The Unlicensed Loan Shark and the Wrong-Exit Bankrupt

The Loan Shark and Her Only Client

Priya: The Unlicensed Loan Shark

Priya, you have spent seven years running a loan shark operation with no money, no muscle and exactly one customer. You keep the Book in your Notes app with dates, columns and a running total, you update it at 1am with the tenderness of a woman feeding a hamster, and you have never once tried to collect, because collecting would end the only conversation you know how to start. A standard Tuesday from your side of the desk:

A six-minute voice note, a S$4.20 kopi and a threat of interest, all before she had replied once. You are not owed money, Priya, you are owed attention, and you dressed the demand up as accounting so nobody could call it needy. In 2022 she offered you S$50 to settle and you called it insulting, then spent it on her birthday dinner. That is not a creditor, that is a woman refusing the ransom so the kidnapping never ends.

Jia Min: The Wrong-Exit Bankrupt

Jia Min is a bankrupt who has never once been asked to leave the building. She has owed money since a S$2.40 kaya toast in 2019, replies eighty minutes late in lowercase fragments, and gets off at Kovan by mistake so reliably that Kovan is now a verb. Her version of a payment plan:

She disputes every charge and pays none of them, which is the exact financial strategy of a small failing nation. When your flat flooded in 2023 she arrived in forty minutes with a mop, a power bank and a bak chor mee, then asked in front of the neighbour whether the noodles could go on the Book. She is the only debtor in history to invoice her creditor during a natural disaster.

The Trap: A Debt Built Never to Be Paid

Every feeling in this chat goes in as a joke and comes out as a line item. You cannot say you missed her, so you add a late fee. Jia Min cannot say thank you, so she disputes the fee in capitals, and the dispute becomes the longest conversation the two of you have had all month.

You kept the Book open so you would never have to ask for a hug, and she kept owing so she would never have to say thank you.

A closed account is a goodbye and an open one is a standing reservation, so the balance has grown to S$1,046.30 and neither of you has touched the principal. Watch it run: she goes quiet, you invent a fee, she screams, and the friendship restarts like a dead car being push-started by its own debt. Seven years, and the only thing either of you has paid is attention, at a rate that would get a real loan shark arrested.

The Dialect of a Two-Woman Finance Company

The Book is the debt: S$1,046.30 at 2% a week, compounded by guilt and unpayable by design. Kovan'd means arriving somewhere with total confidence and zero accuracy, and it now covers one MRT exit, two of Jia Min's jobs and a wedding venue.

Voice Note Weather is the forecast you post before a long one, heavy, six minutes, brace, and it is the only considerate thing either of you has ever typed. Interest Season is the three weeks around each birthday when you add a fee and she disputes it, which is the closest this friendship comes to a holiday.

The dictionary has entries for money, directions and weather. Under love it says see Book, and somebody has torn the page out.

A Live Reading: The Night of 11 March 2026

Here is the night you did not get the promotion, and the only time either of you dropped the act:

A woman whose replies usually take eighty minutes answered in four seconds and still went to the wrong block, because even her love has a navigation problem. She brought two chicken rice and a Milo and never mentioned the promotion, the most emotionally intelligent thing she has done in seven years, and she did it by accident. Then, from the lift:

Zero percent, the only interest-free entry in seven years, from the woman who owes everything to the woman who charges for breathing. You answered with two question marks, Priya, because a kindness with no fee attached is the one transaction your system cannot process.

The Timeline

14 March 2019. A S$2.40 kaya toast set enters the Book with the note will chase, and seven years of chasing produce no money and one friendship nobody can afford to end.

2 February 2021. You introduce 2% weekly interest, she calls it unconstitutional, and February becomes the busiest month in the chat's history for the stupidest reason possible.

2 June 2024. Nine days of silence, the longest in the archive, ended by a late fee you invented to get her attention and she paid for in capital letters.

24 September 2026. She asks whether she can finally settle the Book, you reply don't be silly, and the account stays open exactly as both of you needed it to.

What You Each Wanted

You wanted proof you are not the only one keeping count, so you kept the count yourself and called it a joke. Every entry in the Book is a receipt for a time you showed up, filed away for the day someone asks whether you were ever there.

Jia Min wanted to be allowed to be wrong without being let go. She tested it at every wrong exit for seven years, and you came to find her at every one, which is a better return than any loan you never gave.

The Ruling

Neither of you is the creditor and neither is the bankrupt; you are two women who found the one form of intimacy that needs no eye contact, which is a spreadsheet. Jia Min will owe you S$2.40 forever, and she knows exactly why. Priya, you have charged your best friend interest for seven years because it was easier than admitting you would pay her to stay.