Miss Seetoh in the World (13 page)

She removed the ring from her finger and
held it out towards him. ‘I want to thank you again for your generosity –’she
began and then all was confusion, which would, in the years to come, be a
fearful memory that would return again and again in her dreams.

She saw him, in a whirl of white-faced fury,
grab the ring from her, get out of the car, stand by the side of the gravel
path and in a mighty swing of his arm, fling it far out into the darkness of
sky, trees and bushes. The image would be permanently seared into her memory –
the man, the gesture of angry despair, the brooding night sky, the silent
forest trees. He returned to the car, breathing heavily, and without a word
drove her straight home. ‘Bernard, I’m sorry –,’ she quavered, now in tears,
but his car had already roared away.

That night she had a dream in which, in slow
motion, she saw the arc of the flung diamond traversing the night sky, like a
silvery trail of spittle from the bared jaws of a great night predator as it
sprinted, with easy graceful movements of its long lean body, after its prey.

‘It cost me a fortune, did you know that?’
Bernard shouted in rage. ‘Do you know I’m now in debt to the loan sharks?’

‘I never asked you,’ she said calmly and
then added, ‘Let’s start looking for it. We won’t leave till we find it.’

They cut their hands on sharp branches,
pricked their fingers on thorny bushes, brushed giant ants off their clothes,
all to no avail. Father Rozario, then her mother joined in the torrent of
rebukes. ‘It’s all your fault! You’re the most selfish person on earth! You’re
a cold, unfeeling bitch!’ Then suddenly she saw the diamond, glinting
beautifully in a patch of mud.

‘There it is! Look, Bernard, your diamond!’
She picked it up from the mud and handed it to him joyfully. ‘What will you do
with it now, Bernard? Will the shop take it back? You must get back your twenty
thousand dollars. Your mother needs it for all those expensive operations. You
should never have bought me the ring in the first place, Bernard, because I
never loved you. Aren’t you glad I’ve found it?’

In the dream, speech, loosed from its
moorings, bore her truest thoughts and feelings along a joyously flowing
current. In the dream, she stood fearlessly facing the others, ankle deep in
mud. Livid with fury, Bernard grabbed the ring from her, and flung it into the
darkness a second time. ‘Oh no, oh no,’ she screamed. ‘You go look for it
again,’ roared Father Rozario, ‘and this time I will have it. It goes to the
orphans! Shame on both of you!’ Her mother was crying and drumming her chest
with anguished fists. The well-populated dream admitted one more inhabitant.
‘How do you know it’s a real Tiffany ring?’ sneered Heng. ‘It could be a cheap
fake for all we know. Show us the receipt, Bernard.’ Bernard ignored him and
faced her. ‘Maria Seetoh, you are a curse in my life.’ He picked up a wet
branch and struck her across the face. ‘Since I met you, my life has been a
living hell!’

Someone let out a shriek which was powerful
enough to punch through the dream and yank her up into the reality of
sweat-soaked pillow, rumpled blanket, pounding heart. She sat up, her hair
fallen in tangles over her face, her hands pressed against her ears. Her mother
came knocking on her bedroom door, ‘Maria, what was that noise? Are you
alright?’

The next day was Sunday, and she did not see
Bernard at church. Her mother saved a barrage of anxious inquiries for firing
as soon as they reached home, and she wisely chose not to mention the Tiffany
diamond ring, now lying somewhere in a forested area near a small path that had
no name. Till the end of her life, Anna Seetoh was never told about it.

From the maelstrom of feelings that crowded
the dream, she pulled one out for special safekeeping and solace: her own proud
self-assertion which she had expressed to Bernard as they stood in the mud
together, and she handed him the ring, ‘I’m free now.’ Gifts if they came
loaded with sinister purpose were promptly given back, even in childhood. There
was an aunt who once pushed a coin into her pocket whispering something about
not telling her mother what she had just heard, and she instantly pulled out
the gift and returned it, before running away. I’m free now. In the murkiness
of the dream, the declaration, as she made it repeatedly to Bernard, had stood
out in the clarity and intensity of relief and celebration, and was now even
more powerfully felt in the reality of waking.

