Miss Seetoh in the World (37 page)

Maria thought, poor principal. I’ll miss
him. She asked Brother Philip if he had seen him since. ‘Once,’ he replied, ‘he
looked much thinner. He looked sad and subdued. He did not welcome visitors.’

‘Do you think the charges are true?’ asked
Maria.

‘Who knows?’ shrugged Brother Philip.

Maria thought that the last person she would
link with her greedy, money-desperate brother was the principal of St Peter’s
Secondary school. Venality, corruption, sordidness – from the great murky ocean
outside, they washed up on the shores of an institution dedicated to learning
and noble ideals.

Also heartlessness and cruelty towards young
love. Yen Ping and Mark asked to see her privately. They met in a corner of the
school library after school. Each looked nervously to the other to begin
confiding their troubled story. It seemed that Mark’s mother had found out that
they were serious about each other and had immediately stormed into the school
to complain to the principal. Maria could imagine the woman, insufferably loud
and arrogant, with her heavy make-up, perfectly coiffured hair and designer
clothes, standing before Mr Ignatius Lim, waving her manicured hands about,
dropping hints that she was the niece of the Deputy Minister of Trade and
Business, disdaining to refer to her son’s girlfriend’s parents other than as
working class people with whom she had nothing in common. ‘I have plans for
Mark to go abroad and study in the best university,’ she said, ‘and I would
like you as the principal to see to it that there is no more nonsense going
on!’ Before she left, she opened her handbag, took out her chequebook and made
a donation to the school charity fund, saying with a smile that St Peter’s
could always count on her support. As soon as she left, Mr Lim sent for Mark
and Yen Ping and reminded them that no pairing was allowed in schools. ‘I will
be keeping an eye on you,’ he said with a great show of geniality. ‘Any more
complaints and I might have to do something drastic. You strike me as very
sensible young people. So stop being naughty and concentrate on your studies!’

‘We will not be attending your creative
writing class anymore,’ said Yen Ping tearfully. Mark revealed that his mother
was already making plans to transfer him to another school.
Yen Ping revealed that the angry woman had made a visit to her parents, at
their drinks stall in Siah Street Market, and delivered an ultimatum: if their
daughter persisted in distracting her son from his studies, she would take the
matter to the Deputy Minister of Trade and Business who could revoke any
business licence at very short notice. After she left, Yen Ping’s mother gave
her daughter a sound scolding.

‘Why do you have to get mixed up with those
rich, snooty people? Their world is not our world!’ Her father said, ‘Stop
seeing him, we have our pride.’ They were saving up to send her to a university
of her choice. All she had to do was to study hard and get good grades in the
exams.

Maria thought that the entire ugly affair
was saved only by the purity of the two young people at its centre. They were
like two radiant spirits standing on a vast expanse of seashore, untouched by
the detritus all around. Mark and Yen Ping said, ‘Miss Seetoh, we want you to
know that we have enjoyed and benefited from your creative writing classes, and
that our feelings for one another will always be the same, despite what is
happening,’ then turned to look affectionately at each other and moved closer
for the merest contact of fingers. She had to pull them down from the high
clouds of their love to the hard realities on the ground.

‘How will you continue to see each other?
There will be risks.’

Again they looked at each other. The
resourcefulness of pure, young undeterred love could not be underestimated.

‘We have thought it over,’ they said. ‘We
accept that we can’t see each other as much as we want, but we have ways.
Besides, we can always write to each other.’

Ways? Maria thought of secret meetings in
ice-cream parlours, that she and Kuldeep Singh had dared, and in the Botanic
Gardens where she had seen the young couple, in school uniform, unabashedly
locked in each other’s arms at the top of a grassy slope, then rolling down
together in joyous laughter.

She was taken aback to be so decisively
included in their scheme of secret love.

‘Miss Seetoh,’ they said, ‘would you be able
to give us private tuition in English language to prepare us for the exams? We
could go to your place once a week.’

