Miss Seetoh in the World (56 page)

Come to think of it, you will be the only
one admitted into my new world. For you’re the only one who has ever made me
feel comfortable. For once, I’m going to ignore your advice about getting out
of my skin. I’m going to be very happy staying inside it.

Do come visit, dear Brother Phil. For a
start, I could show you some memorabilia from St Peter’s, (including the
‘plague’ award that made us laugh so much, remember?) for although I left in
unhappy circumstances – I will leave the details to some future letter – I
still have fond memories of my home class students, my creative class students,
and of you, my best friend in St Peter’s. I have saved all your limericks. They
still raise a smile.

Much love,

Maria.

PS Could I make a little donation to your
educational project? I’d love to.’

I keep saying I’m happy, thought Maria, but
what does it mean? I’m going to examine this happiness, observing it both from
the outside with the calm objectivity of the true experimenter, and from the
inside with the exuberant subjectivity of my own personal self. For happiness
must be both science and art, belonging to the realms of reality and of the
imagination in equal parts. She wanted to see how the reality of her new world,
in the concrete, tangible, measurable details of day-to-day living, on the one
hand, and the inner life of her emotions, on the other, were bearing upon each
other.

The unit of a typical day was good for the
observation. The self-observing observer. It began with the child’s delight of
a day free from school, from the tyrannies of alarm clock, rushed breakfast,
rushed taxi ride to school, the start of a routine predictable to the last
minute accounted for in the class timetable. Routine – that word would acquire
new connotations of reassuring familiarity, cosy domesticity. Like a
disembodied presence, she saw herself getting out of bed at last, swinging her
legs over the edge, going to the front door to pick up the morning newspaper on
the doorstep, reading it in bed with a leisureliness so unaccustomed and hence
so relished that it could be the very raison d’etre for reading at all. And the
two cups of coffee she allowed herself everyday at breakfast: while enjoying
the aroma of the first, she was already anticipating the pleasurable indulgence
of the second. The gratification of a self-imposed discipline.

She had bought several health books and
guides, being suddenly aware of the need to take better care of herself and
enjoy her independence to a very ripe, very old age where both mind and body (unlike
poor Por Por’s) would be in perfectly harmonious working condition. Cooking
simple, healthy meals for herself instead of sitting down to a common meal
prepared by the maid with a view to pleasing different tastes was a distinct
satisfaction; she remembered hating the meat or vegetable dishes that had to be
cooked to a paste to allow for poor Por Por’s toothlessness. Even greater than
the freedom to eat exactly what she liked was the freedom to eat precisely when
she liked; her mother and grandmother were used to rigidly fixed mealtimes,
whether or not one felt hungry.

One evening, she had fallen asleep over a
re-reading of a novel by Conrad that she had read years ago, only because it
had been required reading for her literature course in the university. She woke
up, thinking, ‘Well, time to prepare lunch,’ and discovered she had slept
through the meal. In the past, her mother or the maid would have awakened her.
Mealtimes could be gloriously disregarded, hunger completely untied to any
regulating schedule. Sleeping through the hours when she would have been in the
classroom standing before the chalkboard or sitting through a dreary
staff-meeting gave an even sharper tang to the new liberating sensation.

 When she was growing up, her mother had
never felt the need to teach her the obligatory female skills of cooking,
sewing, housecleaning; Anna Seetoh had always said, ‘You study hard, be a good
person, that’s all I ask of you,’ and did everything for her, ironing her
school uniforms, cleaning her shoes, even combing and plaiting her hair. In the
years of her marriage, her husband never wanted to see her sweep, clean, cook
or do any household work, except when it came to personal items like his shoes,
preferring her to spend all her free time by his side. She had looked upon
housework as a chore that mercifully, she had been spared all her life. But
now, in the little apartment of her choice, surrounded by domestic
appurtenances that bore the stamp of her approval and taste, down to the last
little teaspoon and potted plant, she felt that household work was not only
pleasurable but ennobling, a woman’s daily affirmation of life and selfhood.
She noticed, with a heightened sense of recognition and wonder, that it was
always when she was doing the simplest, the most mundane things that certain
ideas would come to her mind, lighting it up to illumine stories rapidly taking
shape. Such inspirational moments had been experienced before, but now they
came with a new energy to match the briskness in her limbs as she went about
the daily tasks of dusting, sweeping, washing dishes at the sink, putting
clothes in the laundry, taking them out to dry. She even felt an affinity with
inanimate objects that submitted to her will and emerged from her hands
spotlessly clean, gleaming, radiating with housework’s sanctity.

