirror and offered him a smile.

“Tired go home, lor?”

“Why — do I look tired?”

He touched his face and caught a glimpse of the wan specter in the same mirror. It was true, he looked appallingly sapped.

“No fun after work, bad time, lah.”

Fun after work? The concept, so ubiquitous around him, had never really occurred to him. Yet the driver’s surprise made perfect sense. He was hurrying home to the same routine he enjoyed every day, but as it happened the word enjoyed was a slight exaggeration.

Feeling suddenly resentful, he fired back: “So, what do you suggest?”

“If you like it, I’ll take you for some relax.”

“I think I’d like that,” Ryu blurted out, and before he could change his mind the driver had shifted lanes and then turned away from the usual road.

“Where, then?” Ryu asked, leaning forward weakly.

“Don’t worry, san, a place where Japanese gentlemen like.”

They drove west. It was a Thursday night in the rainy season, unremarkable in every way, the streets swept with wind and rain, and Ryu didn’t ask again where the driver intended to take him. It seemed so innocuous and unexceptional that he felt embarrassed to ask something that would make him appear a rube. He sat back and enjoyed a ride into Geylang, and soon they were passing along streets of what looked like suburban villas and shop houses.

Some of these were clearly brothels, with dark red lights and a couple of girls sitting outside on metal stools, watching the cars floating by. So that was what the driver had in mind. And yet he was neither surprised nor put off. His curiosity was lightly aroused. The area away from the white neon of the main streets seemed calm and matter-of-fact, and the red-light houses with their girls gave off no energy that could be interpreted as menacing. When they came to a quiet halt in front of one, halfway down a leafy street, he got out with a falsely cheery wave and wondered what commission the driver was given for bringing naïve expats there. The man, holding open the door for him, told him that he would wait for him and take him home afterward for a set price, to which Ryu agreed at once. There didn’t seem any point complicating things unnecessarily.

He went up to an entrance where an older woman sat reading a paper by a garage light, and when he had gone through the bead curtain into the foyer there was a quiet commotion, a pleasurable rustle, and a mama-san appeared with a kettle in one hand and a pair of glasses wrapped around her neck with a glittering string. He had to use his awkward, slightly broken English to make it understood that he did not have much time. That it was his first time, however, was easy enough to disguise.

The room was half-dark, with a Guan Yin shrine in a corner and a walnut coffee table piled with travel magazines. He was served tea while five girls were brought out from the room beyond, all of them dressed in below-the-knee black silk skirts, and from these he had to choose his one-hour paramour. It would have been easier, he reflected, to do so with his eyes closed, not seeing the way they subjected him to their own smiling scrutiny. But as it was, he had to look each one in the eye and cast a quick glance over her shoulder, the obscured curve of the breast and stomach, the hips in their locked poise, the angle of the mouth. Though the air-conditioning had been turned up as soon as he entered, he began to perspire and mopped his forehead with one of the napkins which had come with the tea.

Then he turned his eye back to the girl at the dead center of the row, whose shoulders were bared by her strapless dress. She was the shortest of the line-up and her hair was dyed a curious dark blond at the tips. Her eyes looked green from a distance, as though she were wearing colored contact lenses. She did not smile, but in any case his eye had not returned to her face but to a small tattoo on her left shoulder.

It was a dark blue Chinese character which did not correspond to a kanji which he could decipher. Suddenly prompted by something in this spidery character, with its radiating lines and disciplined geometry, he nodded to her without a moment’s further indecision and rose unsteadily, unsure as to whether his equipment would rise to the occasion of so pretty and relaxed a girl. Such an unflappable professional.

And on top of that, he thought, you’re a swine and a low-life, and now you have a secret, the first secret you have ever had from Natsuo—

The world of secrets. As he followed the girl — he just about caught her name as Cheryl — he wondered if every man had this moment of grim initiation into the world that lay beyond and around marriage.

Certainly, nobody ever talked about it until they were older and it no longer mattered as much. But as soon as one had entered it, there was no going back. It was an irreversible decay, a one-way slide. Everything one had known up to that point as sexual happiness and wonder became instantly foreshortened and relativized. It was this that was arousing. One of his more lewd colleagues at work, now that he thought about it, had expressed it crudely when explaining why he had gotten divorced from his wife in Tokyo: “Like the wondrous and fastidious panda,” he’d said, “I found it impossible to mate in captivity.”

They went into a small back room garishly adorned with a small droplet chandelier and silver-framed mirrors.

“You like short time one hour?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Take shower together.”

He paid her, and they disrobed under the absurd chandelier.

