Miss Seetoh in the World (9 page)

Behind the old woman stood a middle-aged man
with thick glasses and a dour look. He spoke hesitant but intelligible English
and was presumably her translator, as all and sundry from the society’s
plethora of races and languages came to consult her. It was whispered that even
the great TPK had once paid her a visit in the secrecy of night, but then
people could have confused her with another illustrious fortune-teller, a monk
who lived in Taiwan but flew regularly to Singapore to tell the fortunes of the
great and powerful in society, including the political leaders and business
tycoons. Or they could have confused TPK, ever the stern, no-nonsense
rationalist, with his wife, a gentle, nervous woman who, it was said, was much
dependent on fortune-tellers and psychics because of constant bad health. The
whole society, it would appear, was in thrall to the power of myth and magic as
it was to the power of scientific technology; gleaming glass-and-steel towers
comported well with ancient temples and shrines and the occasional makeshift
altar at spots where sudden healing springs of water appeared, or an image of
the Monkey God upon a gnarled tree trunk, inviting devotees and seekers of
winning lottery numbers.

The old fortune-teller in White Heaven
Temple, who was said to be as old as the hundred-year-old temple tortoises and
who wanted only to be known as Venerable Mother, never asked Winnie any
questions, never read her palm or the lines of her face, never required her to
cast the fortune sticks or do anything with the immense pile of holy artefacts
on the table, including urns of joss-sticks, rows of silk scrolls, prayer
bells, golden lotuses, and images of a hundred deities. Therein lay her unique power.
Winnie only had to close her eyes, put her hands together in worshipful
attitude and state her wish in the silence of her heart. After some minutes,
the old one stood up and came to her, laid a withered hand on her head, raised
wide open eyes to heaven and muttered something. She nodded to her attendant
who came forward with a small casket of ivory discs and asked Winnie to pick
one, which he then matched to one of numerous small rolls of pink paper heaped
together in a basket. He gave Winnie the paper, Venerable Mother once more
closed her eyes, took up her prayerful position under a huge framed picture of
a black-faced warrior deity, and the consultation was over.

Out in the sunshine, the three women crowded
together to read the message. Maria Seetoh, who instinctively applied the
teacher’s corrective red pencil to every piece of print, including the little
slips of paper in fortune cookies carrying extravagant tributes and promises,
always read with suppressed amusement, the inevitable howlers when the lofty
idioms and metaphors of one culture were forced into the grammatical patterns
of another. She saved the best in a notebook for sharing with students to
provide comic relief during particularly heavy-going language or literature
lessons.

Out of the many arcane references to bright
mountains, roaring seas, bamboo trees that died, bamboo trees that revived
themselves, a great white pearl lying hidden in a muddy river bank, one
sentence stood out and made Winnie squeal in delight: ‘I only had one wish as I
prayed – you know what it is.’

Meeta said, ‘Alright, alright, we all know
you want Teik to propose to you.’

Winnie went on, her eyes shining, ‘See this
sentence, it says ‘Three heartaches gone, then the full heart is rejoicing with
the fourth.’ You remember all three, don’t you, how it didn’t work out each
time, how miserable I was.’

Meeta said, ‘We warned you, didn’t we,
Maria? All of them useless bums, taking advantage of your generosity. That
Benny Ee, the worst of all. Sponge Number One.’

Winnie said, ‘Three heartaches over. Then my
heart will rejoice with the fourth. And you know what? Today’s the fourth of
July, exactly four months since meeting Teik. And you know what, his name means
‘bamboo’.’ She added, simpering a little, ‘He has as good as proposed. Remember
the pearl necklace I told you about?’

She was wearing it, and pulled it out of the
lacy ruffles of her collar to show it. Every gift from a male acquaintance, no
matter how small, was a foretaste of the ultimate one – the formal declaration
of love and proposal. Winnie Poon’s entire life was organised around that one
wish. She looked again at the precious pink slip in her hand, staring wide-eyed
at the reference to the pearl. ‘How on earth would Venerable Mother know about
the necklace?’ Picking out each truth revealed by the prophecy on the slip of
pink paper was exhilarating, and kept the dream alive.

