Miss Seetoh in the World (19 page)

The packet contained some dried marigold
petals which Maria instantly recognised as those from a garland that Por Por
had some time ago removed from a stone god in a Hindu shrine and which she and
the maid had hastily put back.

If Bernard experienced any frisson of terror
in being singled out as one in dire need of supernatural help, he showed no
sign of it, merely receiving the packet calmly and murmuring something to
humour the old woman. Por Por watched with keen intensity; when he did nothing
with the saving gift and continued eating his breakfast, she burst into a
frenzy of scolding and had to be led away. Maria watched with mounting anxiety.

The ancient fearful world of darkness and
owls and portents had come back to trouble her, and distilled into a single
deadly chill that froze all power of speech and thinking, exactly a week later,
when she had a call from the office of Dr S.K. Chiang to whom her husband went
for his regular medical check-ups.

Dr Chiang said, ‘I need to speak to your
husband; it’s urgent.’

She said, her mouth suddenly very dry,
‘What’s wrong? Could you tell me, Doctor?’

Dr Chiang said, ‘I really would like to
speak to your husband personally. Tell him to call me as soon as he can.’

She made a frantic call to his office where
he was having an important meeting and could not be interrupted. ‘Please tell
him it’s extremely important,’ she begged the secretary. He came on the phone,
none too pleased about having to leave a meeting that he was chairing.
‘Alright,’ he said when she told him. ‘I’ll call Dr Chiang after the meeting.’

‘Will you let me know as soon as you can?’
she asked, and he could not resist the opportunity to say, with the habitual
hard-edged cynicism, ‘Why this concern for me all of a sudden?’

‘Please let me know,’ she pleaded.
‘Alright,’ he said in a softened tone.

She did not want to share her fears with her
mother, in case they turned out to be unfounded: her imagination, in a wild
flight of hope, pictured her husband coming through the door talking with
unaccustomed good humour about wrong prognoses and alarmist doctors.

If she could, she would have shared her
fears with Por Por, to draw out the explanation for those weird actions that
now seemed like some dreadful portent. She looked at Por Por who was looking at
her with the quizzical half frown of someone trying hard to remember something.
An old woman rapidly losing her mind, who had suffered much in her youth, who
must have a huge store of secret hopes, dreams and passions that would finally
go to the grave, unknown and unfulfilled, together with that frail body: were
women like Por Por, at the last stage of their bitter lives, given the gift of
the owl, the harbinger of death? Were they also given the power to avert doom?
The image of Por Por offering Bernard the saving joss stick ash from her
temple, and later, the holy flower petals from an alien shrine would not go
away. In different circumstances, could Por Por have become like the powerful
Venerable Mother in the White Heaven Temple, dispensing hope to the hopeless?
The dark forces of tradition that modernity’s vanguards of education and
technology claimed they had routed, were unroutable.

At the sound of the key turning in the lock,
she rushed to the door to face her husband. He did not look at her; his pale
taut face told her everything.

‘Dear –’ It was the first time in their
married life of nearly three years that she had used any term of endearment to
the man she had promised to love, honour and obey, elicited by none of these
imposed vows, but a natural compassion that swelled and overwhelmed her.
‘Dear,’ she said again and took his arm. She said it in the fullness of heart;
if her heart had never had any place for this thing called love for which men
and women supposedly married, it could at least enlarge now to fill itself with
kindness.

Kindness was superior to pity, to sympathy,
to empathy, maybe even to love itself, for unlike any of these, it was never
self-serving but translated immediately into action to help, relieve and
comfort the sufferer. No other human feeling had been compared to milk, for
indeed it was one with that life-giving sustenance: she saw herself, from that
moment onwards, being impelled by this purest of motives to do everything for
her husband. If love was a talent she did not have, kindness was the
compensating gift of which she had been blessed with plenty.

‘Dear,’ she said, and her husband turned
once to give her a brief forlorn look that said, ‘Too late.’

