Miss Seetoh in the World (14 page)

‘We have to go in pants,’ said Meeta. ‘There
will be thorn bushes and jungle insects. I will wear my Punjabi trousers.’

In the end, the search party grew to seven
in number, all ready to find the lost treasure at the earliest possible
opportunity before it got lost forever, driven deeper into the ground by
passing animals or washed away by rain. It was a project of unprecedented
novelty, adventure and opportunity, enough to give Maria one of her famous
headaches and make her look forward to a speedy, successful conclusion.

The reality was far from the theoretical
simplicity of staking out the area of search, and fanning out efficiently, in
twos or threes, armed with the spades and sticks. As soon as the search party
got out of the van that Maggie’s boyfriend had borrowed for the occasion, they
gazed in dismay at a vast densely forested area stretching endlessly, which
Maria was not even sure was the right location, having only a very dim
recollection of the gravel path where Bernard had parked his car that evening.
‘I remember there was part of an old wire fence near it, covered with
creepers,’ she said suddenly, and to everyone’s relief the fence was soon found
to allow the search to begin.

‘Wait, we have
to do something first,’ said the capable Maggie. ‘Miss Seetoh, show where Mr
Bernard stand exactly when he threw the ring,’ and then she and her boyfriend,
standing on the indicated spot, flung a small pebble each into the forest, to
gauge the distance of the treasure from the path.

‘How on earth –’ said Meeta in dismay,
looking at the surrounding impenetrability of trees, creepers, bushes. ‘Talk
about the needle in the haystack.’

‘What shall we do, Maria? We’ll never find
it,’ said Winnie freeing her foot from a tangle of ground creepers.

Maggie said, assuming the position of
leader, ‘We all here already. Might as well look. No time to lose.’ She carved
out the area of search, assigning the largest, most difficult terrain to
herself and her boyfriend.

Maria called off the hunt after two hours.
‘It’s no use,’ she said. ‘We’re all tired, let’s get back. I’m sorry. Thank
you, everybody.’

Meeta whispered, ‘That Maggie. I don’t trust
her. I saw her give her boyfriend a kind of signal. That diamond could be in
his pocket now. He looks like a gangster.’

A day later,
Maggie voiced exactly the same suspicion to her: ‘Miss Seetoh, I saw Ah Boy’s
brother, he whisper to Ah Boy, and then both of them, they get very close
together, like hiding something, they look around to see if anybody see them,
they don’t know that I am behind a tree, watching them. Maybe they go to
pawnshop and pawn the diamond now, no need to share with the cleaning woman. Do
you want me to confront Ah Boy and ask? I will say Miss Seetoh very angry with
his dishonest action.’

‘Oh no,’ said Maria, suddenly very tired,
burdened by a new heaviness of heart that she could not share with anybody.

Years later, she
would remember the episode, not for its futile search but for the larger
futility of human effort, in all its contradictions of vanity and nobility,
trust and deception, longing and frustration, symbolised by Bernard’s diamond
ring taunting its seekers from its hiding place in a vast forest. She saw
Bernard in the exclusive jewellery shop in Robinson’s Building, selecting it
with the help of the salesgirl, writing out a cheque for it, constantly looking
down, as he drove to pick her up, to check on the precious blue velvet box
lying beside him on his seat, his heart glowing with an anticipatory joy that
was only exceeded by the subsequent misery. In the course of a single day, they
had both ridden on the wildest waves of human feeling, he of hope and despair,
she of shock and pity.

All over the world, down through the aeons
of time, men and women met, then watched, in dismay, their dreams colliding
with each other and crashing to the ground. Did her father and her mother have
similar dreams which later, like angry beasts, turned upon each other? She
remembered seeing their wedding picture which her mother later tore up and
threw away; beyond the propriety of looking solemn for the occasion, her
mother, in her white satin wedding dress, veil and pearl necklace, already had
the sad expression of loss and betrayal.