Meeta later whispered to Maria, ‘A cheap
one, you know, one of those that you get as a free gift in Y.K.K. Departmental
Store if you spend more than a hundred dollars. Teik’s sister got it, and gave
it to him. I know because he told me.’

She took delight in being the confidante of
shy men who went to women for advice, depressed men who needed the warm
motherly shoulder to cry on, guilty men who could never unload their guilt to
their own kind, and then took her rich haul of men’s secrets to share with her
girlfriends. ‘Without mentioning names –,’ she would begin at each delectable
session, usually over high tea, thereby preserving the integrity of the
confidante.

She took the private sharing about the pearl
necklace to a higher level of malice with a conjecture. ‘It’s the cheapskate’s
conscience gift, in return for all those expensive ones she’s plied him with –
all the ties and cuff links and ginseng and I don’t know what else. He will
soon dump her, you mark my words.’

Meeta had gone along with Winnie to the
fortune-teller, as she had on endless urgent errands in Winnie’s restive,
cluttered life, to give the poor girl, she said, moral support. It was strange
support made up entirely of a severe lecture and much scolding afterwards,
which the poor girl received with small, apologetic noises and nervous giggles.

‘How can you take all that scolding?’ Maria
had once asked her.

‘It’s all for my good. Meeta may scold and
nag, but she has the kindest heart and will do anything for me!’ Winnie
replied.

‘How can you treat Winnie like a child?’
Maria had asked Meeta, in the double confidante’s privileged position of
shuttling comfortably between the two unmatched mates.

‘Let me tell you this,’ said Meeta with
haughty authority. ‘Without me, Winnie the Blue, Winnie the Blur would be utterly
–’ She left unfinished the statement of her vast redemptive role in the other’s
life.

In the quiet of her room, away from her
mother’s incessant chatter, and the distractions from Por Por who could be
worse than a disruptive child, Maria wrote a short story which she later tore
up as being just too mean. It was about two diametrically opposed individuals –
in character, personality, disposition and appearance, down to details of
height, build, voice, dress, hairstyle. As Maria wrote, there flashed in her
mind the image of Meeta Nair, nearly six feet tall, large and imposing in her
colourful saris, with hair perfectly dressed in a sleek bun always decorated
with a diamante clip, loud of voice and hearty of laugh, completely eclipsing
the tiny, fragile-looking Winnie Poon in her silly little-girl dresses, with
her light scanty hair, pale face, thin lips inexpertly smeared with some
brownish lipstick, quizzical clown eyebrows and restive fingers always tugging
at something. ‘I don’t know how she ever became a teacher,’ Meeta had said
once. ‘The students show her no respect. I had to teach her the basics of classroom
control.’

Fiction coincided perfectly with fact to
produce a detailed description of the terrace-house jointly rented by the two women,
which Maria had visited a few times, with the main sitting room wall dominated
by images of Hindu gods and a huge framed portrait of the great Sai Baba in the
act of administering a blessing, a gigantic garland around his shoulders.
Facing the wall was a sideboard on which stood a silver cross mounted on a
white marble orb, and a large, leather-bound Bible, both belonging to Winnie.

‘You know what all this means?’ The
liberal-minded Meeta would say to surprised guests, her hand doing an immense
sweep to take in the entire panoply of religious objects. A deliberate
demonstration of the eclecticism that should rule Singapore society, instead of
the narrow-minded bigotry. She said to Maria, chuckling, ‘Every morning I bow
before my Sai Baba and kiss his portrait, then I turn and bow to the cross. If
your Por Por gives me one of her Kuan Yin statues, it too will have place of
honour here!’ Meeta expected to be invited by the Ministry of National Affairs
to be a member of the Council for Religious Harmony. ‘I’d love to sit down with
those stodgy priests, imams and pastors, and shock them with a truth or two!’

Every day, as soon as the two housemates
returned home from school, they changed into casual wear: Meeta into a cotton
caftan as colourful as her sari, and Winnie into her flannel housecoat. Each
had a clearly demarcated part of the shared house, in an arrangement that
roughly reflected their physical proportions, Meeta having the largest of the
three bedrooms, the larger bathroom, and the larger share of refrigerator space
for her special vegetarian fare, healthful yoghurts and face creams.

