A sensational trial captivated readers of a British Malayan newspaper in January 1910. Letchmee, a coolie woman, had left her “husband,” Deyal Singh, after a quarrel. She then went to live with Lal Singh, a police constable at Papan, Perak. Deyal Singh accused Letchmee of husband desertion, but Letchmee asserted that she had never been married to him. “I came with Deyal Singh from India as his mistress,” she claimed, and their relationship had been a non-binding union of convenience. Deyal Singh nevertheless considered Letchmee to be “his” woman and kidnapped her from Lal Singh's house with the help of friends. Lal Singh, with other police constables, managed to rescue Letchmee and filed a police complaint against Deyal Singh for trespassing on his domestic property with the intent of assaulting and kidnapping Letchmee. The case became a drawn-out affair in which witnesses changed their statements frequently. Marriage being unproven, Deyal Singh was fined fifty dollars for trespassing, and his friends who assisted him in his crime were fined five dollars each.

Letchmee's act of “husband” desertion was not uncommon amongst the coolie communities in Malaya or in any estate colony across the British Empire, which depended on overseas coolie labor. Continuing the discussion of domestic and familial relations begun in Chapter 3, this chapter ventures into various intimate relations in which coolie women were involved and explores the “moralities” colonial administrators used when describing or legally adjudicating cases concerning coolie intimacies. In so doing, it investigates how coolie women engaged with racialized and gendered understandings of morality and immorality in estate societies.

Colonial administrators and planters in various plantation colonies across the British Empire frequently voiced their outrage at coolie infidelities and “immoral” intimacies on estates, particularly with the act or threat of “wife-enticement,” which according to the administrators and planters caused nuisance, social violence, and deaths in estate societies. In 1914, James McNeill and Chimman Lal in their report on the conditions of Indian immigrants asserted that “there is no doubt that the morality of an estate population compares very unfavorably with that of an Indian village.”