Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  On the other hand, the last words could be the unuttered ones of sheer panic, as they looked at the hard ground rushing up to meet them, and suddenly saw, in a flash, that perhaps after all, they had made a mistake too late to undo. Did they see the years of arduous study in college, and patient waiting, culminating in a marriage and a happy family life, all wiped out by a mistake which carried its own fearful momentum, ending only when their bodies and the hard ground were brought together in one blinding, pitiless second? Perhaps they saw themselves falling through the air together in slow motion, like a giant soft toy thrown out of the window by an angry child, sailing slowly downwards, its limbs flopping about gently, ending in a black void of nothingness, while friends, family and schoolmates went about their usual business in the world.

  Mr Ignatius Lim held an urgent meeting with his staff. His face taut with anxiety, he told them there would be police investigations including interviews with Yen Ping’s teachers; this was the special demand made by Mrs Gloria Wong who had already informed him that nobody from St Peter’s Secondary School would be allowed to attend Mark’s wake or funeral. She had placed an obituary notice the day after his death, with a recent photograph of him in coat and tie; it had said simply that Mark Wong Lam Yoong, aged seventeen, had passed away peacefully, leaving behind his beloved mother Mrs Gloria Anne Wong and ended with the terse request: ‘No wreaths please.’ Mr Ignatius Lim said, his brow knit with worry, ‘It is most unfortunate that St Peter’s has been implicated, most unfortunate indeed. Our good name will be gone. The Ministry will want to conduct its own investigation.’ He shifted about in his chair and continued, ‘And all because of some poems that the deceased had written to each other in the Creative Writing Class, which, as you all know, has been converted into the Remedial Language Lab.’ He avoided looking at Maria, as did everyone else at the sombre meeting.

  She thought, the bastard, he only cares about the reputation to his school, and rose to say, in an even voice, ‘I’m sorry about this unfortunate incident, and take responsibility for the poems which Mr Lim just now mentioned, because I had encouraged my students to express their thoughts and feelings freely. I would like now to give notice of my resignation.’

  Then she walked out of the staffroom. She would have liked an immediate resignation, but the twenty-four-hour notice entailed financial costs she could not afford. Besides, she needed time to be with her students, to explain things as best as she could, to give closure to her life at St Peter’s Secondary School. It was the practice of the school to give a farewell dinner to a departing teacher; she would remember to write a brief note of polite refusal to Mr Lim.

  Outside, at the gates of the school, she did not turn back to have a look, nor wipe the tears from her face. They were not for poor Mark or Yen Ping, but for herself, for she had failed them, as she had failed Maggie. As soon as she reached home, she would consign that plaque of merit, awarded to her on Teachers’ Day, to the dustheap of memory’s shame.

  Thirty-Five

  Maggie was among the visitors at Yen Ping’s wake, held on the ground level of the housing estate where the dead girl had lived with her family in a three-room flat on the sixth floor. From where she stood at the far end of the area used for the wake, Maria saw Maggie go up to Yen Ping’s mother who was receiving visitors and weeping noisily, and give her a white envelope containing the condolence money. Among the appropriate blacks, blues and greys of mourning, Maggie’s light purple blouse and dark purple pants, together with her vivid make-up and abundance of curls cascading down her back, stood out and invited curious side glances.

  Maria thought, ‘How magnanimous of her,’ remembering her open hostility to Yen Ping during the creative writing classes, and the occasion when she had viciously spat at the girl as they met along a corridor. ‘I’ve got to talk to her,’ she thought.

  But Maggie was gone in a flash. She had seen Maria approaching, smiled to herself, then broke into a run, in her high heels, to a red car parked in the large carpark of the housing estate. There was a man wearing dark sunglasses waiting at the wheel, and as soon as Maggie got in, they drove off.

  ‘That’s Maggie all over,’ sighed Maria. ‘She would have wanted me to run after her, calling her name.’