Naked, she was far more beautiful. In the claustrophobic shower she soaped him from head to foot and nestled against him as she used the shower head to disperse the suds from his chest and back. As she did so, he looked down at the tattoo. It seemed to have been carved into her marvelous skin with a laser, the lines crisp and elegant. They washed each other’s hair and began to laugh. She held his erection with one hand and caressed the back of his neck with the other soaped hand, running her nails into his hair.

He had the impression at once that this one would not keep a faithful eye on the clock by the bed. When they were half dry they rolled onto the bed in their white towels and his guilt subsided and he plunged his face into her hair, holding a shoulder in each hand, and kissed her throat.

During the hour his ear picked up what seemed like distant sounds. Cars passed in the rain, men walked along the street looking into the brothels while a soft thunder rolled across the city. His initial hysteria also calmed and he realized that to take this sort of pleasure one needed a measured coolness, a sense of righteousness. That was the trick. The jittery fear and guiltiness of the newbie were faintly ridiculous to these girls who saw so easily beneath the male surface and who, unlike other women, did not heap facile scorn upon it. But now he also realized that this diversion away from Natsuo was in fact a boomerang motion back toward her. It didn’t matter at all, and nor did it matter that if she discovered his pecadillo she would not understand it in the least. It was one of those things that only explanations and expiation make sordid.

The people we think we know the most are always the people we know the least. They carry their secrets within them with a greater discipline, that is all, but those secrets can be larger than oceans, deeper and more critical by virtue of being skillfully kept out of view by a surgical paranoia.

Afterward, he lay on the bed exhausted while she brought him tea. The girls chattered in Mandarin in the next room.

“I was wondering,” he said at last, while she carefully combed her hair in a dresser mirror, still naked but for a towel wrapped around her hips. “That tattoo on your shoulder. Is it a Chinese character?”

Without turning, she caught his eye in the mirror. “Of course it is. But it’s an old character.”

“I thought so. What does it mean? Do you mind me asking?”

“I don’t mind you asking, but I won’t tell you unless you come back to see me again.”

They smiled.

“That seems fair,” he laughed. “You’ll tell me next time.”

“Maybe, if you make me happy.”

Ah, the tip. He would make it a handsome one.

“Maybe you’ll tell me where you are from?”

“So curious, lah! I am from Penang.”

He guessed it was not quite true. He had heard her speak a quick, native Mandarin to her sisters in the other room. Whatever, he thought in amusement. She is allowed to lie, given what she has to do for a living. She can lie to me, or any man she likes. It’s not the same as a real lie.

He accepted it and admired instead the almost military tension of her spine, the vertebrae visible through that delicate skin. She had a smell like bergamot tea. When she half turned toward him, her eye moved like that of a gecko, ironic and quick.

On the way out, he kissed her more warmly than he should have and was sure that she responded in kind. It produced in him a grateful moment of crackpot pride. There was, then, the hitherto distant possibility that this hour in bed had not been merely a financial transaction, and even if this was an illusion, he clung to that moment of pride all the way back to Bayshore Park.

We were minding our own business! Never causing no trouble! And then, for no reason, you came and cursed us! You are wicked — evil!”

The accusation bursts out of the figure lurking by the vase of welcoming lilies on our rooftop terrace as we come out of the lift.

“Please — not another suicidal teen!” says Renee, my flatmate, only partly in jest.

Living in a modern condo in a heritage conservation district where walkups are the norm means an unexpected visitor to our private penthouse lobby is a potential mugger.

The woman turns on Renee: “You busybody slut, this is all your fault. You made this one curse me! Now my husband is gone and my boy has diabetes and the doctor says he has some lump growing inside so he has to go and operate!”

Renee retreats before the barrage of Singlish and spittle.

The woman has the fierce, focused intensity sometimes seen on people verging on insanity. Her hair looks dirty and she smells... a stale, sour odor of unhealthy, unwashed flesh and fabric envelops and moves with her.

If I were meeting her for the first time, I would classify her as crazy.

“Should we call the police?” Renee asks quietly from behind me.

“Call Gary,” I say. I stay between Renee and our visitor. Gary, chairman of our management committee, lives in the other penthouse in the Banyan Tower and is a reliable witness.

“It’s all your fault! You destroyed my family! And now you are making my son get sick and... and—”

Tears and memories overcome her words. She cannot make herself say the word die. But I know it is not only her son that these harsh raw sobs are for as she twists herself in agony against our front door.

“And that stupid maid. Can you believe the girl had the cheek to offer me money for my boy’s treatment? Whoever heard of such a thing? I told her, if you so laowah and got so much money to throw at people, why are you here washing toilets? I told the police, I told the maid agency, if the girl got so much money she must have stolen it from me! Those useless people come and tell me I’m the one that owes her back pay!”

