Miss Seetoh in the World (51 page)

Outside, at the gates of the school, she did
not turn back to have a look, nor wipe the tears from her face. They were not
for poor Mark or Yen Ping, but for herself, for she had failed them, as she had
failed Maggie. As soon as she reached home, she would consign that plaque of
merit, awarded to her on Teachers’ Day, to the dustheap of memory’s shame.

Maggie was among the visitors at Yen Ping’s
wake, held on the ground level of the housing estate where the dead girl had
lived with her family in a three-room flat on the sixth floor. From where she
stood at the far end of the area used for the wake, Maria saw Maggie go up to
Yen Ping’s mother who was receiving visitors and weeping noisily, and give her
a white envelope containing the condolence money. Among the appropriate blacks,
blues and greys of mourning, Maggie’s light purple blouse and dark purple pants,
together with her vivid make-up and abundance of curls cascading down her back,
stood out and invited curious side glances.

Maria thought, ‘How magnanimous of her,’
remembering her open hostility to Yen Ping during the creative writing classes,
and the occasion when she had viciously spat at the girl as they met along a
corridor. ‘I’ve got to talk to her,’ she thought.

But Maggie was gone in a flash. She had seen
Maria approaching, smiled to herself, then broke into a run, in her high heels,
to a red car parked in the large carpark of the housing estate. There was a man
wearing dark sunglasses waiting at the wheel, and as soon as Maggie got in,
they drove off.

‘That’s Maggie all over,’ sighed Maria. ‘She
would have wanted me to run after her, calling her name.’

It was a staged magnanimity; the girl must
been waiting for her arrival to bear witness to the deed before doing one of
her tantalising disappearing acts.

She saw a large number of Yen Ping’s
classmates, dressed in their school uniforms, and some of her teachers,
including Mrs Neo and Teresa Pang. They all went up, one by one, to Yen Ping’s
mother to offer their condolences in low voices, while she wept, shook their
hand and drummed her fists on her chest, as if a lesser demonstration would have
been inadequate to tell the gods up there how unkind they had been to her who
had served them so well. Yen Ping’s father had taken the news so badly that he
had collapsed repeatedly and had to be sedated. Yen Ping’s brother and three
sisters, all dressed in white T-shirts and black pants, moved quietly among the
visitors, offering drinks in small packets with drinking straws. In a corner
talking quietly to each other were the old and new principals of St Peter’s.
Maria walked up to them, mainly to talk to the old principal who looked thinner
and greyer; she was tempted to snub Mr Ignatius Lim by disregarding his
presence, but relented when he initiated friendly overtures and said, sincerely
enough, that the whole school was going to miss her.

There had been talk that Yen Ping and Mark
had requested, in a note found on the floor from which they had jumped, to be
cremated and for their ashes to be mixed together and scattered in the sea. In
Maria’s mind flashed a picture of the young pair, their heads almost touching
as they discussed this last request for the perfect union, perhaps even quietly
arguing about whether their final resting place should be the sea or simply a
quiet niche in a columbarium bearing inscriptions of their favourite nicknames
for each other. Yen Ping was a Taoist, Mark a Christian; their eternal resting
place, as decided by their romantic imagination, was a universal nameless one,
existing for all time, everywhere and nowhere, a distant shore, a land of
gentle mists where love reigned supreme. In an illustration for one of her
poems, Yen Ping, who showed artistic talent as well, had done a water colour
illustration, in soft pastel shades, of the paradise which lovers had been
denied on earth.

It seemed that when Mrs Gloria Wong learnt of
the young couple’s wish, she went into another bout of hysterics and could only
scream, ‘Never, never, never!’ For the rest of her life, she would put the
blame for the tragedy entirely on the girl – she could not even bear to
pronounce her name, referring to her only as ‘that girl’ and her parents as
‘those hawkers’ – and by extension, on her school. Mrs Wong habitually
expressed regret in the theatrics of cursing: I curse the day I sent my son to
St Peter’s Secondary School, I curse myself for donating so much to their
school building fund. There was talk that she was planning to sue St Peter’s
Secondary School for millions of dollars for her suffering.