  It was a staged magnanimity; the girl must been waiting for her arrival to bear witness to the deed before doing one of her tantalising disappearing acts.

  She saw a large number of Yen Ping’s classmates, dressed in their school uniforms, and some of her teachers, including Mrs Neo and Teresa Pang. They all went up, one by one, to Yen Ping’s mother to offer their condolences in low voices, while she wept, shook their hand and drummed her fists on her chest, as if a lesser demonstration would have been inadequate to tell the gods up there how unkind they had been to her who had served them so well. Yen Ping’s father had taken the news so badly that he had collapsed repeatedly and had to be sedated. Yen Ping’s brother and three sisters, all dressed in white T-shirts and black pants, moved quietly among the visitors, offering drinks in small packets with drinking straws. In a corner talking quietly to each other were the old and new principals of St Peter’s. Maria walked up to them, mainly to talk to the old principal who looked thinner and greyer; she was tempted to snub Mr Ignatius Lim by disregarding his presence, but relented when he initiated friendly overtures and said, sincerely enough, that the whole school was going to miss her.

  There had been talk that Yen Ping and Mark had requested, in a note found on the floor from which they had jumped, to be cremated and for their ashes to be mixed together and scattered in the sea. In Maria’s mind flashed a picture of the young pair, their heads almost touching as they discussed this last request for the perfect union, perhaps even quietly arguing about whether their final resting place should be the sea or simply a quiet niche in a columbarium bearing inscriptions of their favourite nicknames for each other. Yen Ping was a Taoist, Mark a Christian; their eternal resting place, as decided by their romantic imagination, was a universal nameless one, existing for all time, everywhere and nowhere, a distant shore, a land of gentle mists where love reigned supreme. In an illustration for one of her poems, Yen Ping, who showed artistic talent as well, had done a water colour illustration, in soft pastel shades, of the paradise which lovers had been denied on earth.

  It seemed that when Mrs Gloria Wong learnt of the young couple’s wish, she went into another bout of hysterics and could only scream, ‘Never, never, never!’ For the rest of her life, she would put the blame for the tragedy entirely on the girl – she could not even bear to pronounce her name, referring to her only as ‘that girl’ and her parents as ‘those hawkers’ – and by extension, on her school. Mrs Wong habitually expressed regret in the theatrics of cursing: I curse the day I sent my son to St Peter’s Secondary School, I curse myself for donating so much to their school building fund. There was talk that she was planning to sue St Peter’s Secondary School for millions of dollars for her suffering.

  The young couple’s note had said, ‘Please grant us our last wish. It is to be one, in our bodily remains, as we have been one in spirit.’ They had been as close to being one in body as their sense of morality would allow, stamping an invisible ownership sign on their seats in the back row of the creative writing class, tying an invisible scarf of exclusiveness on their wrists that carved out their own space in the school, which was always carefully avoided by the other students.

  Despite their plea, their bodies lay in separate places of repose, in different parts of the city, subjected to the different rituals demanded by their respective faiths. Maria who wished so much to have been allowed to pay Mark a last visit, pictured his body lying in one of the funeral parlours of Peace Casket, Singapore’s most established funeral company, surrounded by white lilies and candles, a large, flower-bedecked cross at the head of his coffin, and his photograph, in a large frame of white and yellow chrysanthemums, at the foot. A priest was in attendance saying prayers from a book, joined by a group of visitors s
itting in white plastic chairs arranged neatly in rows. Mrs Gloria Wong was a woman of strong determination and would have come out of her fainting fits to receive guests, make sure everything was in order, and sob out her story.

  Contrasted with the organised neatness of Mark’s wake in a funeral parlour was the disorderliness of Yen Ping’s in the open space of a housing estate, where unruly children from the nearby flats could be seen running around and occasionally stopping to watch the visitors coming in, the bereaved family members speaking in low voices to each other, a monk in a bright saffron robe chanting prayers with a bell in a haze of incense smoke. Yen Ping’s photograph, showing a pretty smiling girl, was framed with multi-coloured flowers; it was set upon a large table, covered with a red silk embroidered tablecloth, holding small golden statuettes and effigies of temple deities, urns of joss-sticks, as well as food offerings of oranges, biscuits, noodles, peanuts and cups of tea.

