Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

But Kuldeep’s attention was all for her. ‘Hey, Maria, you are as pretty as ever! What are you doing now – we must meet to catch up with all the news and gossip – I am now with Carlton and Wu –’ His genuine joy in seeing her, his eagerness to let her in on his good fortune of an eminently happy marriage blessed with three sons and a senior position in one of Singapore’s most prestigious law firms, completely obliterated her husband nearby, now dangerously glowering. ‘Here’s my card, give me your phone number, we really must catch up,’ said the irrepressible Kuldeep and left.

  In a second he was back, exclaiming, ‘Hey, do you remember the X sign we made that day on the wall of The Rendezvous Bar? Remember, we had to run away real fast!’ He turned to Bernard, speaking to him for the first time, needing a larger audience for the happy recounting of the past: ‘We were crazy! We cut the sign, holding hands like a pair of idiots.’ Roaring with laughter, he turned to face Maria again and said, ‘You know what? It’s still there – we must go back to have a look – we really must catch up –’ He had completely ruined the evening for them. They ate the rest of their dinner in silence.

  The next day she made use of the two free periods in between classes to go to the library where, under the pretext of consulting some reference book, she could take deep breaths, calm down and organise her thoughts and feelings into some coherent pattern. She had reached a point in her marriage when something had to happen, to rescue her from it. The cage, the net, the bell jar, the dark cave from which no shackled prisoner could escape into the sunlight – all were feeble images for her desperation for release.

  At the centre of the tumult was a tiny, tremulous hope: suppose her husband realised that he could not go on in the marriage and decided that a divorce was best? His strong Catholicism forbade that, but suppose his need to be happy was stronger? Beyond the shock of his fellow churchgoers, the parish priest Father Rozario, her friends and, above all, her mother, would be all happiness for her. She would wear the scandal like a badge because it announced the opening of her brave new world.

  There were some Catholic couples in the parish who had separated, were no longer living together, but who continued to be devout Catholics. Separation which would still mean the continuance of that hateful MRS would also mean the end of a hateful life. She did not have the strength or courage to initiate the move, but suppose he, coming to the end of the marital tether, did?

  A coward’s wish. She told her students stirring stories of honesty and courage, and in the privacy of her imagination, the coward’s dream played out, one after the other. So: her husband told her they had best live separately, even if the church did not allow them to divorce; her husband managed to convince Father Rozario that they had married under unacceptable circumstances leaving the church authorities no choice but to accept the reason of non-consummation to dissolve the marriage; her husband had found another woman whom he loved deeply and truly, and quietly made arrangements for their separate lives, even paying for her to do her postgraduate degree course at the Singapore University. Each scenario ended with her saying, ‘Thank you,’ in profound gratitude.

  The coward could be capable of self-blame. Too late, yet so soon, she had realised the great injustice she had done him in marrying him. She never loved him, not when she married him, not afterwards. It was possible – a modern, educated, intelligent woman marrying a man even when she did not love him, and thereafter drifting along in a one-sided marriage with all the passion on his side, and all the regret on hers. The modern woman’s mother or grandmother had had no choice; she abused hers and then found she had to live with the consequences.

  She remembered a survey in which three quarters of the women surveyed stated that if divorced or widowed, they would never marry again. Some gave the most ridiculous reasons for getting married in the first place, the most common being the desirability of the married state itself. I wanted children. I wanted to get away from over-strict parents. I was tired of society labelling me a spinster. All my girlfriends had already got married. It seemed the right and necessary thing for a woman to do.

  She had a girlfriend who decided to get married because she had won a beautiful bridal dress in a competition run by a woman’s magazine, another because the man had a car whereas the other two suitors had only motorcycles, yet another because as a single woman she would not have qualified to buy a government-subsidised flat that she very much desired. She knew of women who got married because they could no longer tolerate the inevitable nosiness of aunts during the Chinese New Year season when unmarried women, regardless of age, were still strictly entitled to receive the traditional gifts of money, ‘So when I see you next year, will you be giving instead of receiving ang pows?’