Private tuition to do better in the exams
was the best stratagem to make even cautious and suspicious parents throw all
caution and suspicion to the winds. She could already see Mark and Yen Ping,
looking as pure and innocent as ever, seated side by side at a table, holding
hands under it while she tutored them. Parental threat from both sides was
clearly drawing them closer to each other and too close to an edge far more
dangerous than hers because they were so young.

Maria suddenly remembered the incident, so
long ago, of her two classmates, both aged sixteen, who were forced to get
married when the girl got pregnant.

The reliable alarm bells in her head rang
loudly on their behalf, and she said, ‘Perhaps we should all sit down and have
a good talk one of these days. I see problems.’

‘Yes, Miss Seetoh,’ they said, adding, ‘we
trust you.’

Yen Ping said, blushing deeply, ‘Miss
Seetoh, I know what you’re thinking. But Mark and I are not like that. We’ve
talked things over. Our plan is to study hard, get good university degrees and
then get married. Our parents would have no objections once we prove that we
are really serious about each other and our future together.’

Maria could only give each a hug. ‘Bless
you,’ she said, the tears coming into her eyes. She noticed they came too
easily these days.

‘So you have only distress stories to tell,’
said Dr Phang. They were once again parked in the dark isolated spot outside
the Botanic Gardens. By now completely attuned to each other’s mood, they were
assiduously avoiding even the slightest possibility of conflict or tension; he
made no demands and she asked no questions.

There were always her stories – from school,
from home, from the realm of pure imagination – to sustain the
neither-here-nor-there state which had its own piquant pleasure. He said, ‘My turn
to tell a story,’ and asked whether as children, they had a common fear
experienced by all Chinese children exposed to the terrifying pantheon of gods
in the mythology of their ancestral cultures before the moderating, calming
effects of Christianity, the common religion of conversion.

It was the terror of the mightiest god in
the pantheon whose supremacy was embodied in his name – Tua Peh Kong – whom
children remembered as the largest, most decked-out statue with the most
elaborate altar in temples that their mothers or grandmothers took them to.

Maria said, her eyes bright with happy
recollection, ‘I remember the Tua Peh Kong in the White Heaven Temple that my
Por Por used to take me. I would hide behind Por Por and peep at the ferocious
eyes, the black beard, the glittering warrior costume, the sunburst of swords
on his back.’

Dr Phang’s Tua Peh Kong was seated on a gold
throne, one booted foot on a pile of screaming demons, like a bunch of writhing
earthworms. As a boy, he would wake up screaming from nightmares of Tua Peh
Kong which continued even after the family converted to Christianity and
formally denounced the superstitions of their forbears.

The best part of the story was in the
connection with the great TPK.

‘The happiest coincidence of initials,’
smiled Dr Phang. ‘Have you ever wondered why the prime minister is seldom
referred to by his real name – Tang Poon Kim? Singapore’s Tua Peh Kong sits
astride his throne, striking terror in all hearts. He makes use of the Thunder
God to hurl the bolts of his fury against his enemies and throw them into
disarray. If V.K. Pandy leaves Singapore and returns to India, that will be the
sixth dissident to flee from his wrath.’ Maria thought, now I know why I’m so
much attracted to this man. It was not only his good looks and his charm, but
his position as a maverick, like herself, remaining in the system, yet out of
it in spirit, taking delight in cocking a snook at the powers that be.

She said, her eyes sparkling, ‘I challenge
you when you next meet up with TPK to tell him about his godly status.’

‘I already have,’ he said chuckling. His
canny charm must have been even more finely calibrated to the great TPK’s mood;
the austere prime minister, it was said, was not without a sense of humour in
private, albeit a wry one, and it was no bad thing to catch him at a moment
when he was in need of some light diversion and tell him, ‘Sir, Singaporeans
say you’re Tua Peh Kong; their children and grandchildren down the generations
will know you only by those fearsome initials!’

The great TPK might even have let out a
smile before resuming the task of tapping on Dr Phang’s brains for this or that
national project.

Maria said, by now all delight, ‘If I write
a book, any book, it must have a place for Tua Peh Kong. His image will be a
blend of our respective childhood nightmares.’

