Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  ‘Of course,’ said Maria, and was glad that the man’s fury had abated enough for him to start eating his pasta. There was a whiff of alcohol about him that added to the overall appearance of defeat and despair.

  He said, as they shook hands before leaving the restaurant, ‘You will not see me again in Middleton Square or anywhere in Singapore. I leave for India in a week’s time.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Pandy, and good luck. Do take care.’ The newspapers carried a very brief report of his departure; almost immediately there were rumours circulating about how the man had gone back to India to die in his native village, for, unknown to anyone, he had a serious illness that he had kept secret for years. Then for months afterwards, all thought of V.K. Pandy vanished as if he had never existed.

  ‘Oh no,’ thought Maria when she reached home and her mother handed her a note, saying, ‘It’s from Heng. It’s urgent, he says.’ Why were people coming to her with their problems in writing, as if to use hard documentary evidence against her, if necessary, in the future? I’ve got a headache and a paranoia coming, she sighed. I want nothing more to do with the world! She slumped into a chair.

  ‘What’s his problem now? Why can’t he just tell me? Or why don’t you tell me, Mother? He must have told you about it.’

  ‘Read it,’ said Anna Seetoh miserably.

  It was a long, type-written letter which, even at a glance, looked too tedious to be read, for it was peppered with figures and even diagrams. The innocuous technicalities were a cover for the desperate message. Heng was making a request: could she buy over his half of the flat that would go to them jointly after their mother’s death? He proposed a sum which he said was much less than the market value; indeed, in a few years, she would be able to sell the flat for a good profit if she wanted, as the accompanying figures and diagrams proved. He did not mention the debts that were behind the urgency of the letter, but as a softening touch, he referred to his decision to send his autistic son to a good but rather expensive school for children with special needs.

  ‘What on earth –’ cried Maria angrily. ‘How dare he talk of claiming his share, Mother, while you are still alive?’

  Anna Seetoh said, looking so wretched that Maria’s anger against her brother rose to match the pity for her mother, ‘It’s okay, since I can continue living here with you. It makes no difference to me.’

  Maria got up and walked straight into her bedroom, rubbing the sides of her head to reduce the turbulence of the thoughts screaming inside.

  ‘Well, what shall I tell Heng?’ said her mother, standing at the doorway.

  ‘Tell him to come and see me tomorrow,’ said Maria wearily. ‘I want to hear exactly what is in his mind.’ She threw the letter into the wastebasket.

  It was the same each time – her mother’s pleading on his behalf, her remonstrances, then the buckling on account of the poor wife and son. When Heng sat in a chair before her, looking up only occasionally, she realised, with a little shudder of horror, that the standard image of the addict she had only seen on TV programmes, with the haunted eyes, the look of desperation mixed with a burning intensity of excited expectation of the next fix, was right before her eyes. She had meant, on behalf of the rest of the family who seemed helpless before him, to give him a sound lecture about his unconscionable neglect of his family and to extract a promise to do something about his addiction. But the sheer thought of its futility drained her of all purpose and energy; she knew that of all persons, she would be the last from whom he would accept advice, much less rebuke.

  In the end, a single thought prevailed: she wanted nothing more to do with him, and the disbursement of the sum would be a final severance. She might even come to see it as a disguised blessing. It would deplete her savings alarmingly; she had always meant to save steadily towards some vague dream of buying a small studio apartment in a new condominium and living entirely on her own – no mother, no Por Por, no maid. Solitary, single, alone – the word, whatever its connotations for women like Meeta or Winnie, had, for her, its own special meanings of peace, freedom and self-fulfilment.

  ‘Thanks,’ her brother said briefly, both to her agreement to his proposal and a gift of some clothes for his wife and toys for his son, which she were in two large paper bags. She could never have trusted him to take back any cash gift for them; he would have made straight for the 4-D betting booth or the jackpot machine in the Manis Club. Anna Seetoh had watched him once at the machine, completely mesmerised by its flashing lights, its idiotic pictures of rows of fruit, lightning zigzags, clown’s faces and the seductive ringing sounds of coins pouring out on to a waiting metal furrow. He would not leave, said Anna Seetoh shaking her head, because he was bent on hitting the jackpot which had snowballed to ten thousand dollars. In the end, she had to forcibly drag him out of the gambling room.

