Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  Maria thought, in a confusion of thinking that invariably ended with painful self-misgivings: I have no right to be jealous. I have not even slept with him. Jealousy claimed prospective rights: she was going to sleep with him. It was simple reasoning to which the heart must eventually submit: if you are so tormented with jealousy now, how much more when you have crossed the line and staked your territory? The flames will become an inferno, the flood a deluge. You will be utterly destroyed. Amazed at how little control she had over an emotion so primitive yet so enduring, she thought desperately, No, I can’t go through with it.

  She thought of the sheer absurdity of being continually tormented at the thought of him celebrating Valentine’s Day with his wife, celebrating her birthday, their wedding anniversary, sleeping on the same bed as her every night. Betty told her about a girlfriend, the mistress of a highly successful corporate lawyer, who could not even bear the thought of his wife’s picture in his wallet and made him remove it. Imagine the greater torment of a hundred suspicious thoughts each time he went outside marital territory to speak amiably to more attractive, younger women. There would always be countless such women in his orbit. Jealousy, suspicion, anger, humiliation – she could not survive their combined power. Jealousy was part of love’s package which she was a fool to think she could approach with a fine selectivity: select in the passion and laughter and pleasure, select out the jealousy and the ugly, painful realities. No woman had ever managed to do that.

  She had made up her mind. In the end, in the pursuit of a happy, peaceful, good life, mind was to be more trusted than the passions and urges of the heart. Like a willful, unruly child, the heart wandered dangerously close to the edge, and the head had to pull it back. She was a survivor.

  Mr Ignatius Lim called her into his office. ‘Green tea? It’s the best for health,’ he said, pouring out a cup for her. Then he put on his glasses and looked through a very impressive-looking black leather folder. ‘Ah, here it is!’ He wanted to consult her, he said, on a very important matter that was connected with the current national campaign for greater productivity. The great TPK and his ministers had decided that for Singapore to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive world, there had to be greater productivity in the country’s industries, a greater effort put in by the people in all domains of activity. ‘Here’s where we come in,’ said Mr Ignatius Lim enthusiastically. ‘Education. We must prove that we too can contribute towards national productivity. And how do we do that? By making a more efficient use of our resources, by re-ordering our priorities.’ He loved the jargon of official talk – ‘resources’, ‘efficient’, ‘priorities’ – which rolled with ease upon his tongue. Miss Seetoh’s creative writing class, he explained politely, could not be a priority compared to other more urgent needs. He was consulting her about how best to put his idea into operation: converting it into a Language Remedial Teaching class that would focus on the needs of students who were always failing their exams because of their poor grammar. In an offhand way, he hinted that the results of last year’s English language exams were not as good as they should be. ‘Miss Seetoh,’ he said earnestly. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that short-story writing, play writing, poetry, all that stuff, isn’t important. I did literature in school and enjoyed it. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears! Even acted in a school play once. But it’s a luxury. Bread and butter first, I say, before we can go on to cake and sweets!’ He laughed heartily. ‘What do you say, Miss Seetoh?’

  He did not like her obduracy; after a while, his smiles faded away and he said, ‘Alright, Miss Seetoh. You will please put up a position paper to justify the continuance of your creative writing class.’

  Maria said coldly, ‘There’s no need for any position paper, sir. I can’t stop you if you want to shut down the class. But let me tell you this: it will be a sad day for the school if by priority you mean only the passing of exams.’ ‘That will be all, Miss Seetoh,’ he said brusquely, and from that moment the battle lines were drawn. He liked to quote the great TPK: ‘Those who are not for me are against me,’ and Miss Maria Seetoh had decidedly placed herself on the other side.

  ‘Brother Phil, I need to talk to you,’ she said to him later that day.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know all about this productivity campaign.’

  ‘No, it’s not that,’ said Maria, ‘it doesn’t bother me one jot.’

  ‘Is it about Maggie?’ asked Brother Philip warily and Maria replied, ‘No, it’s much worse. It’s about me.’

