Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  One evening, she had fallen asleep over a re-reading of a novel by Conrad that she had read years ago, only because it had been required reading for her literature course in the university. She woke up, thinking, ‘Well, time to prepare lunch,’ and discovered she had slept through the meal. In the past, her mother or the maid would have awakened her. Mealtimes could be gloriously disregarded, hunger completely untied to any regulating schedule. Sleeping through the hours when she would have been in the classroom standing before the chalkboard or sitting through a dreary staff-meeting gave an even sharper tang to the new liberating sensation.

  When she was growing up, her mother had never felt the need to teach her the obligatory female skills of cooking, sewing, housecleaning; Anna Seetoh had always said, ‘You study hard, be a good person, that’s all I ask of you,’ and did everything for her, ironing her school uniforms, cleaning her shoes, even combing and plaiting her hair. In the years of her marriage, her husband never wanted to see her sweep, clean, cook or do any household work, except when it came to personal items like his shoes, preferring her to spend all her free time by his side. She had looked upon housework as a chore that mercifully, she had been spared all her life. But now, in the little apartment of her choice, surrounded by domestic appurtenances that bore the stamp of her approval and taste, down to the last little teaspoon and potted plant, she felt that household work was not only pleasurable but ennobling, a woman’s daily affirmation of life and selfhood. She noticed, with a heightened sense of recognition and wonder, that it was always when she was doing the simplest, the most mundane things that certain ideas would come to her mind, lighting it up to illumine stories rapidly taking shape. Such inspirational moments had been experienced before, but now they came with a new energy to match the briskness in her limbs as she went about the daily tasks of dusting, sweeping, washing dishes at the sink, putting clothes in the laundry, taking them out to dry. She even felt an affinity with inanimate objects that submitted to her will and emerged from her hands spotlessly clean, gleaming, radiating with housework’s sanctity.

  She found herself humming as she worked, then singing aloud, mainly the silly love songs of her girlhood. She thought of a party at which the girls of St Anne’s Convent School and the boys of St Stephen’s Brothers’ School got together for a decorous, chaperoned church event, and recollected that one of the boy organisers had cunningly slipped into the approved selection of boy scout and girl guide songs a love song in which Doris Day sang about wanting to croon love’s tune by the light of the silvery moon. The boys and girls erupted in wild cheering, and Sister St Agatha merely smiled stiffly and avoided looking at Brother Aloysius.

  Her pleasures in solitude would cover a dazzling range, from the intellectual stimulation of the books she had hidden from her husband to the seductive allurement of girlhood romances.

  She remembered, with fondness, the artistic student in her home class at St Peter’s who did all the memorable cartoons for her language lessons. If she commissioned a picture captioned ‘Where Does the Inspiration Come From?’, he would probably draw a cartoon of her, with hair piled up, one stray strand down a sweaty forehead, a clothes’ peg in her mouth, hanging up a blouse on a clothesline bristling with items of underwear, while just above her head, hung a lightbulb with a brilliant sunburst of rays.

  Her happiness, she realised, was deep and enduring precisely because it comprised the very small, the ordinary, the quotidian. She had yearned to scale the lofty heights of passion and found peace in the rootedness of small things on the ground. She had longed to write on the large canvas of life, recording the sweep of human thought and emotion, and concluded that her talent lay in working on a little square inch of ivory, with reliable, painstaking stylus, as her much loved novelist from childhood, Jane Austen, had recommended.

  The small events, the insignificant people of her childhood who now crowded her memory, including the little girl whose death was announced by the cry of an owl, the old woman picking up empty beer cans and cardboard from a rubbish bin to sell for a few cents – they would populate her stories, their littleness radiated by the simplicity and honesty of their lives. Happiness miniaturised, like the tiny dolls she had once seen, with every fineness of detail preserved, with none of its beauty lost.

