Miss Seetoh in the World (44 page)

There were envelopes with cards inside,
lying among the flowers, with the name of V.K. Pandy written on some of them,
mostly in the awkward block letters of a childish or an unsure hand. What did
they say? What messages did Singaporeans have for the poor dead opposition
member? They could only be words of praise, condolence, consolation, respect,
compassion, but most of all, praise. The sheer temerity was staggering. Were
not the writers afraid that the anonymity of the messages was no protection
against the cards being traced to them and used against them at a later date,
when it came to getting a job, getting a promotion, getting a study grant, a
business licence?

If there were the dreaded surveillance
cameras around, for one single moment in the life of the society, Singaporeans
dismissed them and said, We are not afraid. Let us do what ought to be done.
For one single moment in the life of a society, a bond of fellow-feeling united
Singaporeans, more powerfully than the camaraderie of cheering for the national
team in the football stadium, even than of standing together, hand on heart, to
sing the national anthem on National Day, because it was unrehearsed and came
from the depths of a consciousness too difficult to articulate except through
the public act of simple, silent tribute.

It was weird, this spontaneous coming
together of Singaporeans who otherwise lived their separate lives and went
their separate ways, as if their common purpose had taken a life of its own,
moving to its own momentum, growing, swelling, like a huge organism sometimes
seen creeping along on forest floors, far bigger than the sum of the millions
of tiny creatures that were its component parts which now had no choice but to
act in accordance with its will. Nothing of the kind had ever been seen in
Singapore.

Maria thought, I have to be part of it,
before it disappears. Such an organism had but a short life cycle; soon it
would reach its peak, then rapidly decline and vanish into its myriad component
parts, each once again helpless on its own. Soon Singaporeans would go their
separate ways again and forget they had ever come together that astonishing day
to pay their respects to the most denigrated man in their midst.

Remembering a small florist shop behind
Middleton Square, Maria dashed to it and was told by the owner that all her
flowers had been sold; she had never had such good business. She had some
artificial sunflowers, though, that looked like the real thing. ‘Quick, give
them to me,’ cried Maria and was back in Middleton Square in an instant. She
scribbled a short message, ‘Dear V.K. Pandy, I do miss you. Maria’, and laid it
on the artificial sunflowers.

She could not bear to tear herself away from
the strange sight, her eyes roaming from the immense carpet of bright blooms to
the sombre faces around. She saw a few balloons floating among the flowers and
a small teddy bear, as if something connoting joy and celebration and innocence
were needed as a counterweight to the sadness of the occasion. Then something
caught her eye. It was a blue folder of cuttings of newspaper reports of V.K.
Pandy over the years, opened at precisely the page to show him at his moment of
greatest triumph, years back, when he unseated a member of the great TPK’s
party at the general elections; he had a stack of garlands around his neck that
came right up to his ears and was waving jubilantly from his perch on the
shoulders of cheering supporters with their fists raised in the air. Who was
that follower who had loyally kept a record of the vicissitudes of the man’s
long political career before he returned to die in his ancestral country? Could
he have been Big Bird whose loyalty had taken a big risk that day?

A large greyish bird circled overhead, its
squawks being the only sound heard in the whole square. Some from the crowd
looked up; already in their minds a story was shaping about V.K. Pandy’s spirit
in the form of a bird, returning to see how Singaporeans were reacting to his
death. The story would accrete absurd details as it was passed on: the bird
circled a number of times over the crowds; it was an owl and it alighted on one
of the bouquets; it was a strange-looking bird that nobody had ever seen before
and it alighted on precisely the newspaper cutting showing V.K. Pandy’s moment
of triumph, staying for a few seconds before flying off again.