  ‘Alright, we’ll have to make it tomorrow. Same café? I’ll be wearing the shirt and trousers again to remain incognito.’ He had worn the frightfully gaudy batik shirt given by someone who had bought it at a beach resort in Bali when they had gone looking for Maggie.

  Maria smiled and said, ‘There! You’ve made me feel better already.’

  It was almost on impulse that she had decided to confide in Brother Philip the secret she had been at pains to keep from him. The burden of the secret had become too great not to seek discharge; no real unburdening, only a superficial sharing could take place with the longtime friends Meeta and Winnie. She had previously avoided talking to Brother Philip, a religious man with limited experience and permanently sworn to celibacy. Now for precisely these reasons, she was seeking him out. Perhaps it was the kindness in his eyes or the simple honesty written all over his person.

  She had worried about the sheer embarrassment of telling the Moral Education teacher of St Peter’s about her plans for a secret rendezvous in a European hotel with a married man, but the telling was surprisingly easy. They were sitting in a coffee-house, and while she poured out her heart, for the first time, to any living being, he sipped his coffee calmly, now and again pausing to look at her. She told him about the unspeakable agonies of a jealousy that was even then troubling her dreams at night and filling her mind with angry thoughts of revenge by day. ‘I am not myself,’ she ended dispiritedly. ‘Please advise me.’

  ‘You go on doing what you’ve been doing, Maria.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Exactly that. I’ve never come across anyone who thinks and feels as much, as deeply, as agonisingly as you do. Nor anyone who asks for advice she has no intention of following.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Brother Phil!’ ‘That’s the truth, Maria. You’re okay.’ ‘Right now, I feel rotten.’ ‘That’s okay too.’ ‘You’re no help at all, Brother Phil!’

  ‘I never intended to be. Now let’s go for a proper meal. The stuff in this café is inedible. Let me pay this time. I can afford it.’

  ‘Hey, Brother Phil, I feel so much better already. If it were not for your awful robe of innocence, I think I could give you a kiss.’

  ‘And if it were not for awful gossipers like Mrs Neo, I would return it.’

  She thought, ‘Dear, dear Brother Phil. Of all the men in my life, I like him best of all.’ Loving a man, falling in love with a man, liking him. Women like her had best stick to the last.

  He had some serious advice for her, which he said he dispensed to everyone who came to him, regardless of the nature of their problem: get outside yourself, step out of your skin and into another’s. It works every time.

  Maria did not enjoy getting under her mother’s skin, layered over with years of anxious pleasing of her god by saving souls for him, like catching fish in a net or gathering grain in fields white with harvest, now that her own was assured of a place in heaven.

  Anna Seetoh said, ‘Heng has agreed to take instructions in the faith. Father Rozario has arranged for his assistant Father Dominic to give him the instructions every week.’

  With Heng’s conversion would come his renunciation of the deadly sin of greed, surely the cause of all his problems. At the back of Anna Seetoh’s mind was the eventual conversion of his wife, now still worshipping temple deities, the devil’s very own, and of course, the poor son who, for all they knew, was a victim of Satanic powers. She had given Heng
a bottle of blessed water she had brought back from her pilgrimage to Lourdes, to sprinkle on his bed every night. Maria thought, poor, poor Mother. It would be impossible to get under her skin to understand how she was allowing the unscrupulous Heng to exploit her religiosity. In the same breath that she had told Maria about his responding well to Father Dominic, she confided, with a sad shake of her head, that he had gone back to the 4-D lottery.

  Maria said severely, ‘Mother, that large sum of money he’s got from me for his share of the flat – why don’t you keep it for him in your bank account? He’s going to blow it all up, let me warn you.’

  Anna Seetoh always ended any heated argument about her reprobate son with words of unshakeable trust, her eyes lifted heavenwards: ‘The good God will never let me down,’ citing cases of sinners brought back, the sick healed, the fallen raised. Her greatest triumph would be the return of the blackest sheep of the Church of Eternal Mercy, her own daughter. ‘You mark my words, Maria. You talk big now, but one day, you will come crawling back to our Lord and His Blessed Mother and they will receive you with open arms.’