  There was a knock on the door. Surprised, for since moving into her apartment in the new condominium, she had not made a single friend, she got up to look through the peephole, and saw three children all dressed in Halloween costumes. The custom was largely observed by the expatriate community only, but of the three children only one was Caucasian, a blonde child dressed like a witch. The other two were dressed as demons with the unmistakable horns, forked tail and trident. All had paint on their faces to show elaborate frowns, wrinkles, fangs. They must be the children of occupants in the condominium.

  ‘Trick or treat?’ they said shyly. She would remember to keep a stock of candy; right now she only had cookies which the children received with a disappointed look before running away.

  She made friends with one of the security guards, a cheerful woman named Asma whose heavy make-up and brightly varnished nails contrasted oddly with the drab khaki guard uniform. Asma introduced herself to each of the condominium residents with a joke, ‘My name is Asma, spelt A-S-M-A. Without the T-H,’ upon which she would simulate an exaggerated attack of wheezing and panting before concluding with a loud chuckle, ‘I am your very healthy, very capable security guard!’

  ‘My dear Brother Phil,’ she wrote. ‘You were rightly amused by all the trivia I had written in my previous letter. Here’s more trivia, but in a completely different sense. I’ve come to notice and love the very small things in existence which I had taken for granted. Now I realise they are the very stuff of existence and meaning. I wanted to know what I was happy about, and at the end of the day listed a dozen things that were all small, ordinary, everyday. The last item of happiness was a TV programme about outrageous pets, which I enjoyed thoroughly, because it made me laugh out loud. You would, if you had seen the little cocker spaniel taking full possession of the house, including the master bedroom. No, the last item was actually a quiet read in bed, before I fell asleep, of quotations from wise men and women that I had picked up over the years. One was a poem, and it made me think of you, because I had copied it out for you – remember the lovely poem by that marvellous Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran about being together, and yet staying apart as individuals, about being like the separate strings of a flute yet quivering to the same music? See, I continue to be the incurable romantic, but the self-contradictory one with head in a swirl of clouds and feet planted firmly on the ground! (I can see you smiling and shaking your head.)

  About a week ago, I saw the ghost of my Por Por. Or rather, thought I saw. It was about ten in the evening. She was standing near the writing desk where I had placed the box containing her favourite dragon ornament inside the top drawer, and she appeared to be looking for it. She turned to give me a look and seemed well and happy. And, most oddly, I did not regard her as a supernatural visitant then, but as my flesh-and-blood Por Por who was always looking for this or that thing, searching shelves and drawers, and asking Rosiah or me for help. I said, going up to her, ‘Por Por, it’s in there, let me take it out for you,’ but at that instant she vanished. Now I know why Yen Ping’s family insisted that her spirit had come back, as proved by the displaced blanket on the bed, the slept-on pillow, the drunk tea. I looked closely at the table to see if there were displaced objects, and guess what I noticed? The drawer had been slightly pulled open. I am almost positive it was completely shut when I last saw it. There you are – the yearning heart that sees what it wants to see!

  Yesterday, three small children in Halloween costumes came to my door. They looked adorable. My mother had actually suggested my adopting a child. Imagine that! I suppose she wants someone to take care of me in my old age. No thank you. I love children and animals, but from a distance away from their mess and noise
and crankiness! (I can hear you say, with that tiny, crinkling, cynical smile: ‘She likes humanity, not people; she likes God but in the abstract; she loves men but across a chasm.’) Do you realise that we are both at that dreadful period of life called the climacteric that heralds decline and decrepitude? Can you imagine us growing old together, old and grey and full of sleep, wearing our trousers rolled? No way! I’ve got a new hairstyle and a new lipstick to match the precise pink of a new cushion cover. Frivolity, at any age, is a legitimate female indulgence. Which Sister Bridget must be free from. By the way, you still haven’t told me about her. When you do, I will use all my writer’s skills of forensic detection to scrutinise every noun, adjective, verb and preposition to decide whether jealousy is called for.

  Love

  Maria.’