The young couple’s note had said, ‘Please
grant us our last wish. It is to be one, in our bodily remains, as we have been
one in spirit.’ They had been as close to being one in body as their sense of
morality would allow, stamping an invisible ownership sign on their seats in
the back row of the creative writing class, tying an invisible scarf of exclusiveness
on their wrists that carved out their own space in the school, which was always
carefully avoided by the other students.

Despite their plea, their bodies lay in
separate places of repose, in different parts of the city, subjected to the
different rituals demanded by their respective faiths. Maria who wished so much
to have been allowed to pay Mark a last visit, pictured his body lying in one
of the funeral parlours of Peace Casket, Singapore’s most established funeral
company, surrounded by white lilies and candles, a large, flower-bedecked cross
at the head of his coffin, and his photograph, in a large frame of white and
yellow chrysanthemums, at the foot. A priest was in attendance saying prayers
from a book, joined by a group of visitors sitting in white plastic chairs
arranged neatly in rows. Mrs Gloria Wong was a woman of strong determination
and would have come out of her fainting fits to receive guests, make sure
everything was in order, and sob out her story.

Contrasted with the organised neatness of
Mark’s wake in a funeral parlour was the disorderliness of Yen Ping’s in the
open space of a housing estate, where unruly children from the nearby flats
could be seen running around and occasionally stopping to watch the visitors
coming in, the bereaved family members speaking in low voices to each other, a
monk in a bright saffron robe chanting prayers with a bell in a haze of incense
smoke. Yen Ping’s photograph, showing a pretty smiling girl, was framed with
multi-coloured flowers; it was set upon a large table, covered with a red silk
embroidered tablecloth, holding small golden statuettes and effigies of temple
deities, urns of joss-sticks, as well as food offerings of oranges, biscuits,
noodles, peanuts and cups of tea.

The girl looked peaceful, her hair combed
back, her face lightly made up. There was a gash on her forehead that defied
the brave efforts of the mortician, and showed up distinctly under the make-up.
She was dressed in her school uniform and covered up to the shoulders by a pale
blue cotton sheet, as if her arms and legs were too badly smashed for public
viewing. Where was the silver locket containing that promise written in blood?

Maria had to ask one of her sisters. The
girl whose name was Yen Ling shook her head. Nobody knew about that locket;
perhaps it had been flung out during the fall and was now lying in a drain or a
clump of grass, irrecoverably lost. Yen Ling said that she would make a search
for it as soon as she could. Maria had a sudden thought which produced a little
tremor: it would not have been beyond the romantic intensity of the pair to
decide for each to swallow the other’s small scrolled promise before the
plunge. She had an image of them facing each other, of Yen Ping counting to
three to ensure a perfect simultaneity for the acts of loving ingestion. Then
there was the counting again, one, two, three, perhaps by Mark, for the leap
over the balcony wall of the twelfth floor of the building.

A white pearl had been placed in Yen Ping’s
mouth, partly showing on her underlip; it had to do with some tradition about
lighting the way for the dead one in the journey to the beyond. In one of the
stories that Maria had read to her class, a woman had died and was making this
journey, a very long one through heat and dust, when she finally reached the
gates of the abode for the dead. But the gatekeeper there stopped her, saying,
‘Open your mouth.’ She did not have the requisite pearl, claiming that her
family had forgotten about it. ‘But see, I have still managed to arrive!’ she
argued. ‘No, you can’t enter,’ said the gatekeeper firmly. The woman wept and
said, ‘I can’t go back. Nobody wants me. I died in the first place because
nobody wanted me.’ ‘Then,’ said the gatekeeper, ‘you will be condemned to
wander the face of the earth for one hundred years.’ Yen Ping’s mother would
make every provision to ensure that her beloved daughter would never be an
aimless wandering spirit.