Each kept strictly to her apportioned space,
but met for afternoon tea and dinner prepared by their jointly employed
Filipino maid Philomena, as well as for the frequent consultations requested by
Winnie who would knock gently on Meeta’s door and ask deferentially, ‘Meeta,
may I come in? I need your advice,’ and the other would emerge, sometimes with
a show of weary resignation as she said, ‘Alright, what now, Winnie girl,’ and
prepared to play her role as advisor, mentor and guide all over again.

They had been brought together not only by a
social status maligned by the society, but by an agreeable mesh of opposites
that complemented and fed each other in perfect co-dependence, like that of the
bully and the weakling, the imposter and the gull, drifting naturally together.
Out of the enormous differences was forged an unbreakable loyalty and
generosity.

Meeta once nursed Winnie through a serious
illness, taking extended leave from school to stay with her in hospital when
her own sisters were unable to do so. ‘I had no time for anything else,’ she
said l3ater. ‘I was running here and there, doing this and that, like a mad
woman, just wanting poor Winnie to recover from the operation. My hair, my
nails, were a mess. Even Dr Pillay noticed. He said to me, ‘Promise me that the
next time you come to see Winnie, you will look your usual self.’ Promise!’ ’
She went to offer prayers, on Winnie’s behalf, in a Hindu temple.

Winnie, on her part, once saved Meeta’s
father from bankruptcy by giving her a large sum of money from the proceeds of
a rubber plantation left by an uncle in Malaysia. She whispered the sum into
Maria’s ear, and watched her wide-eyed reaction. ‘Don’t tell anybody, not even
your mother,’ she said. ‘And don’t tell Meeta that I’ve told you. She doesn’t
want anybody to know.’

Maria thought with twinkling mischief:
‘Well, she didn’t say, ‘Don’t tell your brother,’ so it will be okay to tell
Heng, watch his face contort with trying to digest the sum and hear him call
Winnie a mad woman!’

Fiction departed from fact only in the
ending of the story, when one of the women got married, and the other felt so
repudiated and hurt that their bond was broken forever. ‘Neither of us is
likely to get married,’ said Meeta. ‘I’m so fussy that I’ll never find men who
will meet my requirements, and Winnie’s so keen she frightens them off.’

 Winnie did frighten off Teik who not only
failed to propose but left Singapore without a word. Weeping silently,
incapable of angry recrimination, Winnie left it to Meeta to heap abuse upon
the miscreant.

After each failed relationship, Meeta came
in to energetically clean up the mess, beginning with the famous scolding
lecture, then looking into the messy state of Winnie’s finances. ‘Aiyoh!’ she
would exclaim, laying a dramatic palm on her forehead. ‘You wouldn’t believe
it. I sat down with her for three hours, to straighten out things. That woman
could have been cleaned out! If she isn’t careful, all that inheritance from
her family in Malaysia will be gone.’

She whispered to Maria who felt sorry enough
for Winnie to take her out for lunch. ‘Relationship? What relationship? It was
all in her imagination! He never took her out once on a date. She was the one
taking all the initiative, paying for the lunches and dinners, making all the
assumptions, buying him those expensive vitamin pills, the expensive Korean
ginseng. It was the same with those two others – I can’t even remember their
names. They took everything, then vamoosed.’

She brought her lips close to Maria’s ears.
‘Let me tell you this. They took everything except her virginity – they didn’t
want that!’

‘How do you know?’ asked Maria, intrigued.

‘I know, I know,’ said Meeta, giving a
knowing wink. When Winnie joined them, she launched on a little homily on
women’s need to be the hunted, and to take a stance of great aloofness, to whet
the chase. ‘I blame the government,’ she concluded, ‘All that fuss about woman
needing to get married, and look what it’s done to our poor deprived Winnie!’

Meeta herself, as Maria privately observed,
was capable of the greatest vulnerability of women when they became the
hunters: they built a huge superstructure of hope upon a little hint dropped by
the man, a little compliment offered in the expansiveness of mood after a good
dinner, a cheerful promise to call again that he would promptly forget.