entirety only made them that much more fantastic in my wank-off reveries. Of course, the fact that she was a maid, a live-in servant meant to meet most of our daily needs, only exalted my fantasies about her. It would take me years to grow ashamed of those fantasies and the exploitative relationship that underscored them.
That shame happened when I was at university. Political correctness ruled supreme at my school, and it was especially dominant in the Sociology Department. From my professor, Kander, and those plodding leftist texts he foisted on us, I learned what an exploitative system was embodied in the whole maid-and-master nexus. This was especially true when the maids were plucked from nearby, “less-privileged” societies—as Hazniya had been. Of course, all my classmates and friends at the uni subscribed to this view one hundred per cent plus. So I never volunteered the fact that my own family had kept maids from the Third World when I was a kid. I only confessed it to my closest friends there at the uni, and then only as a sign of how much I had grown during my short time at Stanford.
When I returned to Singapore with my nice, crisp MBA tucked under my arm, I fancied myself a completely transformed person, one damn enlightened guy equally well versed in business and life in general. I was also vehemently committed to self-reliance by then. Anything I couldn’t do for myself just wouldn’t get done. Period.
Of course, an MBA from an elite American school guaranteed that I could just about waltz right into any high-paying job and find a stack of perqs to perk me up. Then, two months after I started working, I started looking for a place of my own.
The complex that I moved into, the Chateau de Luxus, was optimal in many ways. It was right across from a big bus terminal, about an eight-minute walk from an MRT station, another short walk from a huge shopping centre, and it was populated by swarms of attractive young women. Admittedly, some of them had husbands or kids in tow, but a lot of them seemed to be single. The problem was, most of these women seemed to be staunchly single.
Watching them go off to work in the morning, or come back in the evening, or head off on weekend activities was an exercise in slow torture.
Here were these luscious babes, with expertly coiffed hair, long, exposed limbs, fall-on-your-knees figures, and yet they all bore a demeanour that screeched, “Keep your distance, dude!”
This was cold beauty in its purest, coldest form. I finally started thinking of them as just lovely works of art brought in to jack up the Chateau’s property values. Actually embracing one, I thought, would be like fondling a priceless statue or scratching on a painting in some museum.
Fortunately, this permafrost demeanour was only common among the sleek, polished women of my own class, mainly Chinese Singaporeans like myself. There was one group of attractive young women at the Chateau who were anything but cold; in fact, these ladies grew warmer and warmer after a few casual meetings and then regularly greeted me with a giggly friendliness.
And in contrast to the cold, stiff beauty of the career women, these girls exuded an earthy sensuality that filled the air when you passed by them. I’m talking here about the maids.
Not only did the maids always return my greetings, before long they would initiate them, even move into casual conversation when the situation allowed. Which usually meant when their employers were not around. With the employers there, they’d revert to shy, conspiratorial smiles.
And I have to admit, I found many of these maids cute, some of them very cute. More importantly, for my tastes anyway, they were alluring in a thoroughly unpretentious way. Unlike the Chateau’s career ladies, these “domestic workers” were not shrewdly wrapped in the latest expensive fashions with a heavy measure of makeup fine-tuning their features. These maids were more down-to-earth-more real, to put it plainly. No makeup I could detect. And their standard uniform consisted of short pants which only made their way down the top third of their thighs topped by tight tee-shirts or breezy blouses. Simple, straight to the point. Which, in my view, made these ladies much more sensual and alluring than the pampered lovelies of my class and race. If the latter were cold works of art, the maids were rich folk art made flesh.
I always exchanged greetings with the various maids I ran across, and there were a lot to run across in my complex. I sometimes got the impression I might be the only one without one. At the beginning, I convinced myself that my socializing with the maids was a byproduct of my liberal education: I wasn’t going to treat them as mere servants or act like they were invisible because they weren’t off in active pursuit of the five Cs.
But after awhile, I realised that it was not just my democratic instincts at work. I was actually pretty interested, sexually, in some of them. Just seeing them approach, I started to get horny. And finally, I had to admit to myself what should have been obvious: some of the appeal sprang from the fact that several reminded me very much of Hasniya. In about the second month at my new home, I started to imagine the unthinkable: having a little sexual dalliance with some of the maids. Okay, I imagined it a lot; I spun it in my head several times a day.
Actually, it was one maid in particular that sparked my fantasies—Liana.
Liana, what a great name, a sweet blend of Mediterranean mellow and sultry Sulawesi swing. She had—and you’ll soon learn that I had sufficient opportunity to observe—these lovely dark eyes, accentuated by thick, sensual brows. Her lips were full, dreamy, moist, with a pronounced tendency to spill into a smile. Her breasts were… well, I’ll get to that part later. Suffice it to say she had a fucktastic compact figure that cried out for closer inspection.
Except that there was, of course, no chance to carry out this inspection anywhere in the common areas of our condo complex.
And this wasn’t just a one-sided infatuation either. Liana had, right from the start, been the most forward of all the maids. She obviously had her eye on me. “I never see you with your wife, Sir. Does she spending all her time with the children? Or is it her job?” I told her I wasn’t married. Her smile seemed to brighten up about 100 watts when she heard that. “Oh. Well then, Sir must have many girlfriends then. So handsome, and with that beautiful car.” So, she’d noticed my wheels. Good, that’s what they were there for, right? And while handsome might be stretching it a few categories, I am sort of cute… in a subtle way.
“Well, no steady girlfriend at the moment. I’m sort of keeping my options open.” This phrase seemed to puzzle her, so I swung back to straightforward.
“No, I don’t have any regular girlfriend at the moment. Still looking for the right lady.” Again, that smile lit up like a fireworks display.
“Oh,” she’d say, “I think Sir is just being modest.” Unfortunately, Sir was not being at all modest. While I had dated a number of women over the half year I’d been back, I hadn’t had sex—well, you know, real live sex—since returning from the states. And six months without sex, that is not good for one’s health or one’s self-esteem. What good was all my independence really doing me? When I moved in, I thought it would be great: no sneaking a woman past Mom and Dad to get her to my bedroom. But not a single lovely had come anywhere near that waiting sanctuary.
However, Liana and I grew more and more friendly as the weeks went by. The challenge was how to get her back to my place. Fortunately, this was less of a problem than it would have been with many of the other maids.
Unlike most of the domestics prowling the Chateau, Liana did not have any high-energy kids to look after. Or bathe, I reminded myself with relief. She took care of some frail old woman who apparently lived alone in the complex.
Well, not really alone, of course, Liana was there with her most of the time.
Her actual employers, I came to learn, were the old woman’s son and daughter-in-law. They had their own condo over in the East Annexe of the complex. They would drop by quickly in the evening to look in on Mom, and occasionally swing by on the weekends to take the old lady and Liana off for some excursion.
The son always had this loose, distracted look about him. When we’d run into each other and say hello, he’d flash an embarrassed smile that looked more like a wince. Then he’d shrug, like he wished he could have given more to that smile, but had lost it somewhere along the way.
The daughter-in-law was going to be my real hurdle, the way I saw it. She was this perpetually wound-up bitch, who eyed me suspiciously whenever I crossed her path. Okay, she probably eyed everyone she came across suspiciously, she was that type. But I personalised it, as I tend to do with these things. Behind it all, I suspected that she might just be very insightful and could somehow sense how much I wanted to get my hands on Mom’s
