And she, damn her, maintained her usual good spirits—she just smiled and said, “Oh yes, let me get out; I think Jeffrey is big enough now to take care of himself. Oh yes, I see this clearly.”

As she made her way out the door, I shouted a phrase I had learned the year before in school and was just waiting for the right opportunity to use in social discourse: “Fucking bitch!”

I underscored the bitterness of that curse by hurling the washrag at the door she had just closed behind her. I then sank back into the tub and started crying, crying like an eight-year-old. I looked down and saw that my cock had just about returned to its normal shape and size. I felt… saved. But just as soon as that happened, I started thinking of Hazniya and those gorgeous tits and the damn thing started stiffening on me again. “Hazniya, you bitch!” I shouted out into the ceiling, hurt and anger intertwined in my timbre. I then reached down under the soapy surface of the water and gingerly touched the thing. I gently rubbed it a few times, as if to console it, to say it wasn’t its fault that it had caused me so much embarrassment. “You bitch, you bitch, you bitch,” I whispered as I consoled myself a little more.

Luckily, my parents were out that evening, so they caught none of my little outburst. Hazniya and I said nothing about it the next morning, or ever again. We pretended like the whole thing had never really happened.

Of course, I never again let her near the bathroom while I was bathing—or even combing my hair, for that matter. She stayed with us for another six months and then was suddenly gone. She disappeared one week when I was off visiting an aunt and uncle in Hong Kong.

When I asked what happened, my mother shook her head sadly and told me that Hazniya had to leave abruptly because of some family crisis back in Indonesia. A couple of years later, my Dad confided that they had dismissed her because she had “taken some things that didn’t belong to her.” And some time after that, a close family friend told me he’d heard the real reason was that Hazniya got caught having sex on the living room couch with some guy while my folks were supposedly away. But I’ve often asked myself whether our little episode in the bathtub had anything to do with that sudden departure.

Whatever it was, we never engaged another maid after Hazniya left us.

Physically left us, I should say. Her memory stayed with me for the next few years. During the high-tide period of my masturbatory youth, I would invoke images of Hazniya whenever I wanked off: those warm smiles, the bubbly laugher, the wonderful eyes, those fantastic tits. The fact that I had never really viewed those tits in their 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.