Renee, ever softhearted, moves over to comfort the intruder. Instinctively, I reach out an arm to block, to protect. The blue ceramic vase shatters on the wall rack beside her head and—

“Did you see that?” The madness in the woman’s voice rises and she shrieks again. “Did you see what she did? I didn’t break that — but I know you are going to blame me!”

“No one is blaming you...” Renee says, but she retreats to safety behind me. She obviously doesn’t recognize the woman.

It is not surprising that I remember her. After all, I remember everything about Tiong Bahru since the 1930s and it was only a year ago that I first encountered our not-yet-mad visitor at the newly reopened market. The old stigma of subsidized government housing is forgotten in our district’s graceful curved balconies and pastel wooden shutters, and the vegetable patches between rows of terraced walk-ups are tended by a mix of original inhabitants and recent arrivals. In the prewar days the buildings were called mei ren wu or houses of beauty because mistresses of wealthy businessmen lived here. Now that coffee bars, modern bistros, and retro bookshops have moved in, property prices have gone up, attracting real estate agents like this woman.

It is past two a.m. and Saiful stands outside the Church of St. Anthony on Woodlands Avenue 1, smoking one kretek after another as he nervously tugs on his long, greasy hair. He has been waiting for the better part of an hour and is ready to bolt. But he can’t. It is ridiculous to think that all this trouble has been the result of a stupid postage stamp. But the stamp — a rare Straits Settlement misprint from 1902 featuring a pink-colored King Edward VII — is all that Saiful has. On her deathbed, Saiful’s mom, dying prematurely of liver disease, told him to hang onto the family heirloom at any cost. At any cost — that was what she had said, and he had promised her that he would. Now, he is beginning to understand the gravity of his commitment.

Saiful was once considered a mat rocker, a somewhat derogatory term referring to a young Malay who is into heavy metal. With his tight leather jacket, gold-rimmed Ray-Bans, and long sun-bleached hair, he used to be a fixture at Studebaker’s disco in Pacific Plaza. But now that he is reaching the ripe old age of thirty-five, other priorities have surfaced. For one, he has begun to think seriously about getting married and starting a family. After all, his childhood friends Ismail and Khamsani are both hitched and have seven children between them. Plus, the government is extending all sorts of monetary incentives to increase the fertility rate of Singaporeans; though, of course, the unspoken truth is that the bureaucrats are hoping to have more Chinese babies, not Malay ones.

Still, the thought of getting married gives him a headache. He knows only too well that the lovely Aishah, his longtime girlfriend, is averse to the idea. It is not about money — Aishah has said as much; but Saiful feels ashamed that he is unable to afford a condo, car, or country club membership. Sure, it is always possible to sell the stamp and potentially net a six-figure sum, but that would expressly go against his mother’s dying wish. At any cost — the words continue to ring in Saiful’s mind. The truth is, Aishah has other priorities. As much as she appears to love him, her career as a stewardess with Singapore Airlines currently takes center stage.

Saiful takes another drag of the kretek and glances at his watch. At that moment, a creaky, badly scratched Mitsubishi Lancer appears around the bend. The car stops, the door opens and dislodges a petite Indian woman wearing a sari and sporting a pair of sparkly gypsy-style earrings.

Before Saiful can say anything, Leela, for that is the woman’s name, comes right up to him and jabs her index finger at his nonexistent pecs.

“First of all, shut the fuck up. If you want your fucking stamp back, do as I say. And no fucking comments on my brother’s pimp mobile.”

Saiful takes a closer look at the Lancer and decides to keep his opinion to himself. He sees that the driver is Indian too, and correctly assumes that this must be the brother, whom Leela refers to as Babu. Saiful and Leela hop into the vehicle and it trundles off.

Almost immediately, Saiful senses there is something wrong with the baby-faced Babu, but cannot put a finger on it. When he sees the siblings communicating animatedly in sign language, his discomfort builds.

“Doesn’t he speak?”

“What do you think?” Leela retorts.

Then it occurs to Saiful — Babu is a deaf-mute. He isn’t allowed to drive, of course; but Saiful can see that Babu is the perfect chauffeur and getaway driver — his heightened visual sense makes navigating the confusing Woodlands thoroughfares a cakewalk.

“Should he be driving?” Saiful tries again.

“Just keep your fucking mouth shut till we get to the temple.”

As the Lancer chugs along, Saiful peers out onto the empty streets. All he is concerned with right now is getting his stamp back. And whatever he needs to do to make Mr. Rao happy. He has no choice.

