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not sex.
    The superstitious dread was soon gone but
the guilt of secret exultation, not so easily vanquished, returned again and
again. ‘I’m free! I’m free!’ continued the inward cry, and she continued to
beat it down as a shameful truth that must ever be hidden from sight. ‘If I
ever became a writer,’ she thought, ‘I could write at length about a woman’s
journey of guilt.’ Women had an enormous capacity for hate and revenge, also
for triumph and exultation, and most of all, guilt. Did it have to do with her
biology that wracked her body with the anxieties of child-bearing and
child-nurturing, or her culture that instilled in her, from the start, the
imperative of duty to everyone but herself?
    The most frightening image, from a Chinese
comic strip that someone had given her as a child, was of a pregnant woman who
had gone mad with rage as she roamed the land, looking for her faithless lover,
finally killing her newborn and dying in a frenzy of guilt and sorrow.
    She had a close childhood friend named Emily
who often called her on the phone to sob out the latest cruelty of a callous,
philandering husband. One day Emily invited her for lunch, for the sole purpose
of revealing yet another of the cruelties: secretly going through her husband’s
briefcase, she had discovered the receipt for a very expensive diamond pendant
from a shop in Hong Kong. In the ten years of their marriage, she said, the
angry tears filling her eyes, he had never bought her even the tiniest piece of
jewellery. Moreover, she suspected him of siphoning away a large part of the
profits from the sale of some jointly-owned shares in the stock market. As
divorce became the most likely solution to end her misery, she mobilised the
support of lawyer and accountant friends who could advise her on how to get the
best out of a financial settlement, how to pre-empt possible cunning ploys by
her husband and best of all, how to come up with some of her own.
    Miss Seetoh’s help was co-opted for an
intricate scheme of pre-emption she hardly understood but sympathetically
cooperated in. She cheerfully put her signature as witness in an elaborately
worded legal document, to prevent the devious husband from laying his hands on
a joint property. Her adopted brother Heng, ever savvy about money matters, was
aghast. ‘You stood guarantor for something involving hundreds of thousands of
dollars? You could lose everything, you know, including what is not yours!’ He
was referring to the four-room flat owned by their mother which would go to
both of them upon her death.
    Money, money, money – it became the
irreducible, rock-bottom reality, the ultimate bargaining chip of husbands and
wives, parents and children, siblings, best friends. There were regular reports
in the newspapers of family members suing each other over property, the
increasing number of cases correlating perfectly with the rise in property
prices. ‘You want to know what makes a woman stay in a marriage?’ said a
friend, and she demonstrated with the expert rubbing of middle finger and thumb
against each other, the universal language of the miser, the usurer, the
profiteer. Miss Seetoh thought sadly, if only money were the real problem in
her marriage.
    Over steaming beef noodles in the open air
café, Emily launched the bitterest tirade yet against her husband who she now
suspected of having set up an apartment in London for his mistress, a former
airline stewardess who, Emily had found out, was formerly the mistress of a
Brunei oil tycoon. Suddenly she paused, her chopsticks suspended in her hands,
to listen to the drone of a plane overhead. She listened intently for some
seconds and said slowly, ‘If that’s his plane on the way to London to visit his
mistress, here’s a wish: may it crash this instant!’ Miss Seetoh stared in
horror at the look of grim relish on the tear-stained face already raised to
witness the fiery plunge from the sky.
    And from that moment her guilt was