Miss Seetoh in the World (25 page)

She managed to retrieve the letter from the
coffin and return it to its place beside the dead man after adding a
post-script:

‘Dear Bernard, thank you for not letting me
have the property, since to benefit in any way from your tragic death would
have brought guilt to my new life. Guilt there will be, in proportion to the
happiness and freedom I know I will be enjoying, but it should be just that
much and no more. Besides, I couldn’t bear to continue to live in a place that
holds such sad memories. As for the remembrance notices over the next ten
years, they will be just ten years’ worth of falsehood in which, thankfully, I
have had no part. You have upset me so much, Bernard, that you will allow me my
own kind of revenge, though I wouldn’t use that word. From now onwards I will
not want to be known as Mrs Tan Boon Siong.’

What a lovely sight, she thought, my eyes
could feast on it forever. From her bench in the shade of a tree, one of those
lovely ones in the Botanic Gardens that not only provided shade but a
delightful, soothing scent from its clusters of tiny white flowers amid a riot
of the greenest of green leaves, she watched the children by the fish pond,
absorbed in the various delights provided by a large body of water teeming with
hungry fish unafraid to swim right up to the edge, right up to their small
fingers holding out bread crumbs, their little outstretched bodies held tightly
by smiling parents. A young woman wheeling a pram stopped close by the water’s
edge to allow the infant who had just awakened from his nap, to look upon the
lively scene, which he did with gurgling interest.

A little girl who was clutching a plastic
bag of biscuit crumbs was squealing with delight for having spotted a turtle
among the fish; a little boy of about four with a thin serious face was giving
the correct answers to an over-earnest mother turning the entire Botanic
Gardens into a classroom: ‘What is that, Kevin?

‘A fish.’

‘What’s that, out there, look!’

‘A duck.’

‘Spell ‘duck’.

‘D-U-C-K.’

‘Look up there, on the tree branch. What’s
that?’

‘Butterfly.’

‘Butterflies. So many of them. Clever boy!’

A sparrow hopped very close to her feet,
pecking at something on the ground. Another joined it, then a third. She
watched them with interest, wondering at their very thin legs and tiny feet,
like matchsticks that would never snap, but could be depended on to carry them
through any harshness of weather in their briefly appointed existence on the
earth. The lovely, slender may-fly with its beautiful transparent wings lived
exactly twenty-four hours, during which it was born, matured, mated, gave birth
and died. How long did a sparrow live? There must be something special about
these birds to be singled out for mention in the divine lecture admonishing
those who worried unnecessarily: Divine Providence took care of all living
things, including these humblest of birds, for not a single one of them fell to
its death without divine knowledge.

Here in the Botanic Gardens, Providence had
appointed little children, with their generous bags of crumbs, to be its
assistants to make sure its precious sparrows never fell dead from starvation.
‘Providence’, like ‘God’, capitalised, but with the relative pronoun ‘it’ in
lower case, unlike the towering male supremacy of ‘His’. Ever since she stopped
going to church, she had been content to think in terms of abstract nouns – Providence,
Power, Force, Energy, Source, Being, indeed, anything, as long as it was vague
enough for that unknown entity out there, or in here, that was nowhere and
everywhere. She did not want it to have a gender, an ethnicity, a home country,
a face, a voice, a personality, for that had caused all the trouble in the
world. Someone had once said that those who abandoned God were left with a
God-shaped hole that nothing could fill. Hers was being richly filled with all
manner of things that did not even have names.

She made a slight movement with her feet,
but the birds went on pecking, unperturbed. There were now four of them, and
she wondered whether they were a family, the two smaller-sized ones being
nestlings taken out for their first lesson in independent foraging. Her eyes
caught sight, a short distance away, of a group of three sparrows furiously
tearing away at something on the ground that looked like a dead lizard. She
looked closer: oh no, it was a dead bird. One of the sparrows was ferociously pulling
out, through a mess of feathers, an intestine that looked like a very long
worm. Those divinely favoured creatures were cannibalising their own. She moved
to another bench, determined to see nature only at her benign best, not
savagely red in tooth and claw.

