Miss Seetoh in the World (26 page)

She stared, then realised, with a smile, how
unnecessary had been those wild conjectures, as soon as she saw a woman emerge
from behind the trees to say to the child, ‘Ryan, you feel okay now?’ and
adjust his shirt and pants.

She turned to have a look at the picnic
scene she had left behind and saw, as she expected, the other twin. Randal saw
them, shouted, waved, then got up from the picnic mat and came running towards
them. When the two little boys stood before her, perfectly identical from their
round heads, large eyes and stocky legs to the precise shade of green of their
shirts and socks, she burst out in delighted laughter.

She had a tremendous love for children, and
this would be one encounter she would remember with pleasure for a long while.
She would share it with her students in her creative writing class, perhaps
using the subject of identical twins to provoke any number of dramatic stories,
whether comic, tragic or purely farcical. She could see Mark and Yen Ping’s
faces lighting up with the challenge, could foresee Maggie readily responding
with a particularly salacious story of a man worn out by the demands of his
partner, unaware that he had been sleeping with her twin too.

The woman who was clearly the twins’ maid
said, ‘This happens all the time. Even their parents sometimes can’t tell them
apart.’

Randal, clearly the more talkative and
extrovert of the two said, ‘I have a mole on my neck, Ryan has a red mark on
his shoulder!’ and proceeded to show Maria the means of identification.

Her visit to the Botanic Gardens that day
was destined to be dominated by Randal; it could have been dominated by someone
who would certainly have been a much less welcome presence. She was looking up
from her book when in the distance she saw and recognised him: he was the
jogger who, some time ago, had stopped by to comment on the Jane Austen novel
she was reading, and then stayed to chat. He represented the world of men that
she wanted to have nothing to do with from now onwards.

Dr Phang had written a brief note: what was
that strange message from her brother Heng all about? Why was he told not to
come for the funeral? Would she see him as soon as she could to explain what
was happening? Brother Philip’s condolence card caused no anxiety. ‘I look
forward to your return to St Peter’s. Meanwhile, take care and keep well. My prayers
are with you.’ Kuldeep Singh, Dr Phang, Brother Philip – each, through no fault
of his own, would, for the time being, be anathema to her. They would have no
part in her thoughts, much less in her new life. Each, in due course, would
come to understand why. Meanwhile, no new man would be allowed into her world,
whether solidly mortal like the sweating jogger or ethereally distant like the
god-man Sai Baba unabashedly adored by Meeta in both her waking and sleeping
hours, whether a dull, plodding presence like Mr Chin at St Peter’s Secondary
School or that machismo-exuding guy whom Winnie continued to dream of and
consult fortune-tellers about.

She looked down again, burying her face in
her book, and when she looked up, minutes later, the jogger was gone.

A little dog managed to break free of its
leash and ran towards her, leaping up on her legs and arms in a frenzied
celebration of freedom. Its owner, a young man in his thirties, ran up,
apologised, then saw there was no need to, for she was laughing as she bent
over to have the little terrier repeatedly lick her face. Back on its leash, it
kept straining towards her, yapping loudly.

‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’ she shouted
as they left, and the owner shouted back, ‘Alex! But if you’re talking to my
dog, his name’s Laiko!’

‘Well, goodbye, sweethearts both!’ she
yelled back.

Alex returned with Laiko. They looked at
each other, each delighting in the other’s friendly wit.

He said to her with a sparkle of interest in
his handsome eyes, ‘Hey, you’re one of the happiest persons I’ve seen. Probably
the nicest too. I hope you come here regularly? Laiko and I do.’ He looked at
her closely. ‘Coffee? There’s a nice café just outside.’

The Botanic Gardens – it would always be a
place of calm and peace for her, and where there were men who took an interest
in her and began pursuing her, there could be none of that. She would not even
risk the beginning of that interest.

‘Thanks a lot; not this afternoon though.
Maybe another time.’ She was ever mindful about saving male face.

