Miss Seetoh in the World (55 page)

But there was no choice.

Maria had always believed that when she
looked back upon her life, in some distant time in the future, and picked out
the happiest moment, it would have everything to do with her passion for
writing, little to do with men, and still less to do with money.

The anxieties regarding her insecure
financial position were increasing by the day, threatening an onslaught of
those headaches once brought on by other matters. ‘Oh dear,’ she thought,
looking at the intimidating bills that came in for water, electricity,
servicing of the one air-conditioner she allowed herself in the apartment,
replacement of some window panes that had cracked, and a new sofa to replace a
very old one.

There was an official letter that puzzled
her, and when she understood what it was all about, she yelped for joy, and
said, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God,’ for not only would all her money problems be
solved, but that long dreamt-of studio apartment in the heart of the city was
within reach. Best of all, it would make it no longer necessary for her to earn
a living through private tuition. If she, profane as she was, dared to see herself
as a pilgrim, she was one moment in that Slough of Despond and the next,
looking up at the brightness of a city beckoning from a hill top.

Singaporeans’ lives would be changed forever
by the new phenomenon called the en bloc fever, by which ordinary, modest
home-owners became millionaires overnight. It was truly a fever, with a rash of
generous offers from property developers suddenly aware of the value of old
developments and the homeowners delirious with excitement. The developers
sniffed out the potentially valuable housing estates, even if old and rundown,
to buy, then to tear down, and raise in their place gleaming sky-high
condominiums attractive to the newly rich and the foreigners coming in droves
to work in Singapore. The newspapers for a while were filled with amazing
reports of these instant-wealth stories. One ran a story about a couple, a
clerk and his wife, who thirty years ago had acquired an apartment in a housing
development that was now five times its original value. Maria’s apartment was in
that breathless category, causing her to say in a voice weak with astonishment,
‘Oh my God, that’s even better than winning that coveted first prize in the
Singapore National Lottery.’

She remembered the time she had prayed to
God for that win, and now he was answering her prayer. Or rather, since he had
been de-deified and de-anthropomorphised by her, and had melted into any number
of abstractions that could be called, variously, Chance, Randomness,
Probability, Accident, Happenstance and Luck, it was in the capacity of the
last named that he was answering her prayer. And since she could not thank Luck
personally, she could at least show her gratitude by spreading it around a
little.

She called her mother and Heng in Malaysia
to tell them the good news. She told them, for a start, that she would pay for
the expensive fees that were being charged by her little nephew’s school for
special needs children. She also offered to pay for some expensive dental
treatment that Heng’s wife needed. She thought with some pique: couldn’t her
mother and brother rejoice with her in her good luck? They had received her
news with an uneasy silence. Heng was obviously in deep shock about the sheer
bad luck of signing over his share of the apartment to her for a sum of money that
was but a fraction of what he would now have got and that he had long
dissipated at the gambling table. Her mother was in a different kind of shock:
how God could have favoured a prodigal daughter over the returned black sheep,
and concluded that even money, that featured so strongly in the Seven Deadly
Sins, could be used in Providence’s mysterious ways to bring back a sinner. She
said, ‘Maria, it is God’s doing. He has a purpose for you.’ There was a moment
of returning dislike for her brother when he said he would get his lawyer to
look into the terms of the document he had made her sign in the purchase of his
half of the flat; so the old greed was still there, and he was hoping some
legal loophole would enable him to claim a share of her new fortune.

A new kind of pleasure had been opened up
for her by new wealth, starting with the acquisition of the studio apartment.
For the first time in her life, she would live in a place that bore the full
stamp of her personality, her taste, her every preference. The sense of sole
proprietorship was deeply satisfying. ‘Oh, how happy I am!’ she thought as she
looked at her new home, explored every little room, smelt its newness, for she
would not have wanted a place that had already been lived in, that bore the marks
of another’s life story. She was not superstitious but grimaced at tales of the
new occupants of a house seeing strange shapes, hearing strange noises that
turned out to be the last mournful sounds of the deceased former owner.

A bed, a room, a house, a life of her own –
the secret dreams that had begun in childhood and persisted through the years
of her marriage, and again through the years with her mother and grandmother,
were now all coming together in a grand finale of ownership, fulfillment and supreme
happiness. Against the background of a home beautifully appointed to her taste
(she could now afford to replace the old ugly furniture, curtains and
crockery), in the peace and contentment of a life renewed and energies revived,
she could concentrate on the greatest dream in her life: to write a book, and
then another, and another. All this was made possible by the huge cheque that
Luck had dropped on her lap. She would always remember that thrilling moment
when, excited as a child showing off a new, expensive toy, she had taken the
cheque to be deposited into her bank account and watched the expression on the
face of the bank officer. She was somewhat disappointed that the girl appeared
unimpressed, being used to handling fabulous sums in a city where, it was said,
ordinary hawkers could walk into a bank in their open shirts and sandals and
hand over the counter a large paper bag stuffed with cash. A moneyed city state
– for the first time she became part of it, wide-eyed with gratitude and joy.

She took an intense interest in every story
she read or heard about, regarding Luck’s visitations upon other favoured
Singaporeans. A couple who thought they could never afford to retire, finally
did, went on a round-the-world cruise and came back to their brand new
apartment in a much better locality. A single mother who was carefully saving
up to pay for the university education of one of her two sons could now afford
to send both to a university in Canada. She was also thinking of buying a small
apartment near the university, so that all three could continue living
together, and she could cook their favourite Singapore laksa and mee siam for
them.

