Almost everyone there was his age or younger. The few older people were treated with great respect, as though it was a great honour they’d turned up. The senior comrades, one girl explained to him, had fought in the war against the colonial oppressors. While the young may imagine they breathed revolution from every pore, the older ones had actually lived it.

He wondered why everyone was so keen to talk to him. Everything they said was incriminatory. If he were to tell anyone, anyone at all—but they were innocents, like children, bursting to share with him and too eager to consider he might feel differently from them. Ah Lam, he thought. Ah Lam hardly knew him, and he’d invited him to this evening of—ideology? Propaganda? He felt carefully around the edges of these new words.

One of the young women was laughing a bit too hard. Was she drunk? But no, there wasn’t any alcohol here. She noticed him staring and beckoned him over. “I haven’t seen you here before.”

“It’s my first time,” he said. “I came with—” He pointed vaguely at Ah Lam, at the far side of the room.

“You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

“Neither do you.”

“Singapore.”

“Seminyih.”

“The new village? Is it true there was barbed wire all around you?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“You sound like you don’t care.”

“No, it was terrible, but it’s over. I left.”

She offered him a cigarette. He’d only ever had a couple before, but he took one now, trying to inhale in shallow breaths to prevent an embarrassing coughing fit.

“I hope you’ll come again.”

“I will if you’re here.” Almost as the words left his mouth, he wished he could take them back. The bantering flirtation that had become habitual felt inappropriate here.

She didn’t seem bothered. “I’ll be around a bit longer. I’m going inside soon.”

“Inside?” He knew what she meant, he just couldn’t picture her in the jungle, in uniform.

“The ang moh rounded up your people and put you behind a fence. Don’t you want to fight back? This whole Emergency. It’s an excuse to keep us down.”

“What happened to you?” This felt somehow the right question to ask. She was spilling over with it, this thing she was carrying. He could smell it on her. She was avid, her eyes gleaming. And sure enough, even though they’d just met, she told him. The cement cell they’d held her in. The babies she’d had to leave behind. The fear that made her run.

“I can’t go back,” she said. “They’d pick me up right away. My friends are still in detention, even the MPs. So much for democracy—they were chosen by the people. This proves the government doesn’t care about the people. We have to get rid of them. The only way I can do that is from inside.”