Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  To each his own. Live and let live. Life goes on. In the end, life was lived according to the earthy wisdom of banalities and clichés, in accordance with Nature’s primary law that said, Survive, be happy. In the end, Nature’s brute laws of competition and forced cooperation in the game of survival, prevailed, not the high-sounding pronouncements of religion and morality.

  In one of his letters, Brother Philip had described some educational project he had undertaken for the poor children of his parish and mentioned a co-worker named Sister Bridget who taught in the Convent of Mary and the Angels. In subsequent letters, he again referred to Sister Bridget in the warmest tones. Jealousy, which the head denounced as most unreasonable and downright despicable, could still be sustained by the heart’s persistent questions: who was she? Was Brother Phil in love with her? Why was he singling her out for special mention in his letters? Was he trying to make his former colleague and close friend in St Peter’s jealous? Did that mean that he was in love with her? What did it mean when a man who was committed to chaste service to God fell in love with a woman? Could it mean only love of the pure, non-sensual kind? Had he, in the first place, asked for the posting back to Ireland because he had become afraid of his feelings for her?

  Maria decided that the inaction of solitude was bad for her, throwing her into agonies of thinking, that were traceable in the end to pure, useless vanity. In any case, thinking was now a luxury. She had to start planning for a new life, alone in an old, rundown apartment that needed repairs, having little money beyond some modest savings, keeping alive her passion to write when writing guaranteed no income. She stared gloomily at the old ceiling, the cracked cement floor of one of the bathrooms, the scuffed dining room set. Then she stared, even more gloomily, at a clutch of bills in her hands. She would have to think seriously about giving private tuition – coaching students to improve their grammar, pass their G.C.E. O Level English Language paper. The thought alone was dispiriting.

  But there was no choice.

  Thirty-Nine

  Maria had always believed that when she looked back upon her life, in some distant time in the future, and picked out the happiest moment, it would have everything to do with her passion for writing, little to do with men, and still less to do with money.

  The anxieties regarding her insecure financial position were increasing by the day, threatening an onslaught of those headaches once brought on by other matters. ‘Oh dear,’ she thought, looking at the intimidating bills that came in for water, electricity, servicing of the one air-conditioner she allowed herself in the apartment, replacement of some window panes that had cracked, and a new sofa to replace a very old one.

  There was an official letter that puzzled her, and when she understood what it was all about, she yelped for joy, and said, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God,’ for not only would all her money problems be solved, but that long dreamt-of studio apartment in the heart of the city was within reach. Best of all, it would make it no longer necessary for her to earn a living through private tuition. If she, profane as she was, dared to see herself as a pilgrim, she was one moment in that Slough of Despond and the next, looking up at the brightness of a city beckoning from a hill top.

  Singaporeans’ lives would be changed forever by the new phenomenon called the en bloc fever, by which ordinary, modest home-owners became millionaires overnight. It was truly a fever, with a rash of generous offers from property developers suddenly aware of the value of old developments and the homeowners delirious with excitement. The developers sniffed out the potentially valuable housing estates, even if old and rundown, to buy, then to tear down, and raise in their place gleaming sky-high condominiums attractive to the newly rich and the foreigners coming in droves to work in Singapore. The newspapers for a while were filled with amazing reports of these instant-wealth stories. One ran a story about a couple, a clerk and his wife, who thirty years ago had acquired an apartment in a housing development that was now five times its original value. Maria’s apartment was in that breathless category, causing her to say in a voice weak with astonishment, ‘Oh my God, that’s even better than winning that coveted first prize in the Singapore National Lottery.’

  She remembered the time she had prayed to God for that win, and now he was answering her prayer. Or rather, since he had been de-deified and de-anthropomorphised by her, and had melted into any number of abstractions that could be called, variously, Chance, Randomness, Probability, Accident, Happenstance and Luck, it was in the capacity of the last named that he was answering her prayer. And since she could not thank Luck personally, she could at least show her gratitude by spreading it around a little.

  She called her mother and Heng in Malaysia to tell them the good news. She told them, for a start, that she would pay for the expensive fees that were being charged by her little nephew’s school for special needs children. She also offered to pay for some expensive dental treatment that Heng’s wife needed. She thought with some pique: couldn’t her mother and brother rejoice with her in her good luck? They had received her news with an uneasy silence. Heng was obviously in deep shock about the sheer bad luck of signing over his share of the apartment to her for a sum of money that was but a fraction of what he would now have got and that he had long dissipated at the gambling table. Her mother was in a different kind of shock: how God could have favoured a prodigal daughter over the returned black sheep, and concluded that even money, that featured so strongly in the Seven Deadly Sins, could be used in Providence’s mysterious ways to bring back a sinner. She said, ‘Maria, it is God’s doing. He has a purpose for you.’ There was a moment of returning dislike for her brother when he said he would get his lawyer to look into the terms of the document he had made her sign in the purchase of his half of the flat; so the old greed was still there, and he was hoping some legal loophole would enable him to claim a share of her new fortune.

