Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  The same day, along another road, they came across a woman wheeling a double-pram in which her twin babies lay sleeping under snowy white coverlets; it took just a friendly smile from her for Maria to ask if she might look at them. The woman glowed with maternal pride throughout the few minutes that Maria gazed upon the sleeping infants, uttering little delighted sounds at their cherubic beauty, a whiff of heaven upon earth, until they grew up, learnt language, learnt to use it to deceive themselves and others. Bernard said, pressing her arm affectionately as they walked away, ‘I couldn’t help looking at your face. You’ll make a wonderful mother, you’ll give me lots of beautiful children,’ and when he added with something of a suggestive smile, ‘They say the best babies are made during the honeymoon,’ the magic of that encounter with the sleeping infants was gone.

  So soon had the sense of unease set in, of something very wrong with her marriage, that it frightened her. There were stories of brides who tore off their veils and threw away their bridal bouquets at the very altar itself, at the same moment that they threw away their lie, and faced, wild-eyed with elation, a stunned congregation. These were mainly stories from the movies. Some years ago, Meeta told her of a cousin who was marrying again after divorcing his wife of sixteen years. At the very last moment, he changed his mind, destroyed all the wedding invitations that were just about to be sent out, and humbly asked his wife to take him back, saying God had made him see the truth.

  Her own story had none of the drama of Hollywood or divine revelation. It was the old one of marrying without love, and thereafter suffering the consequences. It did not have the excuse of the matchmade marriage where the bride submitted all the way, first to parents, then her husband, then the in-laws in a large household where her feelings counted less than her ability to produce heirs. Lovelessness, from choice, not society’s strictures, was inexcusable and incomprehensible. She had made the greatest mistake of all, for pity was the weakest foundation upon which to build this most enduring and awesome of human institutions. Pity was no substitute even for friendship, duty, empathy. Disguised as love, it had to maintain the pretence, allowing only for a ghost of a marriage, or its parody. Pity was its own nemesis. She had done Bernard an incalculable injustice.

  ‘Hey, that’s Dr Phang,’ whispered Bernard, directing her attention to a tall, handsome man and a very attractive young woman who looked young enough to be his daughter.

  It was the second last day of their four-day honeymoon, and they were in a restaurant for dinner. Bernard’s attention was now given fully to his well revered boss in the Ministry of Defence, while hers, at one glance, took in the sharp contrast between the man’s handsomely graying maturity and the woman’s vibrant beauty brimming in a voluptuousness of red sweater, black tights and a multiplicity of gold and silver trinkets. Bernard instantly stood up to go and pay his respects, but not before informing her, in a whisper, that Dr Phang had recently re-married and this must be the new wife who was from Hong Kong. There had been the hint of a scandal; the first Mrs Phang was a highly respected university lecturer who had borne him a daughter, and the second was said to be a minor starlet or model, twenty years his junior. Bernard, disliking gossip in general, loyally refused to talk about this part of his boss’s life and concentrated only on the remarkable achievements of the man, an acknowledged superstar in the civil service firmament, who was sometimes consulted, it was said, by the great TPK himself. Frowning on sexual scandals in the lives of his aides, the Prime Minister was prepared to overlook them if they were brilliant men who could advise him on the economy or national security.

  Throughout the introductions and pleasantries, she was aware of the illustrious Dr Phang giving her a quizzical glance or two, as if trying to square prior knowledge with present evaluation. What had Bernard told him about her? If her proud, sensitive husband confided in anyone, it must be this man who was both boss and friend.

  In the midst of much small talk, Mrs Phang suddenly pointed to the wedding band on Maria’s finger and said, ‘Very good idea. Never wear expensive jewellery on vacation,’ and went on to describe, with round-eyed wonder, how an aunt had lost a very expensive emerald ring, costing exactly the same amount, in a hotel in Hawaii. It would have been a reflection of Bernard’s immense trust in his boss, as well as of his own need for privacy that at the same time that he had confided the astonishing story of the ring, he had withheld its second half.

