Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  Between her habitual sense of caution whenever she was approached by Maggie, and a genuine desire to help Ah Boy’s wife, Maria felt a weary helplessness that suddenly vanished with the image of the diamond ring lying in the forest. Thrown away because of her rejection, it was surely hers to claim upon change of mind. She instantly saw it shining in a brilliant arithmetic of hope. The twenty thousand dollars that it had cost, even if reduced to half that amount upon resale, would exceed the cost of the operation for the poor woman and provide decent meals for the entire family for months; she remembered Maggie telling her the daily fare was instant noodles or cheap broken rice. Meeta had a very wealthy socialite cousin who might be prevailed upon to buy a Tiffany diamond that she could claim had cost her twenty thousand dollars when she had paid only ten, or nine or even eight for it. The object of love’s bitter controversies, now lying rejected in some deserted spot, could become a gift of life itself.

  As the idea of such a transformational role for the fateful ring grew, so did the excitement of mounting a search for it. Maggie, now in the reverse position of receiving confidential information from a teacher, was wide-eyed and speechless in trembling awareness of her privileged position. It took her some time to digest the amazing nature of Miss Seetoh’s recent experience and the central role she was about to play in the equally amazing aftermath. Once she did, she swung into a state of full preparedness, vowing to Miss Seetoh she would tell no one except her boyfriend who, having been a scout, would be very familiar with the enormous challenges of the forest and its dense undergrowth.

  ‘He is very smart. Even two days lost in Cameron Highlands, can find his way out. He can surely find your ring, Miss Seetoh,’ said Maggie and added, breathless with admiration, ‘I can’t believe it. But I would do exactly like you, Miss Seetoh. If you don’t love a man, what for to accept his gift, even if cost one million dollars? Miss Seetoh, I’m proud of you!’

  The search party, to cover the immense area of forest, would have to include a few more capable men, all to be sworn to secrecy, all to be provided with proper instruments of search such as small hacking knives, spades, digging sticks and even torches to penetrate the dark tangles of undergrowth. The task, in its sheer magnitude, promised unimaginable thrills for Maggie; she wrote down a list of the things needed, together with a clear plan of action while the mathematics lesson was going on, slipping out as soon as it was over, to proudly show the list to Miss Seetoh. Throughout she maintained an elaborate secrecy that was soon noticed by the students and teachers who wondered why she was always summoning Miss Seetoh from the staffroom with such urgency. In the staid atmosphere of St Peter’s Secondary School, a little conspiracy was developing, with the school’s most controversial teacher and most disreputable student at its centre. Ah Boy was immediately approached, briefed and recruited by Maggie, all during the brief school recess. The sole beneficiary of a massive enterprise, he understood little of the details beyond the need to get his brother’s help, and do whatever the kind teacher and the kind schoolgirl asked him to.

  The richly promising arithmetic of the project intrigued Maria enough for her to sit down and work it out systematically on a piece of paper. She recollected Meeta and Winnie telling her about the cleaning woman in their school, who had to take care of two mentally retarded children on her meagre wages, and decided that the ten thousand-dollar yield from the hunt should be divided equally between her and Ah Boy. The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her to do good in a big way had a satisfaction all its own, and she meant to make maximum use of it.

  The anticipatory gratification was equal to that experienced when she was eight years old and joined other children helping an old vagrant who wandered from kampong to kampong in search of fallen coconuts lying unclaimed, ripe fruit from trees still unplucked, eggs snatched from under hens if they wandered out of their coop for the laying, even a dead chicken newly run over by a lorry that might still be cooked and eaten. They would all run to the vagrant if they found such a prize and lead him to it, a noisily triumphant group marching ahead of a somewhat bemused old man in rags, a comic Pied Piper replay in reverse, that made the watching adults smile. There was an unspoken code of honour by which no finder should keep the prize; if he or she did and was found out, the penalty was to compensate the vagrant twice over when he next came to the kampong. Sometimes when there was nothing for the looting, she would feel sorry for the old man rummaging in the large rubbish bins, with his many dirty bundles strung on his body, and shyly offer him a coin from her money box.