  There were any number of substitutes for love, revealed by the survey. I was grateful to him because he had helped pay for my university education. He was the handsomest boy in our group and one day he asked me to marry him, and everyone was so jealous! We were dating for eleven years and one day he said to me, ‘We should get married before my grandmother passes away.’ He was fantastic in bed! He bought me the most beautiful engagement ring from Hong Kong. He was only one of two persons to get a first class degree from the university, and was offered a scholarship to do a PhD.

  All the absurd causes of her husband’s annoyance and displeasure occurring almost on a daily basis – the porridge, his futile calls to her in school, her forgetfulness about this or that, Mr Chin, Brother Philip, her creative writing class, her meetings with the publisher, the shoes not polished right, a wrong telephone call, anything at all – they were laughably trivial, and under different circumstances could have had the opposite effect of creating lively husband-wife raillery. A pet cat fussed over, a little plant lovingly tended – her husband would have crushed them underfoot for taking away the love that should be his. In the absence of love in a marriage, anything could be a trigger for its grievance.

  For three years, he had laboured under that grievance. If hate was the other side of love’s coin, then his was a huge disc, daily flashed at her, glinting with menace. She told herself she did not, would not, could not love him, astonished at the full range of the brutal auxiliaries. What had she done to him? Within a year, his placid countenance had hardened into a rictus of cynicism and frustration unsoftened even in sleep.

  He was exacting a price, and she was ready to pay it. She had done injury to the sacred institution itself, and should, at the least, accord it future respect by never marrying again. If she wanted a new life, completely free of falsehood and all that it brought of confusion, pain and shame, a life as radiant with joy, pride and certainty, as it was now dark with deceit and torment, she would have to begin with nothing less than kneeling before him with a devastating confession of the truth and bow her head to the thunderbolts of his wrath. As he once knelt before her to declare the fullness of his love, she would, by the same ultimate gesture, nullify and void hers. As she was clearer in writing than in speech, she might write him a letter, a very long one, to systematically apologise for the wrongs over three years, beginning with the supreme one of agreeing to marry him. All the others had simply flowed from it. It would not matter if every word in the letter became a bitter pill forced into her mouth, to cleanse her heart of its ills, her soul of its darkness, so that she could rise to a new brightness.

  She had once read a story of a woman who was so unhappy in her marriage that she wanted to run away with a man whom she met when she was thirty years old and who became her secret lover. But fear – of her husband, their relatives, his friends, her friends, society at large – held her back; she said goodbye to the lover and continued in her loveless, soulless marriage till her death, thirty years later. Upon her death, she had the following epitaph inscribed on her tombstone: ‘She died at thirty, and was buried at sixty.’

  In her life she was to look many times, with fearful, honest eyes, into the embarrassing truths about herself. With missionary zeal, even from childhood, she had set out her life’s
shining goal – to be a really good, a really happy person – and then floundered all the way. Be honest, be authentic, be yourself, she urged her students, and herself turned away from the mirror of the myriad painful truths of her marriage. When she summoned enough courage to do so, they became her own small humbling lights on her own personal road to Damascus.

  Did you ever love me? Why did you marry me? At the very end, she was forced to tell the truth: I felt sorry for you. Pity was the least acceptable substitute for love. No man would accept it. He flung it back at her. His pride rose to reject it as a lie. He did not, would not, could not believe her. But by then it was too late.

  Seven

  In July 1989, Maria Seetoh was helping her friend Winnie in a great scheme for a marriage which never took place, just five months before her own which she would never have believed possible.

  Winnie Poon, forty years-old, had discreetly found out that the matchmaking agency set up by the government was not interested in single women of her age group, but soon found another avenue for energies exclusively devoted to freeing herself from that maligned label. Trembling with excitement, she secured the help of her two close friends, Maria Seetoh and Meeta Nair, the latter being also her colleague at Palm Secondary School. All three single women took different positions with regard to a status that was increasingly the subject of nationwide concern. Unlike the anxious Winnie, Maria Seetoh, aged thirty-five, cheerfully declared she would always remain a happy single, while Meeta Nair, aged forty-four, claiming a gallery of rejected beaus, wore the derisory label with self-assured panache and noisy good humour. Both women were only too happy to help Winnie in her scheme, Maria out of sheer curiosity, Meeta out of an amiability that included the expectation of witnessing yet one more fiasco in poor Winnie’s hapless search for love.

