Miss Seetoh in the World (57 page)

Happiness could be infectious, reaching
across continents and oceans. Meeta wrote a note to say that her sister and
brother-in-law were thoroughly spoiling her; she was enjoying a very active
social life with the arty crowd in New Delhi. Meeta painted her new happiness
in the brightest aphorisms: live life in technicolour, not monochrome; be a
glutton at life’s smorgasbord! Winnie expressed her joy in more down-to-earth
terms: Wilbur was building an extension to their already large house in the
countryside to accommodate the increasing number of grandchildren who always
came with their parents to celebrate Thanksgiving.
God/Providence/Force/Fate/Chance was in his/her/its heaven; all was well with
the world!

My little square inch of paradise on earth,
thought Maria. How I love my tiny two-room studio apartment. Its description
announced its purpose of seclusion for serious, artistic work, thereby barring
all visitors capable only of trivial, meaningless talk (Her immediate neighbour
was a fashion designer; she had only seen him emerge from the apartment once,
wearing a black T-shirt, black trousers, a black-and-white scarf, a gold
earring) She thought, my little world is sealed against the great one outside, with
a little door opening out as and when I want.

For her new world would not be a cloister;
that was for those women who declared themselves dead to the world, and she was
very much alive. She had never seen a cloister but as a girl had been impressed
by pictures showing the seclusion and serenity of a Carmelite convent where it
was said a woman walked in but was carried out. It meant that from the moment
she stepped into a convent, its doors shut her out completely from the world to
which she would return only as a corpse, carried out for burial. Since nuns
usually lived to a very ripe old age, the time separating the live walking feet
and the dead shrouded feet could be many decades.

Maria thought, I love the world too much to
want to be so cruelly sequestered from it. She was rediscovering its pleasures,
all the greater if savoured in the leisureliness and freedom of pure solitude –
the shopping centres where shopping with the maid and Por Por had been rushed,
anxious affairs, the cafés where she had enjoyed lunches with friends but
experienced a special pleasure just sitting by herself having a sandwich and
coffee, idly watching the world go by; the bookshops where she could spend
hours browsing; and best of all the Botanic Gardens, scene of so much joy and
pain, peace and tumult, which she could now visit in the capacity of a person
renewed and recharged.

A call came from Maggie. How on earth had
the girl managed to get her new number?

‘Miss Seetoh, have to talk to you, there’s
nobody for me to talk, only you, my old teacher who I trust in the world,’ she
said in a tearful opening calculated to soften a heart much less steeled
against her manouevres than Maria’s.

‘Alright,’ Maria said wearily, ‘what is it
now.’

It was the same complaint about Angel not
taking her studies seriously, taking that useless deejay guy too seriously,
frustrating all Maggie’s efforts to give her a good education.

For the first time the girl mentioned the
name of the man in dark glasses. She called Sonny her close friend and supporter
who also took care of Angel, but hinted there might be trouble involving all
three of them. Talking rapidly and breathlessly, Maggie became incoherent in a
sudden massive discharge of information about her life and problems. Maria
listened desultorily, her mind occupied elsewhere with more pleasant thoughts.
She heard only the rising inflections of Maggie’s frustration and anger – ‘so
ungrateful, I want to kill her!’, ‘he all useless, adding to problem, not
helping me solve, I want to kill him!’ The girl’s histrionics simply fell flat
on her ears and she was jerked out of her inattention only when she heard
Maggie ask urgently, ‘So can you do this favour for me, please, Miss Seetoh?’

It turned out that Sonny had turned violent
one evening and slapped her, pulled her hair and knocked her head against the
wall.

‘He all drunk and sexy, want, sex, sex, sex
all the time. Miss Seetoh, how can woman always be there, give sex anytime? I
said, ‘You bastard, you idiot, go to hell!’ ’

She had warned him that the next time he
abused her, she would go straight to the police and get a restraining order
slapped on him.

‘Then he cannot come near me or Angel, not
even ten feet from us; I found out all about the restraining order.’