‘Another time, then,’ said Alex. ‘Bye!’

She thought, I think I’ll buy a little dog.
Her mother’s apartment that all of them would soon be moving into was far too
small for a pet; perhaps she should just continue to enjoy the delightful
antics of Meeta’s and Winnie’s dog, a playful Alsatian with the impossible name
of Singapore. They had bought it together as a puppy to be a watchdog; Meeta
was the name-giver.

‘Singapore, come here! You’re bad and you
stink!’ Meeta would say loudly, with mischievous intent to alarm her next door
neighbours, a prim and proper couple in their seventies who had, on their
sitting room wall, a framed picture of the prime minister with a map of
Singapore in the background.

Meeta said that Byron had told her she was
guilty of infringing some law akin to lese majesty and could be hauled into
court for an offence only slightly less than tearing up the Singapore flag.
Meeta said if she went to jail, she could be assured of at least one visitor.

‘Well, you can count on me,’ Byron had said.
‘No, I meant Sai Baba,’ said Meeta.

On her way out of the Gardens, she passed a
favourite spot for children, a circular paved playground with a ground fountain
at the centre, comprising thin jets of water that shot up playfully in obedient
response to the stomping feet of children, and then proceeded to chase them and
wet them like playfully writhing garden hoses held by adults. She stopped to
watch the squealing children, alternately running away from and submitting to
the jets, refusing to be led away by parents worried about wet clothes, hair
and shoes. Suddenly she felt a small hand tug hers. It was Randal and he
dragged her right into the orbit of the teasing jets.

‘Ryan’s a cry baby,’ he said disapprovingly
as Maria caught a glimpse of the other twin tearfully watching his mother
remove his wet socks. ‘See, my hair’s all wet!’ he said proudly.

‘Wait a second,’ she said and left her book
safely dry on the ground while she returned to join him in childhood’s pure,
untrammeled celebration of life.

‘Can you do this?’ asked Randal, and he
lifted his face and opened his mouth wide to receive a jet of water.

‘Of course I can,’ she said and succeeded
after the third attempt. ‘Can you do this?’ she asked, doing a little gypsy
dance to the rhythm of her clapping hands.

Randal clapped, hopped about and fell down.
She joined him on the ground, and they began to splash water on each other. She
was aware of someone standing near her and watching them. It was the jogger who
looked both amused and intrigued.

‘Is this your boy?’ he asked, and she said
instantly, ‘Yes!’ to pre-empt any interest from one whom the Botanic Gardens,
despite its vast size, seemed determined to throw in her path.

‘No!’ cried Randal. ‘She’s not my mummy. My
mummy’s there!’

It was wonderful – the sense of solitude in
the vastness of the Gardens, as dusk fell. She stood very still, relishing the
moment, the single overpowering sense of oneness with all of creation. The
grasshopper, the sparrow, the fish, the turtles, Alex and Laiko, Randal, the
bride, the jogger, the young mother conducting lessons in vocabulary and
spelling for her little son, the young lustful couple rolling down the slope –
every single one of them was responding to life’s imperative to be happy. The
great chain of happiness-seeking could be extended downwards to include the
tiniest organisms inside each of their bodies, for surely even these primordial
forms of life sought their own kind of happiness, and upwards to include the
deities of Providence residing in those huge ageless trees, for surely even
gods needed to be happy. When the Gardens closed for the evening, only the mortals
would have to leave and resume their lives in the city. Would the bridal
couple, years hence, look back with regret upon that day of joy; would the
young lustful couple soon go their separate ways, or remain together, even more
separated by those awful conflicts that invariably arose between husbands and
wives as they went through the various stages of their marriage that society
had red-flagged as mid-life crises or seven-year-itches?

‘Should I do it?’ she asked herself.