Illuminated by the mercury flare of the endless rows of streetlamps, Woodlands looks nondescript and anonymous. Yet this is where Saiful feels most at home. Cars and trucks zoom past this forsaken bit of Singapore toward the checkpoint and onward to Malaysia via the causeway. No one stops here, not unless they have to fill up their gas tanks. And those that do make sure they don’t stay too long.

Saiful knows Woodlands well, having grown up in nearby Mandai village. He knows, for example, that it has a higher proportion of unsolved murders than anywhere else in Singapore. A few years ago, a schoolgirl from Si Ling Primary School was found near the train tracks, raped and strangled. The perpetrator was never caught. Several months later, the body of an Indonesian maid was discovered decomposing in a water tank atop one of the HDB apartment blocks along Woodlands Street 73. Even though a Bangladeshi worker was quickly arrested, Saiful heard rumors that the murderer was in fact some rich Singaporean who paid the worker off to take the rap. And what about the famous case of the char kway teow hawker who was found dead in a pool of blood at Old Woodlands Town Centre?

In all fairness, it isn’t surprising that there is a preponderance of unsavory activities here. After all, this is as far away from downtown Singapore as one can get, and here at the fringe, marginal characters find a home. A quick escape to Malaysia is always an option. And if you cannot take the causeway for whatever reason, a brisk swim across the Johor Strait is not impossible.

Saiful’s troubles started when he accepted an offer to work for Madame Zhang, who runs a small fruit stall midway between Marsiling and Kranji. Madame Zhang likes to hire Malays, for she knows they hardly ever complain, work hard, and pretty much keep to themselves. And even though she can only muster a few words of bahasa (her English is equally deficient), she quickly developed a liking for the quiet and dependable Saiful, and groomed him to be one of her top runners.

Apart from selling pineapples and papayas, Madame Zhang makes much of her income peddling forged passports and visas. And with Saiful’s help, she has been making a killing distributing traditional medicines to her wide network of mostly mainland Chinese customers. Be they tiger penises from Burma or human placentas from Vietnam, she has a steady stream of cash buyers for her smuggled goods. Her specialty is rhino horn from South Africa, which, because it is banned, can often fetch up to two thousand dollars per ounce. As the horn is widely considered an aphrodisiac, it is not unheard of for a syndicate of buyers to make an order in the tens of thousands of dollars. Once bought, the prized item is shaved into delicate ribbons of cartilage, boiled in water, and presto, the result is liquid Viagra.

But Saiful is far from thinking about aphrodisiacs. Babu has stopped his car in front of an ugly 1970s-style warehouse somewhere in the concrete maze of Woodlands Industrial Park. Leela signals Saiful to get out and leads him over to a bolted steel door. Babu waits in the Lancer, playing to the hilt the role he knows like the back of his hand.

In the dim moonlight, Saiful can just make out the words: Sri Vinayagar Temple. It certainly doesn’t look like a temple to him, but what does he know?

“First, you have to agree to everything Mr. Rao says,” Leela pipes up. “That being understood, you have to kiss his elephant.”

“Elephant?”

“Just fucking do it, all right?” Without waiting for an answer, Leela rings the doorbell. After several seconds, the door cranks open and a temple guard who is no more than four feet tall shows them in. The midget bows and quickly disappears.

The interior of the warehouse is unexpectedly opulent. Saiful feels like he has stepped into a mini — Taj Mahal, with incense and patchouli candles burning at various corners. Rich silken fabric adorns all four walls, and the dropped ceiling is covered with hammered gold leaves. Everything is cast in a soft, deceptively reassuring glow.

Then Saiful notices the elephant. Almost as big as a real specimen, this is the Hindu god Ganesh, carved out of a single block of blue-green granite and inlaid with bands of moonstone and red garnet. It stands toward the rear of the room, glittering surreptitiously. The animal’s scowl tells all worshippers it is something not to be trifled with.

“Kiss it,” a high-pitched male voice rings out, and from the shadows Mr. Rao appears, looking like a cross between Fat Albert and Salman Rushdie. Mr. Rao is a fleshy, effeminate man. Once he sees Saiful, he begins to examine the thin ex-rocker with undisguised sexual interest.

Mr. Rao appears to be carrying a white mink stole in his left arm, until it opens its eyes and purrs.

“Fernando, say hello to our guests,” Mr. Rao prompts his snowy Persian cat. The animal stares around the room lethargically with its blue crystalline eyes. All at once Saiful feels much more at ease, for cats are by far his favorite animal. As a child, he collected feral tomcats and mated them with the village tabbies in Mandai, and then sold the kittens as purebreds to rich townsfolk. To him, the cat is the ultimate symbol of resourcefulness.