  A new kind of pleasure had been opened up for her by new wealth, starting with the acquisition of the studio apartment. For the first time in her life, she would live in a place that bore the full stamp of her personality, her taste, her every preference. The sense of sole proprietorship was deeply satisfying. ‘Oh, how happy I am!’ she thought as she looked at her new home, explored every little room, smelt its newness, for she would not have wanted a place that had already been lived in, that bore the marks of another’s life story. She was not superstitious but grimaced at tales of the new occupants of a house seeing strange shapes, hearing strange noises that turned out to be the last mournful sounds of the deceased former owner.

  A bed, a room, a house, a life of her own – the secret dreams that had begun in childhood and persisted through the years of her marriage, and again through the years with her mother and grandmother, were now all coming together in a grand finale of ownership, fulfillment and supreme happiness. Against the background of a home beautifully appointed to her taste (she could now afford to replace the old ugly furniture, curtains and crockery), in the peace and contentment of a life renewed and energies revived, she could concentrate on the greatest dream in her life: to write a book, and then another, and another. All this was made possible by the huge cheque that Luck had dropped on her lap. She would always remember that thrilling moment when, excited as a child showing off a new, expensive toy, she had taken the cheque to be deposited into her bank account and watched the expression on the face of the bank officer. She was somewhat disappointed that the girl appeared unimpressed, being used to handling fabulous sums in a city where, it was said, ordinary hawkers could walk into a bank in their open shirts and sandals and hand over the counter a large paper bag stuffed with cash. A moneyed city state – for the first time she became part of it, wide-eyed with gratitude and joy.

  She took an intense interest in every story she read or heard about, regarding Luck’s visitations upon other favoured Singaporeans. A couple who thought they could never afford to retire, finally did, went on a round-the-world cruise and came back to their brand new apartment in
a much better locality. A single mother who was carefully saving up to pay for the university education of one of her two sons could now afford to send both to a university in Canada. She was also thinking of buying a small apartment near the university, so that all three could continue living together, and she could cook their favourite Singapore laksa and mee siam for them.

  There were unhappy stories as well. A divorcing couple who had peacefully settled on who was to get which of their two jointly-owned properties, soon quarrelled violently and went to court over the terms of the settlement, for the husband’s share was now only a pitiable quarter of the wife’s in value. A man who had generously sold his flat to a sibling at a price below market value was suing her for a return of the flat now worth hugely more, arguing that it was not a sale at all, but a temporary gift. In a housing estate that could not go through the en bloc sale because some residents refused to move, there were angry anonymous letters put into their letter-boxes, rubbish left outside their doors and black paint smeared on their parked cars, and vicious rumours about two mysterious suicides in the estate, condemning it to bad luck for years.

  Maria thought, in my new world, I want to have nothing to do with the greed, envy, superstition, folly, stupidity in the big world out there. She saw a delightful image of a clean, white bubble in mid ocean, sealed against floating scum. She wanted nothing even of the minor irritations of dealing with unreasonable bosses, mean colleagues, difficult students, that had come with her teaching job. It was a wonderful irony that money had freed her from its own tyranny.

  In her new world too, there would be nothing of uncertainty, doubt, guilt, jealousy, wounded pride, since she would no longer have anything to do with love and romance, much less marriage. She had tried and failed miserably. Some of her girl friends, also living on their own, said, ‘If it comes, it comes,’ meaning that they were still open to a proposal, a proposition.

  At age forty-three, she thought, ‘That part of my life is over. There is so much living to do! I can hardly wait to begin.’

  Goodbye to the old Maria Seetoh. Long live the new!

  Happy future plans, once only a remote dream, unfolded like a lovely gleaming silk scroll of promise and enchantment. She could travel, do the exciting cruises she had heard about. Some of her friends had gone on safaris in Africa and desert treks in India; they had camped on snow-clad mountain slopes in Austria and visited remote villages tucked away in the Himalayas. Her own mother had been to France, to the renowned pilgrimage centre of Lourdes. She wanted to do her own pilgrimage, to Greece to see and touch the very places where her favourite philosophers had taught thousands of years ago. Even better, she would go abroad for those summer writing courses she had read about, even do a postgraduate degree in a university in Singapore and abroad. It would not matter if she sat in a class with students half her age. Her student days had been among her happiest; she could reclaim that happiness under even better circumstances. Best of all, she could now get down to the serious job of looking into the huge pile of notes, the raw material for her writing, accumulated over so many years. They were in old shoe boxes, stacked somewhere on high shelves, groaning with the treasures and the debris from the past that would have to be carefully separated.

  ‘My dear Brother Phil,’ she wrote. ‘This is going to be such a bright, cheerful letter which I never thought I would be able to write to you. No, it has nothing to do with any reversal of the sad things that have happened: Mark and Yen Ping continue to live in sad memory; Maggie and her sister Angel are in a world that I have no wish to even peek at; I am permanently out of St Peter’s and permanently unemployed; poor Por Por is dead and gone, her ashes kept in a temple columbarium; my mother is in Malaysia with my brother Heng, and despite her fervent prayers, he has lapses of the gambling habit which she won’t tell me about; my little autistic nephew is improving, but very slowly; I occasionally think of poor V.K. Pandy who is now only a very faint memory in Singapore.