She was back at the fish pond, standing at
the water’s edge. She had in fact gone to the Gardens with that special
purpose, but had forgotten it in the midst of all the wonder and joy. She
opened her waist pouch and took out her wedding ring, a plain gold band. She
looked at it for a while, then threw it some distance from where she was
standing. It landed with a soft plop in the water, and in the next second was
lost forever, buried deep in the ooze at the bottom of the pond.

‘Maria, where’s your wedding ring?’ her
mother would ask. Or might not, given the unusual nature of all that had
happened.

If asked, she would say simply, ‘I lost it,’
and still be telling the truth. Her mother had a friend who wore her dead
husband’s wedding ring on a chain next to her heart for the twenty years before
she joined him in death; beside that devoted wife, she must stand as the
blackest-hearted widow.

‘I no longer care what people think of me,’
she thought with the old defiance.

She had noticed, some days before her
husband’s death, that he was no longer wearing the wedding band. If it had
slipped out of his skeletally thin finger, and had been found by somebody, she
was glad it had never been returned to her. Perhaps that somebody was his
devoted Third Aunt whose last words of sharp rebuke to her, after the funeral,
had been interrupted only by a bout of convulsive sobbing.

There was another ring to dispose of, that
would not be the object of any inquiry from her mother for she had never been
told about it. She took out from her waist pouch the gold ring set with the
carved jade piece, the valued memento from his dying mother that her husband
had given her that fateful evening, and for a moment wondered if she should
have returned it to his Third Aunt. But the tedium of having to explain how it
had got into her possession in the first place would have simply drained all
energy from her. She gave it a last look, then with a mighty swing of her arm,
flung it far out into the pond. Again, it fell with a soft sound before being
swallowed up by the pond waters, now dark and less friendly-looking. While all
her late husband’s effects had been left in the apartment for his Third Aunt to
dispose of as she wished, the two rings carried too much of the past not to
warrant a special kind of disposal for closure.

Also to put an end to those unpleasant
dreams in which her husband, either alive or dead, or both, as in the odd way
of dreams, stood before her as accuser and judge. Lying at the bottom of the
pond, the rings would, over the years, be ignored by generations of fish and
turtles and ducks that in any case would be too well fed by children coming
daily with their parents and maids to enjoy the peaceful loveliness of this
most precious spot in Singapore.

It was the object of the society’s greatest
fear, and the schools were its permanent abode from which, like the legendary
ogre that terrified a whole village until it was slain, it had dominated the
lives of Singaporeans for as long as they could remember. The G.C.E. O Level
examinations, which nobody would dare attempt to slay, loomed over the entire
national landscape. So deeply had the fear of not passing them been ingrained
in students that a whole sub-culture, fuelled largely by parental concerns, had
grown around it, from a flourishing industry centred on the provision of
private tuition and exam study aids to a prevailing mindset that a person’s
potential or actual worth, whether in his career or personal life, could be
gauged by the number of distinctions or credits scored in the examinations.

The gauge could be said to apply to the next
world as well, for it was reported that in the funerary ghost-paper house for a
certain deceased Singaporean male, there was, in addition to the usual
appurtenances of furniture, car, kitchen utensils, maidservants, a computer, TV
and CD player, a ghost-paper G.C.E. O Level certificate replete with
distinctions and credits.

Teachers in the schools were acquainted,
first-hand, with the parental anxiety as soon as the results of the school
preliminary exams were announced, for these were supposed to predict the
results of the all-important nation-wide G.C.E., to follow in a matter of
months. Some mothers came crying, some came with bribes cleverly disguised as
donations to a school fund or charity, all pleaded with principals and teachers
to ensure good results, with the stark reminder that their children’s entire
future depended on it. The young Singaporean couple’s life was regulated by the
educational needs of their children, from getting them into the best
kindergarten, the best primary school, the best secondary school, and seeing
that they passed an array of school and national examinations, right from the
first year, through the third and sixth years, culminating in the fearful
G.C.E.