“You may be wondering why you’re here, and who I am,” chirps Mr. Rao, “but none of that is important right now. What is important is that we do what we must do. But first, the elephant.”

Saiful, who has been staring at Fernando to calm his nerves, almost opens his mouth to ask where he should kiss the beast. But he seems to have lost his voice. Moving close to the bejeweled mammoth, he gently places a little peck on the trunk. Saiful feels like he is performing a perverse sexual act.

Leela, who has not said another word, suddenly snaps to. Her face contorted in fury, she approaches Saiful and slaps him across the face.

“When you kiss Ganesh, you kiss his feet, asshole.”

Somehow, this amuses Mr. Rao greatly and he is sent into a paroxysm of giggles. Even Fernando the cat seems to find levity in the situation, and relaxes his formidably impassive face for a moment.

Saiful does what he is told, his nose registering the fact that the elephant feet are scented with sandalwood oil. Then, as he looks to Mr. Rao, the wide smile on the Indian’s face vanishes. With a theatrical flourish worthy of Houdini, Mr. Rao whips out a leather-bound stamp album. Fernando hisses at the abrupt movement and jumps out of its master’s arm.

“You want this, don’t you?” Mr. Rao opens the album and shows Saiful the pink-colored stamp. “Such a beautiful thing. Do you know that Edward the Seventh was a notorious womanizer and loved visiting high-end brothels whenever he was in Paris? His dick was quite famous.”

Saiful stares at the album and can only dumbly nod his head. He has no idea where any of this is going.

“This is what we must do.” Mr. Rao begins to describe a complicated scheme involving the removal of Madame Zhang and his takeover of her smuggling racket, including the inception of a new side business dealing with the importation of yaba, among other things. Mixed in with that, there is also what Mr. Rao refers to as “the pleasure industry.” He speaks continuously for more than ten minutes, but Saiful quickly loses the thread of the narrative and his mind starts to wander.

“So, how would you get rid of Madame Zhang?”

Saiful snaps out of his stupor. “What?” he says, his eyes beginning to tear from the thickening incense vapors.

“The ball is in your court, as the saying goes. Do it... if you want your stamp back.” Mr. Rao shuts the stamp album, nods almost militaristically, and sashays off into the gloomy recesses of the temple.

“I hope you value your life,” Leela whispers ominously into Saiful’s ears. With that, she too disappears. He is left alone in the candlelit temple. He looks again at the elephant, and wonders how and when he fell down this rabbit hole.

The first strike is a slap across her left cheek, but Merla barely flinches. She has learned to anticipate.

His glare still fixed upon her, he steps backward slowly, assessing the situation for a way to force a reaction. There is the faint sound of water lapping against the private berth outside the house while he stands by the designer lamp that has been switched on for the night. Then a flare of inspiration. He turns his eyes to the gaudy Swarovski collection arranged on the console table. A calculated pause, to grant her time to read his next move. His hand hovers over his first choice. She stiffens.

The heavy ornament hits her hard just above the right eye, triggering a mad scrambling of her arms. Even as it lands in her hands, the next projectile is already hurtling toward her, aimed to make her sink to her knees to catch it. The two objects collide in her small palms with a mercifully soft clink, so soft it infuriates him. He grabs another and takes an exaggerated swing, flinging it high up at the wall behind her. As Merla’s chin drops, she feels falling fragments bounce off her back. He strides toward her, seizes her by the hair, and clubs her over the head with his clenched fist. The blow instantly hurling her onto the marble floor, she rolls into a fetal position, disoriented, both ornaments clutched to her chest. Though her eyes are shut, she can feel his obese form looming over her, more so than the pain, which she recognizes as not being the kind that means blood. She does not know what set off this latest attack, but she knows he does not need a reason. She knows to keep still.

You do not walk away. You wait for Sir to go.

Later, when she thinks — prays — that she has seen the last of him for the night, Merla sweeps up. Then she goes to the garage where the Saab and Ferrari are parked, picks up leftover grayish-blue paint and a damp brush from the corner cupboard, and returns to the lounge to cover up the mark on the wall where the crystal smashed into pieces. The paint blends easily. In this opulent house, flanked on either side by similar ones which are still unsold, everything is still new. She has had plenty of practice covering up wall stains, mainly left by him and his guests in the den, for which the paint color is Dulux Black. She tries not to think about that room; these days she tries not to think at all.