The favour she was asking of Maria was this:
could her old teacher write a letter of support for her, a kind of testimonial,
to take to the police to make sure she got that important order?

‘You my old teacher. Also from Catholic
school. Your testimonial very useful. Also, the police look at you and trust
you, Miss Seetoh, because you very classy and educated.’

Maria said, ‘Maggie, I really can’t promise
anything because I hardly know what’s going on, and maybe don’t want to,’
adding, ‘Maggie, I’m starting a new life in my new place, as you can see, and
hope you understand if I ask you not to call again.’

There was a silence, and then Maggie said,
in a changed tone of sly insinuation, ‘Hey, Miss Seetoh, you ever wonder what
happen to the Tiffany ring in the dark forest, whether anyone find it?’

Maria felt a rising tide of anger. The girl
was being maliciously provocative all over again, trying to force a response
from her, to extend the conversation and steer it towards her purpose.

Maria said coldly, ‘I don’t really care,
Maggie. Now if you will excuse me, I’m rather busy.’

She heard Maggie say, in very aggrieved
tones, ‘Miss Seetoh, what happen to you? What happen to teacher I trust and
love most in world?’ before she put down the phone.

The phone rang again, and this time Maggie’s
voice came in a savage snarl. ‘You know or not, Miss Seetoh, I could tell
people you and Brother Philip had affair! Don’t think I don’t know!’

‘How dare you!’ screamed Maria. The girl had
a huge bag of tricks, and now she had pulled out her trump card of blackmail.
‘You’re simply disgusting, Maggie. Don’t you ever call me again!’

Maria banged down the phone. Maggie, in her
messy world, had ruined an otherwise perfect day for her.

She had reckoned without the messiness of
another world which she had almost forgotten. Rumours of V.K. Pandy were
sweeping the society. He had returned to Singapore. The rumour about his death
were just that, after all. The truth was that he had nearly died, in fact had
died, according to some sources, but had been revived by a holy man from an
ashram who, before passing away himself, had enjoined upon him the mission of
doing good in the world by preaching kindness and forgiveness. The holy man, it
was said, had been led to the corpse by the sobbing Mrs Pandy who said her
husband had been dead twenty-four hours. She fell down at the holy one’s feet
when her husband began to stir, and he said to her, ‘You too are restored,’ at
which point her cancer left her completely. She swore to spend the rest of her
life helping the poor in the slums of the city.

Immediately after the miracle, V.K. Pandy
entered into a trance-like state and went without food or water for seven days,
his hair and beard now completely white. He entered the ashram and devoted
himself to the preparation of his new role in the world. In a matter of a few
years, he had become a holy man sworn to holy deeds, calling himself ‘The Holy
One’, after the old saint who had brought him back to life, and made him
promise to continue his good work. As proof of the legacy, he now bore the
god-man’s distinctive mark, a white scar, shaped like a small star, on the
upper right of his forehead. To the astonishment of all around him, he could
fast for weeks. It was said that a band of light encircled his head. He had
come to Singapore, his beloved home for many years, to begin his mission of
healing, preceded by the most astonishing reports of his powers. The lame
walked, the blind saw, the deaf heard again. A twelve-year-old boy who was
brought to him covered with horrible black growths was given back to his
mother, his skin now smooth as an infant’s. Singaporeans listened wide-eyed,
then passed round the stories. There were stories about his astonishing powers
to heal even those very ill and on the point of death.

It was said that he healed through some
miraculous oil that oozed imperceptibly from his body, from a spot somewhere
near his heart, a liquid that was the pure ichor of gods, giving the upper part
of his body a wondrous sheen as if it were lit from within. A mere dab of the
holy fluid was sufficient for the healing.

The question uppermost in Singaporeans’
minds as they read newspaper reports of him and watched him on TV, with his
luminescent skin, his snow-white hair and beard, his forehead daubed with red
ash, was: would he forgive the great TPK enough to work a miracle for Mrs TPK,
said to be beyond the power of modern medical science? Even more significantly,
would the great TPK humble himself to ask?

