Neo Saw, wife of Neo the rubber tapper, had taken ill to detention. It had warped and destroyed her unsturdy spirit into a constant catastrophe of lamentation. Unlike Fong Kiap, who bided her time and possessed herself of an interminable patience on the long dole of days back to her husband in the jungle, Neo Saw fretted herself, the moments, the hours, and the sun-haunted days until their intolerable load of self-torment crushed her.

Lying with thirty other women on the wooden planks forming a single bed along the sleeping hut, round each their own particular litter of babies and small ones, Neo Saw rifled the spent and unconsidered hours with grieving.

Some women sighed and groaned at night, muttered softly in half dream of their males, woke and tossed back to fretful sleep. Some bold and strong with surge of desire in the hot hut, infinitely preoccupied with their self-made dreams, called back sentient memories of flesh close within their flesh, until they sweated and cried Ha with exasperation, or suddenly hugged their babies with soft purring ferocity, or pushed their nipples in the mouths of their three- and four-year-old sons, to appease their own hunger.

And others would whisper to one another of robust coming-togethers, with them lust a clean need like hunger and thirst, and not ashamed obscenities. Their hands soothed their thighs and breasts and their restless heaving bellies.

But most were shy and endured in wordless and actionless waiting, blank as deserts without a mirage.

None, however, wept and sobbed for her man as did Neo Saw, until it became Fong Kiap’s habit to rise sleepily from her place and crawl over the bodies of other women to Neo Saw, and slap slap slap her until she woke and stopped, lest in an excess of sorrow she rend her forlorn soul away from her sad body.

Neo Saw cried at night, wept at meals, stained her sewing with tears, and wore two trails like snail tracks down her cheeks in the classroom where she sat next to Grandmother The Rebel. ‘Your face,’ said the teacher, ‘makes me feel like committing suicide.’

Sitting at rough tables heaving bulging haunches precariously on narrow stools, the women detainees fit for rehabilitation faced the small-boned and highstrung spinster from the Chinese y.w.c.a. who pointed to the blackboard and said: ‘a’.

‘aaaaaaih’ chanted the women in solid square obedience, their distant unseeing gaze wondering what their sons and daughters were doing outside.

‘b, c,’ screamed teacher, the thin-skinned veins of her neck standing their flurry of quick pulse above the collar of her gown.

When they reached the letter f Grandmother rebelled.

‘abc, abc’, she shouted, akimbo on her tiny feet (upon which she had hobbled behind the soldiers, asking to be taken, when they scooped her village in a raid), ‘abc, abc. I am an old woman, come sixty years from the ancestors’ country, a whole life behind me, clean and hard with sons and grandsons, and a thin death in front of me, and all you do is to tell me abc, abc. Of what use is abc to me?’