They brought her into a small room, and finally removed her blindfold. It was ping pong balls, she realised, cut in half and stuck over each lens. Her own glasses were still with them, so everything was blurry. As far as she could tell, this was a government building of some kind, the walls that institutional green you only see in schools and hospitals. A woman came in with some forms for her to fill in, but she couldn’t see to write, and had to dictate her answers. It was just things like her address, and which schools she’d attended, surely information they already had. She wondered where they’d taken her luggage.

A little later, they brought her to a dimmer room. There were some people standing about, she wasn’t sure how many. They seemed to have been waiting for her. Someone said her name again, with a harsh emphasis, and when she answered yes, the interrogation began.

•

Stella’s childhood was unexceptional. The journalists who tried to find some kind of flaw in her upbringing were disappointed—she was mixed-race, of course, but you weren’t allowed to point at that as a defect. Her mother’s early death was a point of interest, but as she was under a year old at the time, and her father remarried not long afterwards, it again seemed unlikely this was to blame.

Her cousins Henry and Janet also lost their mother early, and she grew up very close to them. She’d drifted apart from Janet, who became more and more like her scary father, Stella’s Uncle Jason, as she moved into adulthood. Henry was still one of her best friends, one of the few people who understood why so many things about this place made her dissatisfied.

Like nine-tenths of the population, Stella grew up in a government-provided HDB flat. She went to a primary school within walking distance of her home, and did well enough at the age of twelve to win a place at Methodist Girls’ School. She was from a religious family, and later on there would be many pictures of her friends praying for her, saying they knew she was innocent, asking God to bring the truth to light.

She was only twenty-three at the time of her detention, not long out of university. Much as she admired her cousin Henry for winning his place at Oxford—indeed, she had just returned from visiting him in England when she was taken—she did not have the courage to uproot herself and move to a cold country of unfriendly people and bland food. Her father was a man of decided tastes, and she had grown up with the distinctively-spiced Eurasian curries that are so hard to find anywhere else.

So she ended up at NUS, the National University of Singapore (formerly Malaya, but a new name had to be found after Separation), doing something with history, and sociology. Afterwards, she found herself drifting towards teaching. Many of her classmates ended up there too—there were not many career paths open to those trained in the arts, especially those not overburdened with ambition.