Miss Seetoh in the World (48 page)

‘Ah, here are the pills. Meeta, you’re to
take them every three hours. My darling Wilbur’s aunt went into depression too
some years ago, and he got her exactly these pills.’ ‘Meeta dear, try to look
happy. Sometimes just trying helps. Tell us some of your jokes. Dear Wilbur is
full of jokes. He makes me laugh all the time!’ ‘Maria, are you going to be
with Meeta for the rest of the evening? Can I go back to the hotel now?
Wilbur’s waiting. He’s taking me out for a romantic candlelit dinner this
evening!’

Meeta, coming out briefly from her
despondency, said in a low voice to Maria, ‘Look, I can’t stand it anymore.
Can’t you stop all that nattering?’

Winnie left for Europe at last – ‘My Wilbur
says he can’t wait any longer for our honeymoon to begin!’ – hugging Meeta
warmly as she said, ‘Goodbye, my dear Meeta, take care. I’ll call you when
we’re back home in Washington!’

Meeta muttered, ‘Thank goodness.’

The brief periods of lucidity were enough
for her to remind her sister and Maria that Winnie’s kindness to her now
exactly matched hers, many years ago, when Winnie was hospitalised for a
serious illness and depended on her, rather than her own sisters, to help her
through the recuperation. My favour cancelling out yours. Now we’re quits. It
was the dove’s equivalent of the serpent’s an eye for an eye. Pride, revenge,
kindness, gratitude, resentment – they were all inextricably tied together, as
were love and hate, attraction and revulsion, sense and folly, all horribly
smeared together in the complex human psyche desperately seeking a balance to
stay whole.

Maria thought, with some wonder, how many
friends, lovers, married couples were in perpetual Conditional Mood, staying
together by default, in harmony on the surface, in silent resentment
underneath, waiting for the moment to break free. If only I had the financial
means to be on my own. If only the children were old enough. If only the old
one would go off mercifully; the hospital bills are mounting by the day.

She could imagine Winnie, cuddled up against
her Wilbur, saying, ‘Darling, you can have no idea how I longed to be free of
Meeta,’ telling him about all the times Meeta had made fun of her, discharging
years of resentment that must have built up even as she was telling others in
her nervous, little-girl voice, ‘You know, I wouldn’t know what to do without
Meeta. She advises me, counsels me, scolds me, checks my accounts for me…’

Maria thought, I could write short stories
about the sad lives of women, using only the rich resources of English grammar.
Thus: the Passive Voice for subjugated women like Por Por who were lived, not
living; the Conditional Mood for hopelessly yearning women like herself and
Meeta, with its brutal ifs upon which to hang their shredded dreams. The
Perfect Tense? It was a frightful misnomer because it could only be used to describe
an imperfect world.

Right now, it was also a laughing mockery of
two women keeping each other doleful company, looking back upon their painful
experiences in the past that the special grammatical form made clear were still
impinging upon their present: ‘I have made such a terrible mistake.’ ‘He has
broken my heart.’ ‘We have made such fools of ourselves.’

That evening, on a whim, she decided to go
to a part of the city she had only once glanced at from her taxi window. It was
one of those derelicted parts, away from the gleam and gloss, that the
government, particularly before an election, promised to clean up, put in more
roads, more street lamps, tear down the dilapidated buildings and put up new
ones worthy of the name of the cleanest, greenest, most progressive city in
Asia. She took a walk along a small, broken road covered with puddles from the
last downpour, and watched its occupants going about their business, or simply
sitting idly on chairs and stools by the roadside since there was no business
to go about. Two old men were sitting at a low table playing Chinese chess.
Another old man was feeding a bird hopping about in a cage strung up on a
wooden pole. A middle-aged woman at the doorway of a rundown shophouse was
preparing to send two small children, probably her grandchildren, to school,
both of them in clean, green-and-white school uniforms. As they walked out into
the sunshine, the woman, with a little warning cry, pushed the children out of
the downward path of water dripping from clothes strung out to dry on a row of
bamboo poles from upstairs windows. She raised an angry fist to one of the
windows, after something dropped to the ground at her feet, a styrofoam box
falling apart and scattering the remnants of someone’s lunch. A young woman was
crossing the road with a little girl in a red Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and green
pants, her fringe of hair reaching down to her small bright eyes. A very old,
very bent woman was rummaging about in a garbage bin, a trolley beside her,
half filled with empty beer cans and cardboard boxes. She was ignoring a young
man watching her and making little gurgling noises; he had all the marks of the
village idiot – large bulging eyes, slack, drooling mouth, stiff movements,
shabby clothes. An old man was sitting at a table, drinking some milky tea from
a large glass; he could have been the same man that her taxi driver had once
pointed out to her, the sad victim of a greedy young woman from China who
cleaned out every cent of his pension money.

