Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  It would always be a reflection of loyal and unstinting friendship that Winnie actually delayed her honeymoon in Europe by some days to be with her poor housemate in the hour of need, though it did not help that while busying herself with this or that to make Meeta comfortable, she was sharing her new happiness in an incessant stream of chirpy talk.

  ‘Ah, here are the pills. Meeta, you’re to take them every three hours. My darling Wilbur’s aunt went into depression too some years ago, and he got her exactly these pills.’ ‘Meeta dear, try to look happy. Sometimes just trying helps. Tell us some of your jokes. Dear Wilbur is full of jokes. He makes me laugh all the time!’ ‘Maria, are you going to be with Meeta for the rest of the evening? Can I go back to the hotel now? Wilbur’s waiting. He’s taking me out for a romantic candlelit dinner this evening!’

  Meeta, coming out briefly from her despondency, said in a low voice to Maria, ‘Look, I can’t stand it anymore. Can’t you stop all that nattering?’

  Winnie left for Europe at last – ‘My Wilbur says he can’t wait any longer for our honeymoon to begin!’ – hugging Meeta warmly as she said, ‘Goodbye, my dear Meeta, take care. I’ll call you when we’re back home in Washington!’

  Meeta muttered, ‘Thank goodness.’

  The brief periods of lucidity were enough for her to remind her sister and Maria that Winnie’s kindness to her now exactly matched hers, many years ago, when Winnie was hospitalised for a serious illness and depended on her, rather than her own sisters, to help her through the recuperation. My favour cancelling out yours. Now we’re quits. It was the dove’s equivalent of the serpent’s an eye for an eye. Pride, revenge, kindness, gratitude, resentment – they were all inextricably tied together, as were love and hate, attraction and revulsion, sense and folly, all horribly smeared together in the complex human psyche desperately seeking a balance to stay whole.

  Maria thought, with some wonder, how many friends, lovers, married couples were in perpetual Conditional Mood, staying together by default, in harmony on the surface, in silent resentment underneath, waiting for the moment to break free. If only I had the financial means to be on my own. If only the children were old enough. If only the old one would go off mercifully; the hospital bills are mounting by the day.

  She could imagine Winnie, cuddled up against her Wilbur, saying, ‘Darling, you can have no idea how I longed to be free of Meeta,’ telling him about all the times Meeta had made fun of her, discharging years of resentment that must have built up even as she was telling others in her nervous, little-girl voice, ‘You know, I wouldn’t know what to do without Meeta. She advises me, counsels me, scolds me, checks my accounts for me…’

  Maria thought, I could write short stories about the sad lives of women, using only the rich resources of English grammar. Thus: the Passive Voice for subjugated women like Por Por who were lived, not living; the Conditional Mood for hopelessly yearning women like herself and Meeta, with its brutal ifs upon which to hang their shredded dreams. The Perfect Tense? It was a frightful misnomer because it could only be used to describe an imperfect world.

  Right now, it was also a laughing mockery of two women keeping each other doleful company, looking back upon their painful experiences in the past that the special grammatical form made clear were still impinging upon their present: ‘I have made such a terrible mistake.’ ‘He has broken my heart.’ ‘We have made such fools of ourselves.’

  That evening, on a whim, she decided to go to a part of the city she had only once glanced at from her taxi window. It was one of those derelicted parts, away from the gleam and gloss, that the government, particularly before an election, promised to clean up, put in more roads, more street lamps, tear down the dilapidated buildings and put up new ones worthy of the name of the cleanest, greenest, most progressive city in Asia. She took a walk along a small, broken road covered with puddles from the last downpour, and watched its occupants going about their business, or simply sitting idly on chairs and stools by the roadside since there was no business to go about. Two old men were sitting at a low table playing Chinese chess. Another old man was feeding a bird hopping about in a cage strung up on a wooden pole. A middle-aged woman at the doorway of a rundown shophouse was preparing to send two small children, probably her grandchildren, to school, both of them in clean, green-and-white school uniforms. As they walked out into the sunshine, the woman, with a little warning cry, pushed the children out of the downward path of water dripping from clothes strung out to dry on a row of bamboo poles from upstairs windows. She raised an angry fist to one of the windows, after something dropped to the ground at her feet, a styrofoam box falling apart and scattering the remnants of someone’s lunch. A young woman was crossing the road with a little girl in a red Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and green pants, her fringe of hair reaching down to her small bright eyes. A very old, very bent woman was rummaging about in a garbage bin, a trolley beside her, half filled with empty beer cans and cardboard boxes. She was ignoring a young man watching her and making little gurgling noises; he had all the marks of the village idiot – large bulging eyes, slack, drooling mouth, stiff movements, shabby clothes. An old man was sitting at a table, drinking some milky tea from a large glass; he could have been the same man that her taxi driver had once pointed out to her, the sad victim of a greedy young woman from China who cleaned out every cent of his pension money.