He had never seen her in such a light mood.
He swept her into his arms and whispered in her ear, ‘Well?’

Let’s go to bed. Let me take you to bed.
Shall we? How about it? Would you like to come up and see my etchings? The
wording of a proposition, if clichéd or crude or stale, might dismay the
romantic woman. This man dispensed with them all by a single bold, rising
inflection. Heady with the light-heartedness of the evening, after an extremely
vexatious day, she responded with her own aplomb,

‘Alright, we’ll not keep the silken bed
waiting. Now I’m going home to my plain one – alone.’ She could see his broad
smile in the enveloping darkness; it remained through the ensuing flurry of
serious suggestions.

He would be going on a trip overseas, in a
fortnight’s time, with a team of colleagues for a conference in Europe; he
could go earlier, or return later, on his own, and meet her in a hotel in
London or Paris, whichever suited her. Meanwhile, he would be too busy to see
her.

A fortnight of eager
anticipation that was betrayed by a light step, a flushed skin, a secret smile.
The marks of a woman being in love surely had to do with the anticipation, or
recollection, of the first kiss, the first nakedness together. Sometimes while
having a cup of coffee by herself in an open café, she would look in
pleasurable idleness at people passing by, singling out women betrayed by those
chemical manifestations, whether walking by themselves or beside their lovers,
never their husbands, oblivious to the rest of the world. The element of
secrecy always sweetened the anticipation
.

Once she was in a taxi that screeched to a
sudden halt in front of a dreamy-looking girl who was playing with strands of
her long hair, gently twirling them round her forefinger. When the taxi-driver
leant out of the window to scold her, she merely glanced at him and continued
her serene, smiling walk across the road. Maria watched with amusement.

The taxi-driver turned around to remark,
‘Thinking about her boyfriend, that’s why. These girls, they think, oh, my
darling, oh my darling, when I see you again? When you make love to me again?
They are very big danger on the road, I tell you!’

Maria asked, ‘Have you ever felt like this
in your life?’ and he replied, with a roar of laughter, ‘Aiyah, so, so long
ago. When just in my twenties. She was ronggeng dance girl from Thailand. Very
pretty. So-oo sexy!’

‘Did you marry her?’

‘What, no, lah! How can. My mother found me
girl from her hometown in Malaysia. Married now for thirty-two years! Two sons,
two daughters, five grandchildren. Ha, ha, ha!’ The taxi passed a small street
where outside a rundown coffee shop, a number of elderly men sat on red plastic
chairs round old wooden tables. ‘Miss, look at the old ah peh there, drinking
coffee,’ he said. ‘You know what? They are sixty, seventy years old, yet
dreaming of young sexy mistress! One ah peh, seventy-five, found young girl
from China. Suddenly he look younger, in love, have sex. But only one year. She
took all his pension money and went back to China!’

‘Well, has it happened yet?’ asked Meeta and
Winnie, and the moment she said, ‘Soon, soon,’ she regretted it for the two
women, incorrigibly curious, would now be impelled by their own kind of
anticipation to call her constantly to check.

Brother Philip said astutely, ‘Maria, these
days you are forgetful. It can’t be the bad kind of forgetfulness since it
comes with all those smiles.’

She thought, ‘No, I can’t bear to tell him.
He might lose all respect and regard for me.’

He kept his promise to take her to the Blue
Moon Lounge in another attempt to find Maggie; it too was fruitless. Brother
Philip said, ‘I think they’re lying. Maggie’s mother was probably peeping from
behind some curtain and wondering if we were from the anti-vice squad.’

She found a note from Maggie in an envelope
addressed to her at St Peter’s. It said: ‘I know you and Brother Philip trying
to find me. Don’t waste your time. If you really want to see me and make
apology for what you have insulted me and my sister, meet me at the Chantek
Café on Slim Street at 7.35 tomorrow evening. Do not bring Brother Philip. Do
not be late. My boyfriend will pick me up at 7.40 for dinner and take me for
important appointment in town. If you not punctual by 7.45 latest, I will be
gone, and I will not see you again. Maggie.’