Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  She turned to have a look at the picnic scene she had left behind and saw, as she expected, the other twin. Randal saw them, shouted, waved, then got up from the picnic mat and came running towards them. When the two little boys stood before her, perfectly identical from their round heads, large eyes and stocky legs to the precise shade of green of their shirts and socks, she burst out in delighted laughter.

  She had a tremendous love for children, and this would be one encounter she would remember with pleasure for a long while. She would share it with her students in her creative writing class, perhaps using the subject of identical twins to provoke any number of dramatic stories, whether comic, tragic or purely farcical. She could see Mark and Yen Ping’s faces lighting up with the challenge, could foresee Maggie readily responding with a particularly salacious story of a man worn out by the demands of his partner, unaware that he had been sleeping with her twin too.

  The woman who was clearly the twins’ maid said, ‘This happens all the time. Even their parents sometimes can’t tell them apart.’

  Randal, clearly the more talkative and extrovert of the two said, ‘I have a mole on my neck, Ryan has a red mark on his shoulder!’ and proceeded to show Maria the means of identification.

  Her visit to the Botanic Gardens that day was destined to be dominated by Randal; it could have been dominated by someone who would certainly have been a much less welcome presence. She was looking up from her book when in the distance she saw and recognised him: he was the jogger who, some time ago, had stopped by to comment on the Jane Austen novel she was reading, and then stayed to chat. He represented the world of men that she wanted to have nothing to do with from now onwards.

  Dr Phang had written a brief note: what was that strange message from her brother Heng all about? Why was he told not to come for the funeral? Would she see him as soon as she could to explain what was happening? Brother Philip’s condolence card caused no anxiety. ‘I look forward to your return to St Peter’s. Meanwhile, take care and keep well. My prayers are with you.’ Kuldeep Singh, Dr Phang, Brother Philip – each, through no fault of his own, would, for the time being, be anathema to her. They would have no part in her thoughts, much less in her new life. Each, in due course, would come to understand why. Meanwhile, no new man would be allowed into her world, whether solidly mortal like the sweating jogger or ethereally distant like the god-man Sai Baba unabashedly adored by Meeta in both her waking and sleeping hours, whether a dull, plodding presence like Mr Chin at St Peter’s Secondary School or that machismo-exuding guy whom Winnie continued to dream of and consult fortune-tellers about.

  She looked down again, burying her face in her book, and when she looked up, minutes later, the jogger was gone.

  A little dog managed to break free of its leash and ran towards her, leaping up on her legs and arms in a frenzied celebration of freedom. Its owner, a young man in his thirties, ran up, apologised, then saw there was no need to, for she was laughing as she bent over to have the little terrier repeatedly lick her face. Back on its leash, it kept straining towards her, yapping loudly.

  ‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’ she shouted as they left, and the owner shouted back, ‘Alex! But if you’re talking to my dog, his name’s Laiko!’

  ‘Well, goodbye, sweethearts both!’ she yelled back.

  Alex returned with Laiko. They looked at each other, each delighting in the other’s friendly wit.

  He said to her with a sparkle of interest in his handsome eyes, ‘Hey, you’re one of the happiest persons I’ve seen. Probably the nicest too. I hope you come here regularly? Laiko and I do.’ He looked at her closely. ‘Coffee? There’s a nice café just outside.’

  The Botanic Gardens – it would always be a place of calm and peace for her, and where there were men who took an interest in her and began pursuing her, there could be none of that. She would not even risk the beginning of that interest.

  ‘Thanks a lot; not this afternoon though. Maybe another time.’ She was ever mindful about saving male face.

  ‘Another time, then,’ said Alex. ‘Bye!’

  She thought, I think I’ll buy a little dog. Her mother’s apartment that all of them would soon be moving into was far too small for a pet; perhaps she should just continue to enjoy the delightful antics of Meeta’s and Winnie’s dog, a playful Alsatian with the impossible name of Singapore. They had bought it together as a puppy to be a watchdog; Meeta was the name-giver.