As a child, she had heard hints of Por Por’s
dark past when a suitor rejected by her parents because he came from a
different dialect group, later met her secretly in a temple. When her father
found out, he sent her away to live with a relative in a distant village, but
allowed her back, still stained with dishonour, to marry a simple-minded man
who could be bribed to sustain his opium habit. Men and women met, turned away
from each other, then met again, in a compromise of dreams, condemning
themselves to a lifetime of unhappiness by their own mistakes or allowing
others to do so by theirs. The story of men and women, from time immemorial,
was written in sweat, blood and tears. For each happy journey where love safely
reached its destination, there must have been many ghastly wreckages along the
way.

It was good that she and Bernard had not
reached that point of irrevocable commitment. Two basically good people, both
wanting only to be happy and to do good in life, they had crossed paths and, in
a single colossal moment one dark night in the middle of nowhere, had become
each other’s torment. Through the turmoil of her thoughts and feelings,
appeared again and again one compelling image: Bernard’s face that evening as
he stood by the forest, white and taut in the indescribable pain of holding the
returned gift, now mocking the giver. She had remembered only the fury when he
returned to the car, that was many times amplified in her dream that night; now
two days later, she saw only the desolation of utter despair. And she was the
cause of it all. A stupendous sense of responsibility shook, then depressed
her.

She was already weeping silently, when they
got ready to leave the forest and get back into the van parked on the gravel
path. Meeta, mistaking the tears of pity for those of disappointment, said,
‘Never mind, my dear, you tried your best.’ Winnie said, ‘It’s all fated,’ and
Maggie said, ‘I don’t understand. Maybe someone find it already. Never mind,
Miss Seetoh. We all tried our best.’

In their united effort to console poor Maria
Seetoh, they were silently united by a single puzzling thought – how a woman
who was pretty without being beautiful, charming without being dazzling, could
have inspired such an amazing display of male adulation twice over, first in
the purchasing of a twenty thousand-dollar diamond, fit for the fabulously rich
or royal, and then in its peremptory discarding, as if her rejection had
reduced it to a worthless trinket. Such a superordinate demonstration of love
existed only in the imagination.

The true explanation, said Meeta, as she and
Winnie later discussed the matter at length and came to the same conclusion,
must lie both in Bernard Tan’s deceitfulness and Maria Seetoh’s naiveté. Meeta
said, ‘No, it’s just not possible. That man must have exaggerated the value of
that ring. Maria is so unworldly she’ll believe anything. Sometimes she’s even
more naïve than you, Winnie! Only
towkays
and tycoons can afford such a
gift. And they would never throw it away. They would keep it for the next
mistress. He’s only a civil servant with a salary.’ Maria Seetoh, through her
central role in a drama of love far removed even from their wildest fantasies,
had created an intolerable dissonance in their minds.

‘Dear Bernard,’ she wrote in a letter that
evening, ‘I feel compelled to tell you about what happened two days after you
threw the ring into the forest. But first let me tell you again and again how
sorry I am about the pain that I had caused you. I wanted so badly to apologise
when you took me home, but you had already driven off. It could have been the
need to wrest some good out of this very sad episode in our lives, that I had a
plan to search for the ring, sell it and use the proceeds to help a number of
very needy people. I felt you would have approved of the plan, since your
generosity towards the poor is well known; in any case you would not have
disapproved of it. I organised a discreet search yesterday to find it, but
alas, it is irretrievably lost in that vast forest. It would have given me so
much satisfaction to be able to tell you that your valuable ring helped two
very needy families. May I wish you every happiness.’ Regularly storing up
interesting events in her own life for the telling or the writing of stories,
she was consigning the most momentous one of all to memory’s dust-heap with a
one-page letter.

One little vestige remained to tease her
mind, again related to the potential saving power of that large sum of money.
If Meeta and Winnie were right about Ah Boy and Ah Lan not being fated to
benefit from her kind intentions, would that mysterious force have favoured
someone who was in equal need of financial help? V.K. Pandy, in a lawsuit for
defamation that the great TPK had brought against him, had lost a huge sum of
money, at a time when his wife was undergoing expensive treatment for cancer.
She saw herself striding hurriedly towards him in that spot of infamy in Middleton
Square, pressing an envelope of money into his hands, and then quickly turning
and walking away. But the double insult to Bernard would have been too
daunting: his gift, rejected by the woman he loved, used by her to benefit an
opposition politician he detested.

