“How?” She’d never been in a car with movable windows.

Teck Beng leaned across her lap and tapped the small crank set into the door. She wound it, her face blushing hot. He managed to turn the car around, but it was still slow going amidst the press of traffic, made even more miserable by the confined stuffiness of the car. She kept the top inch of the window wound down for the chance of a breeze. Poor Teck Beng was just as uncomfortable as she, sweat beading on his face.

South Bridge Road was an impassable mess. She anxiously watched the crowd, trying not to work herself into a panic the minute a rickshaw puller darted out too close to the car. She pressed herself into her seat, her new clothes sticking uncomfortably to her skin. All that effort, only to appear rumpled when they finally reached their destination. Given half the chance, she’d rather have kept her mother’s pin. Well, no point worrying about it now.

“I’m sorry to have caused so much trouble,” she said. “If I’d known it would be so bad, I would’ve walked.”

Teck Beng clucked his tongue like a disapproving aunty. “It’s not good for young women to walk so far.”

“Where’s the house?”

“Meyer Road.”

She settled back in her seat. While the traffic jam was certainly unusual, there was no reason to think it was some kind of sign, a message meant only for her. But she couldn’t stop hearing Bee Leng’s warning in her head, and despite the heat of the afternoon, she shivered.

THIS HUMBLE SERVANT

Saturday, 12 March 1927

The traffic cleared once they’d bypassed South Bridge Road. Teck Beng clung to the coastline, driving down a street framed by large, spreading Angsana trees, their leaves dappling the sunlight. The road was so wide that a motorcar might pass a rickshaw and a bicyclist without incident, as many did.

It was less picturesque outside of town—a landscape of big industrial sheds, smoke billowing from tall chimneys. Boats crowded the Kalang River, with wooden, attap-roofed houses built over the water’s edge, resting on spindly stilts. A group of barefooted boys stared at them from outside one of the houses, some in tunics and pants, some only wearing sarongs, round eyes sparkling in their brown faces.

The industrial buildings fell away as they drove farther east. Enormous palm trees soared high above the road, fronds waving in the ocean breeze. Traffic was lighter here in this distant part of the settlement, rickshaws disappearing, the road now the domain of motorcars, pedestrians, and a single mosquito bus. Off the coast, ships and boats crowded the harbour, masts rising from their decks like white bony fingers reaching up from the grave.