Miss Seetoh in the World (3 page)

The man had struck the tenderest of parental
chords. For there was but a small number of these elite schools, and parents
would kill to get their sons and daughters into them. It was rumoured that the
policy, which soon provoked cynical coverage in some international newspapers,
would be tweaked to target a special group of women – the uneducated group from
the lower socio-economic strata who married early and produced broods.

The angry protest of V.K. Pandy, the leader
of the sole opposition party in Parliament, back then a young aspirant for
political life, was almost incoherent in its mix of thunderous denunciations
and obscure references to Darwin, eugenics and totalitarianism, and went
unreported.

‘Mrs Tan, I thought I had sent round a
circular that classroom discussion topics should not include politics.’ The
principal had called her into his office. Even among the forty adoring students
in her class, there must have been a spy or two.

‘We were not discussing politics, sir. V.K.
Pandy’s name had just come up only very incidentally.’

The principal winced visibly.

The opposition leader, always untidy-looking
with his bristling eyebrows, overgrown beard and glittering close-set eyes that
gave him a simian aspect, always loud, cantankerous, unreasonable in his
demands for this or that government policy to be subjected to public debate,
had become a national embarrassment, a blot on the society’s pristine face.

Years ago, the newspapers ran a lengthy
report on his attempt to go by foot all the way to the United Nations
headquarters to present his anti-sterilisation plea on behalf of Singapore’s
women, highlighting its abrupt end when he developed stomach cramps in
Malaysia, twenty-one miles into the heroic walk, and had to accept a car ride
back home. The debacle prompted a derisory editorial captioned, ‘Pandy, You’re
No Gandhi,’ and for a while the taunt, repeated for its serendipitous pun, was
bandied around at cocktail parties and coffee shop gatherings. His few
sympathisers marveled at the tenacity of his political aspirations against such
overwhelming odds; both sympathy and admiration were necessarily muted. The
schools, by tacit agreement, had banned all mention of him in classroom
discussions and debates. He could sometimes be seen, in busy shopping centres,
waving pamphlets, a lone figure in the centre of a large empty space invariably
carved out for him by the crowds, hurrying past, always looking the other way.

The student editor of the school magazine
had inadvertently included, in a commemorative anniversary issue, a photograph
showing visitors to St Peter’s School Fun Fair, in which the opposition member
could be distinctly seen in the background, waving cheerfully. The oversight
was discovered by the magazine’s teacher advisor who rushed to inform the
principal who at once picked up the phone to stop the printer. But it was too
late and he had to make the decision, a painfully expensive one, of having all
eight hundred copies of the magazine destroyed and new ones printed, minus, of
course, the offending photograph. The teacher advisor and the student editor
were forgiven their carelessness, but never again would they be entrusted with
any important assignment.

‘Mrs Tan,’ said the principal who hated
having to call teachers into his office to admonish them on this or that, ‘you
were seen yesterday afternoon talking to the opposition member in Middleton
Square, just outside Shelford Building.’ The school had spies everywhere.

‘Yes, I was,’ said Miss Seetoh, ‘but it was
on my own time,’ adding, ‘and I wasn’t in school uniform.’

Her husband had dropped her at a dispensary
in Shelford Building to collect some medicine for her mother’s asthma; during
the fifteen minutes of waiting for him to pick her up, she had seen the
opposition member in his lonely precinct in the shopping mall, waving his
pamphlets at the streams of shoppers assiduously avoiding him. As she watched
him, she instinctively joined forces with them by stepping behind the
dispensary door, a safe peeping presence only.

Then something very like shame swept over
her, corresponding precisely with the moment that she saw a small child in a
Superman suit break away from his mother to stand and stare in fascination at
V.K. Pandy, saw the man’s frowning face break into smiles, and the mother
rushing up to pull the child away. The small rebel, despite the scolding,
turned round several times to look at V.K. Pandy who was still grinning and
waving. The shame flared, then settled into daring resolution. She strode out
of the dispensary, walked straight into the space, a scrupulously cordoned-off
infected zone in a clean city, and stretched out a hand to greet its sole occupant,
‘Hello, Mr Pandy.’