It would give her the necessary strength in
the days ahead when she would have to begin the tedious work of dismantling the
huge edifice of expectations that everybody had built around them. Her mother,
Father Rozario, Meeta, Winnie, the curious parishioners of the Church of
Eternal Mercy, the inquisitive Maggie, even her brother Heng, even Por Por who
in her lucid moments might demand to see the kind gentleman who had found her
wandering and brought her home – all of them, at some time or other, in one way
or another, would be told the truth, if only to have the peace of mind to move
on to a new phase in her life.

She had learnt a valuable lesson. A woman
had to be mindful of her words and actions if they were not to be construed as
encouragement. She had made a dreadful mistake which, fortunately, could be
corrected. Her imagination supplied an image that made her smile: a large pile
of garbage in the yard, created by her own stupidity and carelessness, which
she must clear quickly in a massive spring cleaning exercise before the Chinese
New Year, if the gods were not to be offended. Soon the gods were appeased, for
the rubbish was all gone. She loved the slate made blank once more, the
chalkboard cleared of all its clutter, for writing on anew.

It would be a truth that needed telling only
in its broadest outlines, without mention of the ring, and she would tell it
with a firmness and finality to preclude all further questions and
speculations. She was once more in charge of her life. In my new life, she
thought, meaning of course her inner world only,
I would admit no one. Maybe only Por Por.

A fearful object in her dreams, where it was
flung into the distance, dug up from mud, caught in a roaring torrent, pulled
out from the throat of some forest predator, amidst a chaos of tears and
curses, the ring was the subject of much quiet wonder in her waking hours.
Nobody would believe my story if I wrote it, she thought. Mortals stamped their
love on monuments of marble that towered into the skies for all eternity;
lesser mortals with money to spend bought diamonds that had the same enduring
power. That Tiffany ring would lie unclaimed under dead leaves long after she
and Bernard had passed away. Or it would be dug up, hidden inside huge clumps
of soil, and then dumped into a pit, once the bulldozers moved in to clear the
forest for the new developments that were springing up all over the island. Or
its fate would take it to a muddy ditch that, with the rainy season, swelled
into a stream and flowed out to sea, casting it to the very bottom, its resting
place for all eternity, testimony to the sad story, that could not be told, of
a man who loved a woman who could not love him back.

Within two days, she had broken the promise
to herself, and told the story. The seductive romance of love’s twenty thousand
-dollar tribute had suddenly come up against the brute calculus of life’s
realities. She had to act quickly, to find the ring before anyone did.

The project, as she was later to call it, had
begun, as with so many things, with the irrepressible Maggie. Two days after
the ring incident, Maggie stood outside the staffroom, asking to speak to her,
indicating that her presence was urgently needed.

It was the luckless school gardener whom
everybody called Ah Boy, for whose sick wife Maggie had months before collected
a small class donation. Now it turned out that the poor woman needed a very
expensive operation. A few thousand dollars, whispered Maggie, relishing her
dramatic role of the savior when she should be busy preparing for the
approaching school examinations. Could Miss Seetoh speak to the principal? If
he declined to help, could she pass round the hat among staff members? Maggie
on her part would try to get some help from her mother. She looked intently at
Miss Seetoh, studying her reaction. ‘Two thousand dollars for the operation
alone, and money, money for the stay in hospital, for this and that, for good
food and medicine which they can’t afford. My heart feel so much pity for them,
I want to help, even if other people don’t want,’ said the girl who had sensed
yet another opportunity for self-worth to rise above the daily contempt.

Between her habitual sense of caution
whenever she was approached by Maggie, and a genuine desire to help Ah Boy’s
wife, Maria felt a weary helplessness that suddenly vanished with the image of
the diamond ring lying in the forest. Thrown away because of her rejection, it
was surely hers to claim upon change of mind. She instantly saw it shining in a
brilliant arithmetic of hope. The twenty thousand dollars that it had cost,
even if reduced to half that amount upon resale, would exceed the cost of the
operation for the poor woman and provide decent meals for the entire family for
months; she remembered Maggie telling her the daily fare was instant noodles or
cheap broken rice. Meeta had a very wealthy socialite cousin who might be
prevailed upon to buy a Tiffany diamond that she could claim had cost her
twenty thousand dollars when she had paid only ten, or nine or even eight for
it. The object of love’s bitter controversies, now lying rejected in some
deserted spot, could become a gift of life itself.

