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pleaded with Miss Shakilah
before she left the room, and Miss Shakilah nodded and agreed
to try to coax Madam into not carrying such heavy bags.
    Neither of them mentioned the girl, almost as if that conversation hadn't occurred, but Malika could see on Miss
Shakilah's face when she was walking out (although Miss
Shakilah wasn't looking at her directly) a kind of relief, her features relaxing as if she understood something now, as if a curtain were beginning to rise and someone had lit a candle for her in
the darkness ahead.

    That was the feeling Malika was left with, as she removed
the damp clothes from the washing machine and dropped them
into the dryer (it was Francesca who had bought the washing
machine and dryer and insisted that Malika learn to use them).
She could hear Madam's car backing out of the driveway in the
front of the house, then a pause, then the long, slow swing of
the wrought-iron gate. Madam never called her out to close the
gate for her anymore, not even when it rained.

    H A N D R A SUBRINAYA. SHE'S probably changed her name
by now, to her husband's name, whatever it is. Probably
some kind of Western name, because Chandra was one of those,
always hankering after the angmo boys. The blonder, the better,
was her motto. Not that she would ever admit it, but it was obvious to anyone who wasn't blind. All you had to do in those days
was wait around after her shift at the library was over, and see
who came to pick her up. Without fail, it was always an angmo,
usually American, since there were already a lot of Americans
working in Singapore at the time, which was also why I thought
Shak wouldn't find it so strange to be here-if she felt strange.

    Chandra must have wondered about it herself, whether
Shak was going to seek out the company of Americans, and
what sort of competition that would be for her.
    Of course it had occurred to me Shak might feel a tiny bit
strange. Even if there was no reason for her to feel that way
because she was from here, we don't always feel the way we
should, right? Fifteen years. That's a long time to be away from
anywhere, but especially where Singapore's concerned. We had
changed a lot, you know. Our whole country was getting a
facelift. Already, we had jumped from being the third busiest
port in the world when Shak left to being the first, busier even
than New York City or Amsterdam-imagine.
    Luckily our neighborhood hadn't changed that much. Not
yet, although some houses were being renovated along River
Road, where new families had moved in. On our own road,
Auntie Coco and her sister were the only neighbors Shak didn't
know, since they had moved in in 1985, and by then, Shak had
been gone for six years already. (The family that used to live in
Auntie Coco's house had moved out after the grandmother
died. For a few years the house had remained empty, so people
were saying it was haunted by the grandmother's ghost. But
then Auntie Coco and her sister had bought the house, and as
my mother and her yakkity-yak friends were keen to point out,
Auntie Coco hadn't tried to sell the house in all the time that
she and her sister had been living in it, so the grandmother's
ghost was just a rumor, in their opinion.)
    And the old Muslim cemetery was still there, on our side of
the granite wall that ran along the back of the cemetery, with
Kampong Alam on the other side, where Che' Halimah lived.
She and our mothers used to be classmates, you know. She,
too, had once been a pupil at the convent. Che' Halimah,
whom most people knew of only as the bomoh. She was still
living that year, and I wondered if Shak would want to go and
visit her, but I thought I wouldn't ask. In case the idea hadn't entered Shak's mind, I didn't want to put it there. With the old
Shak, there would have been no question that she would want
to see Che' Halimah, but we were much older now, not
teenagers anymore, foolish and restless the way we used to be.

    Shak,