Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  A woman developed very long and sensitive antennae to catch the mood of the man she was interested in, and they reliably relayed to her the signals. No questions, no demands for explanations, no accusations. Words could so easily kill joy which was as fragile as it was precious. The only permitted use of language was to enhance the pleasure of the present, which, like a cool, quiet room with a silken bed, should remain oblivious of the loud knocking from outside. The annoying whys of the past and what-ifs of the future were crude barbarians at joy’s gate, best ignored.

  ‘I love talking to you,’ he said, by which he meant mostly listening while she talked and told her stories. Sometimes she wondered, as he made surreptitious attempts to touch her hand across the table or caress her foot under it, if he was listening at all. Surely it was his way of biding time; he had his own line, not of danger but conquest and victory, and with each phone call, each lunch meeting with her, he came closer to it, with the mighty anticipation of the fevered bull elephant or moose.

  She thought, ‘Ah, you evil, exasperating, egoistical, intriguing, wonderful, irresistible man. You’re okay.’

  The spillover effects of her exuberance had to touch poor Por Por, now hopelessly demented but still as trusting as a child. She had no idea that her concern for her grandmother could lead to family conflict. Por Por had asked to have back her jade earrings, her jade bangle, her gold chain. Maria, remembering that her brother had taken away all the items of jewellery after the old woman was almost robbed in her wanderings and given them to their mother for safekeeping, now asked for their return. She explained that since Por Por was mostly at home now, watched over by the maid, she should be allowed to wear all the jewellery she wanted to make her happy. Anna Seetoh instantly looked uncomfortable.

  She murmured, ‘They’re not with me anymore.’

  ‘What do you mean, not with you anymore?’ said Maria sharply, and the suspicions which were quickly forming in her mind were as quickly confirmed.

  Heng’s many money problems had caused him to do reckless things, including pawning all Por Por’s jewellery.

  ‘How dare he!’ exploded Maria. Pawning was as good as selling off; Heng would have neither the means nor inclination to redeem it. She said angrily to Anna Seetoh, ‘Tell me, Mother, has he been borrowing money from you too, or rather, demanding it? Come on, tell me. Now it’s your turn to tell the truth and shame the devil!’ She was all up in arms now.

  It turned out that the truth was much worse. Anna Seetoh had even borrowed money for the errant adopted son; it was a substantial sum. Maria said, hot tears coming into her eyes, ‘How can he do this to you and Por Por? What on earth is happening? I thought he was not doing too badly in his businesses, whatever they were. Remember he was always boasting about making profits here and profits there?’ Anna Seetoh clearly needed a full unburdening of horrible family secrets, in the same way that she needed a full confession of the week’s stock of sins, even if very minor, at the confessional in the Church of Eternal Mercy.

  She said, not looking at her daughter, ‘You remember that Por Por had a large biscuit tin in which she kept all the ang pows that we had given her over the years?’

  Every Chinese New Year, Por Por’s main delight was to receive the gifts of cash from family members, which she instantly put into her pocket, happy as a child. Maria remembered the pitifully rusty, square biscuit tin holding all the money that the old woman possessed in the world, which she kept under her bed. ‘Is that gone too?’ Her mother nodded and said tearfully, ‘He’s in debt.’ Months back, he had gone into a risky business venture in China with a friend that was supposed to make millions for them; very soon after, he lost all his money, as well as all contact with the friend. Anna Seetoh delivered the last bit of bad news in a lowered voice, ‘He’s been gambling. He says the loan sharks are after him.’ Maria thought of the long-suffering wife and the autistic son whom she had seen only once, years ago, when she had gone on a visit to Malaysia with her mother and Por Por, a sickly, unhappy child who sat huddled on the floor with a plastic bag of coloured balls, breaking into occasional tantrums and hitting the sides of his head with tightly clenched fists. His mother, always haggard-looking, would rush to him and rock him in her arms till he calmed down.