It didn’t matter what he or she said after
that; she had done the defiant deed for the day, so that when her husband
returned to pick her up at the dispensary, the assertive glow on her neck and
cheeks saved the rest of her demeanour from the usual docility. Exuding a
radiant confidence before her principal, her colleagues and her students, she
shrank in timid deference before her husband. Glowing in the queendom of her
classroom, she crawled back each day into the oppression of the marital
sanctuary.

‘Look at that idiot,’ he said with a smile,
pointing to the man now squatting on the ground, his tie askew, his pamphlets
still in a large stack beside him, staring absently into the distance,
‘thinking he can bring down the government. Did you see that?’ he continued
with a spiteful chuckle, as the man took a small bottle out of his pocket,
looked around furtively, drank from it and wiped his beard with his hand. ‘A
drunk as well.’

Bernard Tan Boon Siong had written a number
of scathing letters to The Singapore Tribune about the obstreperous opposition
member, which he always passed to his boss for approval and endorsement. She
had actually offered to help him craft some of the letters, after he told her
that the boss, the formidable Dr Phang with his two PhDs, the first from Oxford
University, the second from Harvard, someone clearly being marked out by the
government for a life in politics, was a stickler for perfect grammar and
appropriate style. He had once invited Dr Phang and some office friends home
for dinner, an expensively catered affair that had her nervous mother on
tenterhooks all evening repeatedly inspecting each tray and pot of food as it
was brought in by the caterers.

The disobedient act of her adventure in
Middleton Square had given rise to a confusion of many feelings: surprise at
her own audacity, fear of recrimination from her husband, dislike of his boss,
guilt towards V.K. Pandy for her hypocrisy. For she had played the part of the
loyal government supporter, delving into her rich repertoire of derogatory
terms to spice the venom of her husband’s letter to the newspaper. He had
smiled in approval and later told her the boss had thought it an excellent
letter.

It was an act of unkindness to V.K. Pandy
for which she was prepared to pay the price of more secret ventures into that
banned space, perhaps even with the offer of a hamburger and a can of cold beer
for his lunch. The confusion of feelings was soon no more than a whirligig of
emotions easily tamed into a single, very pleasurable sensation, as she thought
in tremulous excitement, My God, what if he finds out. V.K. Pandy’s pamphlet
was safely tucked between the pages of her teacher’s record book which was
placed, in a continuing show of defiance, side by side with his briefcase on
the sitting room table.

The act of rebellion had brought back the
memory of a girlhood incident very similar in its triumphant reclaim of
self-regard. She was eight years old, a bright, alert pupil who enjoyed the
English language lessons, in particular, the dictation lesson during which the
pupils were required to transcribe each sentence of a short story, as it was
slowly read out, phrase by phrase, by the English language teacher, Sister St
Agatha. The story was usually taken from a small collection of readers which,
from a very young age, she had read voraciously and knew by heart.

Sister gave the students a few minutes to
get acquainted with the more difficult words in the story before the dictation
lesson began. Proudly dispensing with the assistance, she wrote down in her
copy book the entire story, perfectly registered in her memory, in a fraction
of the dictation lesson time. So when Sister began the exercise, it was a
simple matter of pretending to write, by letting her pencil tip float lightly
over each phrase in her copy book. Sister’s sharp eyes caught the pretence; her
nostrils flared with the angry triumph of catching a cheat red-handed. She
pulled the culprit up from her seat, pinned the evidence of the dishonesty to
her blouse and made her stand in front of the class all morning. It all
happened so quickly that she was unable to explain the truth to Sister, and in
any case, probably could not have done so in her confusion. Burning with shame,
she wished that she would die that instant.

In the next dictation lesson, Sister was
astonished to see her furiously writing down in her copy book the entire three
paragraphs of the designated story, even before the dictation lesson had begun.
Then she got up with her book, laid it on Sister’s table without a word, and
returned to her desk glowing with restored self-esteem.

‘Mrs Tan, you know that even outside the
school premises, staff and students are supposed to behave with decorum.’ Miss
Seetoh’s large innocent eyes widened in surprise.

