Miss Seetoh in the World (33 page)

A woman developed very long and sensitive
antennae to catch the mood of the man she was interested in, and they reliably
relayed to her the signals. No questions, no demands for explanations, no
accusations. Words could so easily kill joy which was as fragile as it was
precious. The only permitted use of language was to enhance the pleasure of the
present, which, like a cool, quiet room with a silken bed, should remain
oblivious of the loud knocking from outside. The annoying whys of the past and
what-ifs of the future were crude barbarians at joy’s gate, best ignored.

‘I love talking to you,’ he said, by which
he meant mostly listening while she talked and told her stories. Sometimes she
wondered, as he made surreptitious attempts to touch her hand across the table
or caress her foot under it, if he was listening at all. Surely it was his way
of biding time; he had his own line, not of danger but conquest and victory,
and with each phone call, each lunch meeting with her, he came closer to it,
with the mighty anticipation of the fevered bull elephant or moose.

She thought, ‘Ah, you evil, exasperating,
egoistical, intriguing, wonderful, irresistible man. You’re okay.’

The spillover effects of her exuberance had
to touch poor Por Por, now hopelessly demented but still as trusting as a
child. She had no idea that her concern for her grandmother could lead to
family conflict. Por Por had asked to have back her jade earrings, her jade
bangle, her gold chain. Maria, remembering that her brother had taken away all
the items of jewellery after the old woman was almost robbed in her wanderings
and given them to their mother for safekeeping, now asked for their return. She
explained that since Por Por was mostly at home now, watched over by the maid,
she should be allowed to wear all the jewellery she wanted to make her happy.
Anna Seetoh instantly looked uncomfortable.

She murmured, ‘They’re not with me anymore.’

‘What do you mean, not with you anymore?’
said Maria sharply, and the suspicions which were quickly forming in her mind
were as quickly confirmed.

Heng’s many money problems had caused him to
do reckless things, including pawning all Por Por’s jewellery.

‘How dare he!’ exploded Maria. Pawning was
as good as selling off; Heng would have neither the means nor inclination to
redeem it. She said angrily to Anna Seetoh, ‘Tell me, Mother, has he been
borrowing money from you too, or rather, demanding it? Come on, tell me. Now
it’s your turn to tell the truth and shame the devil!’ She was all up in arms
now.

It turned out that the truth was much worse.
Anna Seetoh had even borrowed money for the errant adopted son; it was a
substantial sum. Maria said, hot tears coming into her eyes, ‘How can he do
this to you and Por Por? What on earth is happening? I thought he was not doing
too badly in his businesses, whatever they were. Remember he was always
boasting about making profits here and profits there?’ Anna Seetoh clearly
needed a full unburdening of horrible family secrets, in the same way that she
needed a full confession of the week’s stock of sins, even if very minor, at
the confessional in the Church of Eternal Mercy.

She said, not looking at her daughter, ‘You
remember that Por Por had a large biscuit tin in which she kept all the ang
pows that we had given her over the years?’

Every Chinese New Year, Por Por’s main
delight was to receive the gifts of cash from family members, which she instantly
put into her pocket, happy as a child. Maria remembered the pitifully rusty,
square biscuit tin holding all the money that the old woman possessed in the
world, which she kept under her bed. ‘Is that gone too?’ Her mother nodded and
said tearfully, ‘He’s in debt.’ Months back, he had gone into a risky business
venture in China with a friend that was supposed to make millions for them;
very soon after, he lost all his money, as well as all contact with the friend.
Anna Seetoh delivered the last bit of bad news in a lowered voice, ‘He’s been
gambling. He says the loan sharks are after him.’ Maria thought of the
long-suffering wife and the autistic son whom she had seen only once, years
ago, when she had gone on a visit to Malaysia with her mother and Por Por, a
sickly, unhappy child who sat huddled on the floor with a plastic bag of
coloured balls, breaking into occasional tantrums and hitting the sides of his
head with tightly clenched fists. His mother, always haggard-looking, would
rush to him and rock him in her arms till he calmed down.