  Meeta and Winnie were delighted with the magnanimous scheme of rescue, and readily joined it. ‘You know what, God’s hand is at work,’ said Winnie devoutly. ‘I just heard yesterday that Ah Lan’s older daughter got ill again and needs expensive medicine.’

  ‘We have to go in pants,’ said Meeta. ‘There will be thorn bushes and jungle insects. I will wear my Punjabi trousers.’

  In the end, the search party grew to seven in number, all ready to find the lost treasure at the earliest possible opportunity before it got lost forever, driven deeper into the ground by passing animals or washed away by rain. It was a project of unprecedented novelty, adventure and opportunity, enough to give Maria one of her famous headaches and make her look forward to a speedy, successful conclusion.

  The reality was far from the theoretical simplicity of staking out the area of search, and fanning out efficiently, in twos or threes, armed with the spades and sticks. As soon as the search party got out of the van that Maggie’s boyfriend had borrowed for the occasion, they gazed in dismay at a vast densely forested area stretching endlessly, which Maria was not even sure was the right location, having only a very dim recollection of the gravel path where Bernard had parked his car that evening. ‘I remember there was part of an old wire fence near it, covered with creepers,’ she said suddenly, and to everyone’s relief the fence was soon found to allow the search to begin.

  ‘Wait, we have to do something first,’ said the capable Maggie. ‘Miss Seetoh, show where Mr Bernard stand exactly when he threw the ring,’ and then she and her boyfriend, standing on the indicated spot, flung a small pebble each into the forest, to gauge the distance of the treasure from the path.

  ‘How on earth –’ said Meeta in dismay, looking at the surrounding impenetrability of trees, creepers, bushes. ‘Talk about the needle in the haystack.’

  ‘What shall we do, Maria? We’ll never find it,’ said Winnie freeing her foot from a tangle of ground creepers.

  Maggie said, assuming the position of leader, ‘We all here already. Might as well look. No time to lose.’ She carved out the area of search, assigning the largest, most difficult terrain to herself and her boyfriend.

  Maria called off the hunt after two hours. ‘It’s no use,’ she said. ‘We’re all tired, let’s get back. I’m sorry. Thank you, everybody.’

  Meeta whispered, ‘That Maggie. I don’t trust her. I saw her give her boyfriend a kind of signal. That diamond could be in his pocket now. He looks like a gangster.’

  A day later, Maggie voiced exactly the same suspicion to her: ‘Miss Seetoh, I saw Ah Boy’s brother, he whisper to Ah Boy, and then both of them, they get very close together, like hiding something, they look around to see if anybody see them, they don’t know that I am behind a tree, watching them. Maybe they go to pawnshop and pawn the diamond now, no need to share with the cleaning woman. Do you want me to confront Ah Boy and ask? I will say Miss Seetoh very angry with his dishonest action.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Maria, suddenly very tired, burdened by a new heaviness of heart that she could not share with anybody.

  Years later, she would remember the episode, not for its futile search but for the larger futility of human effort, in all its contradictions of vanity and nobility, trust and deception, longing and frustration, symbolised by Bernard’s diamond ring taunting its seekers from its hiding place in a vast forest. She saw Bernard in the exclusive jewellery shop in Robinson’s Building, selectin
g it with the help of the salesgirl, writing out a cheque for it, constantly looking down, as he drove to pick her up, to check on the precious blue velvet box lying beside him on his seat, his heart glowing with an anticipatory joy that was only exceeded by the subsequent misery. In the course of a single day, they had both ridden on the wildest waves of human feeling, he of hope and despair, she of shock and pity.

  All over the world, down through the aeons of time, men and women met, then watched, in dismay, their dreams colliding with each other and crashing to the ground. Did her father and her mother have similar dreams which later, like angry beasts, turned upon each other? She remembered seeing their wedding picture which her mother later tore up and threw away; beyond the propriety of looking solemn for the occasion, her mother, in her white satin wedding dress, veil and pearl necklace, already had the sad expression of loss and betrayal.