‘I was behaving with perfect decorum, sir,
since we were in an open, public place. Mr V.K. Pandy was explaining something
in his pamphlet. It had to do with the sterilisation policy, sir.’

The principal muttered, ‘That was so long
ago,’ his acute discomfort betrayed by a facial tic and a tightening of the
hands clasped behind his back. He sometimes wondered if Miss Seetoh, of the
refreshingly open countenance and helpful writing skills, was secretly mocking
him.

The government organisation, tasked with
helping single women find husbands and unburdened by any memory of that awful
time of draconian population controls three decades ago, went all the way of
friendly cajolery, and would probably have no objection to extending its help
to widows still capable of bearing children. Miss Seetoh, aged thirty-nine,
happy once more, thought, Never again. The government organisation’s request
for help, very discreetly worded, went out to the schools which were known to
have large numbers of single women on their staff. The principal of St Peter’s
responded to the request by passing on the official letter to the unmarried
women teachers, together with his own personal encouragement, also delicately
worded, about the Christian ideal of motherhood and the importance of cooperation
to solve a problem highlighted by the Prime Minister himself.

There was a form to be filled by the single
women to indicate their interest or otherwise in participating in a variety of
social events, such as tea dances and computer games, being organised for them
to meet eligible single men. Here was another reason for poor plain Miss Teresa
Pang, never courted in her life, to be unfavourably compared, in whispered
comments, to the pretty widow, Miss Seetoh. An unkind joke went round, in the form
of a riddle, purportedly started by a waggish young trainee teacher: what is
the only thing, desired by Singapore men that Miss Pang has which Miss Seetoh
doesn’t? Answer: her virginity.

Miss Seetoh had put a large tick in the ‘Not
Interested’ box on the form, and then, as an afterthought, had added, ‘But
thank you for the kind consideration.’

The celebration of her new status would have
to remain private in an atmosphere charged with matrimony’s sanctity, so she
quickly peeled the proclamatory label from the tin box, taking care not to
dislodge the absurd little pink rosettes that Maggie had sprinkled all around
it. She rolled up the band of paper and put it inside her handbag.

‘Thank you, Maggie,’ she said. ‘As I’ve told
you, I like it very much but it had best stay out of sight!’

That was invitation enough for the girl,
ever inquisitive and talkative, to engage in conversation clearly intended to
draw out information on the carefully guarded private life of the fascinating
Miss Seetoh. If her favourite teacher remained unyielding, she simply changed
the topic to other teachers’ private lives. Mrs Naidu, the geography teacher,
had again been taken ill in class, sitting down heavily in the midst of a
lesson and furiously rubbing Tiger Balm on her forehead and chest. In such
moments of distress, her carefully coiled hair uncoiled into a mess of waving
strands around her face, giving her the appearance of a grieving Medusa,
frightening the students. Everyone knew that the cause of her endless headaches,
stomach cramps and mouth ulcers was her husband.

Miss Monteiro, the physical education
teacher, spoke openly about her German boyfriend: once she took medical leave
for two days, and somebody saw her on the resort island of Sentosa with him.
She kept a photo of him in her wallet, shirtless on a beach, his wind-blown,
sun-drenched blondness instantly placing him among the advertising world’s
golden boys, and passed it round among her colleagues and students. One of her
students, the scary Jaswant Singh, sixteen years old, hairy, deep-voiced, a
muscular six-footer towering over his classmates, had tried to date her once.

Maggie had developed the knack of catching
hold of teachers while they were walking along the corridors, down the stairs
or across the yard to the school canteen, and in the few available minutes,
mixing innocuous student inquiries with a load of trivia and gossip, watching
their reaction, storing up for future use whatever they said in response, no
matter how brief or brusque. Some teachers chose to simply ignore her and turn
away. In class, they chose to ignore her hand raised eagerly to answer every
question of which she had not the faintest idea. The overaged student had
surely overstayed her welcome in the school. They were reproachful of the young
sports coach who was nicknamed Singapore’s Tony Curtis, for his being unable to
turn away from the persistent Maggie; someone had seen him once give her a ride
on his motorcycle.