There were unhappy stories as well. A
divorcing couple who had peacefully settled on who was to get which of their two
jointly-owned properties, soon quarrelled violently and went to court over the
terms of the settlement, for the husband’s share was now only a pitiable
quarter of the wife’s in value. A man who had generously sold his flat to a
sibling at a price below market value was suing her for a return of the flat
now worth hugely more, arguing that it was not a sale at all, but a temporary
gift. In a housing estate that could not go through the en bloc sale because
some residents refused to move, there were angry anonymous letters put into
their letter-boxes, rubbish left outside their doors and black paint smeared on
their parked cars, and vicious rumours about two mysterious suicides in the
estate, condemning it to bad luck for years.

Maria thought, in my new world, I want to
have nothing to do with the greed, envy, superstition, folly, stupidity in the
big world out there. She saw a delightful image of a clean, white bubble in mid
ocean, sealed against floating scum. She wanted nothing even of the minor
irritations of dealing with unreasonable bosses, mean colleagues, difficult
students, that had come with her teaching job. It was a wonderful irony that
money had freed her from its own tyranny.

In her new world too, there would be nothing
of uncertainty, doubt, guilt, jealousy, wounded pride, since she would no
longer have anything to do with love and romance, much less marriage. She had
tried and failed miserably. Some of her girl friends, also living on their own,
said, ‘If it comes, it comes,’ meaning that they were still open to a proposal,
a proposition.

At age forty-three, she thought, ‘That part
of my life is over. There is so much living to do! I can hardly wait to begin.’

Goodbye to the old Maria Seetoh. Long live
the new!

Happy future plans, once only a remote
dream, unfolded like a lovely gleaming silk scroll of promise and enchantment.
She could travel, do the exciting cruises she had heard about. Some of her
friends had gone on safaris in Africa and desert treks in India; they had
camped on snow-clad mountain slopes in Austria and visited remote villages
tucked away in the Himalayas. Her own mother had been to France, to the
renowned pilgrimage centre of Lourdes. She wanted to do her own pilgrimage, to
Greece to see and touch the very places where her favourite philosophers had
taught thousands of years ago. Even better, she would go abroad for those
summer writing courses she had read about, even do a postgraduate degree in a
university in Singapore and abroad. It would not matter if she sat in a class
with students half her age. Her student days had been among her happiest; she
could reclaim that happiness under even better circumstances. Best of all, she
could now get down to the serious job of looking into the huge pile of notes,
the raw material for her writing, accumulated over so many years. They were in
old shoe boxes, stacked somewhere on high shelves, groaning with the treasures
and the debris from the past that would have to be carefully separated.

‘My dear Brother Phil,’ she wrote. ‘This is going
to be such a bright, cheerful letter which I never thought I would be able to
write to you. No, it has nothing to do with any reversal of the sad things that
have happened: Mark and Yen Ping continue to live in sad memory; Maggie and her
sister Angel are in a world that I have no wish to even peek at; I am
permanently out of St Peter’s and permanently unemployed; poor Por Por is dead
and gone, her ashes kept in a temple columbarium; my mother is in Malaysia with
my brother Heng, and despite her fervent prayers, he has lapses of the gambling
habit which she won’t tell me about; my little autistic nephew is improving,
but very slowly; I occasionally think of poor V.K. Pandy who is now only a very
faint memory in Singapore.

But I am happier now than I have ever been.
It is not good to talk about money to a man of God who is committed to, among
other vows, the vow of poverty. But dear Brother Phil, if I could, I would give
this filthy god Mammon a kiss for showering his filthy lucre on me! He has a
Chinese counterpart, the Deity of Prosperity who has been around a long time in
Singapore, claiming a very honoured place in local temples where devotees show
their gratitude after winning lotteries by burning giant joss-sticks and making
big donations to the temple. It would be too tedious to go into all the details
of this new phenomenon in Singapore that everyone is calling the en bloc
madness. It is a kind of collective sale whereby developers are prepared to
hand out large sums to homeowners for their properties because of the much
larger sums they will get in return from the condominiums they will build on
every available inch of land they have acquired. I think you can guess what has
happened. I can thank my old apartment for relieving me of every financial worry,
the major one being of course finding a job to support myself. I was in fact
getting ready to offer private tuition, to spend the rest of my life preparing
students for those hateful exams! Can you imagine me, dear Brother Phil,
growing grey and furrowed as I struggle to get that dumb student to score at
least a credit in his English language paper. Now, thanks again to Mammon/Deity
of Prosperity (whom I hope I never worship but only offer a genuine, profound,
once-and-for-all thank you card) I can concentrate on my writing; you, dear
Brother Phil, more than anyone, had encouraged me in the pursuit of this
passion. How I wish you were here for me to talk to you about it. I’m as
excited as a child.

Only the other day I was going through some
of the notes I’d been scribbling down for years in notebooks and scraps of
paper, and found some that must have been inspired by you or that I must have
shown to you. Do you remember that we had actually talked about collaborating
on a play in Singlish? I think the idea came from you. Well, dear Brother Phil,
if you are not too busy working on that educational project with Sister Bridget
(now you must tell me more about her so that I can decide whether or not to be
jealous) and if by chance you happen to come to this part of the world, could I
invite you to my new home and my new world? By that time I should be able to
cook up a decent meal of fried bee hoon. I’m thinking, now that I have much
more free time, to do a cooking course. Can you imagine me in apron and chef’s
cap?! Maybe also swimming. And yoga. And computer. And dancing. You could start
warning me about those dashing young dance instructors who are able to sniff
out new money.

I have at least three stories about
Singapore’s tai tais who fell for their dancing instructors. But no, no
flamboyant adventurer, beau, swain, suitor, in my life. I’m out of the game
completely. (If you’re curious about a certain suitor whom I had told you in
confidence about, we’ll leave that to a later time when I can look at things
even more dispassionately and honestly.)