  Out of Maria’s hearing, in the kitchen with his mother, Heng’s posture of defeat vanished in a new flare of outraged pride. ‘Who does she think she is, talking to me like that?’ His dream of winning the million-dollar first prize in the national lottery fired him with the savage triumph of the ultimate revenge, ‘As soon as I collect my prize, I will say to her, ‘Tell me how much I owe you, plus interest, down to the last cent,’ and then I will throw the money upon the floor for her to pick up. But not before wiping my backside with it!’ He let out a sharp, hysterical laugh.

  His mother said, ‘Please, not so loud.’ In her early morning visits to the Church of Eternal Mercy, she would double her prayers for him and make a special petition to St Anthony, the saint for hopeless cases.

  ‘My turn to write a note,’ Maria thought grimly and she sat down and wrote her brother a note, or rather a warning that he could expect no more financial help from her. The ending words should be seared into his brain if he had any pride at all: ‘You are an irresponsible husband and father and should be ashamed of yourself.’

  Only he, she thought with a return of tender feelings as she prepared for bed that night, would be able to restore her trust in notes. He had never written her one. Even an unsigned one, making oblique reference to a happy moment shared, a joke laughed over together in the parked car outside the Botanic Gardens, or over lunch in the Bon Vivant Café would have brought her so much joy. In a week’s time, he would be leaving for Europe; in a week’s time, they would be meeting for that climactic moment, even if there were no silken bed in their hotel room. While he had waited with cheerful patience, she had been deliberating about it for more than a year, before succumbing to that irresistible ‘Well?’ The perfect, one-word proposition.

  She was tempted to send him a note that was sure to make him laugh, summarising his romantic quest and its success in a cartoon depiction of a large question mark of hope suddenly straightened out into the exclamation mark of triumph. She had actually done the drawing, in bright red, but thrown it away, because he encouraged neither letters nor calls from her, never once mentioning Olivia’s powers of detection which ranged far and wide. Olivia Phang had befriended one of the clerks in her husband’s office, a very friendly, talkative girl, who, while thanking Mrs Phang for the occasional presents of perfume and costume jewellery, had no idea she was divulging much valuable information about her husband.

  If not a meeting, then a note, if not a note then a call: a yearning woman sadly whittled down her hopes. If, in the midst of his hectic programmes, he had managed to give her a brief call, a very brief one lasting no more than a minute, how happy that would have made her! A woman in love grew hungry for small assurances, and if deprived of them, would pine and wilt.

  Meeta and Winnie were far from wilting; both had suddenly found themselves in circumstances that, like a shower after a long drought, revived parched flowers and made them bloom and smile again. Byron was meeting Meeta for lunches and drinks at the Polo Club because he happened to be experiencing his own romantic dry season when one female companion had left with no replacement in sight, and the ever available Meeta Nair, large, overbearing, loud,
might do for temporary companionship. He had never initiated any of their meetings, so it was with special delight that Meeta accepted his invitation to be his partner at the coming gala ball in the Polo Club. She understood that his insistence on her finding another couple or two to join them to form a large table at the ball was born of a general unease at being alone with her, a fact she was not too embarrassed to mention to Winnie or Maria before satisfying herself with the sneering proclamation, ‘The bastard should realise I’m playing the same game too! One of these days, when I find my Mr Right, I’m going to chuck my for-the-time-being beau!’

  Winnie was in the happy position of being free from all doubts and misgivings; in fact she hinted that she would soon be engaged to a man she had met through a friend’s introduction, a Chinese-American who did secret work all over the world for the US navy.

  Meeta had whispered to Maria, ‘Introduction, my foot! She found his name in some dating column in some newspaper,’ and again, ‘Secret work in the US navy, my other foot! He’s another of those sweet-talking con men that our poor Winnie’s always picking up, who will run away as soon as he’s fleeced her enough.’