A group of tourists in shorts, T-shirts and
hats stopped to watch. Curious to know what was happening, they got only
apologetic smiles from the locals who moved away. There was enough danger for
the day; nobody wanted to take the additional risk of providing information
about the political opponent to foreign journalists, especially one from the
blacklisted International Courier, even if anonymity was guaranteed. A man in
his forties whispered something very quickly to a young woman who was
scribbling in a reporter’s pad, mouthing an urgent condition: ‘Don’t quote me.’

Maria was sure that a face looking out of a
parked car some distance away was that of Dr Phang, but when she moved to have
a closer look, the face turned and the car moved off. Was the man there in the
capacity of a government spy, since he was a senior officer in the Ministry of
Defence? What manner of man was he that while one part was claimed by loyal
service to the great TPK, which included the maligning of the great one’s
adversaries, another part rebelled against the subjection to the point of
making secret donations to the arch enemy? She was almost certain that it was
through his intervention that the Big Bird incident had not resulted in more
fines for V.K. Pandy and his supporters. And what manner of woman was she that
while she was now paying tribute to V.K. Pandy, she had actually helped her
husband in the crafting of his vicious letters against the poor man to The
Singapore Tribune? She remembered the rare occasions when she and Bernard had
laughed and joked with each other over the letters. Like everyone else, she had
been complicit in the tragedy of V.K. Pandy.

She suddenly had the idea to write a letter
begging his forgiveness, undeterred by the sheer futility of opening up one’s
heart to the dead, as she had done once, when she wrote a long letter to
Bernard and placed it inside his coffin. Letters to the dead were free of all
falsehood, and were useful to the living in bringing relief to an over-charged
heart. She would tell him she was so sorry for providing her husband with all
those scathing epithets that must have been so hurtful, and would he forgive
her?

Very early the next morning, when she went
to Middleton Square to lay her letter among the flowers, she found that
everything was gone. Overnight, the square had been cleared, and all that
remained was a faint scattering of remnants of leaves, ferns and flower petals.
She wondered about the fate, in particular, of that file of newspaper cuttings:
by now the efficient machinery of surveillance and control would have traced
the owner. She looked up, and saw one of the balloons with its long string
entangled on a TV aerial sticking out of a building. Then she looked down again
and caught sight of a burnt-out stub of a red candle on the ground, half hidden
under a scrap of newspaper. Had someone been praying to V.K. Pandy? Obviously,
an inveterate Singaporean punter ever on the lookout for the lingering presence
of the dead, whether in accident sites or funeral parlours, since they were the
most reliable source of winning lottery numbers, had made an unobtrusive
appearance in Middleton Square.

Winnie’s wedding was the only bright spot in
a vast desolation of broken, bleeding hearts.

Having made up her mind never to see Dr
Phang again, Maria yet waited eagerly for his call for their next meeting.
Women were ever Marys who were quite contrary, running away from men, running
to them. The last meeting would have to have something of closure and finality
about it. She was determined for it to be in the public setting of the Bon
Vivant Café or a restaurant, not the dark isolated area of parked cars outside
the Botanic Gardens, where, under the combined influence of a beguiling
ambience and the man’s unfailing charm, she might succumb once more and agree
to a love tryst in a hotel room. Their last meeting, after which they would
never see each other again, should leave her pride intact, her good spirits
restored, her peace of mind assured. Above all, the honesty she never wanted to
lose in herself because she valued it so much in others should remain
protected. She had been carried away by whatever romantic follies that
sometimes overpowered common sense and decency in even the most sensible woman,
but had been saved in time, ironically, by that most toxic of all human
emotions: jealousy. One day, she thought, she might even say to the fearsome
monster acknowledged in song and literature, thank you, you saved me. Right
now, she could only cry out, enough, enough of the pain and anger.

Rehearsed speeches,in her experience with
Bernard, had been a dismal failure, but she felt they would succeed with the
amiable Dr Phang who would listen without the slightest frown on his handsome,
open face. She had actually written down the last speech for the last meeting
to make sure she got her message across clearly, firmly, truthfully. Until she
did that, the waiting would be unbearable, requiring enormous effort to hide
her nervous tension while standing in front of her class and teaching them the
strategies of avoiding the most common grammar mistakes in the exams.