She found herself humming as she worked,
then singing aloud, mainly the silly love songs of her girlhood. She thought of
a party at which the girls of St Anne’s Convent School and the boys of St
Stephen’s Brothers’ School got together for a decorous, chaperoned church
event, and recollected that one of the boy organisers had cunningly slipped
into the approved selection of boy scout and girl guide songs a love song in
which Doris Day sang about wanting to croon love’s tune by the light of the
silvery moon. The boys and girls erupted in wild cheering, and Sister St Agatha
merely smiled stiffly and avoided looking at Brother Aloysius.

Her pleasures in solitude would cover a
dazzling range, from the intellectual stimulation of the books she had hidden
from her husband to the seductive allurement of girlhood romances.

She remembered, with fondness, the artistic
student in her home class at St Peter’s who did all the memorable cartoons for
her language lessons. If she commissioned a picture captioned ‘Where Does the
Inspiration Come From?’, he would probably draw a cartoon of her, with hair
piled up, one stray strand down a sweaty forehead, a clothes’ peg in her mouth,
hanging up a blouse on a clothesline bristling with items of underwear, while
just above her head, hung a lightbulb with a brilliant sunburst of rays.

Her happiness, she realised, was deep and
enduring precisely because it comprised the very small, the ordinary, the
quotidian. She had yearned to scale the lofty heights of passion and found
peace in the rootedness of small things on the ground. She had longed to write
on the large canvas of life, recording the sweep of human thought and emotion,
and concluded that her talent lay in working on a little square inch of ivory,
with reliable, painstaking stylus, as her much loved novelist from childhood,
Jane Austen, had recommended.

The small events, the insignificant people
of her childhood who now crowded her memory, including the little girl whose
death was announced by the cry of an owl, the old woman picking up empty beer
cans and cardboard from a rubbish bin to sell for a few cents – they would
populate her stories, their littleness radiated by the simplicity and honesty
of their lives. Happiness miniaturised, like the tiny dolls she had once seen,
with every fineness of detail preserved, with none of its beauty lost.

There was a knock on the door. Surprised,
for since moving into her apartment in the new condominium, she had not made a
single friend, she got up to look through the peephole, and saw three children
all dressed in Halloween costumes. The custom was largely observed by the
expatriate community only, but of the three children only one was Caucasian, a
blonde child dressed like a witch. The other two were dressed as demons with
the unmistakable horns, forked tail and trident. All had paint on their faces
to show elaborate frowns, wrinkles, fangs. They must be the children of
occupants in the condominium.

‘Trick or treat?’ they said shyly. She would
remember to keep a stock of candy; right now she only had cookies which the
children received with a disappointed look before running away.

She made friends with one of the security
guards, a cheerful woman named Asma whose heavy make-up and brightly varnished
nails contrasted oddly with the drab khaki guard uniform. Asma introduced
herself to each of the condominium residents with a joke, ‘My name is Asma,
spelt A-S-M-A. Without the T-H,’ upon which she would simulate an exaggerated
attack of wheezing and panting before concluding with a loud chuckle, ‘I am
your very healthy, very capable security guard!’