Distant shadowy figures who had little part
in her world, her sister-in-law and nephew now provoked deep pity. She made a
mental note to enquire after their welfare and arrange to send them some money;
now all her anger was directed at the feckless, irresponsible brother. ‘Listen,
Mother,’ she said, ‘you are not to give him any more money for his gambling, do
you hear, not one cent. Have you spoken to him?’ Her brother would never speak
to her, except in the position of advisor, dispenser of knowledge, fault-finder
about her naivete in money matters.

Anna Seetoh realised her mistake as soon as
she said, ‘Heng thinks that if Bernard had not willed the apartment to his
Third Aunt –’ for Maria instantly said, raising her voice, ‘How dare he! And
how dare he assume that if the apartment had come to me, he would have any
share in it?’ She had never despised her brother as much as she did now.

She looked at her mother, still sniffling
into a piece of tissue paper, and wondered if this was the right time to ask
her the question that had been in her mind for years: was Heng her real
brother, rather than the claimed adopted one? As a child, she had caught enough
adult whispers to suspect that Heng was the son of one of her father’s
mistresses, who had abandoned him at birth. The infant had then been brought to
her mother, to be brought up as an adopted son. Her mother, already incensed by
her husband’s infidelities, had refused until he had, by way of compensation,
bought her a flat and given her a sum of money, his generosity coinciding with
a period of prosperity in some shady business that would never come his way
again. The boy was as nasty as any sibling could be, and she was glad that he
had spent many of the childhood years with his real mother who had
unaccountably reappeared in his father’s complicated life. No, thought Maria, I
would prefer to think of him as an adopted brother rather than one related by
blood; I don’t want any of that nastiness flowing in my veins.

The next time she saw him, she was shocked
by his appearance. He had lost weight, looked haggard and depressed. The old
arrogance was gone.

She felt sorry enough to press some money
into his hands, for which he said humbly, ‘Thanks.’ Anna Seetoh whispered,
shaking her head, ‘It will go into the fruit machines at the Manis Club, or the
horse races or the 4-D.’

Heng had apparently, after having once won a
fairly substantial amount at the national Four-Digits lottery, begun to have
dreams of a colossal win that would wipe off all his debts. He had begun to
take on the irrational behaviour of the big-time lottery dreamer, fervidly
seeking lucky numbers in his dreams by night and in the most improbable events
by day. He threw away hundreds of dollars on a single bet in pursuit of that
elusive jackpot. Anna Seetoh confided that he had taken Por Por to a temple to
pray before a deity reputed to give winning numbers, and had made reckless bets
based on her age, the age of an old neighbour who had been knocked down by a
lorry, the number on the registration plate of the lorry, the number he made
his son pick up from a box of counters, a number randomly picked up from a
scrap of newspaper stuck to the sole of his shoe. He had gone mad.

Maria thought in self-reproach, ‘Was I so
engrossed in my own affairs that I had no knowledge of what was going on?’

He asked Maria rather sheepishly, not
looking at her, ‘What was Ah Siong’s exact age when he passed away?’, actually
taking out a piece of paper and a stump of a pencil from his pocket.

She said, white with rage, ‘You disgust me.
Go away.’

Dr Phang said, in a call that evening, ‘You
sound depressed,’ and she said, ‘I am. Family problem.’

He said, ‘Would you like to tell me about
it?’ and she replied, ‘No, it’s not a pretty story; I’ll try to forget it.’

‘Tell me anyway,’ he said. ‘I like the sound
of your voice, the brightness in your eyes, whatever you’re telling me.’
Suppose I ask you all that I’ve been dying to ask from Day One? Suppose we sit
down and talk?

The question of course could not be given
utterance; she had learnt to fully cooperate with his strategy of deflection.
What was it about men and women that it was so difficult to sit down for a
good, honest talk?

‘Let’s have lunch again, sometime next
week,’ he said.

 ‘Yes, let’s,’ she said eagerly. He could
lift her mood from dark despondency to singing elation. Could love or
infatuation or whatever it was called become an addiction, like Heng’s
gambling, like the drug habits of Ah Boy, the gardener’s son, that Maggie had
once told her about? Addiction had no use for talk, only the next fix.