A skinny brown squirrel appeared from
somewhere, scurried to a spot under her bench and made off with something,
probably a nut, or a bit of a child’s biscuit. She looked up into the sky and
saw a huge flock of white birds, their bodies moving in perfect group
synchronisation like a single playful organism that changed rapidly from one
shape into another, now stretched out into a row of pennants streaming in the
wind, like the beard of an awesome warrior god riding out to battle, now
gathered into itself to look like the round-headed friendly ghost with a tail,
seen in comic books. That too dissolved, in a matter of seconds, to form –
surely it was her vanity that was distorting her vision! – the letter M. Her
name writ large in the sky, if only for one fleeting second.

It had been her vanity, right from
childhood, to believe that when she cried, nature shed tears too, sending down,
if not a torrent, at least a tiny drizzle. A fallacy by no means pathetic, it
had become part of a dependable comfort kit in her long hours of solitude.
Rain, sun, sky, cloud, grass, the birds of the air and the lilies in the field
– she had co-opted them all for her own safe, happy world. Stare hard enough at
the clouds, she was told as a child, and they will form any picture you like.
She only looked out for letter formations of her name; if there were none, she
created them, needing only small lengths of white cloud to work with, like
pliable plasticine, to shape into any letter of her full name. ‘Look!’ she
would tell her mother or Por Por. ‘That’s my name in the sky!’

As a child, she had had her birthday
celebrated only once. Her mother had bought a cake and iced her name on it. She
was so thrilled she could not bear the cake knife to break up the five pink
letters arranged in a rainbow curve. In the end her mother sliced off the whole
top portion of the cake for her, to keep the name intact. She wondered how she
could bear to spoon up her name and eat it. Could she keep them in a box
forever?

‘Don’t be silly,’ said her mother laughing.

Then her brother Heng stole up from behind
her with a large tin spoon and plunged it right into the middle of her name.
She screamed. Her mother did nothing to punish the culprit; Anna Seetoh’s
constant anxiety about what people would think of her had invested the adopted
child’s position with special privileges. Heng always got away with the
naughtiness and later, the viciousness of boyhood pranks, laughing to see all
the scolding, pinching and slapping directed elsewhere. When he made further
devastation of her name on the cake, she rose in full fury. While she had
submitted to his hair-pulling and arm-smacking, his raiding of her small store
of coloured pencils and coins in her coconut-shell money-box, she could not let
him get away with the mutilation of her name. She chased him with such fury
that he ran away in fright; when she caught him, she smashed a surprisingly
strong fist into his face. He ran howling to Anna Seetoh who subsequently
calmed him down with a fistful of coins.

From that day on, he never bullied her
again. Her mother would never tell her why she had adopted him, why he had had
very little share in the family’s privations as they moved from place to place
to escape the loan sharks, but stayed comfortably with his biological mother
whom he called ‘Auntie’. Years later, when she reminded him of the incident of
the cake, he feigned a forgetfulness not consistent with the bribe of money.

She looked at the giant gnarled trees
towering skywards, that had existed in brooding silence for hundreds of years
before they became part of a garden constructed for the pleasure of a tired
city; in them surely resided a pantheon of deities that had never left their
abodes in nature for the man-made churches, temples and shrines of the city.
Here in this loveliest, most peaceful spot in her world, the feathered, furred
and finned denizens of nature came up, unafraid, to be fed and stroked by
children.

She got up from the bench and walked to a
nearby gentle slope where she lay on the grass, stretching out her arms and
legs to luxuriate fully in its warmth and scent, a solitary mortal on the face
of the earth, at one with all the life nourished by it and nourishing it,
animal, vegetable, human, divine, and who knows, also the tiniest of tiny
specks of life in a universe so vast that Earth would have perished and
returned to primordial dust by the time it was visited by a sister planet
separated by breathlessly unimaginable light years. A small grasshopper flew
into her hair and got entangled in the long strands spread out on the grass.
The more it struggled to escape, the more deadly became the trap; she sat up
and carefully freed it, hair by hair.