  Maria hated the picture of the ultimate humiliation the word conjured: herself on abject hands and knees before God and his pantheon of saints including her dead husband, V.K. Pandy in similar locomotion of forced humility before the great TPK, a whole society in humble obeisance to what was being described as the most powerful deity in Singapore, the acronymic god of the material five Cs of Cash, Car, Condominium, Credit Card and Country Club Membership.

  Her moral report card from dear, wise, kind Brother Philip would show, alas, the red marks of failure for her behaviour to her own family. It would fare a little better regarding Mark and Yen Ping. It surprised her that despite the tight net of vigilance thrown around them by Mark’s mother, they managed sometimes to wriggle through the tiny interstices, like small desperate fish, to meet and exchange love notes and poems. But the net was getting tighter and crueller, and they racked their brains to outwit it.

  Yen Ping said, one afternoon, after the creative writing class, ‘Miss Seetoh, Mark and I need your help.’ Their plan seemed a simple one: once a week in the evening, Mark would be chauffeured to and back from his maths tutor’s home; on the way back, could he occasionally drop by at Miss Seetoh’s house to pick up notes from Yen Ping and leave his for her? It would take seconds, if Miss Seetoh would allow the maid to be the messenger; Mark would be all the while in the car, never out of sight of the watchful chauffeur. Mark would of course have told his mother beforehand that kind Miss Seetoh was helping him with some useful points for English grammar or creative writing, and if she insisted on taking a look, he would have enough material as proof.

  Maria, astonished at the vast scheme of deception of the young lovers who continued to look as innocent and pure as children, could only marvel at their strength of purpose. She had never seen them together since Mark was taken out of St Peter’s by his mother, so it came as a shock when, one afternoon, instead of the usual routine of Rosiah going up to the waiting car with the putative teaching notes from Miss Seetoh, she saw them both together, standing at the foot of a flight of stairs leading to her flat, well out of sight of the waiting chauffeur. ‘Miss Seetoh, I’ll explain later,’ whispered Yen Ping, and the lovers spent the few stolen minutes talking in low voices to each other, their foreheads almost touching, their hands inside each other’s. Yen Ping demurred about how they had arranged the meeting, keeping even the trusted Miss Seetoh out of love’s secret daredevilry, but showed her, with tears sparkling in her eyes, a poem she had written for Mark entitled ‘Dear Heart’ and his response entitled ‘Soulmate.’

  Brother Philip said, ‘Maria, if I were you, I would be more careful about being part of those kids’ secret meetings.’

  ‘Poor kids, I feel happy for them,’ sighed Maria. ‘I think I understand them perfectly, for I not only got into their skin but was able to crawl around!’

  The date of Dr Phang’s return from Europe was not marked on her calendar, but it stood out as if circled by a huge red reminder of both threat and promise. He called at last on the third day of his return. ‘Well?’ He was inviting her to lunch, clearly having decided to go back to square one and start all over again. In the jargon, there was nothing to lose. She had meanwhile lost much, mainly her peace of mind. Honesty – she had always prided herself on that and there had been little of it in her erstwhile foray into the perilous world of secret passion. The greatest peril, jealousy, once it reared its head, went on a rampage of destruction, sparing nothing, not even the basic sense of truth and fairness, for women, enraged at the sight of cheating men, forgot that they were in the cheating game themselves. If she were ever to be destroyed by any emotion, it would be jealousy. She never wanted to encounter that monster again.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘But what do you feel?’

  ‘I feel not too.’

  ‘Well, don’t think or feel then. Come and just tell me your stories. I miss my Sheherazade!’

  Twenty-Nine

  The news circulated far more effectively in the underground grapevine of the coffee shops and private homes than it could ever have had through the official media. In fact, it was not mentioned at all in any of the newspapers, the radio news bulletins or on TV, not even as an unverifiable rumour best dismissed. Singaporeans were whispering to one another, ‘Have you heard? V.K. Pandy’s dead.’ Nobody could trace the source of the news, but it was said to be a very reliable one, a nephew from India who had made known that his uncle had died in the ancestral village that he had returned to shortly after his departure from Singapore. How did he die? Even the nephew was not sure. Probably a broken heart. He had died a sad, disillusioned man and on his deathbed had expressed the wish to return to Singapore which he said he would never forget, for it had been a beloved home for so many years.