  This was exactly the melodrama that would have appealed so much to Mrs Olivia Phang that she would have insisted on its full retelling in the restaurant. She would have listened to it wide-eyed and breathless, interrupting with little cries of delight and admonition by turns. Her husband could already be regretting that he had told her at all; Maria saw him giving her arm a slight nudge as she was about to make more comparisons with her aunt’s expensive jewellery, and her instantly clamping her mouth shut before giving him a playful nudge in return.

  But the partial telling, while it saved his pride, hurt hers. She did not care about the opinion of the boss’s wife, but it vexed her that this man who struck her as eminently superior in looks, speech and manners to every other man around, should attribute to her, even if only in the privacy of his thoughts, the lowest of motives for marrying. Why did it matter to her what he should think of her, when she had no wish to see him again?

  In an urgency of need to throw off any aspersions of falsehood, she seized the first opportunity to tell him the whole truth. The next day when the four of them were walking through a famed flower garden, and she found him walking beside her, she at once set about repairing the damage to her reputation. In two minutes she was done. Then she realised her mistake. His astonished look showed he had not known about her rejection of the gift and her husband’s own angry rejection of it in the forest. She would always remember how he looked that afternoon, as the habitual smile was momentarily suspended for a look of amazement mixed with puzzlement. Her husband had always exercised a fine circumspection in the telling of secrets about himself, even with the most trusted friends. ‘I lost my head and bought her a ring I could hardly afford,’ would have been harmless, even pleasant self-deprecatory secret-sharing with his male friends, resulting in no more than laughing male camaraderie. ‘She rejected it, and I threw it away’ would have invited shock, unwanted sympathy and worst of all, the pity reserved for the greatest humiliation a man could suffer – not only outright rejection by a woman, but his being driven to insane action by it.

  The earlier vexation was replaced by an overwhelming confusion, as she saw her massive betrayal, even if inadvertent, of her husband. In trying to save her pride, she had ruined his with the person whose opinion he cared most about. The pain of the confusion made her turn pale and feel ill. Dr Phang was watching her closely, not in judgement but with genuine concern and goodwill.

  He said very quickly, for his wife was walking towards them, ‘Don’t worry. Nobody will ever know,’ and touched her hand reassuringly.

  ‘Can I trust him?’ she wondered. ‘What an awful blunder. Now things are going to get more complicated than ever with Bernard.’

  ‘So what was it like?’ Meeta and Winnie with their usual prurient curiosity, the usual crude nods, winks and nudges, were sure to ask her. She would resort to their own easy jargon to put a stop to all the inquisitiveness: so-so, okay, no big deal. The truth was she blamed her own ignorance and prejudices based entirely on a few childhood incidents that should have been of no consequence in a woman’s path to maturity and fulfillment in sex.

  When she was a little girl of eight and playing hopscotch with two friends of about the same age, the unruly kampong urchins, led by a brutal-looking boy of fourteen, suddenly surrounded them and herded them into a disused hut, where they tried to pull off their underwear, having already stepped out of their own. She had a terrified glimpse of raw, turgid male power, quivering with menace, before all three of them screamed so loudly that someone came running to investigate and the culprits fled.

/>   Then when she was about ten, her mother took her on a short ferry trip, when they were seated on a wooden bench opposite a man who was lounging on his seat, with his legs wide apart, his trousers unzipped, staring at them menacingly.

  She remembered her mother bending down and hissing to her, ‘Don’t look,’ then pulling her up by the hand and hurrying away to another bench at the far end of the ferry.

  Back home, her mother made her spit three times into the drain, each time accompanied by a loud cry of ‘Choy!’ which she knew was some kind of countervailing curse. Then her mother washed her hair in water purified by flower petals, refusing to provide any explanation and all the time muttering to herself that men were evil, doing their evil thing in public. That night she had a bad dream in which she alone faced the man in the ferry, and stood transfixed as he pulled out from between his legs one snake after another, and tossed them at her.