They were all living the Conditional Mood of
regret and yearning. If, if, if only.

Maria then decided to go to Middleton
Square, not in respectful remembrance of its most notable occupant whose death
now seemed only a faint memory, but simply to watch the Singaporeans there, well-dressed
and prosperous-looking and therefore in no need of the Conditional Mood. A
young man in smart shirt and tie was walking rapidly beside two Caucasians in
smart business suits and carrying briefcases; he was talking animatedly to them
and could be steering them towards a big business deal over drinks in a posh
pub. Two young women with long straight hair, wearing bright T-shirts and jeans
were giggling over some shared secret; they were carrying large fashionable
tote-bags, one wearing impossibly high heels, the other dark green sandals
showing off her toenails varnished a brownish red. A maid was on a shopping
trip with her tai tai mistress, her arms straining under the weight of shopping
bags bearing designer labels.

All would have appeared, at some time or
other, in the glossy tourist posters and advertisements proclaiming the city’s
success. The brightness of their appearance and vigour of their movements would
still have warranted the use of the Passive Voice: We are told to keep our city
clean and green and attractive. We are prohibited from chewing gum and spitting
and littering. We have been warned against offending our government. We have
been promised a Utopia. We have been bought.

But the Passive Voice could have been easily
shouted down by the Active: They give us clean, crime-free streets. They
subsidise our flats. They give scholarships to our children. They put money in
our pockets. They give us not only the five Cs but newer, better versions of
the five Cs!

One of Singapore’s most prestigious hotels,
The Summit, employed humour to enable Singaporeans as well as tourists to get
rid of whatever irritation they might experience about the harsh anti-littering
laws: it provided a special bar where unshelled peanuts lay waiting in small
attractive baskets for patrons to pick up, pop the tasty kernels into their
mouths and then throw the shells, not into the mandatory waiting bins, but upon
the gleaming polished floor itself, thus celebrating the Active Voice with
joyous abandon: I am littering. I littered. I have littered. I can litter as
much as I want!

Meeta’s recovery was slow, but she made
steady progress under the devoted care of her sister from New Delhi who made
arrangements for a cousin to take over when she had to return home. Her sister
Saroja had made a firm offer: ‘Leave Singapore, come and live with me, my
husband and our four children who adore their aunt Meeta. You will have a maid
to yourself. You will have nothing to do but enjoy yourself.’

Meeta had confided in Maria, ‘No thank you.
Saroja’s the sweetest, most generous sister you’ll ever find, but I want a life
of my own. Like you.’

Her mirror moment of truth, like Maria’s,
was of the literal kind, coming as she looked steadily at her reflection,
staring at the changed lineaments on her face, the dullness in the once bright
eyes, the limpness of hair once in bright coils enhanced by sparkling hair
clips, the lusterlessness of a life once an inspiration to others.

