Miss Seetoh in the World (15 page)

The same day, along another road, they came
across a woman wheeling a double-pram in which her twin babies lay sleeping
under snowy white coverlets; it took just a friendly smile from her for Maria
to ask if she might look at them. The woman glowed with maternal pride
throughout the few minutes that Maria gazed upon the sleeping infants, uttering
little delighted sounds at their cherubic beauty, a whiff of heaven upon earth,
until they grew up, learnt language, learnt to use it to deceive themselves and
others. Bernard said, pressing her arm affectionately as they walked away, ‘I
couldn’t help looking at your face. You’ll make a wonderful mother, you’ll give
me lots of beautiful children,’ and when he added with something of a
suggestive smile, ‘They say the best babies are made during the honeymoon,’ the
magic of that encounter with the sleeping infants was gone.

So soon had the sense of unease set in, of
something very wrong with her marriage, that it frightened her. There were
stories of brides who tore off their veils and threw away their bridal bouquets
at the very altar itself, at the same moment that they threw away their lie,
and faced, wild-eyed with elation, a stunned congregation. These were mainly
stories from the movies. Some years ago, Meeta told her of a cousin who was
marrying again after divorcing his wife of sixteen years. At the very last moment,
he changed his mind, destroyed all the wedding invitations that were just about
to be sent out, and humbly asked his wife to take him back, saying God had made
him see the truth.

Her own story had none of the drama of
Hollywood or divine revelation. It was the old one of marrying without love,
and thereafter suffering the consequences. It did not have the excuse of the
matchmade marriage where the bride submitted all the way, first to parents,
then her husband, then the in-laws in a large household where her feelings
counted less than her ability to produce heirs. Lovelessness, from choice, not
society’s strictures, was inexcusable and incomprehensible. She had made the
greatest mistake of all, for pity was the weakest foundation upon which to
build this most enduring and awesome of human institutions. Pity was no
substitute even for friendship, duty, empathy. Disguised as love, it had to
maintain the pretence, allowing only for a ghost of a marriage, or its parody.
Pity was its own nemesis. She had done Bernard an incalculable injustice.

 ‘Hey, that’s Dr Phang,’ whispered Bernard,
directing her attention to a tall, handsome man and a very attractive young
woman who looked young enough to be his daughter.

It was the second last day of their four-day
honeymoon, and they were in a restaurant for dinner. Bernard’s attention was
now given fully to his well revered boss in the Ministry of Defence, while
hers, at one glance, took in the sharp contrast between the man’s handsomely
graying maturity and the woman’s vibrant beauty brimming in a voluptuousness of
red sweater, black tights and a multiplicity of gold and silver trinkets.
Bernard instantly stood up to go and pay his respects, but not before informing
her, in a whisper, that Dr Phang had recently re-married and this must be the
new wife who was from Hong Kong. There had been the hint of a scandal; the
first Mrs Phang was a highly respected university lecturer who had borne him a
daughter, and the second was said to be a minor starlet or model, twenty years his
junior. Bernard, disliking gossip in general, loyally refused to talk about
this part of his boss’s life and concentrated only on the remarkable
achievements of the man, an acknowledged superstar in the civil service
firmament, who was sometimes consulted, it was said, by the great TPK himself.
Frowning on sexual scandals in the lives of his aides, the Prime Minister was
prepared to overlook them if they were brilliant men who could advise him on
the economy or national security.

Throughout the introductions and
pleasantries, she was aware of the illustrious Dr Phang giving her a quizzical
glance or two, as if trying to square prior knowledge with present evaluation.
What had Bernard told him about her? If her proud, sensitive husband confided
in anyone, it must be this man who was both boss and friend.

In the midst of much small talk, Mrs Phang
suddenly pointed to the wedding band on Maria’s finger and said, ‘Very good
idea. Never wear expensive jewellery on vacation,’ and went on to describe,
with round-eyed wonder, how an aunt had lost a very expensive emerald ring,
costing exactly the same amount, in a hotel in Hawaii. It would have been a
reflection of Bernard’s immense trust in his boss, as well as of his own need
for privacy that at the same time that he had confided the astonishing story of
the ring, he had withheld its second half.