‘Oh my God,’ gasped Maria as she watched The
Holy One on TV, robed in white, sitting with crossed legs on a raised platform
in some huge hall, a garland around his neck, his eyes closed, his hands
pressed reverently together while around him Singaporeans looked on, in awe and
fascination. The national interest in him was too great for the media to block
out news and images of him as they had done in the past. In any case he was no
longer a political opponent but a holy Hindu man, as entitled to respect as any
holy man or woman from any of the other religious faiths in the society.

Maria had vivid recollections of the shabby
little man in Middleton Square with his pathetic pamphlets, crushed by the
weight of his financial losses and the sickness of his wife, and also of the
overwhelming floral tributes – symbol of a nation’s guilt-charged conscience –
filling the square after the news of his death in India. She recollected in
every vivid detail his lunch with her when he spoke, with tears of bitter rage
spurting from his eyes, about the great TPK’s taunt of him, comparing him to
crawling vermin.

Now he was a towering magisterial figure, as
awe-inspiring as any visionary emerging from the wilderness with the fire of
the sun in his eyes, for he had seen what was not granted to ordinary mortals.
According to the rumours that swelled in fervour by the day, he had come to
show forgiveness and to heal a whole nation, starting with the physical healing
of poor Mrs TPK. Maria thought, no tale from my imagination, even at its
runaway best, can match the amazing story of V.K. Pandy.

This was the great world outside that Maria
had every desire to connect with.

From where she stood, among the huge crowd
thronging the Singapore Exposition Hall which was being used by The Holy One to
meet, touch and cure Singaporeans, Maria could not see him clearly. Despite the
transformation in appearance and setting, she could recognise the V.K. Pandy of
old, specially those close, deep-set eyes that had filled with angry, bitter
tears that day when he had lunch with her. The recollection of the little
donation of money in a brown envelope that she had shyly pushed towards him and
which he had pushed back, made the transformation even more staggering. She had
experienced some moments of surreality in her life, none exceeded by this one,
as she continued to stare at the man she had never stopped thinking and
speaking of as ‘poor Pandy’. Now no commiseration was called for, only respect
and reverence for the white-robed figure raised to sainthood; indeed, the image
of the The Holy One, pure, transcendental, had already wiped out or rendered
irrelevant whatever lowly image remained of the despised political opponent,
just as a mighty prophet or seer would not be remembered for his earlier life
as a goatherd or carpenter or water-carrier.

Maria thought, I wish I could believe all
those rumours. Already Singaporeans were saying, I saw with my own eyes, I was
there when the crippled man stood up, somebody who saw it happened told me, the
woman who had the evil spirit cast out of her was a relative of my mother’s
friend. Everybody talked about the wondrous method of healing: a tiny dab of
the holy fluid that emanated from the holy skin, which some claimed had a
fragrant smell that was not exactly like perfume but rather like the essence of
some mysterious nocturnal flower.

Already, into the holy enterprise of healing
the sick had crept the unholy element of competition. Some Christian churches
had noticed a declining number in attendance, and a few had given subtle
warnings from the pulpit about not being taken in by forces that were surely
against the Holy Spirit. There was a tree in the compound of a Chinese temple
that had been attracting worshippers because its bark bore the distinct face of
the Monkey God, but since the arrival of The Holy One, there had been a drop in
the number of devotees bringing joss-sticks, flowers and food offerings.

Through the excitement and wonder sweeping
Singapore, the government of the great TPK must have been keeping an alert
look-out for any signs of subversion that could result in disruption and
disorder. But no, there were no political undertones in The Holy One’s
speeches, no evidence that his followers were spreading malicious rumours.
Also, there was no evidence of potential religious conflict, for The Holy One’s
speeches were only about love, forgiveness and mercy. Indeed, the huge numbers
flocking to see him included the entire range of faiths in the multiracial
society, as well as the non-religious who came out of curiosity and wondered if
there might be psychological and medical underpinnings to all those miracles
after all.