‘My dear Brother Phil,’ she wrote. ‘You were
rightly amused by all the trivia I had written in my previous letter. Here’s
more trivia, but in a completely different sense. I’ve come to notice and love
the very small things in existence which I had taken for granted. Now I realise
they are the very stuff of existence and meaning. I wanted to know what I was
happy about, and at the end of the day listed a dozen things that were all
small, ordinary, everyday. The last item of happiness was a TV programme about
outrageous pets, which I enjoyed thoroughly, because it made me laugh out loud.
You would, if you had seen the little cocker spaniel taking full possession of
the house, including the master bedroom. No, the last item was actually a quiet
read in bed, before I fell asleep, of quotations from wise men and women that I
had picked up over the years. One was a poem, and it made me think of you,
because I had copied it out for you – remember the lovely poem by that
marvellous Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran about being together, and yet
staying apart as individuals, about being like the separate strings of a flute
yet quivering to the same music? See, I continue to be the incurable romantic,
but the self-contradictory one with head in a swirl of clouds and feet planted
firmly on the ground! (I can see you smiling and shaking your head.)

About a week ago, I saw the ghost of my Por
Por. Or rather, thought I saw. It was about ten in the evening. She was
standing near the writing desk where I had placed the box containing her
favourite dragon ornament inside the top drawer, and she appeared to be looking
for it. She turned to give me a look and seemed well and happy. And, most
oddly, I did not regard her as a supernatural visitant then, but as my
flesh-and-blood Por Por who was always looking for this or that thing,
searching shelves and drawers, and asking Rosiah or me for help. I said, going
up to her, ‘Por Por, it’s in there, let me take it out for you,’ but at that
instant she vanished. Now I know why Yen Ping’s family insisted that her spirit
had come back, as proved by the displaced blanket on the bed, the slept-on
pillow, the drunk tea. I looked closely at the table to see if there were
displaced objects, and guess what I noticed? The drawer had been slightly
pulled open. I am almost positive it was completely shut when I last saw it.
There you are – the yearning heart that sees what it wants to see!

Yesterday, three small children in Halloween
costumes came to my door. They looked adorable. My mother had actually
suggested my adopting a child. Imagine that! I suppose she wants someone to
take care of me in my old age. No thank you. I love children and animals, but
from a distance away from their mess and noise and crankiness! (I can hear you
say, with that tiny, crinkling, cynical smile: ‘She likes humanity, not people;
she likes God but in the abstract; she loves men but across a chasm.’) Do you
realise that we are both at that dreadful period of life called the climacteric
that heralds decline and decrepitude? Can you imagine us growing old together,
old and grey and full of sleep, wearing our trousers rolled? No way! I’ve got a
new hairstyle and a new lipstick to match the precise pink of a new cushion
cover. Frivolity, at any age, is a legitimate female indulgence. Which Sister
Bridget must be free from. By the way, you still haven’t told me about her.
When you do, I will use all my writer’s skills of forensic detection to
scrutinise every noun, adjective, verb and preposition to decide whether
jealousy is called for.

Love

Maria.’

In her happiness, she had tamed jealousy,
making it a ready tool for wit and self-deprecatory humour. A thought occurred
at this point: if she happened to see Benjamin Phang now at the Polo Club,
dancing with an attractive woman, holding her close, would the old feelings of
shock and hurt return? Would she have another night of fitful sleep? She had
read about scientific experiments on jealousy that concluded it to be a purely
reflexive, unconscious reaction, so that a woman, while all the time denying
it, was actually registering all the physiological telltale signs on the
instruments attached to her head, chest and fingertips. She had no doubt she
would defy those instruments and pass the test.

There had been a single postcard from him
when he was ambassador to Germany, addressed to her at St Peter’s and
redirected to her old apartment, bearing only the brief salutations and
niceties necessitated by an open mode of communication. ‘How are you?’ he had
asked. But it was only a typical opening line, not a genuine question requiring
an answer. In the first few days in her new home, while watching TV, she heard
the newscaster announce his new posting to Japan and saw his image appear for a
few seconds. On both occasions, there had been no reaction from her. She had
passed the most crucial test of all, a self-imposed one: there had been no more
dreams of him since she moved into her new life.