Meticulously, she rearranges the Swarovski collection, predominantly birds. Most of them are seagulls, birds that she has never seen in her two years in this country, even though the waterfront villas are nestled amidst lush tropical foliage, on an isle within a cove of an island off the Singapore shore. Perhaps there are no birds because the vegetation is landscaped, the isle built from Cambodian sand and the cove artificially carved. Or maybe because there are never any crumbs to be found.

She picks up a small crystal seagull and looks at it more closely under the lamp. It has tiny red gemstones for eyes — rubies? How much is it worth? she wonders, as she has in the past. Enough, surely, to pay for half a year of round-the-clock care when her mother’s Alzheimer’s takes full grip. Enough to buy time for her younger brother to complete secondary school.

Look after Nanay. Study hard. I’ll send everything I get.

A sound from the floor above startles her. He is clearing his throat, his usual noise like a skanky alley cat coughing up fur and filth. His noxious spit will follow. She turns off the lamp and briskly heads back to the servants’ quarters. She does not run anymore.

Merla locks herself in her tiny room, behind the utility area where the washing machine and dryer are kept. She has a single bed with a thin mattress, a low chest of drawers, an unreachable window near the ceiling facing the side wall of the compound. The cicadas are quiet tonight. In the adjoining bathroom, she removes her blouse and winces as she lifts her bra away from her scalded breasts. The skin is still raw. She showers quickly, with cold water. She knows she should have seen him coming the other night, when he appeared in the kitchen doorway just as the kettle started to boil.

As she towels herself off, she stops to touch her back, where the deep burn from a few months ago has dried and hardened into a large triangular scab. Not the way to do collar! he had yelled. He yanked the cord, grabbed the iron away from her, and rammed her face against the wall. Hot metal. Fabric stuck to melted skin. As she writhed on the floor, trying to muffle her own cries, he ransacked her room, leaving with her battered old Nokia, her address book, and her passport.

At least that time there was a reason. The luxury of a reason. But sometimes there is no reason, or logic, or fairness. Only faith. She kneels and surrenders her eyes — one swollen, both weary — to the framed picture of Mother Mary on the bedside unit. Five hours to go before she is expected to toil again, but she knows that as always there will be little sleep. Still in need of solace, she recalls her long-dead father. The year His Holiness visited the Philippines, her father emptied his savings account to travel from their remote village by bus to Manila, bringing his teenage daughter with him. His wife and newborn son stayed at home. Young Merla watched as he wept in Luneta Park during closing Mass. She felt forever changed. From a roadside stall, he bought her first rosary beads, made of wood. Now the beads remind her not just of home, but of the time they were shoved into her mouth and forced down her clenched throat. The time she was left gagging, her shaking hand pushing through her open jaws to get a grip of the chain, her esophagus cut as she pulled out the metal crucifix.

The rosary beads are where she always keeps them — coiled around a corner of a small mirror, next to the picture of the Virgin Mary.

It was around four a.m. and the cupboard-sized room was, as always, unbearably warm. Natalia could feel herself choking on her own breath. She climbed down from the bunk bed and glided to the door on cotton slippers, past her belongings and the photographs of her family in Java. Her employers were still asleep.

The security guard did not notice her leaving the compound. Her only witnesses were the pair of green stone fish that spouted water even in the middle of the night. She walked along the gravel jogging path toward the reservoir, a street away, intending to make herself tired enough to sleep.

A Bangladeshi worker was wedged on a bench, asleep, his light blue phone still pressed between his shoulder and ear. There were pink plastic bags and condom wrappers on the grass, and lamps blazed around the perimeter of the water. Too much light would draw complaints from the condo dwellers, so there were unlit patches, and Natalia liked to disappear into them.

Soon enough she found a spot that would do, settling down on the grass a foot away from the water, staring into the blackness of the reservoir. This gleaming scentless lagoon with its circle of manicured greenery, hive-like concrete dwellings, and evenly spaced trees could not have been more different from the lake of her village. Yet it made her think of home, of her mother, her aunties, her friends, scrubbing their blouses in the water, swimming. Any moment out of her bosses’ apartment gave her joy, but it was these quiet ones stolen in the early hours of the day that she relished. There was hardly any breeze. She wanted to hear waves but the waters remained silent.

Natalia felt herself falling asleep when she spotted a man in a cap about twenty feet away, approaching the water. Trees obscured him, but from the way he was hunched, he seemed to be carrying something. A fisherman trying to catch something early in the morning? She had seen those once or twice this early in the day, but it was rare. Then there was a splash, and for a moment she saw the surface of the water rippling in response.

From the corner of her eye, she saw the man walking away. He was almost at his car, parked in a bus lane, when he abruptly turned and appeared to be looking at her. She ducked, hoping the foliage would hide her.