‘Foolish thing!’ she laughed, and cast it
back into the air.

A wedding group was busily posing for
pictures under a large tree. The bride’s long white dress with a full skirt and
her long veil of net, held by a diamante tiara, were being carefully arranged
for the camera by her two bridesmaids, both dressed in pale pink. The bride
carried a bouquet of yellow and white orchids, smiling gamely in the heat under
her thick make-up that was being constantly repaired by a powder puff held by a
middle-aged woman in a cheongsam, whose own make-up looked very much in need of
repair. The bridegroom in a smart grey suit and red tie was smiling broadly
throughout, and readily acceded to a demand yelled out by one of the watching
guests, ‘Kiss, kiss!’ for the last of three different bridal poses for the
cameraman; to loud applause, he clumsily turned his bride around, pushed aside
her veil, and planted a quick kiss on her lips.

Giddy with happiness and new mischief as she
sat on her bench watching them, she could have cupped her hand and shouted out
to the newly married pair, ‘Hey, I offer my condolences!’

If they had shouted back angrily, ‘You, sour
grapes, you!’, she would have joyfully told them her story, like the man in the
myth who, when he was forbidden to tell his secret, ran out to a field of corn
and whispered it to them, thereafter investing them with ears.

The Botanic Gardens was clearly an even more
popular place for trysting couples who might or might not end up marrying; on
her way to the fish pond, she had passed several of them in secluded spots in
the various poses of happy love, from the shy tentativeness of hand-holding to
the aggressive demonstrations of full-blown passion checked only by the law’s
prohibition against public disrobing. One very young-looking couple, probably
students, had dispensed altogether with discretion; they were nestled, fully
clothed, against each other on the top of a grassy slope, and then, locked
tightly together, rolled down the slope, laughing all the way.

Oh, how happy I am, she thought, and
realised she had not used that word in the present tense for a long while. I
was happy. I will be happy. She wanted to summon the entire romancing, loving,
lusting, marrying population of the Botanic Gardens to come before her for a
lecture: Are you sure it’s love? Otherwise, don’t! For goodness’ sake, don’t!

The book on her lap lay unread; she was
content to watch the people around her, their faces temporarily cleared of all
the stresses of negotiating life one day at a time in a city increasingly
stressful, as they took in long draughts of the invigorating air and broke into
smiles at the antics of the little ones around them, wrestling with each other
on the grass, rummaging picnic baskets, running after their hoops and balls.

A little boy of about three stopped before
her, uncertain about how to rescue his bright red ball that had rolled under
her bench. He stood before her, a forefinger inside his mouth, looking intently
at her. She bent to retrieve the ball, then smilingly handed it to him.

It must have been her bright, encouraging
smile that inspired the little fellow to launch upon his own initiative of
friendly self-introduction.

‘My name’s Randal,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a
blue boat. And Spiderman.’

She was delighted. ‘My name’s Maria,’ she
said. ‘I don’t have a boat or Spiderman, but lots of books. You like books,
Randal?’

But Randal’s interest had taken a different
turn. He took her hand and led her up a grassy slope, to where a woman was
sitting on a bright mat surrounded by an assortment of picnic cups, plates and
boxes.

‘Oh there you are, Randal,’ she said. To
Maria, she said smiling, ‘I hope my boy hasn’t been bothering you?’ It was part
of the continuing delight of the encounter that she accepted the invitation
from the friendly woman to sit down for a sandwich and a drink of juice.

The delight climaxed in the most unexpected
way. As she was walking back to her bench, she saw, some distance ahead, Randal
emerging from behind a clump of trees. Surely that was not possible! A little
boy with the supernatural power of bilocation, who could simply appear and
disappear at different spots as he chose? A child’s ghost, or more accurately,
a doppelganger, in a popular recreational spot even before daylight had gone?
She had heard tales of the ghosts of Japanese soldiers seen wandering in the
gardens, more than half a century after the war, recognisable by their distinct
uniforms and caps.