What was the beyond for this pair of young
lovers? Maria had exactly the same thought as when she was looking upon the
body of her dead husband in his coffin: could Mark and Yen Ping, now pure
spirits, be hovering about somewhere, looking upon their own dead bodies, their
grieving parents, the quietly composed visitors, the instruments of bell and
book calling upon the bereaved to pray for the departed souls, and seeing
everything, at last, with the eyes of truth? What was their truth like?

‘Miss Seetoh, my mother wants to speak to
you,’ said Yen Ling. The woman, haggard from lack of sleep, dressed in a light
blue blouse and grey pants, came up to Maria and clasped her hands. She spoke
in a dialect that Maria could not understand, and Yen Ling did the translation.
‘Tell Miss Seetoh that Yen Ping often spoke about her with great affection. She
was Yen Ping’s favourite teacher.’ And it was at this point that the tears that
had been held back with difficulty burst forth. Maria could not stop her sobs.
Yen Ping’s mother put a soothing hand on her arm. ‘It’s alright,’ said the
brave woman. ‘Yen Ping will have her wish, and you will be a witness.We will
call you when we’re ready.’ She got her daughter to take down Maria’s phone
number.

Yen Ling called exactly a fortnight after
the funeral to give news of an event that had brought some cheer to her
parents. Yen Ping had come back, as invited, which meant that her spirit was
still in loving contact with her family.

‘How do you know?’ said Maria who had taken
a liking to this sister, two years younger, and very bright, mature and
confident.

There were all the signs, said Yen Ling. The
room that she had shared with her three sisters had been vacated by all of them
to prepare for her return – the bed had been properly made, the blanket placed
neatly on the bedsheet, the pillow, with a new white pillow case, well fluffed
up. Beside the bed on the table, was a glass of tea. Then the windows and the
door of the room were locked. In the middle of the night, the family heard the
faint howl of a dog, a sign that it had sighted a spirit not visible to human
eyes, and in the morning, they opened the bedroom door and saw that the bed had
been slept in – the sheet and blanket were slightly displaced and crumpled, and
there was a distinct hollow in the pillow where the head must have been. But
the most persuasive sign from Yen Ping was related to the glass of tea – the
level of the tea was clearly much lower.

Yen Ling said, ‘We were all happy to see
that her spirit had come back on the fourteenth day.’

Maria asked, ‘Will you be inviting her
spirit to come back again?’ and Yen Ling said, ‘Oh no, my mother wants to make
sure she won’t. She’s already making preparations for that. You will be invited
as a witness to the ceremony, as you were my sister’s favourite teacher.’

Rosiah the maid insisted on paying Por Por a
visit in the Sunshine Home before she left for home to get married.

‘Tell me about the man you’re marrying,’
said Maria pointedly.

She did not want to associate the maid,
after years of faithful service, with a lie both unnecessary and
uncharacteristic of the simple village girl from Indonesia who had served the
family loyally for years. She said, ‘Rosiah, you’re not telling me the truth.
You’re not getting married at all.’

Rosiah said awkwardly, not looking at her,
that it was not herself who was getting married, but her sister: Ma’am must
have heard wrongly.

‘But all your sisters are married; you’d
already told us that.’

Rosiah needed to be rescued from the lie
that she was floundering deeper into.

‘It’s alright, Rosiah. You can’t manage Por
Por anymore. No one can manage Por Por anymore; that’s why I’ve put her in a home.’

Greatly relieved, Rosiah had more stories to
tell of how difficult the old woman had become in the past six months – she
soiled herself, refused to get out of her soiled clothes, threw food into
Rosiah’s face and on several occasions threatened to kill her with a knife, a
pair of scissors, a long bamboo pole. And she screamed curses at her in an
unintelligible dialect, but which Rosiah knew to be filled with the worst
obscenities. Dear gentle Por Por – what demons of frustration and resentment
had been lying dormant inside her confused mind and heart all these years, to
break out with such savagery?

Maria had said to Rosiah, ‘I wish you could
continue to work for me, but I can’t afford you now.’

The loyal girl had said, ‘Oh Ma’am, you can
cut my pay, I don’t mind,’ and it was at that point that Maria started crying
again. The tears flowed readily those days, a time when she would remember as
the darkest in her life.