They were dreary days which she would
remember with much sadness, filled with anxious waiting never rewarded with
good news. The prognosis, confirmed by two other cancer specialists, was even
worse than expected.There was an initial period, expected in such circumstances
of shock and disbelief, when the sufferer lashed at all and sundry in the sheer
incomprehensibility of it all. How could Dr Chiang have failed to detect the
cancer in all those regular check-ups? How could it have spread so rapidly and
virulently without notice? All those expensive tests, all those reassurances.
Anna Seetoh, always awed by her son-in-law, readily joined him in castigating
the doctor.

There was a moment of wavering faith when
Bernard turned his cynicism in another direction, dismaying the parish priest
Father Rozario who had come to comfort as soon as he heard the news.

‘Father, why does God punish those who have
always served Him faithfully? Can you explain that?’ His tone of grievance was
by turns plaintive, savage. For a while, the very sight of life itself was too
cruel a reminder of his impending loss of it, so that visitors, by the mere
fact of their being alive and in good health, gave offence and were not
welcome.

Facing death, he hated the living. Por Por,
her mother, herself, the maid Rosiah, the delivery boy coming in with the
groceries, the caller on the phone, the TV news presenter – each, as he saw and
heard them, still a participant in the greatest human enterprise called life,
must have squeezed out of him, again and again, the wrenching cry, ‘Why me?’

It would only be a matter of time, thought
Maria, before he turned upon her, in blame’s desperate escalation: ‘Cancer is
brought on by stress, as the medical literature has proved. For the last three
years, I have never been so stressed in my life.’

When the accusation came, in all the
remaining bitterness that had to be expelled from his system, she received it
humbly, thinking only of the relief it gave him. Third Aunt came on an urgent
visit, pulled her aside and said in a rebuke she was able to receive with equal
humility because it bore no malice, only love of the suffering man: ‘I told you
my Ah Siong not happy, so thin. Why you never take care of him? Why you never
tell me?’

It took some time for her to absorb the
brutal ultimatum of death’s sentencing. Four months, the doctors had said, at
most six. But what about those cases she had heard where the patient, given
some months, lived on for years? What about those who beat the disease
altogether? The doctors, understandably, were wary of giving false hope. She
knew her husband knew, but that deadly piece of knowledge would never be openly
brought up, as if its mere mention might hasten its fulfilment. In a house of
death, the word was assiduously avoided, both by the sufferer and those in
timid attendance on him.

Anna Seetoh, who never spoke much to her
son-in-law, used the same neutral terms whenever she had to say something to
him: ‘This soup is good for giving energy.’ ‘This oil is good for massaging the
arms and legs.’ She stuck to the language of hope, ‘When you get well,’ but
abandoned it when talking privately to her daughter, ‘When Ah Siong dies, what
are you going to do?’

Father Rozario, in charge of preparing his
parishioners for death, did not have the luxury of circumvention. He asked
Bernard’s permission to make an announcement of the illness after his sermon,
so that fellow parishioners at the Church of Eternal Mercy might start novenas
for his recovery. Bernard managed a small sharp laugh, his proud, sensitive
nature recoiling from an outpouring of sympathy from people he hardly knew, or
cared to know.

‘It’s alright, Father. Your prayers are good
enough. Besides, as you can see, I’m still well enough to go to church on some
days.’ Later Father Rozario said to Maria and her mother, ‘We can have our own
private prayer gatherings here, with a few close friends of Bernard’s choice.
We will all pray for a miracle. It will happen, with Bernard’s acceptance of
God’s will. That in itself is a miracle, you see.’