And in that one moment, Meeta’s pride
asserted itself as it never had before, vanquishing depression and launching
her on the road to full restoration. Her volatility, having plunged her into
desperation, now pulled her up, with the same ferocity for the immediate task
of self-rescue. She called loudly for the maid who came running and ordered her
to get her bath water ready, with her favourite jasmine-scented bath soap, also
her blue and green sari, nail polish, pearl hairclip, black-and-silver sandals.
Then she took a last look at herself in the mirror and said with a smile,
‘That’s the last I’ll see of the old, stupid Meeta Nair who was stupid enough
to fall for a bum, a man not fit to kiss the sandals on her feet. The next time
I stand before you, Mirror, it will be a brand new Meeta, more beautiful and
carefree than ever! I’ll show him!’

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Women cared less
about being the fairest of them all than about coming out of a crisis with
their dignity intact.

Meeta, through sheer pride, never asked
exactly what happened that day in the classroom; the incomplete recollection
was enough to tell her she had behaved in the most embarrassing way, badly
damaging her image with her students and colleagues at Palm Secondary School
who were probably now all whispering to each other about her. She never
returned to the school, after her extended medical leave, and chose instead to
continue her teaching career in a private school. Her meetings with friends
grew fewer, and one day, some months after her breakdown, she called Maria to
say that she had resigned from her job and had accepted her sister’s invitation
to live in New Delhi. Her plan to do a pilgrimage to meet the holy Sai Baba was
revived with a dream, almost a vision, that she had had of him, in which he
appeared in a thick mist and blessed her.

‘I’ll visit his ashram, then go on to New
Delhi,’ she said cheerfully. She spoke at length about how she would devote
herself to Saroja’s children and give them the time that their busy parents
could not afford.

‘Have I told you,’ she said, ‘Saroja’s house
is a mansion, with that kind of garden you’ll never find in our land-hungry,
little Singapore. It has at least a dozen varieties of mango alone. And
Saroja’s friends include the arty-farty kind who will take me to the theatre. I
don’t know how I will find the time to do everything!’

Meeta said that she practised what she had
taught her students to do in times of indecisiveness: take out a piece of
paper, draw a line down the middle and call the two columns ‘Pros’ and ‘Cons’,
to list out all the reasons for or against a decision. Writing down one’s
thoughts clarified them marvellously. She showed her pros and cons list for
leaving Singapore to live with her sister, the top reason for vamoosing, she chuckled,
being lack of political freedom. ‘But you’ve never shown any interest in
politics,’ said Maria. ‘Aw, everybody knows we don’t have any freedom! Look at
poor V.K. Pandy.’ It was the first time that Maria remembered she had mentioned
the opposition member.

Meeta confided hearing from a reliable
source that at long last she might get an invitation from the Ministry of
National Affairs to be a member of the Council for Religious Harmony.

‘High time,’ she said loftily, and toyed
with the idea inspired by that tale about a genie in a bottle that waited a
hundred years to be rescued, getting more impatient by the day. He was so fed
up with waiting that he swore that the person who rescued him, instead of being
rewarded, would bear the brunt of his annoyance.

‘When I get the letter,’ declared Meeta,
‘I’ll write and say, ‘Too late! No thank you’.’

The letter never came. Maria one afternoon
found her playing with the dog Singapore.

She said, hugging the dog to her chest,
‘This is the only Singapore I will trust!’ She was deep in thought for a while
and then asked, ‘Hey, do you think I should write a book? About my life.
There’s so much to tell.’

Maria thought, ‘Poor Meeta. She’s still
looking for a workable coping strategy. But aren’t we all.’

Winnie called a few times from her new home
in Washington. The celebratory joyousness of voice in the early days of her
marriage could not be sustained indefinitely. There was a call when she said,
in rather subdued tones, that she missed her old life in Singapore. Winnie was
never one to impart anything clearly and coherently, either when asking
questions or giving answers, and it was some time before Maria understood that
she was talking about some problems related to Wilbur’s drinking and his odd
habit of disappearing for days, which he said, had to do with his secret work
with the US navy.

She said bravely, ‘He says he loves me very
much and will always take good care of me. So I should not complain about
anything!’ adding, ‘Every morning, he brings me breakfast in bed.’