  They were all living the Conditional Mood of regret and yearning. If, if, if only.

  Maria then decided to go to Middleton Square, not in respectful remembrance of its most notable occupant whose death now seemed only a faint memory, but simply to watch the Singaporeans there, well-dressed and prosperous-looking and therefore in no need of the Conditional Mood. A young man in smart shirt and tie was walking rapidly beside two Caucasians in smart business suits and carrying briefcases; he was talking animatedly to them and could be steering them towards a big business deal over drinks in a posh pub. Two young women with long straight hair, wearing bright T-shirts and jeans were giggling over some shared secret; they were carrying large fashionable tote-bags, one wearing impossibly high heels, the other dark green sandals showing off her toenails varnished a brownish red. A maid was on a shopping trip with her tai tai mistress, her arms straining under the weight of shopping bags bearing designer labels.

  All would have appeared, at some time or other, in the glossy tourist posters and advertisements proclaiming the city’s success. The brightness of their appearance and vigour of their movements would still have warranted the use of the Passive Voice: We are told to keep our city clean and green and attractive. We are prohibited from chewing gum and spitting and littering. We have been warned against offending our government. We have been promised a Utopia. We have been bought.

  But the Passive Voice could have been easily shouted down by the Active: They give us clean, crime-free streets. They subsidise our flats. They give scholarships to our children. They put money in our pockets. They give us not only the five Cs but newer, better versions of the five Cs!

  One of Singapore’s most prestigious hotels, The Summit, employed humour to enable Singaporeans as well as tourists to get rid of whatever irritation they might experience about the harsh anti-littering laws: it provided a special bar where unshelled peanuts lay waiting in small attractive baskets for patrons to pick up, pop the tasty kernels into their mouths and then throw the shells, not into the mandatory waiting bins, but upon the gleaming polished floor itself, thus celebrating the Active Voice with joyous abandon: I am littering. I littered. I have littered. I can litter as much as I want!

  Meeta’s recovery was slow, but she made steady progress under the devoted care of her sister from New Delhi who made arrangements for a cousin to take over when she had to return home. Her sister Saroja had made a firm offer: ‘Leave Singapore, come and live with me, my husband and our four children who adore their aunt Meeta. You will have a maid to yourself. You will have nothing to do but enjoy yourself.’

  Meeta
had confided in Maria, ‘No thank you. Saroja’s the sweetest, most generous sister you’ll ever find, but I want a life of my own. Like you.’

  Her mirror moment of truth, like Maria’s, was of the literal kind, coming as she looked steadily at her reflection, staring at the changed lineaments on her face, the dullness in the once bright eyes, the limpness of hair once in bright coils enhanced by sparkling hair clips, the lusterlessness of a life once an inspiration to others.

  And in that one moment, Meeta’s pride asserted itself as it never had before, vanquishing depression and launching her on the road to full restoration. Her volatility, having plunged her into desperation, now pulled her up, with the same ferocity for the immediate task of self-rescue. She called loudly for the maid who came running and ordered her to get her bath water ready, with her favourite jasmine-scented bath soap, also her blue and green sari, nail polish, pearl hairclip, black-and-silver sandals. Then she took a last look at herself in the mirror and said with a smile, ‘That’s the last I’ll see of the old, stupid Meeta Nair who was stupid enough to fall for a bum, a man not fit to kiss the sandals on her feet. The next time I stand before you, Mirror, it will be a brand new Meeta, more beautiful and carefree than ever! I’ll show him!’