The man was now walking toward her; she stood up. Surely she had done nothing wrong. The city’s many laws confused her. Perhaps she should not be so close to the water’s edge? But she was just taking a breather. She walked up the slope and onto the gravel path. Her movements woke the Bangladeshi worker; he sat up and scratched himself, his phone still stuck to his shoulder. He looked dazed and mumbled a few confused words. It sounded like he was calling for his parents.

When Natalia glanced back at the man, he had turned around and was now jogging back to his car. He drove off without turning on his headlights. Ruffled, she hurried back to the condominium.

After the security guard waved her into the compound, she said a prayer before stepping into the house. Back in her room, she found herself wishing that she had taken down the car’s license plate.

Natalia tried to sleep but just lay in bed, dreading the day. The Chans usually woke up at about six thirty a.m. There was no predicting their moods, particularly Mrs. Chan. Ma’am was in her mid-thirties, successful, and wore sleek power jackets. They made quite a bit of money, but their condominium was small. Even so, Mrs. Chan seemed to think it was the size of a mansion and made Natalia clean every room, even the rarely used spare bedroom, every day except Sunday.

When Natalia heard the alarm go off in their room, she got up and started brewing coffee and making scrambled eggs and toast.

From the moment she stepped out of the master bedroom, Mrs. Chan started with her litany of complaints. Were the eggs fresh? Natalia had added too much milk to the coffee. Had she ironed the clothes? Did she manage to bring the clothes inside before it rained yesterday?

Natalia tried not to shrug and simply nodded, knowing that Mrs. Chan hated her talking back. She apologized often, saying she would try better. When Mr. Chan emerged, he already had his company lanyard on even though he was still in his light blue pajamas. Natalia wondered if he had slept with it on. He propped his feet up on the coffee table and ate his toast, flipping between channels and letting his wife continue her nagging.

Moving over to the balcony to do his morning stretches, he suddenly remarked, “Look. The police again.” The block in front of their apartment gave them only a partial view of the reservoir, but still, when Mrs. Chan and Natalia joined him in peering over the railing, they could see a crowd milling about by the water.

“Another drowning?” Mrs. Chan surmised, craning her long neck for a better glimpse.

“Looks like,” he said. “Suicides attract, like magnets. We should sell this place. So many deaths.”

“Can’t get a good price now,” Mrs. Chan replied before turning back to Natalia and giving her a look that sent her scurrying back to work. “We’re leaving for Madrid tonight. I know you’re happy we’ll be gone. I want you to send me a photo every evening of the rooms.”

Natalia nodded. Even though she was glad, she kept her face blank. What did it matter whether the rooms were clean when they were away? All they wanted was to get something out of her salary, even if they weren’t here to see it.

“How long away, ma’am?”

“Ten days. I’ll get my mother to come check on things some days. I should send you there to work for her but she doesn’t enjoy... never mind.” If Mrs. Chan was awful, her mother was a tyrant. Natalia knew enough Cantonese to know that her mother’s insults were racist and vulgar. A missed spot warranted a reprimand or even a slap. Mrs. Chan talked about how her mother had once scalded a maid for burning some chicken.

Still, ten days was a boon. Even if Mrs. Chan’s mother turned up, she never stayed long. She hated the smallness of the place and nagged her daughter for buying it. It occurred to Natalia that her prayers had worked.

Mrs. Chan was now chattering to her husband in Mandarin as they tried to gauge what was happening at the reservoir. Natalia waited until they left to change into their work clothes before cleaning up, making sure to pick up bits of toast from the couch.

Once Natalia saw the Chans’ car leave, she headed to the reservoir, getting as close as she could to the heart of the crowd. There were a few policemen standing around, not far from where she had been earlier that morning. The locals were taking photos on their phones and posting them. The ambulance arrived a few minutes later; as they placed the body on a stretcher, she could see it was a Chinese woman in a red dress. Her hair was loose, her nails were pale pink, and her wrist had a red string looped around it. One of the medics threw a white towel over the woman’s face.

Natalia knew the stories about how those seeking to be reborn as vengeful ghosts would drown themselves wearing red. She thought about the man in the cap that morning and the splash. Did he have something to do with the woman? What had he been carrying? It had been too dark to tell. No, she knew nothing. There was a house to clean, she told herself, hurrying away.

Trying not to think about the dead woman, she focused on the list of chores Mrs. Chan had left. She packed their luggage, pretending that it was her going on a trip, started cooking dinner at six, and let the food simmer.