  But I am happier now than I have ever been. It is not good to talk about money to a man of God who is committed to, among other vows, the vow of poverty. But dear Brother Phil, if I could, I would give this filthy god Mammon a kiss for showering his filthy lucre on me! He has a Chinese counterpart, the Deity of Prosperity who has been around a long time in Singapore, claiming a very honoured place in local temples where devotees show their gratitude after winning lotteries by burning giant joss-sticks and making big donations to the temple. It would be too tedious to go into all the details of this new phenomenon in Singapore that everyone is calling the en bloc madness. It is a kind of collective sale whereby developers are prepared to hand out large sums to homeowners for their properties because of the much larger sums they will get in return from the condominiums they will build on every available inch of land they have acquired. I think you can guess what has happened. I can thank my old apartment for relieving me of every financial worry, the major one being of course finding a job to support myself. I was in fact getting ready to offer private tuition, to spend the rest of my life preparing students for those hateful exams! Can you imagine me, dear Brother Phil, growing grey and furrowed as I struggle to get that dumb student to score at least a credit in his English language paper. Now, thanks again to Mammon/Deity of Prosperity (whom I hope I never worship but only offer a genuine, profound, once-and-for-all thank you card) I can concentrate on my writing; you, dear Brother Phil, more than anyone, had encouraged me in the pursuit of this passion. How I wish you were here for me to talk to you about it. I’m as excited as a child.

  Only the other day I was going through some of the notes I’d been scribbling down for years in notebooks and scraps of paper, and found some that must have been inspired by you or that I must have shown to you. Do you remember that we had actually talked about collaborating on a play in Singlish? I think the idea came from you. Well, dear Brother Phil, if you are not too busy working on that educational project with Sister Bridget (now you must tell me more about her so that I can decide whether or not to be jealous) and if by chance you happen to come to this part of the world, could I invite you to my new home and my new world? By that time I should be able to cook up a decent meal of fried bee hoon. I’m thinking, now that I have much more free time, to do a cooking course. Can you imagine me in apron and chef’s cap?! Maybe also swimming. And yoga. And computer. And dancing. You could start warning me about those dashing young dance instructors who are able to sniff out new money.

  I have at least three stories about Singapore’s tai tais who fell for their dancing instructors. But no, no flamboyant adventurer, beau, swain, suitor, in my life. I’m out of the game completely. (If you’re curious about a certain suitor whom I had told you in confidence about, we’ll leave that to a later time when I can look at things even more dispassionately and honestly.)

  Come to think of it, you will be the only one admitted into my new world. For you’re the only one who has ever made me feel comfortable. For once, I’m going to ignore your advice about getting out of my skin. I’m going to be very happy staying inside it.

  Do come visit, dear Brother Phil. For a start, I could show you some memorabilia from St Peter’s, (including the ‘plague’ award that made us laugh so much, remember?) for although I left in unhappy circumstances – I will leave the details to some future letter – I still have fond memories of my home class students, my creative class students, and of you, my best friend in St Peter’s. I have saved all your limericks. They still raise a smile.

  Much love,

  Maria.

  PS Could I make a little donation to your educational project? I’d love to.’

  Forty

  I keep saying I’m happy, thought Maria, but what does it mean? I’m going to examine this happiness, observing it both from the outside with the calm objectivity of the true experimenter, and from the inside with the exuberant subjectivity of my own personal self. For happiness must be both science and art, belonging to the realms of reality and of the imagination i
n equal parts. She wanted to see how the reality of her new world, in the concrete, tangible, measurable details of day-to-day living, on the one hand, and the inner life of her emotions, on the other, were bearing upon each other.

  The unit of a typical day was good for the observation. The self-observing observer. It began with the child’s delight of a day free from school, from the tyrannies of alarm clock, rushed breakfast, rushed taxi ride to school, the start of a routine predictable to the last minute accounted for in the class timetable. Routine – that word would acquire new connotations of reassuring familiarity, cosy domesticity. Like a disembodied presence, she saw herself getting out of bed at last, swinging her legs over the edge, going to the front door to pick up the morning newspaper on the doorstep, reading it in bed with a leisureliness so unaccustomed and hence so relished that it could be the very raison d’etre for reading at all. And the two cups of coffee she allowed herself everyday at breakfast: while enjoying the aroma of the first, she was already anticipating the pleasurable indulgence of the second. The gratification of a self-imposed discipline.

  She had bought several health books and guides, being suddenly aware of the need to take better care of herself and enjoy her independence to a very ripe, very old age where both mind and body (unlike poor Por Por’s) would be in perfectly harmonious working condition. Cooking simple, healthy meals for herself instead of sitting down to a common meal prepared by the maid with a view to pleasing different tastes was a distinct satisfaction; she remembered hating the meat or vegetable dishes that had to be cooked to a paste to allow for poor Por Por’s toothlessness. Even greater than the freedom to eat exactly what she liked was the freedom to eat precisely when she liked; her mother and grandmother were used to rigidly fixed mealtimes, whether or not one felt hungry.