  The childhood incidents could have been so much light-hearted sharing between husband and wife on honeymoon. Their honeymoon, she noted with dismay, was the start of a serious exercise of reclamation and restoration on the part of her husband: he had worked so hard, endured so much, suffered such great material loss that the work of self-compensation had to begin without any loss of time. Their roles should now exactly be reversed: she to do all the giving, he to receive all the attention and adulation, beginning with the claims of the marital bed. If there was the greatest possible mismatch between a man’s small build and quiet demeanour, and his sexual passion, it was her husband’s, she noted with awe mixed with anger because it was a passion that excluded hers. In the cosiness of the honeymoon room, as he claimed her body, at any time of the day or night, working through his appetite energetically and methodically, she thought, with mounting panic, that she, Maria Seetoh, experienced graduate teacher of English language and literature in modern-day Singapore, was no different from her mother who squirmed under her drunken father, and her Por Por who, it was said, was dragged to the bed of her opium addict husband and told to remain there, naked, till he was ready.

  Her mother would have passed that awful test of a woman’s pristineness; her Por Por, if she had lost it to that lover during the temple trysts, could have been punished with death in the ancestral country. She herself had let out a little scream of pain in the darkness, and winced to see the satisfaction on her husband’s face, and hear the satisfaction in his voice. He said, caressing her, ‘I too kept mine for you, you know,’ making her wince even more. For now, to the huge financial investment of the ring, there was the libidinal one of the preserved manhood, an awful double debt to pay.

  She returned from the honeymoon sick in mind and body, and her husband, ever attentive, took several days’ leave to take care of her. When she recovered, he said eagerly, ‘Guess what? Dr Phang has invited us for dinner with him and Mrs Phang at The Pavilion Hotel.’

  There was a moment during the dinner when the man, with the debonair mane of greying hair and boyish smile, had the opportunity to whisper to her, ‘You don’t look well. Take care of yourself.’

  She thought he looked at her with pity, and understood what it felt like to be the object of this most unwelcome of human offerings. She said to him, with all the pride she could gather, ‘Thank you. I’m alright,’ before Mrs Phang came up to say breezily, ‘That’s a pretty dress. But I wish you would wear some make-up, my dear! You would look even prettier, wouldn’t she, Bernard?’

  Twelve

  It had always been the suspicion of the intellectual elite as well as the diplomatic community in Singapore that both the national TV and newspapers, always serious in their dissemination of news and highlighting of national problems and solutions, occasionally allowed themselves the indulgence of humour without losing the seriousness. They did this through the simple principle of contrast, by juxtaposing news and pictures of the great TPK with those of his hated political opponent, V.K. Pandy, for instance, between the awesome prime minister speaking into a forest of microphones against an array of international flags at the United Nations, and the pitiable opponent in his lonely corner in Middleton Square, waving his pamphlets at the lunchtime crowds hurrying by.

  On another occasion, a TV news programme showed the prime minister in tuxedo receiving the highest honour from a business community in the United States, followed by a picture of V.K. Pandy in untidy shirt and crumpled trousers loudly arguing with a traffic policeman.

  A national campaign on the proper use of English, the necessary language of trade, technology and international relations, which was initiated by TPK himself and launched amidst great fanfare in the media, was yet another occasion for highlighting the astounding contrast between the prime minister and the opposition member who dared to challenge him – TPK’s impeccable use of Oxford-marked English and V.K. Pandy’s deliberate, persistent use of Singlish, the awful localised variety, completely unintelligible to the international English-speaking community. Indeed, Singlish was the special target of the campaign which had kicked off with a pledge by schools and colleges to take corrective measures.

  The principal of St Peter’s Secondary School, upon receiving official notice from the Ministry of Education, immediately called a staff meeting to work on a plan of action with clear objectives and time frames to replace Singlish with proper, grammatical English in both the writing and speech of students.