  In her happiness, she had tamed jealousy, making it a ready tool for wit and self-deprecatory humour. A thought occurred at this point: if she happened to see Benjamin Phang now at the Polo Club, dancing with an attractive woman, holding her close, would the old feelings of shock and hurt return? Would she have another night of fitful sleep? She had read about scientific experiments on jealousy that concluded it to be a purely reflexive, unconscious reaction, so that a woman, while all the time denying it, was actually registering all the physiological telltale signs on the instruments attached to her head, chest and fingertips. She had no doubt she would defy those instruments and pass the test.

  There had been a single postcard from him when he was ambassador to Germany, addressed to her at St Peter’s and redirected to her old apartment, bearing only the brief salutations and niceties necessitated by an open mode of communication. ‘How are you?’ he had asked. But it was only a typical opening line, not a genuine question requiring an answer. In the first few days in her new home, while watching TV, she heard the newscaster announce his new posting to Japan and saw his image appear for a few seconds. On both occasions, there had been no reaction from her. She had passed the most crucial test of all, a self-imposed one: there had been no more dreams of him since she moved into her new life.

  Happiness could be infectious, reaching across continents and oceans. Meeta wrote a note to say that her sister and brother-in-law were thoroughly spoiling her; she was enjoying a very active social life with the arty crowd in New Delhi. Meeta painted her new happiness in the brightest aphorisms: live life in technicolour, not monochrome; be a glutton at life’s smorgasbord! Winnie expressed her joy in more down-to-earth terms: Wilbur was building an extension to their already large house in the countryside to accommodate the increasing number of grandchildren who always came with their parents to celebrate Thanksgiving. God/Providence/Force/Fate/Chance was in his/her/its heaven; all was well with the world!

  My little square inch of paradise on earth, thought Maria. How I love my tiny two-room studio apartment. Its description announced its purpose of seclusion for serious, artistic work, thereby barring all visitors capable only of trivial, meaningless talk (Her immediate neighbour was a fashion designer; she had only seen him emerge from the apartment once, wearing a black T-shirt, black trousers, a black-and-white scarf, a gold earring) She thought, my little world is sealed against the great one outside, with a little door opening out as and when I want.

  For her new world would not be a cloister; that was for those women who declared themselves dead to the world, and she was very much alive. She had never seen a cloister but as a girl had been impressed by pictures showing the seclusion and serenity of a Carmelite convent where it was said a woman walked in but was carried out. It meant that from the moment she stepped into a convent, its doors shut her out completely from the world to which she would return only as a corpse, carried out for burial. Since nuns usually lived to a very ripe old age, the time separating the live walking feet and the dead shrouded feet could be many decades.

  Maria thought, I love the world too much to want to be so cruelly sequestered from it. She was rediscovering its pleasures, all the greater if savoured in the leisureliness and freedom of pure solitude – the shopping centres where shopping with the maid and Por Por had been rushed, anxious affairs, the cafés where she had enjoyed lunches with friends but experienced a special pleasure just sitting by herself having a sandwich and coffee, idly watching the world go by; the bookshops where she could spend hours browsing; and best of all the Botanic Gardens, scene of so much joy and pain, peace and tumult, which she could now visit in the capacity of a person renewed and recharged.

  A call came from Maggie. How on earth had the girl managed to get her new number?

  ‘Miss Seetoh, have to talk to you, there’s nobody for me to talk, only you, my old teacher who I trust in the world,’ she said in a tearful opening calculated to soften a heart much less steeled against her manouevres than Maria’s.

  ‘Alright,’ Maria said wearily, ‘what is it now.’

  It was the same complaint about Angel not taking her studies seriously, taking that useless deejay guy too seriously, frustrating all Maggie’s efforts to give her a good education.

  For the first time the girl mentioned the name of the man in dark glasses. She called Sonny her close friend and supporter who also took care of Angel, but hinted there might be trouble involving all three of them. Talking rapidly and breathlessly, Maggie became incoherent in a sudden massive discharge of information about her life and problems. Maria listened desultorily, her mind occupied elsewhere with more pleasant thoughts. She heard only the rising inflections of Maggie’s frustration and anger – ‘so ungrateful, I want to kill her!’, ‘he all useless, adding to problem, not helping me solve, I want to kill him!’ The girl’s histrionics simply fell flat on her ears and she was jerked out of her inattention only when she heard Maggie ask urgently, ‘So can you do this favour for me, please, Miss Seetoh?’