  Distant shadowy figures who had little part in her world, her sister-in-law and nephew now provoked deep pity. She made a mental note to enquire after their welfare and arrange to send them some money; now all her anger was directed at the feckless, irresponsible brother. ‘Listen, Mother,’ she said, ‘you are not to give him any more money for his gambling, do you hear, not one cent. Have you spoken to him?’ Her brother would never speak to her, except in the position of advisor, dispenser of knowledge, fault-finder about her naivete in money matters.

  Anna Seetoh realised her mistake as soon as she said, ‘Heng thinks that if Bernard had not willed the apartment to his Third Aunt –’ for Maria instantly said, raising her voice, ‘How dare he! And how dare he assume that if the apartment had come to me, he would have any share in it?’ She had never despised her brother as much as she did now.

  She looked at her mother, still sniffling into a piece of tissue paper, and wondered if this was the right time to ask her the question that had been in her mind for years: was Heng her real brother, rather than the claimed adopted one? As a child, she had caught enough adult whispers to suspect that Heng was the son of one of her father’s mistresses, who had abandoned him at birth. The infant had then been brought to her mother, to be brought up as an adopted son. Her mother, already incensed by her husband’s infidelities, had refused until he had, by way of compensation, bought her a flat and given her a sum of money, his generosity coinciding with a period of prosperity in some shady business that would never come his way again. The boy was as nasty as any sibling could be, and she was glad that he had spent many of the childhood years with his real mother who had unaccountably reappeared in his father’s complicated life. No, thought Maria, I would prefer to think of him as an adopted brother rather than one related by blood; I don’t want any of that nastiness flowing in my veins.

  The next time she saw him, she was shocked by his appearance. He had lost weight, looked haggard and depressed. The old arrogance was gone.

  She felt sorry enough to press some money into his hands, for which he said humbly, ‘Thanks.’ Anna Seetoh whispered, shaking her head, ‘It will go into the fruit machines at the Manis Club, or the horse races or the 4-D.’

  Heng had apparently, after having once won a fairly substantial amount at the national Four-Digits lottery, begun to have dreams of a colossal win that would wipe off all his debts. He had begun to take on the irrational behaviour of the big-time lottery dreamer, fervidly seeking lucky numbers in his dreams by night and in the most improbable events by day. He threw away hundreds of dollars on a single bet in pursuit of that elusive jackpot. Anna Seetoh confided that he had taken Por Por to a temple to pray before a deity reputed to give winning numbers, and had made reckless bets based on her age, the age of an old neighbour who had been knocked down by a lorry, the number on the registration plate of the lorry, the number he made his son pick up from a box of counters, a number randomly picked up from a scrap of newspaper stuck to the sole of his shoe. He had gone mad.

  Maria thought in self-reproach, ‘Was I so engrossed in my own affairs that I had no knowledge of what was going on?’

  He asked Maria rather sheepishly, not looking at her, ‘What was Ah Siong’s exact age when he passed away?’, actually taking out a piece of paper and a stump of a pencil from his pocket.

  She said, white with rage, ‘You disgust me. Go away.’

  Dr Phang said, in a call that evening, ‘You sound depressed,’ and she said, ‘I am. Family problem.’

  He said, ‘Would you like to tell me about it?’ and she replied, ‘No, it’s not a pretty story; I’ll try to forget it.’

  ‘Tell me anyway,’ he said. ‘I like the sound of your voice, the brightness in your eye
s, whatever you’re telling me.’ Suppose I ask you all that I’ve been dying to ask from Day One? Suppose we sit down and talk?

  The question of course could not be given utterance; she had learnt to fully cooperate with his strategy of deflection. What was it about men and women that it was so difficult to sit down for a good, honest talk?

  ‘Let’s have lunch again, sometime next week,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, let’s,’ she said eagerly. He could lift her mood from dark despondency to singing elation. Could love or infatuation or whatever it was called become an addiction, like Heng’s gambling, like the drug habits of Ah Boy, the gardener’s son, that Maggie had once told her about? Addiction had no use for talk, only the next fix.

  The day which had begun badly was fully restored in its joy.

  The next morning when she walked into the staffroom after a lesson, she saw a note placed under her teacher’s record book, recognised Brother Philip’s handwriting and smiled. It contained a limerick:

  There is a Brother named Brother P

  Who is as naïve as naïve can be,

  When asked about the birds and bees,

  He said, ‘Why, yes, if you please,

  They’re welcome for my plants and trees!