  The three women knocked on the door of the little room tucked inside the vast darkness of the White Heaven Temple, and a very old, quavering voice said in an obscure Chinese dialect, ‘Come in!’ It belonged to a very old, wizened Chinese woman, indistinguishable from a man because of her shaved head and loose yellow robe, sitting at a table heaped with the paraphernalia of her art. Surrounded by curls of whitish, fragrant smoke, her eyes closed and hands clasped upon her chest, she might have been some deity newly descended from heaven to do earth’s bidding. It was whispered that she was Singapore’s most revered fortune-teller, and had been around for so long that nobody knew her age, only that families had sought her help through three generations.

  Maria Seetoh suspected that Por Por in her time had consulted the old woman, and her mother too, before the dramatic conversion to Christianity. Mrs Seetoh Bee Liew renamed Mrs Anna Mary Seetoh, stopped going to temple fortune-tellers, now banned practitioners of the devil’s arts, but continued to consult knowledgeable English-educated psychics who must know something of God’s mysteries. Neither camp had been helpful in her efforts to make her errant husband mend his ways, or to find out where he was in hiding with his mistress.

  Behind the old woman stood a middle-aged man with thick glasses and a dour look. He spoke hesitant but intelligible English and was presumably her translator, as all and sundry from the society’s plethora of races and languages came to consult her. It was whispered that even the great TPK had once paid her a visit in the secrecy of night, but then people could have confused her with another illustrious fortune-teller, a monk who lived in Taiwan but flew regularly to Singapore to tell the fortunes of the great and powerful in society, including the political leaders and business tycoons. Or they could have confused TPK, ever the stern, no-nonsense rationalist, with his wife, a gentle, nervous woman who, it was said, was much dependent on fortune-tellers and psychics because of constant bad health. The whole society, it would appear, was in thrall to the power of myth and magic as it was to the power of scientific technology; gleaming glass-and-steel towers comported well with ancient temples and shrines and the occasional makeshift altar at spots where sudden healing springs of water appeared, or an image of the Monkey God upon a gnarled tree trunk, inviting devotees and seekers of winning lottery numbers.

  The old fortune-teller in White Heaven Temple, who was said to be as old as the hundred-year-old temple tortoises and who wanted only to be known as Venerable Mother, never asked Winnie any questions, never read her palm or the lines of her face, never required her to cast the fortune sticks or do anything with the immense pile of holy artefacts on the table, including urns of joss-sticks, rows of silk scrolls, prayer bells, golden lotuses, and images of a hundred deities. Therein lay her unique power. Winnie only had to close her eyes, put her hands together in worshipful attitude and state her wish in the silence of her heart. After some minutes, the old one stood up and came to her, laid a withered hand on her head, raised wide open eyes to heaven and muttered something. She nodded to her attendant who came forward with a small casket of ivory discs and asked Winnie to pick one, which he then matched to one of numerous small rolls of pink paper heaped together in a basket. He gave Winnie the paper, Venerable Mother once more closed her eyes, took up her prayerful position under a huge framed picture of a black-faced warrior deity, and the consultation was over.

  Out in the sunshine, the three women crowded together to read the message. Maria Seetoh, who instinctively applied the teacher’s corrective red pencil to every piece of print, including the little slips of paper in fortune cookies carrying extravagant tributes and promises, always read with suppressed amusement, the inevitable howlers when the lofty idioms and metaphors of one culture were forced into the grammatical patterns of another. She saved the best in a notebook for sharing with students to provide comic relief during particularly heavy-going language or literature lessons.

  Out of the many arcane references to bright mountains, roaring seas, bamboo trees that died, bamboo trees that revived themselves, a great white pearl lying hidden in a muddy river bank, one sentence stood out and made Winnie squeal in delight: ‘I only had one wish as I prayed – you know what it is.’