  It turned out that Sonny had turned violent one evening and slapped her, pulled her hair and knocked her head against the wall.

  ‘He all drunk and sexy, want, sex, sex, sex all the time. Miss Seetoh, how can woman always be there, give sex anytime? I said, ‘You bastard, you idiot, go to hell!’ ’

  She had warned him that the next time he abused her, she would go straight to the police and get a restraining order slapped on him.

  ‘Then he cannot come near me or Angel, not even ten feet from us; I found out all about the restraining order.’

  The favour she was asking of Maria was this: could her old teacher write a letter of support for her, a kind of testimonial, to take to the police to make sure she got that important order?

  ‘You my old teacher. Also from Catholic school. Your testimonial very useful. Also, the police look at you and trust you, Miss Seetoh, because you very classy and educated.’

  Maria said, ‘Maggie, I really can’t promise anything because I hardly know what’s going on, and maybe don’t want to,’ adding, ‘Maggie, I’m starting a new life in my new place, as you can see, and hope you understand if I ask you not to call again.’

  There was a silence, and then Maggie said, in a changed tone of sly insinuation, ‘Hey, Miss Seetoh, you ever wonder what happen to the Tiffany ring in the dark forest, whether anyone find it?’

  Maria felt a rising tide of anger. The girl was being maliciously provocative all over again, trying to force a response from her, to extend the conversation and steer it towards her purpose.

  Maria said coldly, ‘I don’t really care, Maggie. Now if you will excuse me, I’m rather busy.’

  She heard Maggie say, in very aggrieved tones, ‘Miss Seetoh, what happen to you? What happen to teacher I trust and love most in world?’ before she put down the phone.

  The phone rang again, and this time Maggie’s voice came in a savage snarl. ‘You know or not, Miss Seetoh, I could tell people you and Brother Philip had affair! Don’t think I don’t know!’

  ‘How dare you!’ screamed Maria. The girl had a huge bag of tricks, and now she had pulled out her trump card of blackmail. ‘You’re simply disgusting, Maggie. Don’t
you ever call me again!’

  Maria banged down the phone. Maggie, in her messy world, had ruined an otherwise perfect day for her.

  She had reckoned without the messiness of another world which she had almost forgotten. Rumours of V.K. Pandy were sweeping the society. He had returned to Singapore. The rumour about his death were just that, after all. The truth was that he had nearly died, in fact had died, according to some sources, but had been revived by a holy man from an ashram who, before passing away himself, had enjoined upon him the mission of doing good in the world by preaching kindness and forgiveness. The holy man, it was said, had been led to the corpse by the sobbing Mrs Pandy who said her husband had been dead twenty-four hours. She fell down at the holy one’s feet when her husband began to stir, and he said to her, ‘You too are restored,’ at which point her cancer left her completely. She swore to spend the rest of her life helping the poor in the slums of the city.

  Immediately after the miracle, V.K. Pandy entered into a trance-like state and went without food or water for seven days, his hair and beard now completely white. He entered the ashram and devoted himself to the preparation of his new role in the world. In a matter of a few years, he had become a holy man sworn to holy deeds, calling himself ‘The Holy One’, after the old saint who had brought him back to life, and made him promise to continue his good work. As proof of the legacy, he now bore the god-man’s distinctive mark, a white scar, shaped like a small star, on the upper right of his forehead. To the astonishment of all around him, he could fast for weeks. It was said that a band of light encircled his head. He had come to Singapore, his beloved home for many years, to begin his mission of healing, preceded by the most astonishing reports of his powers. The lame walked, the blind saw, the deaf heard again. A twelve-year-old boy who was brought to him covered with horrible black growths was given back to his mother, his skin now smooth as an infant’s. Singaporeans listened wide-eyed, then passed round the stories. There were stories about his astonishing powers to heal even those very ill and on the point of death.