  ‘Singapore, come here! You’re bad and you stink!’ Meeta would say loudly, with mischievous intent to alarm her next door neighbours, a prim and proper couple in their seventies who had, on their sitting room wall, a framed picture of the prime minister with a map of Singapore in the background.

  Meeta said that Byron had told her she was guilty of infringing some law akin to lese majesty and could be hauled into court for an offence only slightly less than tearing up the Singapore flag. Meeta said if she went to jail, she could be assured of at least one visitor.

  ‘Well, you can count on me,’ Byron had said. ‘No, I meant Sai Baba,’ said Meeta.

  On her way out of the Gardens, she passed a favourite spot for children, a circular paved playground with a ground fountain at the centre, comprising thin jets of water that shot up playfully in obedient response to the stomping feet of children, and then proceeded to chase them and wet them like playfully writhing garden hoses held by adults. She stopped to watch the squealing children, alternately running away from and submitting to the jets, refusing to be led away by parents worried about wet clothes, hair and shoes. Suddenly she felt a small hand tug hers. It was Randal and he dragged her right into the orbit of the teasing jets.

  ‘Ryan’s a cry baby,’ he said disapprovingly as Maria caught a glimpse of the other twin tearfully watching his mother remove his wet socks. ‘See, my hair’s all wet!’ he said proudly.

  ‘Wait a second,’ she said and left her book safely dry on the ground while she returned to join him in childhood’s pure, untrammeled celebration of life.

  ‘Can you do this?’ asked Randal, and he lifted his face and opened his mouth wide to receive a jet of water.

  ‘Of course I can,’ she said and succeeded after the third attempt. ‘Can you do this?’ she asked, doing a little gypsy dance to the rhythm of her clapping hands.

  Randal clapped, hopped about and fell down. She joined him on the ground, and they began to splash water on each other. She was aware of someone standing near her and watching them. It was the jogger who looked both amused and intrigued.

  ‘Is this your boy?’ he asked, and she said instantly, ‘Yes!’ to pre-empt any interest from one whom the Botanic Gardens, despite its vast size, seemed determined to throw in her path.

  ‘No!’ cried Randal. ‘She’s not my mummy. My mummy’s there!’

  It was wonderful – the sense of solitude in the vastness of the Gardens, as dusk fell. She stood very still, relishing the moment, the single overpowering sense of oneness with all of creation. The grasshopper, the sparrow, the fish, the turtles, Alex and Laiko, Randal, the bride, the jogger, the young mother conducting lessons in vocabulary and spelling for her little son, the young lustful couple rolling down the slope – every single one of them was responding to life’s imperative to be happy. The great chain of happiness-seeking could be extended downwards to include the tiniest organisms inside each of their bodies, for surely even these primordial forms of life sought their own kind of happiness, and upwards to include the deities of Providence residing in those huge ageless trees, for surely even gods needed to be happy. When the Gardens closed for the evening, only the mortals would have to leave and resume their lives in the city. Would the bridal couple, years hence, look back with regret upon that day of joy; would the young lustful couple soon go their separate ways, or remain together, even more separated by those awful conflicts that invariably arose between husbands and wives as they went through the various stages of their marriage that society had red-flagged as mid-life crises or se
ven-year-itches?

  ‘Should I do it?’ she asked herself.

  She was back at the fish pond, standing at the water’s edge. She had in fact gone to the Gardens with that special purpose, but had forgotten it in the midst of all the wonder and joy. She opened her waist pouch and took out her wedding ring, a plain gold band. She looked at it for a while, then threw it some distance from where she was standing. It landed with a soft plop in the water, and in the next second was lost forever, buried deep in the ooze at the bottom of the pond.

  ‘Maria, where’s your wedding ring?’ her mother would ask. Or might not, given the unusual nature of all that had happened.

  If asked, she would say simply, ‘I lost it,’ and still be telling the truth. Her mother had a friend who wore her dead husband’s wedding ring on a chain next to her heart for the twenty years before she joined him in death; beside that devoted wife, she must stand as the blackest-hearted widow.