Maria thought, I will join in all the
prayers, in all the storming of heaven for a miracle, even if I believe in
neither. Indeed, for the past year, even as she accompanied her husband to
church and joined him in the partaking of the holy sacraments, she was aware of
a falsehood that simply could not be sustained in its enormity. The comforting
God of childhood, the benign presence whom she greeted, both upon waking and
sleeping, with words of love and adoration, as taught by her mother, was now a vague
irrelevant presence far removed from the exigencies of everyday living. It did
not need the combined impact of those TV news programmes she watched to
emphasise the irrelevance – of whole villages washed away in a hurricane, of
innocent families clinging to each other and their bundles of belongings,
fleeing brutal soldiers, of children walking around on stumps, their legs blown
off by hidden mines when they went looking in the fields for scrap metal to
sell.

She had thought she could write stories
about God and that particular group of His creatures He had singled out for
special loving mention, but it would have been too painful. She thought she
could write about the little children she often read about in newspaper
reports, who were washed away in deadly typhoons, crushed by tons of mortar in
earthquakes, or died from disease, poverty, starvation and constant abuse from
adults, while an omnipotent, omniprescient and omnibenevolent God was
presumably looking on. Her stories would have bristled with a hundred frantic
questions, fired uselessly into the vastness of divine indifference: why did
they have to suffer? What wrong had they done? What did that promise mean, the
promise that had begun with a rebuke to the adults to stop making a fuss, and
to suffer the little children to come to Him, to touch His divine person as
only children could, climbing upon the divine knees for a hug, fighting to be
in the divine arms for a cuddle, for of such was the kingdom of Heaven?

If He existed, she thought, she could count
on this perfect love to understand her timidity, very much like a child’s, and
to forgive all that pretence of going to church, receiving the sacraments,
conducting catechism lessons, as one would smile at a child’s desperate
whistling in the dark or telling fantastical tales to hide his fear; if He did
not, all that pretence, as a purely human coping mechanism, was quite in order.

In his illness, Bernard had some good days
when he would go to church, in complete reconciliation with his God after the
initial outburst of anger. ‘You needn’t come along if you don’t wish to,’ he
said to her. Was he aware of her increasing alienation from the religion in
which they had made their marital vows to love till death did them part, or was
he simply being considerate, aware that she was juggling the demands of both
the job in school and the caregiving at home? For the first time in their
married life, she had difficulty detecting his tone, to act in accordance with
his wish; the line between cynicism and civility had become blurred by the
muffled, laboured speech and the habit, from the beginning of the illness, to
look down or away each time he spoke to her.

Silence served her as well now as it did in
those days of quivering confrontation; it was the silence of kindness, giving
much peace of mind, not of resentment, throwing her whole being into turmoil.
As they made their way into church or out of it, her husband leaning on her, a
shrunken version of his former proud, confident self, it was no longer pity she
felt for him, but something transcending it, enabling her to fend off the
pitying looks cast in their direction and turn to him even more attentively.

She had taken to speaking to a rapidly
disappearing God as if He were still the solid presence of her childhood years:
‘God, if You’re still around, I’m going to Holy Communion now with Bernard
because it pleases him, and he’s very ill, and that’s no sacrilege, is it,
God?’ After a while, the silent messages of apology and excuse became tedious
and stopped altogether, as she joined the prayer group from the Church of
Eternal Mercy, led by Father Rozario, saying prayers and singing hymns, first
for his body, and as it rapidly deteriorated, for his soul. There was a wall
mirror in the room where she could see herself kneeling with her mother and the
prayer group from the Church of Eternal Mercy, holding a hymn book, her mouth
open in song and prayer, the expression on her face perfectly harmonised with
that of the others in an outpouring of love, goodwill and hope. The sight
always induced a sense of surreality, as if she were a detached presence
looking upon another Maria, created for the sole purpose of making a dying man
happy. When her husband died, this false Maria would too. She felt not the
slightest twinge of guilt for the outward appearance of worshipful trust and
the inward reality of hardening disbelief and isolation that would soon make
her a shocking prodigal daughter of the church. For kindness, like a powerful
mantle, covered all sins, even those of lying and sacrilege.