  Maria thought, unable to hide the smiles that were inviting curious looks from Mrs Neo and some others, ‘Maybe I love Brother Philip, but am only in love with Dr Phang.’

  Twenty-Three

  From the doorway of the dispensary on Middleton Square where she had gone to get some cough medicine for Por Por, she looked to see if V.K. Pandy was at his usual post, with his pitiful pamphlets, with the even more pitiful unspoken message of despair written all over the shabby appearance, the unruly beard, the piercing bitter eyes searching the faces of all who passed by: ‘See what the great TPK has done to me. Now I have lost not only my business, but my political career. And not a single one of you has the guts to stand up for me!’ Some time after he had sold his business to pay the huge sum to settle the defamation suit taken against him, he had been found guilty of tax evasion, had once again been hauled into court and fined a sum which instantly put him in the category for disqualification from membership in Parliament. When he lost his parliamentary seat, it was said, V.K. Pandy sat down on the floor and cried like a child. That night he got drunk in a beer shop and had to be taken home by the beer shop owner. The case of his dismissal from parliament was not reported in the local papers but when The International Courier, based in Bangkok, reported it at length, the paper was slapped with a court order for defamation and had to pay a fine, after which it learnt to be more cautious in its dealings with Singapore.

  V.K. Pandy was not at his post, but the space his presence carved out in the bustling square remained empty, being avoided, by habit, by the crowds hurrying by. It was as if an invisible V.K. Pandy was there, still captured on the secret relentless surveillance cameras, and nobody wanted to take any risk of being seen with him. There were a few who took the risk, albeit circuitously, after hearing about the poor man’s financial misfortunes; their strategy was to send someone, a child or a maid, to go up and casually drop an innocuous-looking envelope containing the donation money beside his pile of pamphlets. Singaporeans were ever kind, responding generously to reports about families suffering the loss of the sole breadwinner, foreign workers left in the lurch by thieving contractors who had made them pay large sums to come to work in Singapore’s construction industries, a seriously ill child whose parents were too poor to pay for the expensive medical treatment. Kindness to them sometimes won praise in ministerial speeches on social cohesion, as kindness to political opponents never would. There must have been enough secret donors for V.K. Pandy to put up a small placard that said ‘Thank you, kind Singaporeans.’ The bitter lines around his mouth must have added sadly, ‘But not brave enough to be kind openly.’

  Without V.K. Pandy waving his pamphlets and loudly calling out, the familiar circle of empty ground looked eerily empty and silent. Maria, watching from the dispensary, felt a sudden heaviness of heart, weighed down equally by sadness and pity. She was thinking of V.K. Pandy’s wife whom she had never seen but only heard about, a woman sick with cancer and perpetual worry for her now bankrupt husband. At what point in her anger was she driven to get out of the house, go out into the streets, stand in front of the closed shutters of their modest printing shop and weep loudly to protest the injustice against her husband, wearing the white sari and long dishevelled hair of mourning? People had passed by quickly; they had to avoid looking at her too.

  Maria noticed a figure striding across the square towards V.K. Pandy’s spot; indeed it cried out for notice, being dressed in the costume of a huge chicken, with bright yellow feathers and a very long, sharp orange beak; it had the friendly familiarity of Big Bird in the popular children’s TV show. Jerking its head up and down, it held up a placard mounted on a stick, which Maria could not read from her distance. There being a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet near the square, which was very popular with the lunchtime crowd, her immediate thought was that Big Bird was there for some promotional stunt. As soon as she had that thought, she smiled to see how delightfully wrong she was.

  The figure who was probably a male, given the height, build and energy of movement, stopped at precisely the spot made familiar by V.K. Pandy’s presence, held up his placard and began to prance around with comical strutting and flapping chicken movements and sounds. Cock-cock-cock-quawk! Cock-cock-cock-quawk! On the placard were the words in bright red which Maria could now read distinctly: ‘Chicken – that’s what we are, Singaporeans!’ and below them a sentence which she could read only partially but understood perfectly, for the word ‘fear’ in it was highlighted. The demonstrator stopped his crazy dance briefly to pass a small camera to one of the passersby, a middle-aged man in neat shirt and trousers, with a request to take a picture of him. The man backed away, laughing nervously as he raised both palms and began waving them about in a frantic gesture of refusal; a young woman with blonde hair, in tourist hat and sunglasses, stepped forward and offered to take the picture.