  ‘I no longer care what people think of me,’ she thought with the old defiance.

  She had noticed, some days before her husband’s death, that he was no longer wearing the wedding band. If it had slipped out of his skeletally thin finger, and had been found by somebody, she was glad it had never been returned to her. Perhaps that somebody was his devoted Third Aunt whose last words of sharp rebuke to her, after the funeral, had been interrupted only by a bout of convulsive sobbing.

  There was another ring to dispose of, that would not be the object of any inquiry from her mother for she had never been told about it. She took out from her waist pouch the gold ring set with the carved jade piece, the valued memento from his dying mother that her husband had given her that fateful evening, and for a moment wondered if she should have returned it to his Third Aunt. But the tedium of having to explain how it had got into her possession in the first place would have simply drained all energy from her. She gave it a last look, then with a mighty swing of her arm, flung it far out into the pond. Again, it fell with a soft sound before being swallowed up by the pond waters, now dark and less friendly-looking. While all her late husband’s effects had been left in the apartment for his Third Aunt to dispose of as she wished, the two rings carried too much of the past not to warrant a special kind of disposal for closure.

  Also to put an end to those unpleasant dreams in which her husband, either alive or dead, or both, as in the odd way of dreams, stood before her as accuser and judge. Lying at the bottom of the pond, the rings would, over the years, be ignored by generations of fish and turtles and ducks that in any case would be too well fed by children coming daily with their parents and maids to enjoy the peaceful loveliness of this most precious spot in Singapore.

  Twenty

  It was the object of the society’s greatest fear, and the schools were its permanent abode from which, like the legendary ogre that terrified a whole village until it was slain, it had dominated the lives of Singaporeans for as long as they could remember. The G.C.E. O Level examinations, which nobody would dare attempt to slay, loomed over the entire national landscape. So deeply had the fear of not passing them been ingrained in students that a whole sub-culture, fuelled largely by parental concerns, had grown around it, from a flourishing industry centred on the provision of private tuition and exam study aids to a prevailing mindset that a person’s potential or actual worth, whether in his career or personal life, could be gauged by the number of distinctions or credits scored in the examinations.

  The gauge could be said to apply to the next world as well, for it was reported that in the funerary ghost-paper house for a certain deceased Singaporean male, there was, in addition to the usual appurtenances of furniture, car, kitchen utensils, maidservants, a computer, TV and CD player, a ghost-paper G.C.E. O Level certificate replete with distinctions and credits.

  Teachers in the schools were acquainted, first-hand, with the parental anxiety as soon as the results of the school preliminary exams were announced, for these were supposed to predict the results of the all-important nation-wide G.C.E., to follow in a matter of months. Some mothers came crying, some came with bribes cleverly disguised as donations to a school fund or charity, all pleaded with principals and teachers to ensure good results, with the stark reminder that their children’s entire future depended on it. The young Singaporean couple’s life was regulated by the educational needs of their children, from getting them into the best kindergarten, the best primary school, the best secondary school, and seeing that they passed an array of school and national examinations, right from the first year, through the third and sixth years, culminating in the fearful G.C.E.

  Maria Seetoh knew a couple from the Church of Eternal Mercy who had four school-going children and systematically organised their priorities for allocation of resources and attention around the child who happened to be preparing for the examinations. Thus, at the beginning of the month, when the father handed his pay packet to his wife, she would instantly rip open the envelope and count out the exact sum needed for the child’s examination fees, private tuition fees, cost of exam aids and guidebooks, and dozens of bottles of ‘Essence of Chicken’ as well as the best Korean ginseng for the long hours of night study; it did not matter how much money was left for the entire household expenses and needs of the other school-going children who were by no means resentful since each would have his or her privileged turn. By the time the last child sat for the examinations, the father who had suffered a mild stroke and had been given a job with a much lower salary, was in debt. The mother who had little education understood its value enough to be ready to take on a part-time job washing dishes in a restaurant if it helped in securing a place for her child in that special crash course, conducted outside school hours by enterprising teachers-turned-tutors, that were guaranteed to improve exam results.