‘Yen Ping, you’re crying. What’s the
matter?’ she asked as the girl struggled to hold back her tears. They were
sitting at a table in a quiet corner of the canteen where they were not likely
to be heard. Mark’s mother was abroad on one of her business trips, and she had
got her younger sister to stay in the house for the entire duration of the trip
to keep an eye on Mark. The sister who took her responsibility very seriously
sometimes accompanied him to and from school in the chauffeured car. She had on
one occasion done a secret search of Mark’s room, and discovered some of the
poems that Yen Ping had written to him and also a small teddy bear with their
initials sewn into its collar.

‘Miss Seetoh, I don’t know how long we can
go on like this,’ said Yen Ping tearfully. She revealed that they had only
managed to meet once that week, and only for a few brief minutes, and he had
managed to speak to her twice on the phone, also for only a very brief while.
They had devised a system of codes for their phone contact. She said, ‘Miss
Seetoh, next week on Friday, Mark’s auntie won’t be able to accompany him to
his maths tutor’s house; can we meet at your place on his way back?’

The young couple had apparently managed to
work out some plan by which the chauffeur would be told that Mark would have to
consult Miss Seetoh for half an hour on an important school project, during
which time the man would be sent on an errand to town that would take a
convenient forty minutes.

Maria said, ‘You know, Yen Ping, I don’t
feel comfortable about all this deceit. I suppose your parents don’t know
either?’

The girl had already told her parents she
had broken up with Mark.

The enormity of their love carved out its
own path of explanation and justification; if they told lies, those lies could
only be the whitest of white, reflecting the purity of their purpose.

‘Yen Ping, let me ask you this,’ said Maria
hesitantly. ‘Do you and Mark feel uncomfortable about all these lies, I mean, I
can’t imagine either of you deceiving others like this?’

Apparently the pair, still looking like lost
babes in the woods, had thought out every move to thwart parental suspicion.
Without their being aware of it, they were following to perfection the wise
biblical advice to be both dove and serpent. The time of dove was over, and
serpent had to take charge to survive the pitilessness of parents.

Yen Ping said, her lips trembling, ‘Oh Miss
Seetoh, I don’t know what we can do without you.’

‘Yen Ping,’ said Maria looking at her with
frowning seriousness, ‘I hope you and Mark won’t do anything stupid – you know
what I mean?’

There had been a dream in which Yen Ping’s
mother dragged her by the arm to the kitchen, to watch the girl, pale and
crying, bent over the sink, retching dreadfully. ‘See!’ screamed the woman. ‘My
daughter’s pregnant, and it’s all your fault. You let them use your bedroom for
their secret meetings. You, their teacher! Shame on you!’

Yen Ping tried to hide her shock at Miss
Seetoh’s unseemly suggestion. ‘We promised ourselves that we would remain pure
for each other till our marriage, Miss Seetoh.’ Neither Mark’s Christianity nor
her Taoism made any such demand, she explained, but their special love did.
‘I’m going to tell you something we’ve never told anybody,’ she said, her eyes
shining through her tears. ‘We made our promise in blood.’

They had made small incisions in their
wrists, mixed their drops of blood and written their initials with it. ‘We each
have a copy of the promise,’ she said, ‘and I keep it close to my heart. See?’
She pulled out a small silver locket from under her shirt, and opened it to
reveal a roll of paper inside. Young love was transcendental, awe-inspiring.

Beside its pure sheen, Meeta’s and Byron’s
affair was all dross. Since the evening of the Polo Club ball, they had been
dating, mainly on Meeta’s initiative. As he grew more anxious to get out of
what was an increasingly tedious affair, she grew more demanding, assuming the
rights of the officially acknowledged partner who in the past would have been
able to sue for breach of promise and compel the man to marry her.