Jessica was taciturn for the next hour working at the serving counter. As she scooped from the container of sayur lodeh onto the plates held by the migrant workers, she studied their faces. She had seen them all before, pumping sewage out of clogged drain pipes on the roadside, filthy towels wrapped around their necks to soak up perspiration, or seated on the void decks in groups of three or four, eating out of packets of mixed vegetable rice unfolded on the cement floor. They existed in her peripheral awareness only as aberrations of the neat and orderly city she grew up in. Their alien presence was an inconvenient necessity.

Jessica had never seen them properly until tonight. She now saw them as Majumders and Bhimuls, fearful of asking for their unpaid salaries lest their employers might repatriate them debt-laden, or despondent as they awaited the outcome of interminable bureaucratic processes that wore down their spirits and wiped out their savings. And Jessica felt angry. How could her government, and her people, allow such injustice to perpetuate? How could she herself not have known?

After the soup kitchen had closed, Jessica and Andreae made their way to the nearest underground MRT station on foot. The latter was babbling about Krison, extolling his saintly qualities and practically offering herself as a sacrificial virgin at his altar. But Jessica was not listening. She was troubled. Now that the indignation had tapered off, she had to ask herself: What was she going to do about it?

In the past, whenever Jessica became impassioned with social injustices and human tragedies, she had always taken action. When she read about the genocides in Somalia and Syria, she signed the online petitions to condemn the perpetrators, and shared them readily on Facebook. When an earthquake of magnitude 8.9 hit Japan two years ago and sent a 10-metre tsunami rolling through large swaths of farmland, she stuffed three huge canvas bags with her old clothes and lugged them to the Mercy Relief collection point. Her actions satisfied her conscience enough such that she did not feel guilty splurging on her next Nike or Speedo purchase. She had done her part and a certain destitute child in a far away corner in Somalia, Syria or Japan was better for it.

What she learnt tonight was different. The system put in place by her government and practised by her people had allowed the despicable to prey on the vulnerable. The injustice occurred in her backyard. She felt culpable, almost as if she were guilty herself. She did not know what she could do—not yet—but she knew she had to act.

Jessica’s train of thought was abruptly interrupted when Andreae suddenly grabbed her wrist and hissed, “Don’t look. Just keep walking.”

“What? Where?”

“The poster. Don’t look at the poster on the left.”