  Meeta told the story of the mother of one of her students who, after having done all that was humanly possible for her son, went on to secure the help of the supernatural. Moreover she wanted to maximise that help, thus adopting a shrewd eclecticism by visiting, in turn, her church, an old Chinese temple reputed to have a thoughtful, motherly goddess, and an ancestral tomb, and returning home with, respectively, a bottle of holy water, an amulet and a joss-stick. It was only in the examination hall that her son noticed a small cloth amulet sewn into the sleeve of his school uniform, which was really at odds with the wooden cross he carried in his wallet. Which of the two forces proved to have the greater influence on his G.C.E. results was not known.

  The G.C.E. phenomenon could be explained simply by the fact that Singaporeans took the cue for much of their behaviour and thinking from the great TPK. For some reason, the prime minister had settled upon the possession of a full G.C.E. O Level certificate as the starting benchmark for personal worth and integrity, as was demonstrated in two major policies. Firstly, the government organisation that had been set up to matchmake single Singaporean men and women, made it clear to them that to benefit from the various free matchmaking activities, such as tea dances, they would have to possess that certificate; the condition was clearly based on the assumption that below that educational level, young Singaporean men and women were incapable of producing and raising intelligent children for the country’s economic future. Ideally, parents should be graduates; realistically, the organisation was prepared to settle for less. Secondly, if a Singaporean aspired to join the government political party, the certificate was again the very minimal qualification for entry; unless supported by incredible experience and sterling qualities, it would not have stood a chance beside the plethora of competing academic qualifications from Harvard and Cambridge.

  TPK and his ministers had drawn scathing attention to the fact that V.K. Pandy had to sit twice for the G.C.E. O Level examinations to secure a partial certificate, whereas their own party candidates could boast of distinctions in a wide range of subjects, which in turn had opened the doors to the highest institutions of learning, both at home and abroad. Following the shameful revelation of his low academic
standing, V.K. Pandy wrote a letter to The Singapore Tribune in which he reminded Singaporeans that a former protégé of the prime minister, a Dr Yong, whose academic credentials blazed with a PhD degree, two Masters’, a First Class Honours and an eight-distinction G.C.E. O Level, had been on the run for years to escape corruption charges involving millions of dollars, whereas he, V.K. Pandy with no G.C.E., had, with patience and hard work, successfully built up a business that would still be running if he had not been prosecuted and fined several hundred thousand dollars on charges of defaming the government. When his small printing shop had to close down, V.K. Pandy’s wife, it was said, put on a white sari of mourning, let down her long hair, stood in front of the closed shutters and threatened to commit suicide. The letter was not published by the newspaper, and V.K. Pandy put it up, in enlarged print on a placard mounted on a stand in his favourite spot in Middleton Square. ‘No G.C.E. doesn’t mean No Integrity!’ was the caption.

  Employers who, like the schools, were ever alert for signs from the leaders, also demanded good G.C.E. results before they would even call up applicants for interviews. Thus the position of an examination which continued to be designed, set and marked by examiners of a former colonial power, long after that power had left, became unshakeably entrenched in the national landscape.

  One of Maria’s friends, Emily, had one day brought along a young, pretty relative who worked as a sales assistant in a departmental store to join them for lunch. Swee Hoong needed urgent advice for a problem related to the G.C.E. She was being courted by three men: one was fairly well-to-do, being a contractor and driving a Mercedes, but he had no G.C.E.; the other, a technician, was far less wealthy but much handsomer, and had only a partial certificate, scoring a credit only for Chinese language; the third was reasonably well off, lived in a semi-detached house, drove a Mercedes, had a full certificate and a very successful business as an undertaker, revealing that last, discomfiting fact only very late in the courtship. Despite society’s top ranking of the G.C.E., it occurred with just too many competing variables in the young woman’s calculus to sort out and come to the best decision.