‘What on earth –’ She had just finished the
letter, and was staring at Bernard as he stood dripping wet on the doorstep. In
the short distance from the open car park to her apartment, he had been
drenched by a sudden, torrential shower. Her mother, Por Por and the maid had
gone to bed, leaving her to face what could well be a ghostly visitant making
its appearance on the stroke of midnight.

‘Forgive me,’ he said when it should have
been herself, still pained by the memory of his anguish, to say those words. He
asked forgiveness for his bad behaviour that evening, for throwing away the
ring in a fit of temper, for driving off in an even greater fit, when she had
tried to speak to him.

As he spoke, calmly and simply, a hundred
turbulent thoughts raced through her mind, among which was a question that was
answered as soon as it arose: Suppose he proposes that we start all over again?
No, a very firm No. Then I’ll offer him a hot drink, a towel for his wet hair
and clothes, and sit down with him to wait out the rain. As soon as he leaves,
I’ll throw away that letter.

‘I was going to write you a note,’ he said,
‘but I changed my mind and drove here instead. I was hoping you would still be
awake.’ Letters unwritten, letters unread, letters torn up – they were supposed
to help failed speech, but were themselves failures.

‘Oh Bernard –’ she said, deeply moved and
reached out to touch his hand. She was startled to see him holding out to her a
small thick square of some silky stuff which she then recognised as a ring
purse. ‘Oh no,’ she thought in panic, expecting a bizarre replay of the awful
scene that night by a forest.

‘It’s my
mother’s,’ said Bernard, opening the purse and taking out a gold ring, set with
a small piece of carved jade. She remembered, as a child, seeing a similar ring
on Por Por’s finger, and being allowed to feel the carved surface of the dark
green jade. ‘She left it as a memento when she died. I would like you to have
it as a token of my deep regret for causing you so much distress.’

He added, in a little apologetic murmur,
‘It’s rather old-fashioned, with little value beyond the sentimental one for
me. But I will be very happy if you will accept it.’

She said again, ‘Oh Bernard –’ and was
unable to go on. Her first thought was, ‘Oh my God, after that twenty thousand
dollars, he would have no more money for gifts,’ and her first feeling was an
overwhelming pity, as she stared at the once proud, sensitive man, now wet from
the rain, standing before her humbly offering his most valued possession.

Within a month, she had married him.

Years later, she would remember the honeymoon
for two small incidents that had nothing to do with it. Both had to do with
children. Childless, she found much pleasure in their presence, or simply
observing them from afar, happy inhabitants of a world of innocence until their
time came for entry into the complicated world of experience.

 Taking a walk along one of the peaceful
country roads of the lovely Cameron Highlands in Malaysia (Bernard had said in
a flush of generous promise, ‘That’s all I can afford for the present; for our
second honeymoon, I’ll take you to Europe’), they came upon a scene of
distress. A little boy of about four was sitting on the ground with a bad cut
on his forehead, and his mother who looked very young was wringing her hands
and making small sounds of panic as she looked around for help. It was a simple
matter for her and Bernard to effect a full rescue, which they did promptly.
She cleaned the child’s forehead with tissue paper from her handbag and wrapped
her scarf around it; then Bernard carried him to the nearest hotel where his
wound could be properly attended to by the resident doctor. ‘My, young man, you
are heavy,’ said Bernard, not exactly complaining.

She had to suppress her amusement as witness
of a running drama between the precocious, self-assured child and the silly,
helpless adult. Assuming a stoical silence as his wound was being attended to,
the little boy ignored his mother’s plaintive noises until she raised a wail
and he turned a cool bandaged head towards her to say with some sternness, ‘If
you don’t mind, the doctor says must not make noise!’