Miss Seetoh in the World (8 page)

If she feared a coldly judgemental husband,
she was repelled by an abjectly whimpering one. Her marriage had become pure
grotesquerie. She got up, rushed to the bathroom, closed the door and expelled
her revulsion, which came out in a swift stream, into the toilet bowl.

The bathroom, scene of so many private
miseries, had become her most dependable room. Affinity between a lost person
seeking protection and an inanimate object offering it could actually grow: in
the early hours of a morning, she had sat on the cover of the toilet seat for a
full hour, frantically working on the setting of an examination paper due the
next morning for the school typist to type and print out. On another occasion,
still secure in her hiding place, she had gone through, for the second time, a
marvelous story a student in the creative writing class had submitted, and
written a whole page of encouraging comments. Both times, thankfully, her
husband was still peacefully sleeping when she completed the job and climbed
silently back into bed.

The accidental meeting with Kuldeep in a
restaurant some weeks later could not have come at a worse time. They were
sitting at a table, looking at the menu, and he was telling her about a special
project that the admired Dr Phang was entrusting him with over the heads of at
least two senior officers. He was in a good mood and summoned the waiter to ask
if he could make a special order for his wife’s favourite pork rib soup that
was not on that evening’s menu.

Then Kuldeep strode up to her, bellowing,
‘Hey, Maria Seetoh! Do you remember me? Imagine meeting you after all these
years!’

Of course she remembered him, at once seeing
the handsome beaming confidence superimposed upon the schoolboy’s scrawny limbs
and untidy uniform. She greeted him joyfully, not daring to return the effusive
hug, and instantly turned to her husband to introduce him. ‘This is my husband,
Bernard.’

But Kuldeep’s attention was all for her.
‘Hey, Maria, you are as pretty as ever! What are you doing now – we must meet
to catch up with all the news and gossip – I am now with Carlton and Wu –’ His
genuine joy in seeing her, his eagerness to let her in on his good fortune of
an eminently happy marriage blessed with three sons and a senior position in
one of Singapore’s most prestigious law firms, completely obliterated her
husband nearby, now dangerously glowering. ‘Here’s my card, give me your phone
number, we really must catch up,’ said the irrepressible Kuldeep and left.

In a second he was back, exclaiming, ‘Hey,
do you remember the X sign we made that day on the wall of The Rendezvous Bar?
Remember, we had to run away real fast!’ He turned to Bernard, speaking to him
for the first time, needing a larger audience for the happy recounting of the
past: ‘We were crazy! We cut the sign, holding hands like a pair of idiots.’
Roaring with laughter, he turned to face Maria again and said, ‘You know what?
It’s still there – we must go back to have a look – we really must catch up –’
He had completely ruined the evening for them. They ate the rest of their
dinner in silence.

The next day she made use of the two free
periods in between classes to go to the library where, under the pretext of
consulting some reference book, she could take deep breaths, calm down and
organise her thoughts and feelings into some coherent pattern. She had reached
a point in her marriage when something had to happen, to rescue her from it.
The cage, the net, the bell jar, the dark cave from which no shackled prisoner
could escape into the sunlight – all were feeble images for her desperation for
release.

At the centre of the tumult was a tiny,
tremulous hope: suppose her husband realised that he could not go on in the
marriage and decided that a divorce was best? His strong Catholicism forbade
that, but suppose his need to be happy was stronger? Beyond the shock of his
fellow churchgoers, the parish priest Father Rozario, her friends and, above
all, her mother, would be all happiness for her. She would wear the scandal
like a badge because it announced the opening of her brave new world.

There were some Catholic couples in the
parish who had separated, were no longer living together, but who continued to
be devout Catholics. Separation which would still mean the continuance of that
hateful MRS would also mean the end of a hateful life. She did not have the
strength or courage to initiate the move, but suppose he, coming to the end of
the marital tether, did?

A coward’s wish. She told her students
stirring stories of honesty and courage, and in the privacy of her imagination,
the coward’s dream played out, one after the other. So: her husband told her
they had best live separately, even if the church did not allow them to
divorce; her husband managed to convince Father Rozario that they had married
under unacceptable circumstances leaving the church authorities no choice but
to accept the reason of non-consummation to dissolve the marriage; her husband
had found another woman whom he loved deeply and truly, and quietly made arrangements
for their separate lives, even paying for her to do her postgraduate degree
course at the Singapore University. Each scenario ended with her saying, ‘Thank
you,’ in profound gratitude.

The coward could be capable of self-blame.
Too late, yet so soon, she had realised the great injustice she had done him in
marrying him. She never loved him, not when she married him, not afterwards. It
was possible – a modern, educated, intelligent woman marrying a man even when
she did not love him, and thereafter drifting along in a one-sided marriage
with all the passion on his side, and all the regret on hers. The modern
woman’s mother or grandmother had had no choice; she abused hers and then found
she had to live with the consequences.

She remembered a survey in which three
quarters of the women surveyed stated that if divorced or widowed, they would
never marry again. Some gave the most ridiculous reasons for getting married in
the first place, the most common being the desirability of the married state
itself. I wanted children. I wanted to get away from over-strict parents. I was
tired of society labelling me a spinster. All my girlfriends had already got
married. It seemed the right and necessary thing for a woman to do.

She had a girlfriend who decided to get married
because she had won a beautiful bridal dress in a competition run by a woman’s
magazine, another because the man had a car whereas the other two suitors had
only motorcycles, yet another because as a single woman she would not have
qualified to buy a government-subsidised flat that she very much desired. She
knew of women who got married because they could no longer tolerate the
inevitable nosiness of aunts during the Chinese New Year season when unmarried
women, regardless of age, were still strictly entitled to receive the
traditional gifts of money, ‘So when I see you next year, will you be giving
instead of receiving ang pows?’