  A few passersby had gathered to watch; one, a young man with long hair tied in a ponytail, and gold ear-studs, began imitating the squawking sounds and movements, flapping huge imaginary wings and lumbering behind Big Bird with exaggerated clumsiness, causing the crowd to break out in laughter. Despite the presence of the large beak fastened around his mouth, Big Bird’s words of denunciation came out with amazing clarity, filling the square and drawing more curious onlookers.

  We’re comfortable and we’re fearful!

  We’re rich and we’re fearful!

  We’re safe and we’re fearful!

  We’re Chicken Licken, Chicken Stricken,

  The sky’s falling, and we don’t even know it!

  Chicken Licken, licked clean of our freedom

  Chicken Stricken, struck dumb with fear

  We say Yes, Yes, Yes, because No, No, No

  Means more, more, more fear

  Fear of losing our job, our promotion, our son-in-law’s promotion, our bonuses, our upgraded housing estates,

  our good life

  Fear of bringing the taxman beating at our door, crying

  ‘Foul Fowl! Off to jail you go!’

  Chicken Licken, Chicken Stricken

  The sky is falling

  And we can only go quawk quawk, quawk quawk!

  Fortunately for Big Bird intent on delivering his message in full, the police arrived on the scene in twenty minutes, longer than the usual efficient five or ten, to effect the entire operation of issuing a note of warning to the offender, confiscating whatever paraphernalia of offence they could find, hauling him off to the police station since his offence was deemed serious enough, and dispersing the crowd. Apparently they had had no forewarning of Big Bird’s demonstration in Middleton Square, but one of them was alert enough to spot the camera held by the tourist and instantly confiscated it.

  Maria looked in the new
spapers the next morning for any report on the incident; there was none. Demonstrations were rare; there had been one about a year ago, to protest some government policy, which was widely reported in the local newspapers; The Straits Tribune made much of the fine imposed on each of the three demonstrators, clearly as a deterrent to future troublemakers. But every tiny incident of a political nature which did not make it to the media created rumours that circulated underground in the private gossip of the coffee shops and cocktail parties: the chicken demonstrator was V.K. Pandy himself. That accounted for his absence in the square that day. Maria doubted it; the man was too skinny for the robust looking figure she had seen, and his voice was nowhere as loud.

  She had as many questions to ask V.K. Pandy as she had for Dr Phang, and one of them brought together the two men, whose worlds could not be more different, in an intriguing possibility – was it true that Dr Phang, civil servant and poster boy of the great TPK, had secretly donated a large sum of money to help V.K. Pandy in his financial woes? There were other questions of a more immediate and urgent nature: what was he going to do now, what was happening to his poor cancer-stricken wife, was it true that the great TPK once called him ‘vermin’, was it true that he was going to get out of politics permanently, return to his native village in India and retire there?

  There was a question for herself, for which she had no answer: for all her sympathy for V.K. Pandy, why did she not have the courage to come out from her safe peeping place inside the dispensary and join the crowd cheering Big Bird? Such questions came during what she called the mirror moment, when she stood before the mirror in her bathroom and took a good hard look at herself. She had started the practice, secretly, from the first year of her marriage to Bernard, and now, as then, fear featured large in the self-questioning. If it was not fear of the great TPK, was it fear of the principal’s displeasure, especially after he had issued another stern reminder to the teaching staff, clearly aimed at her, not to have anything to do with opposition politics? Whether of the powerful TPK or of the principal of St Peter’s Secondary School, it was still fear, and she was as much trapped by it as any of the Singaporeans derided by Big Bird. Big Bird himself had hidden his identity under an elaborate, all enveloping costume; he too was not free from fear. It was a whole society in thrall; it was mirror time for a whole society.