  As a child, she had heard hints of Por Por’s dark past when a suitor rejected by her parents because he came from a different dialect group, later met her secretly in a temple. When her father found out, he sent her away to live with a relative in a distant village, but allowed her back, still stained with dishonour, to marry a simple-minded man who could be bribed to sustain his opium habit. Men and women met, turned away from each other, then met again, in a compromise of dreams, condemning themselves to a lifetime of unhappiness by their own mistakes or allowing others to do so by theirs. The story of men and women, from time immemorial, was written in sweat, blood and tears. For each happy journey where love safely reached its destination, there must have been many ghastly wreckages along the way.

  It was good that she and Bernard had not reached that point of irrevocable commitment. Two basically good people, both wanting only to be happy and to do good in life, they had crossed paths and, in a single colossal moment one dark night in the middle of nowhere, had become each other’s torment. Through the turmoil of her thoughts and feelings, appeared again and again one compelling image: Bernard’s face that evening as he stood by the forest, white and taut in the indescribable pain of holding the returned gift, now mocking the giver. She had remembered only the fury when he returned to the car, that was many times amplified in her dream that night; now two days later, she saw only the desolation of utter despair. And she was the cause of it all. A stupendous sense of responsibility shook, then depressed her.

  She was already weeping silently, when they got ready to leave the forest and get back into the van parked on the gravel path. Meeta, mistaking the tears of pity for those of disappointment, said, ‘Never mind, my dear, you tried your best.’ Winnie said, ‘It’s all fated,’ and Maggie said, ‘I don’t understand. Maybe someone find it already. Never mind, Miss Seetoh. We all tried our best.’

  In their united effort to console poor Maria Seetoh, they were silently united by a single puzzling thought – how a woman who was pretty without being beautiful, charming without being dazzling, could have inspired such an amazing display of male adulation twice over, first in the purchasing of a twenty thousand-dollar diamond, fit for the fabulously rich or royal, and then in its peremptory discarding, as if her rejection had reduced it to a worthless trinket. Such a superordinate demonstration of love existed only in the imagination.

  The true explanation, said Meeta, as she and Winnie later discussed the matter at length and came to the same conclusion, must lie both in Bernard Tan’s deceitfulness and Maria Seetoh’s naiveté. Meeta said, ‘No, it’s just not possible. That man must have exaggerated the value of that ring. Maria is so unworldly she’ll believe anything. Sometimes she’s even more naïve than you, Winnie! Only towkays and tycoons can afford such a gift. And they would never throw it away. They would keep it for the next mistress. He’s only a civil servant with a salary.’ Maria Seetoh, through her central role in a drama of love far removed even from their wildest fantasies, had created an intolerable dissonance in their minds.

  ‘Dear Bernard,’ she wrote in a letter that evening, ‘I feel compelled to tell you about what happened two days after you threw the ring into the forest. But first let me tell you again and again how sorry I am about the pain that I had caused you. I wanted so badly to apologise when you took me home, but you had already driven off. It could have been the need to wrest some good out of this very sad episode in our lives, that I had a plan to search for the ring, sell it and use the proceeds to help a number of very needy people. I felt you would have approved of the plan, since your generosity towards the poor is well known; in any case you would not have disapproved of it. I organised a discreet search yesterday to find it, but alas, it is irretrievably lost in that vast forest. It would have given me so much satisfaction to be able to tell you that your valuable ring helped two very needy families. May I wish you every happiness.’ Regularly storing up interesting events in her own life for the telling or the writing of stories, she was consigning the most momentous one of all to memory’s dust-heap with a one-page letter.