There were any number of substitutes for
love, revealed by the survey. I was grateful to him because he had helped pay for
my university education. He was the handsomest boy in our group and one day he
asked me to marry him, and everyone was so jealous! We were dating for eleven
years and one day he said to me, ‘We should get married before my grandmother
passes away.’ He was fantastic in bed! He bought me the most beautiful
engagement ring from Hong Kong. He was only one of two persons to get a first
class degree from the university, and was offered a scholarship to do a PhD.

All the absurd causes of her husband’s
annoyance and displeasure occurring almost on a daily basis – the porridge, his
futile calls to her in school, her forgetfulness about this or that, Mr Chin,
Brother Philip, her creative writing class, her meetings with the publisher,
the shoes not polished right, a wrong telephone call, anything at all – they
were laughably trivial, and under different circumstances could have had the
opposite effect of creating lively husband-wife raillery. A pet cat fussed
over, a little plant lovingly tended – her husband would have crushed them
underfoot for taking away the love that should be his. In the absence of love
in a marriage, anything could be a trigger for its grievance.

For three years, he had laboured under that
grievance. If hate was the other side of love’s coin, then his was a huge disc,
daily flashed at her, glinting with menace. She told herself she did not, would
not, could not love him, astonished at the full range of the brutal
auxiliaries. What had she done to him? Within a year, his placid countenance had
hardened into a rictus of cynicism and frustration unsoftened even in sleep.

He was exacting a price, and she was ready
to pay it. She had done injury to the sacred institution itself, and should, at
the least, accord it future respect by never marrying again. If she wanted a
new life, completely free of falsehood and all that it brought of confusion,
pain and shame, a life as radiant with joy, pride and certainty, as it was now
dark with deceit and torment, she would have to begin with nothing less than kneeling
before him with a devastating confession of the truth and bow her head to the
thunderbolts of his wrath. As he once knelt before her to declare the fullness
of his love, she would, by the same ultimate gesture, nullify and void hers. As
she was clearer in writing than in speech, she might write him a letter, a very
long one, to systematically apologise for the wrongs over three years,
beginning with the supreme one of agreeing to marry him. All the others had
simply flowed from it. It would not matter if every word in the letter became a
bitter pill forced into her mouth, to cleanse her heart of its ills, her soul
of its darkness, so that she could rise to a new brightness.

She had once read a story of a woman who was
so unhappy in her marriage that she wanted to run away with a man whom she met
when she was thirty years old and who became her secret lover. But fear – of
her husband, their relatives, his friends, her friends, society at large – held
her back; she said goodbye to the lover and continued in her loveless, soulless
marriage till her death, thirty years later. Upon her death, she had the
following epitaph inscribed on her tombstone: ‘She died at thirty, and was
buried at sixty.’

In her life she was to look many times, with
fearful, honest eyes, into the embarrassing truths about herself. With
missionary zeal, even from childhood, she had set out her life’s shining goal –
to be a really good, a really happy person – and then floundered all the way.
Be honest, be authentic, be yourself, she urged her students, and herself
turned away from the mirror of the myriad painful truths of her marriage. When
she summoned enough courage to do so, they became her own small humbling lights
on her own personal road to Damascus.

Did you ever love me? Why did you marry me?
At the very end, she was forced to tell the truth: I felt sorry for you. Pity
was the least acceptable substitute for love. No man would accept it. He flung
it back at her. His pride rose to reject it as a lie. He did not, would not,
could not believe her. But by then it was too late.

In July 1989, Maria Seetoh was helping her
friend Winnie in a great scheme for a marriage which never took place, just
five months before her own which she would never have believed possible.

Winnie Poon, forty years-old, had discreetly
found out that the matchmaking agency set up by the government was not
interested in single women of her age group, but soon found another avenue for
energies exclusively devoted to freeing herself from that maligned label.
Trembling with excitement, she secured the help of her two close friends, Maria
Seetoh and Meeta Nair, the latter being also her colleague at Palm Secondary
School. All three single women took different positions with regard to a status
that was increasingly the subject of nationwide concern. Unlike the anxious
Winnie, Maria Seetoh, aged thirty-five, cheerfully declared she would always
remain a happy single, while Meeta Nair, aged forty-four, claiming a gallery of
rejected beaus, wore the derisory label with self-assured panache and noisy
good humour. Both women were only too happy to help Winnie in her scheme, Maria
out of sheer curiosity, Meeta out of an amiability that included the
expectation of witnessing yet one more fiasco in poor Winnie’s hapless search
for love.

The three women knocked on the door of the
little room tucked inside the vast darkness of the White Heaven Temple, and a
very old, quavering voice said in an obscure Chinese dialect, ‘Come in!’ It
belonged to a very old, wizened Chinese woman, indistinguishable from a man
because of her shaved head and loose yellow robe, sitting at a table heaped
with the paraphernalia of her art. Surrounded by curls of whitish, fragrant
smoke, her eyes closed and hands clasped upon her chest, she might have been
some deity newly descended from heaven to do earth’s bidding. It was whispered
that she was Singapore’s most revered fortune-teller, and had been around for
so long that nobody knew her age, only that families had sought her help
through three generations.

Maria Seetoh suspected that Por Por in her
time had consulted the old woman, and her mother too, before the dramatic
conversion to Christianity. Mrs Seetoh Bee Liew renamed Mrs Anna Mary Seetoh,
stopped going to temple fortune-tellers, now banned practitioners of the
devil’s arts, but continued to consult knowledgeable English-educated psychics
who must know something of God’s mysteries. Neither camp had been helpful in
her efforts to make her errant husband mend his ways, or to find out where he
was in hiding with his mistress.