Miss Seetoh in the World (47 page)

Money, money, money. Was it an even stronger
force than love? Did it create jealousies among women that were even more
corrosive than sexual jealousy? Betty told the story of a grand-uncle who put
an end to the jealousies of his three wives, not by giving them equal time on
his bed, but equal allowances from his coffers. Did men become corrupt because
money could bring them love, and not the other way around?

The principal was glad to see them. Maria
had brought a gift of fruit for him. He had lost a great deal of weight and his
hair had become thin and grey. But as soon as he talked to them about a hobby
he had just acquired, his face lit up with deep satisfaction and joy. He called
it a hobby but it was a mission of mercy, a vocation to imbue his new life with
purpose and meaning. For he was now doing charitable work in a community that
his member of parliament, a kindly person who had kept in touch with him during
the months of suspension from school, had arranged for him.

‘I visit the homes of the aged, the poor,
the destitute,’ said the principal smiling. ‘I talk to them, read to them,
bring them simple gifts of food and groceries. They show such deep
appreciation!’

There could have been the merest tinge of
disillusionment with the world of power and influence that had not shown
appreciation for the support he had given them through the years; he reminded
Maria, in a voice filled with regret, of the many times that he had got her
help for crafting papers to help the Minister of Education make decisions on a
variety of educational issues. In the depths of despair when he was first
suspended, he had written a pleading letter to the minister, but had got no
reply. She tried to remember his real name and had to ask Brother Philip on
their way back. Augustine Tan Chee Kuan. No, she would always refer to him, and
remember him, with affection, as ‘the principal’. Exactly a year later, she
would be shocked to read in the Obituary pages of The Straits Tribune that
Augustine Tan Chee Kuan, aged sixty-two, had passed away. She would have gone
to the funeral with Brother Philip except that by that time Brother had gone
back to his native Ireland, and too many distressing things were happening to
make it the darkest period of her life.

‘Brother Phil,’ she asked after waving
goodbye to the principal who had walked with them to the gate of his modest
one-storey terrace house, ‘have you ever gone through a time in your life when
you were tormented by doubts and misgivings, when you actually hated yourself a
little?’

‘I don’t know about the hate,’ he replied
smiling, ‘but yes about the doubts and misgivings. All the time.’

She needed the fresh air of the Botanic
Gardens to clear her mind and her heart. The place could not hold very happy
memories for her, with the two rings of unhappy association with her husband
lying at the bottom of its fish pond, and the wooded area deserted at night,
not far from its gates, holding the most painful recollections of her erstwhile
lover. But she continued to love the place and to be drawn to it as a living,
breathing entity that had become bound up with her very existence. She looked
at her favourite tree, a very old gnarled and fascinating structure of trunk,
branches and roots so closely, densely intertwined that you could not tell them
apart anymore. During the brief period when its pale pink flowers burst into
bloom and drifted down with the slightest touch of breeze, she liked to sit
under it and turn her face to receive the falling showers. She thought, how
nice, when I die, to have my ashes scattered among its roots and washed into
the ground by the rain.

Romantic notions always had a softening effect
on the mind and heart, no matter how burdened with pain, confusion, regret.
Everybody, when faced with pain, summoned their coping strategies, whether of
religious faith, like her mother and Meeta, or humanitarian instincts, like the
principal, of sheer serpent’s wile, like Heng, Maggie, Mark and Yen Ping.
Perhaps even V.K. Pandy’s dull-eyed despair, ending with death, was a kind of
coping mechanism.

She still had to work out hers, and right
now, as she sat under her favourite tree, she was contented with simply
enjoying the beauties of her favourite spot in Singapore. She saw a jogger
approaching her and recognised him instantly, the one who had first seen her
with her Jane Austen novel some years back. He was waving and smiling broadly,
and as she expected, immediately sat down beside her, wiping his handsome face
with the towel round his neck and peppering her with questions; how she had
been, when they had last seen each other, did she remember playing like a child
in the fountain playground. She had her own questions which she had never been
able to ask other men – her husband, her near-lover, her best friend at St
Peter’s – but which she was going to throw at him now, systematically, one by
one, in the manner of the serious investigator and inquisitor. She only needed
the opening gambit, which came very soon. As they talked about a whole range of
inconsequential things, she noted, as she had indeed expected, that he was
making a conscious effort to turn the conversation towards the subject of sex,
all the time watching her reaction. That was assuredly a man’s way of assessing
his chances with a woman pretty and friendly enough to mark out as a potential.
If she smiled, that was encouragement; if she frowned or looked down in
embarrassment, that was the end of the move which could be wrapped up and saved
for another day.

Maria smiled throughout as the jogger, by
now cool and rested, talked extensively about an encounter, not too long ago,
with an American lady jogger who happened to be jogging at the same time in the
Botanic Gardens. She was on a month-long visit to Singapore, on some assignment
from her company based in New York, and had taken a service apartment very near
the Gardens.

‘She invited me for a beer in her
apartment,’ he said casually, and added, casting a sly glance at Maria, ‘It was
the most wonderful experience – for both of us.’

Maria said, also very casually, ‘But you
told me you’re married!’

He said, ‘Aw’, dismissively, as if the
question had no relevance. But her blood was fired up. There was no stopping
her questions now.

She said, ‘You’ve got to tell me this: just
how do you reconcile these two things?’

‘What two things?’

‘The fact that you’re happily married, with
three children, and your having an affair with this woman.’

He did not like her question, but answered
it with much bravado, ‘Hey, it doesn’t mean I don’t love my wife!’ And he went
on to protest that it didn’t mean either that the lady jogger – he even
revealed her name, Bonnie – didn’t love her husband.

