My friend Valerio calls tontines “mafia arrangements”, saying someone is bound to take advantage, which could turn “fatal if somebody tries to cheat”.
There was, indeed, a case of the treasurer of a tontine group in Singapore being challenged by one of the members about some missing funds. They were sisters-in-law as well.
The treasurer was a butcher, so when they had a fierce argument at the treasurer’s house (the challenger went to see her), the butcher treasurer killed the challenger and chopped up her body, bagged the parts up and threw them in different places. One of the bags was thrown into the Singapore River, where it got caught in a low overhanging branch of a tree when the tide went down. That was how the gruesome discovery was made. It was all in the papers.
What made it worse for me was the fact that I actually knew the victim’s daughter — she was a girl in my secretarial course class.
Poor girl: she went from being a bubbly, ever-ready-to-smile girl to being very subdued.
It could’ve been from the shock of having one’s mother being killed (which is bad enough) and having her body treated that way (hacked up and strewn all over Singapore).
It could’ve been the shame of having such a relative.
It could’ve been having one’s dirty linens so publicly aired.
Probably a combination of all three. Poor girl.
(Singapore, 1973)
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