  The girl looked peaceful, her hair combed back, her face lightly made up. There was a gash on her forehead that defied the brave efforts of the mortician, and showed up distinctly under the make-up. She was dressed in her school uniform and covered up to the shoulders by a pale blue cotton sheet, as if her arms and legs were too badly smashed for public viewing. Where was the silver locket containing that promise written in blood?

  Maria had to ask one of her sisters. The girl whose name was Yen Ling shook her head. Nobody knew about that locket; perhaps it had been flung out during the fall and was now lying in a drain or a clump of grass, irrecoverably lost. Yen Ling said that she would make a search for it as soon as she could. Maria had a sudden thought which produced a little tremor: it would not have been beyond the romantic intensity of the pair to decide for each to swallow the other’s small scrolled promise before the plunge. She had an image of them facing each other, of Yen Ping counting to three to ensure a perfect simultaneity for the acts of loving ingestion. Then there was the counting again, one, two, three, perhaps by Mark, for the leap over the balcony wall of the twelfth floor of the building.

  A white pearl had been placed in Yen Ping’s mouth, partly showing on her underlip; it had to do with some tradition about lighting the way for the dead one in the journey to the beyond. In one of the stories that Maria had read to her class, a woman had died and was making this journey, a very long one through heat and dust, when she finally reached the gates of the abode for the dead. But the gatekeeper there stopped her, saying, ‘Open your mouth.’ She did not have the requisite pearl, claiming that her family had forgotten about it. ‘But see, I have still managed to arrive!’ she argued. ‘No, you can’t enter,’ said the gatekeeper firmly. The woman wept and said, ‘I can’t go back. Nobody wants me. I died in the first place because nobody wanted me.’ ‘Then,’ said the gatekeeper, ‘you will be condemned to wander the face of the earth for one hundred years.’ Yen Ping’s mother would make every provision to ensure that her beloved daughter would never be an aimless wandering spirit.

  What was the beyond for this pair of young lovers? Maria had exactly the same thought as when she was looking upon the body of her dead husband in his coffin: could Mark and Yen Ping, now pure spirits, be hovering about somewhere, looking upon their own dead bodies, their grieving parents, the quietly composed visitors, the instruments of bell and book calling upon the bereaved to pray for the departed souls, and seeing everything, at last, with the eyes of truth? What was their truth like?

  ‘Miss Seetoh, my mother wants to speak to you,’ said Yen Ling. The woman, haggard from lack of sleep, dressed in a light blue blouse and grey pants, came up to Maria and clasped her hands. She spoke in a dialect that Maria could not understand, and Yen Ling did the translation. ‘Tell Miss Seetoh that Yen Ping often spoke about her with great affection. She was Yen Ping’s favourite teacher.’ And it was at this point that the tears that had been held back with difficulty burst forth. Maria could not stop her sobs. Yen Ping’s mother put a soothing hand on her arm. ‘It’s alright,’ said the brave woman. ‘Yen Ping will have her wish, and you will be a witness.We will call you when we’re ready.’ She got her daughter to take down Maria’s phone number.

  Yen Ling called exactly a fortnight after the funeral to give news of an event that had brought some cheer to her parents. Yen Ping had come back, as invited, which meant that her spirit was still in loving contact with her family.

  ‘How do you know?’ said Maria who had taken a liking to this sister, two years younger, and very bright, mature and confident.