  He had a video recording of TPK’s TV appearance, played out on a big screen in the auditorium during the school assembly, in which the prime minister, looking as severe as when he had warned Singaporeans of the danger of not marrying and producing children, warned them that if their standard of English continued to deteriorate, business with the international English-speaking community would suffer. The prime minister referred to official letters and memos in the civil service which failed to convey their meaning because they failed to observe the basic rules of English usage. He made no mention of Singlish, but it was understood that this was the real culprit, being a low form of spoken English with liberal admixtures of the local languages, that was utterly incomprehensible to the foreign visitor and tourist. Hence Singlish became the single target of an intensive nationwide campaign called ‘Use Proper English’ launched immediately after the prime minister’s TV appearance.

  As the campaign against Singlish intensified, so did V.K. Pandy’s perverse use of it. At one parliamentary sitting, he asked his questions in loud, deliberate Singlish, lacing it with low marketplace Malay and Hokkien colloquialisms, making everyone squirm and prompting the Speaker to warn him against levity and disrespect. Throughout, TPK looked away angrily, outraged by the presence of the untidy, loud-mouthed Indian with the ever-present whiff of alcohol clinging to his clothes in the august precincts of Parliament House, surely an intolerable insult to the dignity of government.

  V.K. Pandy was a politician by default, elected by the people at precisely a time when there was public anger with what was perceived as an overweening arrogance of the leaders.

  In a noisy rally just days before the election, V.K. Pandy had warned of even greater arrogance and disregard of the people’s feelings, attracting large noisy crowds. Furiously punching the air with his fists, to wild roars of approval from the crowd, he asked again and again, ‘Why do they treat us like children? Why do they treat us as if we don’t have minds of our own? You know why, dear fellow Singaporeans? Because we apparently don’t have minds of our own! We have become a nation of fools and idiots! They say, ‘Don’t have so many children’ and then they say, ‘Don’t you dare have more than two children!’ and we say, ‘Yes, yes, we obey.’ I say, wake up, wake up before it’s too late!’

  He had been elected on a wave of anti-government sentiment that would have voted in an illiterate trishaw peddler, a circus clown, a monkey. In a post-election TV appearance, TPK, livid with rage, vowed that if Singaporeans chose to vote irrationally, they would have to learn a lesson or two about social responsibility.

  By and large, the leadership was not un
duly worried about the people’s choice of V.K. Pandy over their more academically and professionally qualified, and certainly more competent, hard-working candidate. It would only be a matter of time before these unthinking people woke up to their mistake and saw the man’s sloppiness and utter incompetence as a leader, before they realised that under him, their constituency was getting dirtier, poorer, more disorderly as others were getting cleaner and more prosperous; they would surely then kick him out as hastily as they had voted him in. A newspaper editorial had referred to him as a thorn in the side of the body politic.

  It was by some kind of tacit, civilised consensus among the society’s wags that no joke about politicians should include their families. Occasionally, in the circuits of private sharing, a riddle would surface: what did the great TPK and the wretched V.K. Pandy have in common that neither would admit? Answer: a sickly, superstitious wife. Both Mrs TPK and Mrs Pandy, it was whispered, sought help from a variety of traditional supernatural sources, with or without the knowledge of their avowedly rational husbands. Indeed, went the rumour, in their desperation they once crossed over into each other’s territory: Mrs TPK seeking help from a famed Hindu priest, and Mrs Pandy drinking blessed temple water brought to her by a Chinese friend.

  Not satisfied with his championing of Singlish in Parliament, V.K. Pandy stood on a box in Middleton Square and delivered an hour’s oration, deliberately in pure Singlish, on why it should not be abolished in favour of standard English.

  ‘What is this? Singlish our natural Singapore language. Otherwise how can Indian man speak to Malay taxi driver; how can salesgirl speak to one another? We all not University professors, you know, we all not educated in Oxford, we are simple working people! Why bring back Queen’s English, I ask you? We still have colonial mentality or what? Our Singapore how can call itself independent sovereign nation when still want to speak language of colonial master? Where got any pride? Any national identity? Still want to lick boot of foreign master, eh?’