  Winnie seemed to have an interminable source of old money from parents and grandparents who were among the most established families in the historical state of Malacca in Malaysia. Endless rubber, coconut and oil plantations from the time of British colonisation continued to feed Winnie’s bottomless bank account which, like the magic purse in fairy tales, was refilled with gold coins, as soon as the last one was spent. Meeta said that men could smell Winnie’s money from countries far away, which was why a Frenchman and now a Chinese-American had come a-wooing.

  Maria said, ‘Why, Winnie, you look years younger!’ Indeed, Winnie looked prettier, her normally sallow skin suddenly irradiated by love’s glow.

  She said simpering, ‘Wilbur makes me feel so happy.’ Like a child eager to share happy secrets, she told Maria about her many happy dates. ‘We’re planning a short holiday to Langkawi,’ she confided with the unmistakable coyness about a holiday, at last, with a man. ‘I bought some suitable nightwear from Robinson’s,’ she confided further, blushing deeply.

  Maria thought, ‘Poor Meeta.’ As Winnie’s housemate, she must have heard about the planned Langkawi holiday and the bought lingerie a dozen times.

  Wilbur, a very happy-looking individual who talked and laughed endlessly, was all for making others happy too. ‘My philosophy?’ he said. ‘Nobody comes to Wilbur for a favour and goes away disappointed! You can back me up on this, eh, Winnie girl?’ He put his arm around her shoulder and she giggled. ‘Not exactly a useful quality for my kind of work, eh, Winnie sweetheart?’ And he winked at her.

  Maria had never seen Winnie look so happy. ‘What, your friend Maria has no partner for the ball?’ he said to Meeta. ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier? I’ll call Freddie at once. His wife’s away, and won’t mind him going out and having a good time now and then. Freddie’s a great guy!’

  ‘Now, Maria, you can’t say no to joining us,’ said Meeta severely, ‘because Winnie’s Wilbur has gone to all the trouble of finding you a partner. We’re all going to have a ball!’

  Winnie said sympathetically, ‘What a pity your Dr Phang is married. Otherwise, he can come as your partner. I’m sure he and Wilbur will get along fine. Both of them are so handsome and distinguished-looking!’

  Twenty-Seven

  ‘Mother, for goodness’ sake, what are you doing?’ cried Maria and wrested the cane from her mother’s hand.

  ‘I was only threatening her,’ said Anna Seetoh. She complained that Por Por was behaving like a naughty child and had to be treated like one. Rosiah, the maid, whispered to Maria that her mother had three canes in different parts of the house, for instant punishment of an old parent irremediably cast back into an unmanageable second childhood. The extreme state of poor Por Por’s dementia, while it provided relief in making her too timid to venture out on her own, pushed her back into a hopelessly infantile state, making her throw her food about, soil herself, sit in her own puddle, break things. The much harassed Rosiah said she could not manage the old woman single-handed and hinted about going back home to Indonesia.

  Por Por looked with frightened eyes at Anna Seetoh with the raised cane, as the latter, so long ago, must have looked at her, in the cruel role reversals of old age.

  Maria thought, as she put away the cane and bent to comfort the old woman, ‘God, if you’re still there and not averse to doing favours even for prodigal daughters, could you take me away before I reach Por Por’s pathetic stage?’ At the back of her mind was one thought, not fully articulated: ‘She will have to go to a home. If Rosiah leaves, I have no choice.’ Her world could not bear to include the stench and stains of old age left on the floor, the furniture, in the very air itself.

  A feeling of guilt tugged at her, and she dismissed it, thinking, ‘No, I must be fair to myself. I couldn’t take on the burden of caring for Por Por for the rest of her life.’ Her mother was already talking about going to live with Heng’s family in Malaysia, to save them from ruin, as God had made clear to her. Her school work was demanding, and when she returned home from school, she wanted to lock herself in her room, away from her mother’s querulous complaints about her brother, Rosiah’s complaints about her grandmother, her grandmother’s helplessness against the devastations of old age.