  One little vestige remained to tease her mind, again related to the potential saving power of that large sum of money. If Meeta and Winnie were right about Ah Boy and Ah Lan not being fated to benefit from her kind intentions, would that mysterious force have favoured someone who was in equal need of financial help? V.K. Pandy, in a lawsuit for defamation that the great TPK had brought against him, had lost a huge sum of money, at a time when his wife was undergoing expensive treatment for cancer. She saw herself striding hurriedly towards him in that spot of infamy in Middleton Square, pressing an envelope of money into his hands, and then quickly turning and walking away. But the double insult to Bernard would have been too daunting: his gift, rejected by the woman he loved, used by her to benefit an opposition politician he detested.

  ‘What on earth –’ She had just finished the letter, and was staring at Bernard as he stood dripping wet on the doorstep. In the short distance from the open car park to her apartment, he had been drenched by a sudden, torrential shower. Her mother, Por Por and the maid had gone to bed, leaving her to face what could well be a ghostly visitant making its appearance on the stroke of midnight.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said when it should have been herself, still pained by the memory of his anguish, to say those words. He asked forgiveness for his bad behaviour that evening, for throwing away the ring in a fit of temper, for driving off in an even greater fit, when she had tried to speak to him.

  As he spoke, calmly and simply, a hundred turbulent thoughts raced through her mind, among which was a question that was answered as soon as it arose: Suppose he proposes that we start all over again? No, a very firm No. Then I’ll offer him a hot drink, a towel for his wet hair and clothes, and sit down with him to wait out the rain. As soon as he leaves, I’ll throw away that letter.

  ‘I was going to write you a note,’ he said, ‘but I changed my mind and drove here instead. I was hoping you would still be awake.’ Letters unwritten, letters unread, letters torn up – they were supposed to help failed speech, but were themselves failures.

  ‘Oh Bernard –’ she said, deeply moved and reached out to touch his hand. She was startled to see him holding out to her a small thick square of some silky stuff which she then recognised as a ring purse. ‘Oh no,’ she thought in panic, expecting a bizarre replay of the awful scene that night by a forest.

  ‘It’s my mother’s,’ said Bernard, opening the purse and taking out a gold ring, set with a small piece of carved jade. She remembered, as a child, seeing a similar ring on Por Por’s finger, and being allowed to feel the carved surface of the dark green jade. ‘She left it as a memento when she died. I would like you to have it as a token of my deep regret for causing you so much distress.’

  He added, in a little apologetic murmur, ‘It’s rather old-fashioned, with little value beyond the sentimental one for me. But I will be very happy if you will accept it.’

  She said again, ‘Oh Bernard –’ and was unable to go on. Her first thought was, ‘Oh my God, after that twenty thousand dollars, he would have no
more money for gifts,’ and her first feeling was an overwhelming pity, as she stared at the once proud, sensitive man, now wet from the rain, standing before her humbly offering his most valued possession.

  Within a month, she had married him.

  Eleven

  Years later, she would remember the honeymoon for two small incidents that had nothing to do with it. Both had to do with children. Childless, she found much pleasure in their presence, or simply observing them from afar, happy inhabitants of a world of innocence until their time came for entry into the complicated world of experience.

  Taking a walk along one of the peaceful country roads of the lovely Cameron Highlands in Malaysia (Bernard had said in a flush of generous promise, ‘That’s all I can afford for the present; for our second honeymoon, I’ll take you to Europe’), they came upon a scene of distress. A little boy of about four was sitting on the ground with a bad cut on his forehead, and his mother who looked very young was wringing her hands and making small sounds of panic as she looked around for help. It was a simple matter for her and Bernard to effect a full rescue, which they did promptly. She cleaned the child’s forehead with tissue paper from her handbag and wrapped her scarf around it; then Bernard carried him to the nearest hotel where his wound could be properly attended to by the resident doctor. ‘My, young man, you are heavy,’ said Bernard, not exactly complaining.

  She had to suppress her amusement as witness of a running drama between the precocious, self-assured child and the silly, helpless adult. Assuming a stoical silence as his wound was being attended to, the little boy ignored his mother’s plaintive noises until she raised a wail and he turned a cool bandaged head towards her to say with some sternness, ‘If you don’t mind, the doctor says must not make noise!’