As the idea of such a transformational role
for the fateful ring grew, so did the excitement of mounting a search for it.
Maggie, now in the reverse position of receiving confidential information from
a teacher, was wide-eyed and speechless in trembling awareness of her
privileged position. It took her some time to digest the amazing nature of Miss
Seetoh’s recent experience and the central role she was about to play in the equally
amazing aftermath. Once she did, she swung into a state of full preparedness,
vowing to Miss Seetoh she would tell no one except her boyfriend who, having
been a scout, would be very familiar with the enormous challenges of the forest
and its dense undergrowth.

‘He is very smart. Even two days lost in
Cameron Highlands, can find his way out. He can surely find your ring, Miss
Seetoh,’ said Maggie and added, breathless with admiration, ‘I can’t believe
it. But I would do exactly like you, Miss Seetoh. If you don’t love a man, what
for to accept his gift, even if cost one million dollars? Miss Seetoh, I’m
proud of you!’

The search party, to cover the immense area
of forest, would have to include a few more capable men, all to be sworn to
secrecy, all to be provided with proper instruments of search such as small
hacking knives, spades, digging sticks and even torches to penetrate the dark
tangles of undergrowth. The task, in its sheer magnitude, promised unimaginable
thrills for Maggie; she wrote down a list of the things needed, together with a
clear plan of action while the mathematics lesson was going on, slipping out as
soon as it was over, to proudly show the list to Miss Seetoh. Throughout she
maintained an elaborate secrecy that was soon noticed by the students and
teachers who wondered why she was always summoning Miss Seetoh from the
staffroom with such urgency. In the staid atmosphere of St Peter’s Secondary
School, a little conspiracy was developing, with the school’s most
controversial teacher and most disreputable student at its centre. Ah Boy was
immediately approached, briefed and recruited by Maggie, all during the brief
school recess. The sole beneficiary of a massive enterprise, he understood
little of the details beyond the need to get his brother’s help, and do
whatever the kind teacher and the kind schoolgirl asked him to.

The richly
promising arithmetic of the project intrigued Maria enough for her to sit down
and work it out systematically on a piece of paper. She recollected Meeta and Winnie
telling her about the cleaning woman in their school, who had to take care of
two mentally retarded children on her meagre wages, and decided that the ten
thousand-dollar yield from the hunt should be divided equally between her and
Ah Boy. The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her to do good in a big way had
a satisfaction all its own, and she meant to make maximum use of it.

The anticipatory gratification was equal to
that experienced when she was eight years old and joined other children helping
an old vagrant who wandered from kampong to kampong in search of fallen
coconuts lying unclaimed, ripe fruit from trees still unplucked, eggs snatched
from under hens if they wandered out of their coop for the laying, even a dead
chicken newly run over by a lorry that might still be cooked and eaten. They
would all run to the vagrant if they found such a prize and lead him to it, a
noisily triumphant group marching ahead of a somewhat bemused old man in rags,
a comic Pied Piper replay in reverse, that made the watching adults smile.
There was an unspoken code of honour by which no finder should keep the prize;
if he or she did and was found out, the penalty was to compensate the vagrant
twice over when he next came to the kampong. Sometimes when there was nothing
for the looting, she would feel sorry for the old man rummaging in the large
rubbish bins, with his many dirty bundles strung on his body, and shyly offer
him a coin from her money box.

Meeta and Winnie were delighted with the
magnanimous scheme of rescue, and readily joined it. ‘You know what, God’s hand
is at work,’ said Winnie devoutly. ‘I just heard yesterday that Ah Lan’s older
daughter got ill again and needs expensive medicine.’