  She said to her grandmother, adopting the firmness of voice one used for a particularly difficult child, ‘If you don’t behave, Por Por, and do as you’re told, no more this,’ she held up a cheap imitation jade ring, ‘nor this,’ she held up an ang pow opened to show part of a dollar note. The old woman, probably remembering a biscuit tin filled with her ang pow money, had accused Rosiah of stealing it, and could only be pacified with another biscuit tin containing a generous scattering of the red gift packets. In a moment her restiveness vanished, as she decked herself with trinkets and counted the money in the biscuit tin. Her childish regressions were far less perturbing than her occasional recollection of an action involving Bernard. One morning she had suddenly gone into the kitchen scolding Rosiah for not helping her get ready the rice porridge and pickled vegetables for Ah Siong’s breakfast. On another occasion, she had suddenly stopped in the middle of a shopping trip in a mall and begun to insist on going back into a shop to get something which Ah Siong had requested her to get for him. It would always reflect well on her dead husband and badly on her, thought Maria sadly, that while he had gone from her thoughts, he remained affectionately lodged in an old woman’s memory.

  A heaviness of heart, of the unfocussed kind related to the overall sadness of the human condition, descended on Maria as she went into Por Por’s room that evening to see if she was well covered against the chill of a coming storm; like a petulant child, Por Por sometimes kicked off her blanket or threw her pillows on the floor. The room smelt of the stale smells of sad decrepitude. The old woman was sleeping peacefully. Every woman on the face of this earth, thought Maria, no matter how wretched her life, should have at least a single day, even a part of a day, of joy and triumph, when she could look into the mirror and say, ‘I’m so happy! I’ll never be that happy again.’ What was that supreme moment for her mother? Perhaps having nothing to do with men, it had everything to do with love of the non-carnal, religious kind, and lay not in her past but somewhere in her future with the conversion of her errant children through her prayers and sacrifices, when she could at last rise from her knees in church and celebrate God’s love with her arms lifted high in an ecstatic hallelujah.

  ‘I live for my children,’ Anna Seetoh had said dolefully, and her daughter had callously retorted, ‘Let us do our own living, Mother. And for goodness’ sake, be happy, for no one can do that for you!’

  What was Por Por’s one single unmitigated joy? It surely had to do with the secret lover. Who had initiated that act of love in the warm hiding place provided by the temple? When Por Por stood before the mirror, laughing and
smiling at herself in those gaudy trinkets, was she seeing a pretty young girl with her hair in plaits wearing the cheap plastic earrings that had been a secret gift from her lover? The clothing that young village girls wore in those days, comprising cloth trousers tied at the waist with string and a cloth jacket with a row of tight frog buttons, was surely a challenge to the lover’s trembling fingers, impatient to touch the pure, white young body inside. Between Por Por’s moment of sweet daring in the distant past and her own, to be experienced in the very near future in a hotel room in Europe, lay her mother’s long blameless, joyless womanhood. Had her imagination, incurably romantic, invested Por Por’s experience with a false radiance when it had only been the squalid ground of a rundown temple, full of muddy patches and chicken droppings, followed by the greater squalor of a faithless love, ruthless parents and a ruined life?

  One day, she thought, she would write a story about her grandmother’s life. It would be a very short story: She was born, was brought up in a poor village in China, was taught to be obedient, was threatened with punishment if she dared to disobey and be different from the other girls in the village. Then one day, she dared to disobey and be different – she secretly met the man she loved in a temple and experienced the happiest moment of her life. But it was exactly that – a moment only. Soon she was brought back in disgrace, punished by her parents, married off to an opium addict, bullied by all her in-laws in the household, brought to Singapore, despised by everyone including her own daughter as being stupid and incompetent and burdensome, and was finally devastated by the madness of old age.

  The whole of Por Por’s life could be written in the passive voice, since she was lived, not living, except for that one moment of glory, one third way through the story, when the active voice proudly proclaimed that she rose in rebellion, dared to defy society and secretly went to meet the man she loved.