She had been married six years, with two
lovely kids. She had shown him their pictures, which she carried around in her
travels. The jogger added, ‘It’s just an affair, that’s all. Everybody’s in the
game,’ adding with a wink, ‘those who aren’t, can’t.’ And still she wanted to
ask him questions about men and what they wanted of women, whether they were
capable of loving more than one woman. And like the rest of men, he did not
like questions and evaded them. Soon he grew tired of the subject, turned to
her and said, ‘You’re very attractive, you know. Care to have a drink
sometime?’

She was out of the game because she could
not cope with its complexities. Right now, she was still coping with the
painful doubts and misgivings arising from those complexities. There was only
one thing to do because of its certain rehabilitative power. She would adopt
the principal’s exemplary coping strategy, which in fact dear Brother Philip
had already articulated for her: get outside yourself, get outside your skin,
get into another’s.

And the skin that needed getting into was
Meeta’s. Winnie had called to say that she was delaying her trip to Washington
to help Meeta through a crisis: the poor woman had gone into deep depression
and was in fact on medical leave at home, being attended by a younger sister
who had flown in from New Delhi. The pilgrimage to India had not been made
after all. Perhaps Meeta had never been serious about it.

A student from her class in Palm Secondary
School had one morning run into the office of the principal and said
breathlessly, ‘Please, Madam, Miss Nair has collapsed. She was teaching us when
she suddenly collapsed to the floor, and now she’s crying, pulling her hair and
beating her chest, and nobody knows what to do!’

One of the teachers who happened to meet
Winnie on one of her last-minute shopping trips relayed the bad news and Winnie
immediately called Maria.

The complete story of poor Meeta Nair’s
sudden personal tragedy took some time to assemble from a variety of sources,
mostly reliable. For while Meeta was noted for her loud voice, loquacity, sense
of fun and love of attention, she kept much of her private life hidden, even
from her close friends, carefully selecting for release only those bits that
confirmed a self-image she wanted others to share – that of a supremely
confident, contented woman at ease with the rest of the world. In particular
she wanted the world to know that when it came to men, she was as far removed
as was possible from her silly housemate Winnie and that group of nervous,
eager women in the government’s matchmaking programme who were always on
tenterhooks about whom they would be matched with. ‘I couldn’t be bothered,
it’s beneath me,’ she would declare with queenly hauteur, blissfully unaware
that at some unconscious level of body language or verbal slippage, she was
conveying exactly the opposite impression, especially during her visits to the
Polo Club where her avidly searching eyes had given her thenickname, among the
more spiteful female club members, of ‘Meeta the Manhunter’. She had amassed an
immense stock of popular gender jokes, some quite gross, which she readily
shared with girlfriends, provoking hysterical laughter.

While she had liberally divulged the secret
of her liaison with the maharajah’s cousin, (the truth of which her sister,
looking very puzzled, could not confirm) she had kept concealed a little affair
when she was eighteen (which her sister could confirm). There was a man, a
technician, shy but sincere who had courted her and applied for her hand in
marriage. Because he was a Sri Lankan, her father who was a very conservative
and authoritative figure turned him down and forbade her to see him again. He
later married someone else, and was apparently happy in his marriage and
successful in a business he had started soon after. According to Meeta’s
sister, she kept his letters and small gifts, but burnt them all when he got
married.

This sad little episode in Meeta’s life so
many years ago, which must have lain somewhere in the obscure depths of tender
memory, had suddenly surged to the surface in the most fearsome way on the day
of her nervous breakdown while conducting a lesson for her students in Palm
Secondary School. Reports from various sources had pieced together a story as
sad as any about the forsaken, mad woman in popular literature. When Meeta
finally realised the futility of pursuing Byron – he took leave from his work
and fled to a little known beach resort in Thailand for a week – she went into
a despondency that was noticed by her colleagues at Palm Secondary, and would
have been noticed by Winnie if she had been around. The maid Philomena had made
an urgent call to Winnie in her hotel to say that Ma’am Meeta would sit by
herself for hours in the dark, sometimes sobbing quietly.

Meeta agreed to take medical leave to rest
at home, but on the last morning before the one-week leave, she went into class
for the usual English language lesson with such a strange look in her eyes that
her students looked at each other uneasily (‘Like she is possessed by devil,
like in trance or something,’ said one of the students in an awe-stricken
voice).

She faced the students with her blazing eyes
and said in a voice shrill with urgent purpose, ‘Today, boys and girls, I’m
going to teach you the Conditional Mood. You know what that is? ‘If only.’ ‘If
I could –’ ‘If I hadn’t done that –’ If, if, if. The mood that tells about
wishes, hopes, dreams.’ She began to scribble sentences on the chalkboard,
reading out each word as she wrote it: ‘If only I had listened to my heart!’
‘If only I had stood my ground with Father!’ ‘I wish that I had never been born
to such a selfish, mean, heartless, domineering old bastard!’ ‘What’s wrong
with Sri Lankans? That man would have made me happy.’ ‘If I could make that
bastard Byron come crawling to me –’ She stood majestically before her students,
the bun of hair at the back of her head coming undone and falling in loose
strands upon her back, and flung out her arms in a final dramatic gesture, ‘So
now I have taught you the Conditional Mood. I hope you need never use it, boys
and girls, because it’s the saddest mood in the English language. It’s the
language of loss and missed opportunity and dreams dashed to the ground. And
you know what, boys and girls? My whole life is the Conditional Mood!’ It was
at this point that she collapsed to the floor, weeping, and her students sprang
up from their seats and rushed to her aid.

It would always be a reflection of loyal and
unstinting friendship that Winnie actually delayed her honeymoon in Europe by
some days to be with her poor housemate in the hour of need, though it did not
help that while busying herself with this or that to make Meeta comfortable,
she was sharing her new happiness in an incessant stream of chirpy talk.