This was exactly the melodrama that would
have appealed so much to Mrs Olivia Phang that she would have insisted on its
full retelling in the restaurant. She would have listened to it wide-eyed and
breathless, interrupting with little cries of delight and admonition by turns.
Her husband could already be regretting that he had told her at all; Maria saw
him giving her arm a slight nudge as she was about to make more comparisons
with her aunt’s expensive jewellery, and her instantly clamping her mouth shut
before giving him a playful nudge in return.

But the partial telling, while it saved his
pride, hurt hers. She did not care about the opinion of the boss’s wife, but it
vexed her that this man who struck her as eminently superior in looks, speech
and manners to every other man around, should attribute to her, even if only in
the privacy of his thoughts, the lowest of motives for marrying. Why did it
matter to her what he should think of her, when she had no wish to see him
again?

In an urgency of need to throw off any
aspersions of falsehood, she seized the first opportunity to tell him the whole
truth. The next day when the four of them were walking through a famed flower
garden, and she found him walking beside her, she at once set about repairing
the damage to her reputation. In two minutes she was done. Then she realised
her mistake. His astonished look showed he had not known about her rejection of
the gift and her husband’s own angry rejection of it in the forest. She would
always remember how he looked that afternoon, as the habitual smile was
momentarily suspended for a look of amazement mixed with puzzlement. Her
husband had always exercised a fine circumspection in the telling of secrets
about himself, even with the most trusted friends. ‘I lost my head and bought
her a ring I could hardly afford,’ would have been harmless, even pleasant
self-deprecatory secret-sharing with his male friends, resulting in no more than
laughing male camaraderie. ‘She rejected it, and I threw it away’ would have
invited shock, unwanted sympathy and worst of all, the pity reserved for the
greatest humiliation a man could suffer – not only outright rejection by a
woman, but his being driven to insane action by it.

The earlier vexation was replaced by an
overwhelming confusion, as she saw her massive betrayal, even if inadvertent,
of her husband. In trying to save her pride, she had ruined his with the person
whose opinion he cared most about. The pain of the confusion made her turn pale
and feel ill. Dr Phang was watching her closely, not in judgement but with
genuine concern and goodwill.

He said very quickly, for his wife was
walking towards them, ‘Don’t worry. Nobody will ever know,’ and touched her
hand reassuringly.

‘Can I trust him?’ she wondered. ‘What an
awful blunder. Now things are going to get more complicated than ever with Bernard.’

‘So what was it like?’ Meeta and Winnie with
their usual prurient curiosity, the usual crude nods, winks and nudges, were
sure to ask her. She would resort to their own easy jargon to put a stop to all
the inquisitiveness: so-so, okay, no big deal. The truth was she blamed her own
ignorance and prejudices based entirely on a few childhood incidents that
should have been of no consequence in a woman’s path to maturity and
fulfillment in sex.

When she was a little girl of eight and
playing hopscotch with two friends of about the same age, the unruly kampong
urchins, led by a brutal-looking boy of fourteen, suddenly surrounded them and
herded them into a disused hut, where they tried to pull off their underwear,
having already stepped out of their own. She had a terrified glimpse of raw,
turgid male power, quivering with menace, before all three of them screamed so
loudly that someone came running to investigate and the culprits fled.

Then when she was about ten, her mother took
her on a short ferry trip, when they were seated on a wooden bench opposite a
man who was lounging on his seat, with his legs wide apart, his trousers
unzipped, staring at them menacingly.

She remembered her mother bending down and
hissing to her, ‘Don’t look,’ then pulling her up by the hand and hurrying away
to another bench at the far end of the ferry.