  If death softened the image even of the authoritarian leader or the corrupt politician, it invested the much-battered political opponent with an aura of sanctity and martyrdom. Suddenly from the depths of his humiliation, he rose to new, awed recognition. Suddenly, everyone felt profound admiration for the dead V.K. Pandy, mixed with an overwhelming pity for the remembered V.K. Pandy whose sufferings at the hands of a ruthless government had surely been a living hell. The image of the man, solitary in the vast space in Middleton Square, reduced to a position of beggary through no fault of his own, came back to seize the imagination and tug at the heart. While Singaporeans had gone about their business of making money and fattening their 5 Cs on an already overladen table of plenty, the poor man had stuck to his principles and in the process lost everything – his business, his house, his health. While they walked by quickly, their heads lowered in fear of being seen, he had been the solitary, unafraid voice in the wilderness until struck down.

  Nobody could remember what ideology he preached but everybody recalled the pathetic sight of the man when he called to a heedless crowd hurrying past, waving his pamphlets at them as he sat on a stool in the sun in his shabby, sweat-soaked shirt and tie, and thanked the small children and maids sent to put donations in his hands, while the furtive donors looked on from a discreet distance. It was never verified that when he lost his seat in parliament, he squatted on the ground and cried like a child, but that image too was conjured up in uneasy collective memory.

  Guilt came quickly on the heels of pity, and some Singaporeans began asking, at least in the private tribunal of the conscience: had a whole society been unfair to V.K. Pandy? Beside the wretched man, now dead and his ashes cast into the waters of the holy Ganges, the great TPK, still very much alive with the thrusting jaw and jabbing forefinger, looked a much diminished human being. His huge juggernaut of control and punishment, like the iconic giant tank about to mow down the little man standing in front of it and calmly blocking its way, was now an enduring symbol of oppression of all and sundry who dared to oppose him. The indomitability of the human spirit, courage, strength o
f will, sanctity of purpose, all hitherto only vague abstractions with little relevance in a society committed to getting and spending, suddenly became palpable realities deserving serious thought and discussion.

  Maria, quite by accident, watched the beginning of a scene that she would remember for the rest of her life. It was Saturday morning, and she was as usual in the dispensary at Middleton Square, looking idly upon the spot vacated by the poor V.K. Pandy, now a spirit hovering somewhere over the vast Ganges, when she suddenly noticed a small object on the ground close to the spot where the opposition member often placed his wooden stool. She looked more closely: it was a small bunch of yellow flowers wrapped in white plastic, tied with a white ribbon. Somebody had placed a memorial bouquet for the dead man. Then she saw a woman approaching, holding the hand of a little boy who held a bunch of red and white carnations, tied with a large white bow. The woman whispered something to the child, and he placed the flowers close to the first bouquet. The woman then stood, with her head bowed for a few seconds, before hurrying away with the child: was she saying prayers for the repose of V.K. Pandy’s soul, or saying sorry for the time when her little boy broke from her to smile at the outcast and she rushed to pull him away, terrified of those surveillance cameras?

  Maria decided that as soon as she had delivered the asthma medicine to her mother, she would return to watch what promised to be a most unusual happening in Singapore.

  ‘This is unbelievable,’ she gasped, as she looked upon the floral tributes now occupying a large stretch of ground.

  In the half hour that she had taken to return to the scene, the offerings had multiplied. There were elaborate bouquets as well as simple single stalks, some carefully wrapped in transparent gift wrapping paper, all neatly laid side by side, with the merest overlapping, each visitor claiming space for the full display of his or her offering of respect and regard, while being mindful of the claims of others. And still they came. Each bent to place the tribute, then withdrew to make way for others, staying on to join the crowd that had gathered to watch. The flowers on the ground were building up to an immense carpet of richest hues, and still they grew. Nobody made the slightest sound, as if the silence of profound awe were better than any rhetorical tribute. In the distance, the sounds of moving traffic could be heard, but in the square itself, perfect silence reigned.