  There were all the signs, said Yen Ling. The room that she had shared with her three sisters had been vacated by all of them to prepare for her return – the bed had been properly made, the blanket placed neatly on the bedsheet, the pillow, with a new white pillow case, well fluffed up. Beside the bed on the table, was a glass of tea. Then the windows and the door of the room were locked. In the middle of the night, the family heard the faint howl of a dog, a sign that it had sighted a spirit not visible to human eyes, and in the morning, they opened the bedroom door and saw that the bed had been slept in – the sheet and blanket were slightly displaced and crumpled, and there was a distinct hollow in the pillow where the head must have been. But the most persuasive sign from Yen Ping was related to the glass of tea – the level of the tea was clearly much lower.

  Yen Ling said, ‘We were all happy to see that her spirit had come back on the fourteenth day.’

  Maria asked, ‘Will you be inviting her spirit to come back again?’ and Yen Ling said, ‘Oh no, my mother wants to make sure she won’t. She’s already making preparations for that. You will be invited as a witness to the ceremony, as you were my sister’s favourite teacher.’

  Thirty-Six

  Rosiah the maid insisted on paying Por Por a visit in the Sunshine Home before she left for home to get married.

  ‘Tell me about the man you’re marrying,’ said Maria pointedly.

  She did not want to associate the maid, after years of faithful service, with a lie both unnecessary and uncharacteristic of the simple village girl from Indonesia who had served the family loyally for years. She said, ‘Rosiah, you’re not telling me the truth. You’re not getting married at all.’

  Rosiah said awkwardly, not looking at her, that it was not herself who was getting married, but her sister: Ma’am must have heard wrongly.

  ‘But all your sisters are married; you’d already told us that.’

  Rosiah needed to be rescued from the lie that she was floundering deeper into.

  ‘It’s alright, Rosiah. You can’t manage Por Por anymore. No one can manage Por Por anymore; that’s why I’ve put her in a home.’

  Greatly relieved, Rosiah had more stories to tell of how difficult the old woman had become in the past six months – she soiled herself, refused to get out of her soiled clothes, threw food into Rosiah’s face and on several occasions threatened to kill her with a knife, a pair of scissors, a long bamboo pole. And she screamed curses at her in an unintelligible dialect, but which Rosiah knew to be filled with the worst obscenities. Dear gentle Por Por – what demons of frustration and resentment had been lying dormant inside her confused mind and heart all these years, to break out with such savagery?

  Maria had said to Rosiah, ‘I wish you could continue to work for me, but I can’t afford you now.’

  The loyal girl had said, ‘Oh Ma’am, you can cut my pay, I don’t mind,’ and it was at that point that Maria started crying again. The tears flowed readily those days, a time when she would remember as the darkest in her life.

  The only thing that seemed to calm and comfort Por Por in the home was the sight of the small porcelain dragon ornament, probably from some temple or shrine, that must have been in her possession for more than half a century. Maria had put it in a cloth-lined box which the old woman carried everywhere with her in the home, afraid to let it out of her sight. The ornament had had the opposite effect on Anna Seetoh who was convinced it was a Satanic object and had recoiled in horror from it. She wanted it th
rown out of the house. Surely there was no greater generational estrangement than theirs: an old woman, still clinging to the traditional beliefs of her childhood, and her daughter, secure in the Christian religion of her conversion, convinced that ties of blood mattered much less than ties of faith. Maria Seetoh had taken her grandmother’s side in a noisy quarrel over the dragon ornament, and had insisted that it not only remain in the house but have a place of honour in Por Por’s room, as the old one wanted.

  It was Anna Seetoh’s belief, never openly uttered, that the evil object had been partly responsible for her son-in-law’s death, since its presence had invalidated the prayers of the church group that had come to pray for him. It was the cause of persistent estrangement, for Anna made it clear that as long as Por Por revered the object (in a dream she had seen the dragon, covered with pitch black scales, crawling out of a swamp) she could never pay her a visit in the home, much as filial duty dictated.

  ‘What when Por Por dies?’ Maria had asked angrily. ‘Will you even come for the funeral?’ It would be a funeral with the Taoist rites that Por Por would have wanted.