  Mirror, mirror on the wall. Women cared less about being the fairest of them all than about coming out of a crisis with their dignity intact.

  Meeta, through sheer pride, never asked exactly what happened that day in the classroom; the incomplete recollection was enough to tell her she had behaved in the most embarrassing way, badly damaging her image with her students and colleagues at Palm Secondary School who were probably now all whispering to each other about her. She never returned to the school, after her extended medical leave, and chose instead to continue her teaching career in a private school. Her meetings with friends grew fewer, and one day, some months after her breakdown, she called Maria to say that she had resigned from her job and had accepted her sister’s invitation to live in New Delhi. Her plan to do a pilgrimage to meet the holy Sai Baba was revived with a dream, almost a vision, that she had had of him, in which he appeared in a thick mist and blessed her.

  ‘I’ll visit his ashram, then go on to New Delhi,’ she said cheerfully. She spoke at length about how she would devote herself to Saroja’s children and give them the time that their busy parents could not afford.

  ‘Have I told you,’ she said, ‘Saroja’s house is a mansion, with that kind of garden you’ll never find in our land-hungry, little Singapore. It has at least a dozen varieties of mango alone. And Saroja’s friends include the arty-farty kind who will take me to the theatre. I don’t know how I will find the time to do everything!’

  Meeta said that she practised what she had taught her students to do in times of indecisiveness: take out a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle and call the two columns ‘Pros’ and ‘Cons’, to list out all the reasons for or against a decision. Writing down one’s thoughts clarified them marvellously. She showed her pros and cons list for leaving Singapore to live with her sister, the top reason for vamoosing, she chuckled, being lack of political freedom. ‘But you’ve never shown any interest in politics,’ said Maria. ‘Aw, everybody knows we don’t have any freedom! Look at poor V.K. Pandy.’ It was the first time that Maria remembered she had mentioned the opposition member.

  Meeta confided hearing from a reliable source that at long last she might get an invitation from the Ministry of National Affairs to be a member of the Council for Religious Harmony.

  ‘High time,’ she said loftily, and toyed with the idea inspired by that tale about a genie in a bottle that waited a hundred years to be rescued, getting more impatient by the day. He was so fed up with waiting that he swore that the person who rescued him, instead of being rewarded, would bear the brunt of his annoyance.

  ‘When I get the letter,’ declared Meeta, ‘I’ll write and say, ‘Too late! No thank you’.’

  The letter never came. Maria one afternoon found her playing with the dog Singapore.

  She said, hugging the dog to her chest, ‘This is the only Singapore I will trust!’ She was deep in thought for a while and then asked, ‘Hey, do you think I should write a book? About my life. There’s so much to tell.’

  Maria thought, ‘Poor Meeta. She’s still looking for a workable coping strategy. But aren’t we all.’

  Winnie called a few times from her new home in Washington. The celebratory joyousness of voice in the early days of her marriage could not be sustained indefinitely. There was a call when she said, in rather subdued tones, that she missed her old life in Singapore. Winnie was never one to impart anything clearly and coherently, either when asking questions or giving answers, and it was some time before Maria understood that she was talking about some problems related to Wilbur’s drinking and his odd habit of disappearing for days, which he said, had to do with his secret work with the US navy.

  She said bravely, ‘He says he loves me very much and will always take good care of me. So I should not complain about anything!’ adding, ‘Every morning, he brings me breakfast in bed.’

  About what was going on in Maria’s life, she showed little interest, about Meeta’s, even less. It would only be a matter of time before the three friends whom Meeta once called ‘The Terrible Trio’, ‘The Golden Girls’, ‘The Three Misses Who Missed’, ended all communicaton with each other and disappeared into the darkest corners of memory.

  Maria called her mother a few times in her new home in Malaysia. ‘We’re all doing well, praise be to the Lord and His Holy Mother,’ said Anna Seetoh. ‘Heng will be baptised next month. His new name will be Vincent, after St. Vincent de Paul. His godma will be Francesca Low. I must have told you about her, a truly pious lady who’s been to Lourdes three times. Heng’s a completely different person now.’