Back home, her mother made her spit three
times into the drain, each time accompanied by a loud cry of ‘Choy!’ which she
knew was some kind of countervailing curse. Then her mother washed her hair in
water purified by flower petals, refusing to provide any explanation and all
the time muttering to herself that men were evil, doing their evil thing in
public. That night she had a bad dream in which she alone faced the man in the
ferry, and stood transfixed as he pulled out from between his legs one snake after
another, and tossed them at her.

The childhood incidents could have been so
much light-hearted sharing between husband and wife on honeymoon. Their
honeymoon, she noted with dismay, was the start of a serious exercise of
reclamation and restoration on the part of her husband: he had worked so hard,
endured so much, suffered such great material loss that the work of
self-compensation had to begin without any loss of time. Their roles should now
exactly be reversed: she to do all the giving, he to receive all the attention
and adulation, beginning with the claims of the marital bed. If there was the
greatest possible mismatch between a man’s small build and quiet demeanour, and
his sexual passion, it was her husband’s, she noted with awe mixed with anger because
it was a passion that excluded hers. In the cosiness of the honeymoon room, as
he claimed her body, at any time of the day or night, working through his
appetite energetically and methodically, she thought, with mounting panic, that
she, Maria Seetoh, experienced graduate teacher of English language and
literature in modern-day Singapore, was no different from her mother who
squirmed under her drunken father, and her Por Por who, it was said, was
dragged to the bed of her opium addict husband and told to remain there, naked,
till he was ready.

Her mother would have passed that awful test
of a woman’s pristineness; her Por Por, if she had lost it to that lover during
the temple trysts, could have been punished with death in the ancestral
country. She herself had let out a little scream of pain in the darkness, and
winced to see the satisfaction on her husband’s face, and hear the satisfaction
in his voice. He said, caressing her, ‘I too kept mine for you, you know,’
making her wince even more. For now, to the huge financial investment of the
ring, there was the libidinal one of the preserved manhood, an awful double
debt to pay.

She returned from the honeymoon sick in mind
and body, and her husband, ever attentive, took several days’ leave to take
care of her. When she recovered, he said eagerly, ‘Guess what? Dr Phang has
invited us for dinner with him and Mrs Phang at The Pavilion Hotel.’

There was a moment during the dinner when
the man, with the debonair mane of greying hair and boyish smile, had the opportunity
to whisper to her, ‘You don’t look well. Take care of yourself.’

She thought he looked at her with pity, and
understood what it felt like to be the object of this most unwelcome of human
offerings. She said to him, with all the pride she could gather, ‘Thank you.
I’m alright,’ before Mrs Phang came up to say breezily, ‘That’s a pretty dress.
But I wish you would wear some make-up, my dear! You would look even prettier,
wouldn’t she, Bernard?’

It had always been the suspicion of the intellectual
elite as well as the diplomatic community in Singapore that both the national
TV and newspapers, always serious in their dissemination of news and
highlighting of national problems and solutions, occasionally allowed
themselves the indulgence of humour without losing the seriousness. They did
this through the simple principle of contrast, by juxtaposing news and pictures
of the great TPK with those of his hated political opponent, V.K. Pandy, for
instance, between the awesome prime minister speaking into a forest of
microphones against an array of international flags at the United Nations, and
the pitiable opponent in his lonely corner in Middleton Square, waving his
pamphlets at the lunchtime crowds hurrying by.

On another occasion, a TV news programme
showed the prime minister in tuxedo receiving the highest honour from a
business community in the United States, followed by a picture of V.K. Pandy in
untidy shirt and crumpled trousers loudly arguing with a traffic policeman.

A national campaign on the proper use of
English, the necessary language of trade, technology and international
relations, which was initiated by TPK himself and launched amidst great fanfare
in the media, was yet another occasion for highlighting the astounding contrast
between the prime minister and the opposition member who dared to challenge him
– TPK’s impeccable use of Oxford-marked English and V.K. Pandy’s deliberate,
persistent use of Singlish, the awful localised variety, completely
unintelligible to the international English-speaking community. Indeed,
Singlish was the special target of the campaign which had kicked off with a
pledge by schools and colleges to take corrective measures.