The Chans came home late that night, spending just ten minutes in the apartment — enough time for Mrs. Chan to scold Natalia for cooking dinner and wasting food. Even as Mrs. Chan was dragging her luggage out the door, she was shouting instructions for more chores and insults in the same breath. Her husband, amused by the tirade, said nothing to stop her. His work lanyard was still on, until his wife turned her scolding on him for a moment, reminding him he did not have to use it at Immigration.

Mrs. Chan only quieted down when the elevator doors finally closed. (Though Natalia then received two text messages from Mrs. Chan telling her to air out the mattress and wash the curtains.)

Once their absence set in, Natalia sat on the couch, relieved but drained. That night, she slept with the door to her small room wide open. She had vivid dreams of water seeping all over the floor; the woman in red appeared next to her bed.

When the newspapers arrived the next morning, she looked for a report. The article occupied half a page.

The woman at the reservoir was named XueLing, a twenty-year-old Chinese girl who had arrived in Singapore two years earlier. She worked at a restaurant and had been missing for three days. There were few details about her — the press had not been able to find out the significance of her red dress, who she wanted revenge on. The rest of the article mentioned the other reservoir suicides, including one where only half the man’s body was found. Natalia had heard about the drownings before and the friends that she met on her day off enjoyed joking about it.

But this one struck home; the girl had come here with hope. Like Natalia, she wanted a better life. It was true that sometimes Natalia also considered suicide, but she knew she had to press on. If she died, her debts would simply be passed on to her family.

His New Year’s resolution was to give up murders. Murders were horrible, messy, smelly, difficult, heart-rending things. And not nearly as profitable as they used to be.

“Red or white?” the waiter asked.

“Tea,” C.F. Wong responded.

The feng shui master sat at a table at the ballroom of the Raffles Hotel, thinking about the trajectory of his career. For many years, he’d been a geomancer specializing in scenes of crime. He had masterfully cornered the niche, aided by the fact that no one else wanted it. Which was not surprising. His competitors had conditioned themselves for years to recoil from anything that could even metaphorically be associated with death, from kitchen knives to broken bowls.

So crime was Wong’s patch alone. Tenant murdered? The landlord would pay Wong to “do his feng shui thing,” to cleanse the place so it could be rented out again. Gang wars in your district? Wong would fix the bad vibes so that all the negative energy would move out of the area.

But lately, his job had started to depress him. He began to realize what his young assistant meant when she said that murders were “real downers.” The dead body and the room in which it was found were often in a highly unpleasant condition. You spent your time in dark corners, breathing foul air, dealing with unhappy people, one of whom might be an actual killer.

The money had compensated for that, but even this delight was seeping away. Property prices had risen so high in Singapore that people no longer shied away from renting places where horrible things had happened. Some tenants even sought them out for the discount from the market price. Thus, Wong’s share of the pie was shrinking daily.

His rivals in geomancy preferred to work for stupid rich people, who would pay them vast sums for visiting their luxury homes. They worked in mansions, sipping silver tip tea and sitting on designer sofas as they spouted random platitudes about chi and the flying star school and the flow of good luck. And these days, they usually got paid more than he did.

So Wong had decided to taste the easy life. Step one had been to muscle his way into the “designer” feng shui business, offering his services to event organizers.

After weeks of pitching, he had been hired to oversee the geomantic side of the arrangements at a major car racing event. This wasn’t Singapore’s famous Formula One race. This was a grudge-match-as-spectacle showdown between Emerson Brahms and Andreletti Nelson, who were among the world’s greatest racing champions. The men had long been archrivals, although it was hard to tell whether they really hated each other or were just media-savvy enough to know that finger-wagging and fist-thrusting attracted TV cameras.

Wong had checked the feng shui of all the venues, including this gorgeously decorated pink-walled room at the luxurious hotel on Beach Road — an avenue at the heart of the urban district, many kilometers from the nearest beach. The only major negative he had found was a grotesque clash between the event date and the birthday of the main sponsor, a businessman named Lim Cheong Li. But that had been solved easily enough. Arrangements had been made for the official opening of the event to be led by a Buddhist abbot named Sin Sar. This man had the perfect birthday in terms of earth roots and heavenly pillars. His presence would ensure the event would not just go well, but be an unforgettable triumph.

Wong had promised the abbot a big lunch and a small fee, and gave him strict instructions: “Don’t say anything. Don’t do anything. Just sit there. Pretend you don’t know English. When they give you a bell, just ring it. Then sit down and shut up. Shut up all the time. Got it?”

The man had nodded, but not without an audible sigh. “I’m not stupid,” he said, in his oddly high singsong voice.

Wong had responded with a fake smile. The man was not stupid. But he was an idiot, all the same.