  Meeta said, ‘Alright, alright, we all know you want Teik to propose to you.’

  Winnie went on, her eyes shining, ‘See this sentence, it says ‘Three heartaches gone, then the full heart is rejoicing with the fourth.’ You remember all three, don’t you, how it didn’t work out each time, how miserable I was.’

  Meeta said, ‘We warned you, didn’t we, Maria? All of them useless bums, taking advantage of your generosity. That Benny Ee, the worst of all. Sponge Number One.’

  Winnie said, ‘Three heartaches over. Then my heart will rejoice with the fourth. And you know what? Today’s the fourth of July, exactly four months since meeting Teik. And you know what, his name means ‘bamboo’.’ She added, simpering a little, ‘He has as good as proposed. Remember the pearl necklace I told you about?’

  She was wearing it, and pulled it out of the lacy ruffles of her collar to show it. Every gift from a male acquaintance, no matter how small, was a foretaste of the ultimate one – the formal declaration of love and proposal. Winnie Poon’s entire life was organised around that one wish. She looked again at the precious pink slip in her hand, staring wide-eyed at the reference to the pearl. ‘How on earth would Venerable Mother know about the necklace?’ Picking out each truth revealed by the prophecy on the slip of pink paper was exhilarating, and kept the dream alive.

  Meeta later whispered to Maria, ‘A cheap one, you know, one of those that you get as a free gift in Y.K.K. Departmental Store if you spend more than a hundred dollars. Teik’s sister got it, and gave it to him. I know because he told me.’

  She took delight in being the confidante of shy men who went to women for advice, depressed men who needed the warm motherly shoulder to cry on, guilty men who could never unload their guilt to their own kind, and then took her rich haul of men’s secrets to share with her girlfriends. ‘Without mentioning names –,’ she would begin at each delectable session, usually over high tea, thereby preserving the integrity of the confidante.

  S
he took the private sharing about the pearl necklace to a higher level of malice with a conjecture. ‘It’s the cheapskate’s conscience gift, in return for all those expensive ones she’s plied him with – all the ties and cuff links and ginseng and I don’t know what else. He will soon dump her, you mark my words.’

  Meeta had gone along with Winnie to the fortune-teller, as she had on endless urgent errands in Winnie’s restive, cluttered life, to give the poor girl, she said, moral support. It was strange support made up entirely of a severe lecture and much scolding afterwards, which the poor girl received with small, apologetic noises and nervous giggles.

  ‘How can you take all that scolding?’ Maria had once asked her.

  ‘It’s all for my good. Meeta may scold and nag, but she has the kindest heart and will do anything for me!’ Winnie replied.

  ‘How can you treat Winnie like a child?’ Maria had asked Meeta, in the double confidante’s privileged position of shuttling comfortably between the two unmatched mates.

  ‘Let me tell you this,’ said Meeta with haughty authority. ‘Without me, Winnie the Blue, Winnie the Blur would be utterly –’ She left unfinished the statement of her vast redemptive role in the other’s life.

  In the quiet of her room, away from her mother’s incessant chatter, and the distractions from Por Por who could be worse than a disruptive child, Maria wrote a short story which she later tore up as being just too mean. It was about two diametrically opposed individuals – in character, personality, disposition and appearance, down to details of height, build, voice, dress, hairstyle. As Maria wrote, there flashed in her mind the image of Meeta Nair, nearly six feet tall, large and imposing in her colourful saris, with hair perfectly dressed in a sleek bun always decorated with a diamante clip, loud of voice and hearty of laugh, completely eclipsing the tiny, fragile-looking Winnie Poon in her silly little-girl dresses, with her light scanty hair, pale face, thin lips inexpertly smeared with some brownish lipstick, quizzical clown eyebrows and restive fingers always tugging at something. ‘I don’t know how she ever became a teacher,’ Meeta had said once. ‘The students show her no respect. I had to teach her the basics of classroom control.’