The day which had begun badly was fully
restored in its joy.

The next morning when she walked into the
staffroom after a lesson, she saw a note placed under her teacher’s record
book, recognised Brother Philip’s handwriting and smiled. It contained a
limerick:

There is a Brother named Brother P

Who is as naïve as naïve can be,

      When asked about the birds and bees,

      He said, ‘Why, yes, if you please,

They’re welcome for my plants and trees!

Maria thought, unable to hide the smiles
that were inviting curious looks from Mrs Neo and some others, ‘Maybe I love
Brother Philip, but am only in love with Dr Phang.’

From the doorway of the dispensary on
Middleton Square where she had gone to get some cough medicine for Por Por, she
looked to see if V.K. Pandy was at his usual post, with his pitiful pamphlets,
with the even more pitiful unspoken message of despair written all over the
shabby appearance, the unruly beard, the piercing bitter eyes searching the
faces of all who passed by: ‘See what the great TPK has done to me. Now I have
lost not only my business, but my political career. And not a single one of you
has the guts to stand up for me!’ Some time after he had sold his business to
pay the huge sum to settle the defamation suit taken against him, he had been
found guilty of tax evasion, had once again been hauled into court and fined a
sum which instantly put him in the category for disqualification from
membership in Parliament. When he lost his parliamentary seat, it was said,
V.K. Pandy sat down on the floor and cried like a child. That night he got
drunk in a beer shop and had to be taken home by the beer shop owner. The case
of his dismissal from parliament was not reported in the local papers but when
The International Courier, based in Bangkok, reported it at length, the paper
was slapped with a court order for defamation and had to pay a fine, after which
it learnt to be more cautious in its dealings with Singapore.

V.K. Pandy was not at his post, but the
space his presence carved out in the bustling square remained empty, being
avoided, by habit, by the crowds hurrying by. It was as if an invisible V.K. Pandy
was there, still captured on the secret relentless surveillance cameras, and
nobody wanted to take any risk of being seen with him. There were a few who
took the risk, albeit circuitously, after hearing about the poor man’s
financial misfortunes; their strategy was to send someone, a child or a maid,
to go up and casually drop an innocuous-looking envelope containing the
donation money beside his pile of pamphlets. Singaporeans were ever kind,
responding generously to reports about families suffering the loss of the sole
breadwinner, foreign workers left in the lurch by thieving contractors who had
made them pay large sums to come to work in Singapore’s construction
industries, a seriously ill child whose parents were too poor to pay for the
expensive medical treatment. Kindness to them sometimes won praise in
ministerial speeches on social cohesion, as kindness to political opponents
never would. There must have been enough secret donors for V.K. Pandy to put up
a small placard that said ‘Thank you, kind Singaporeans.’ The bitter lines
around his mouth must have added sadly, ‘But not brave enough to be kind
openly.’

Without V.K. Pandy waving his pamphlets and
loudly calling out, the familiar circle of empty ground looked eerily empty and
silent. Maria, watching from the dispensary, felt a sudden heaviness of heart,
weighed down equally by sadness and pity. She was thinking of V.K. Pandy’s wife
whom she had never seen but only heard about, a woman sick with cancer and
perpetual worry for her now bankrupt husband. At what point in her anger was
she driven to get out of the house, go out into the streets, stand in front of
the closed shutters of their modest printing shop and weep loudly to protest
the injustice against her husband, wearing the white sari and long dishevelled
hair of mourning? People had passed by quickly; they had to avoid looking at
her too.

Maria noticed a figure striding across the
square towards V.K. Pandy’s spot; indeed it cried out for notice, being dressed
in the costume of a huge chicken, with bright yellow feathers and a very long,
sharp orange beak; it had the friendly familiarity of Big Bird in the popular
children’s TV show. Jerking its head up and down, it held up a placard mounted
on a stick, which Maria could not read from her distance. There being a
Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet near the square, which was very popular with the
lunchtime crowd, her immediate thought was that Big Bird was there for some
promotional stunt. As soon as she had that thought, she smiled to see how
delightfully wrong she was.