Curious, Jessica stole a glance at her name tag.

Hashwini.

...

Flying as a career did not turn out to be as glamorous as Hashwini had hoped for.

She had pictured herself wearing the graceful sarong kebaya, the signature cabin crew uniform of Singapore Airlines. She imagined the romance of sipping a thimbleful of espresso in a café in Paris admiring the Eiffel Tower from afar or the excitement of shopping at SoHo in Manhattan before catching a Broadway play. She might even fall madly in love with a handsome stranger flying first class who happened to have a thing for exotic Asian beauties.

But Hashwini’s dream did not come true.

Teddy Toy Boy convinced her that he did not have enough strings to pull to get her into SIA. Not at her height.

So here she was—flying regional with Tiger Airways. For some reason, sipping teh tarik at some coffeeshop in Kuala Lumpur with the Petronas Towers in the distance just did not carry the same element of romance. It was a poor mutation of her fantasy lifestyle.

Worst of all were the incredulous stares she received from passengers whenever she had to jump to throw their luggage into the overhead compartment. It was especially challenging when she had to aim to fit the last piece between two others. More than once she had miscalculated and the falling luggage narrowly missed the head of the passenger seated beneath. Hashwini counted her blessings that no one had filed a complaint against her thus far.

It was an important life lesson that Hashwini had learnt to embrace—one must always count one’s blessings.

After all, she was only too aware of her own criminal history: impersonating a law enforcement officer, inadvertently causing the death of a migrant worker and triggering a riot, and twice blackmailing a civil servant.

She was lucky she was not serving time in jail.

About the Author

Photo by Eng Chun Pang

Sebastian Sim grew up in a two-room HDB flat with parents who were part of the pioneer generation of independent Singapore. Not one to shy away from the road less taken, he has travelled around the world to soak up different experiences and cultures, and tried his hand in diverse industries: as a bartender at Boat Quay, an assistant outlet manager at McDonald’s, an insurance salesman, a prison officer in a maximum security prison, and a croupier in a casino. He published three Chinese wuxia novels between 2004 and 2012, and his first English-language novel, Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao! (2016), was shortlisted for the 2015 Epigram Books Fiction Prize.

Acknowledgements