Fiction: Beneath the veneer of civility lies a hotbed of secrets of residents of a chic apartment

Lola Li glanced at her phone with squinted eyes while still curled up in her comfy bed in her apartment in Mont Kiara.

Even though the curtains were drawn, the morning sun still managed to shine through them, and it hurt her eyes. 11.46 am. and she was still tired. A few things ran through her sleepy head but the most pressing issue was that of deciding what to wear when her boyfriend – as she would like to call him – visited her that evening.

Stretching her lithe body like a cat, Lola yawned as she reached for the phone. She wanted to see what her friends were up to on Instagram and if there was anywhere worth going to that day. The fear of missing out – FOMO in Instagram-speak – was a debilitating concern for her.

Growing up in a mid-sized family where she was the middle child made her painfully aware that being left out and ignored was the second worst thing to experience. The first was the feeling of being unloved.

As Lola was scrolling through her feed, something caught her eye. Janice – an acquaintance from when she had been a flight attendant – had posted a photo of her new Kelly bag. Lola expanded the photo with her well-manicured fingers to study the details. The stitching on the bag and palladium hardware looked authentic enough but the gain of the leather seemed just a tad too coarse.

“It’s a fake,” she muttered under her breath as she made her way to her en-suite bathroom to begin her day.

After breakfast, Azizah Rozali called out to her Indonesian helper, Widya, to clear the table. Even though Widya had been working with Zainal and his wife for almost two years, she knew deep down that this was just a temporary hiatus. They had been very kind to her and she had nothing to complain about. Neither did they have any little children to babysit nor did they have elderly parents she had to care for.

“Can you iron the dress that I have hung on the rack?” Azizah asked, although it was really an order. “Turn down the heat on the iron, ya? It’s silk and I don’t want it scorched.”

Widya obeyed. There were some days when all that ironing and cleaning and scrubbing and chopping and slicing and frying and whatever else she did for the Rozalis would drive her up the wall. On such days she would placate herself by thinking of the money that she could squirrel away in her bank account. She needed just a couple more months of her salary to break free.

Later that morning, while sipping her coffee, Azizah felt that pang of emptiness inside of her. She did everything she thought a good wife could do yet nothing left her feeling fulfilled. With her daughter now studying in Australia, she had plenty of time on her hands. Once upon a time, many moons ago, before she had met Zainal, she had a promising career as a singer. She even released two albums, one in Malay and the other in English. Her record company hailed her as the new Sharifah Aini. Everything seemed to be in place for her to achieve stardom.

But fate had dealt her a bad hand. Her father fell into great debts in his import and export business and shortly after, her mother was diagnosed with the big C. It was all too much for the twenty-four-year-old songstress to bear. As the only child, the weight of these catastrophes fell heavily and solely on her shoulders. She fell into a deep, black hole of depression and lost her voice. She couldn’t speak, she couldn’t talk and worst of all, she couldn’t sing.

Her record company gave up on her and she gave up on herself. As ephemeral as the short-lived fame Azizah experienced had been, she knew she had to survive. “A woman is like a teabag, you never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water,” her counsellor at the Woman’s Aid Organization used to tell her during those dark days.

An old classmate had suggested working at an insurance company that just happened to have an open position and she decided to give it a go. She was glad that her new chosen career didn’t require her to rely on her looks. Although her looks were certainly above average, Azizah knew it was tricks up her sleeves she employed that added to her allure.

The make-up, false eyelashes, highlighted hair, high heels, and body-skimming clothes created a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. Glamour, they say, is an illusion, and Azizah was a master illusionist.

Azizah liked to recount the tale of how she had met the then-dashing twenty-nine-year-old Zainal. “He fell for me in front of the photocopy machine!” She would announce to rapturous laughter at her dinner parties. “I didn’t even notice him but approached me to ask me if I knew how to photocopy a document on both sides!”

Her husband Zainal, of course, would smile and keep mum. He knew it wasn’t the complete truth and Azizah was a great embellisher of facts. But being the magnanimous man he was, he indulged her. As an assistant manager then, he was able to help Azizah out financially and pay a portion of her father’s debts. He, of course, had a vested interest. Nine months after they met, Azizah and Zainal tied the knot. She didn’t particularly mind working but she chose to resign a few years into their marriage.

Excerpted with permission from Harmony Heights, Ong Chin Huat, Penguin South East Asia.