  Anna was anxious to know about Por Por who was getting to be more unmanageable, refusing to eat or have her bath. A few times she had grabbed Rosiah’s hand and bitten it. Maria had bad news. ‘Rosiah’s leaving in six weeks’ time. She says she’s getting married, but I suspect it’s an excuse. I don’t blame her. She’s no longer able to manage Por Por and can’t wait for me to come home everyday to take over.’ ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Anna anxiously and Maria said sadly, ‘I’m going to put Por Por in the Sunshine Home.’ She wished it could have been the Silver Valley Home which had better facilities and round-the-clock medical care, but it was too expensive. She wished, with all her heart, that she had more money.

  Thirty-Three

  ‘Oh no, you can’t do this to me,’ gasped Maria when Brother Philip told her the bad news: he was going on long leave to Ireland after which his superiors there would decide on his next posting which would likely not be Singapore again. ‘Oh no, dear Brother Phil, you can’t leave me when I need you most. You know that I need you, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course, Maria. I know that.’

  ‘Then why are you leaving me?’

  ‘I have no choice, Maria.’

  ‘This is nonsense, Brother Phil. Of course you have a choice. Don’t you love me at all?’

  ‘Of course I do, Maria. Now stop behaving like a spoilt child.’

  ‘No, you can’t love me if you’re abandoning me like this!’

  It was strange that they were using the language of lovers when they were not, nor could ever be. If it was true that real, lasting love between a man and a woman went through a number of stages, beginning with the heat of passion, then a tumultous power struggle to see who would be in control, followed by a period of painful accommodation and finally, the ultimate reward of perfect soulmateship, then she and her colleague in St Peter’s Secondary School, worlds apart in temperament and chosen way of life, had co-opted the entire process and made it their own; they had dispensed with all the burdensome stages of the journey and leapt directly to the golden reward at the end. They had managed this magical flight, like two winged creatures, precisely because they carried no lovers’ bagga
ge.

  After she had fully opened up her heart to him about the painful dilemmas of a near love affair, she had learnt to trust him completely and relish the pleasure of his wise, witty company; it did not matter if the gossips in the school were wondering why Maria Seetoh and Brother Philip were seen so often together. Once she had asked him, ‘There’s a rumour going on about us. Does it bother you?’ and he had said, ‘Only if it’s true.’ She had thought, ‘Dear, dear Brother Phil. He makes me feel what no man has ever made me feel – comfortable.’

  She made him promise that he would write to her from Ireland and let her know what was going on in his new life.

  ‘Nothing much happens. Long hours of study, prayers, walks in my favourite fields and downs. Maybe an occasional visit to a pub for beer and Irish music.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind that kind of peaceful, uncomplicated existence! But no, dear Brother Phil, you must still write, I want to know.’

  As a parting gift, she gave him a pen with his name inscribed. ‘Remember you had once wanted to collaborate with me in the writing of a play?’ she asked. ‘Maybe one of these days, should you get a re-posting to Singapore, we could still do it.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Brother Philip, looking at her very affectionately. She had wanted to give him a hug then, but desisted. There was only one time he had held her, but that was because she was crying over her failure to reach Maggie and he wanted to console her. Here was a life that was undamaged and happy, and she, with a life still to recover from damage, a happiness still to be found, had no right to come knocking on the gates of his Eden.

  The school gave him a farewell dinner in a restaurant. That evening, she tossed about in fretful sleeplessness, drifting into a troubled sleep at dawn, heavy-hearted at the thought that only his vacated desk in the staff common room would greet her every morning. The true test of a woman’s feelings for a man, it was said, lay in how much he was missed. By that reckoning, she must have loved Dr Phang a little, and her husband not at all. Brother Philip’s departure hollowed out a huge part of her inner self, leaving an emptiness shockingly alien to her sense of independence and love of solitude. It frightened her. Perhaps she was confusing need with love, only this time it was not the need for the warmth of a man’s body in a parked car or on a silken bed, but of something superior and subtler – his unconditional friendship. If she was now confusing love with friendship, it was no bad thing, for indeed, at their best, they were one. Was love an ersatz friendship, or was it the other way round? The need to hear from him grew sharp and insistent with each day of his absence, making her wait for a letter that she had told him there was no need to write, for a call that would never be made as he could not afford expensive overseas calls and she had been too embarrassed to tell him, ‘make it a collect call.’