Miss Seetoh in the World (34 page)

The figure who was probably a male, given
the height, build and energy of movement, stopped at precisely the spot made
familiar by V.K. Pandy’s presence, held up his placard and began to prance
around with comical strutting and flapping chicken movements and sounds.
Cock-cock-cock-quawk! Cock-cock-cock-quawk! On the placard were the words in bright
red which Maria could now read distinctly: ‘Chicken – that’s what we are,
Singaporeans!’ and below them a sentence which she could read only partially
but understood perfectly, for the word ‘fear’ in it was highlighted. The
demonstrator stopped his crazy dance briefly to pass a small camera to one of
the passersby, a middle-aged man in neat shirt and trousers, with a request to
take a picture of him. The man backed away, laughing nervously as he raised
both palms and began waving them about in a frantic gesture of refusal; a young
woman with blonde hair, in tourist hat and sunglasses, stepped forward and
offered to take the picture.

A few passersby had gathered to watch; one,
a young man with long hair tied in a ponytail, and gold ear-studs, began imitating
the squawking sounds and movements, flapping huge imaginary wings and lumbering
behind Big Bird with exaggerated clumsiness, causing the crowd to break out in
laughter. Despite the presence of the large beak fastened around his mouth, Big
Bird’s words of denunciation came out with amazing clarity, filling the square
and drawing more curious onlookers.

We’re comfortable and we’re
fearful!

We’re rich and we’re fearful!

We’re safe and we’re fearful!

We’re Chicken Licken, Chicken
Stricken,

The sky’s falling, and we don’t
even know it!

Chicken Licken, licked clean of
our freedom

Chicken Stricken, struck dumb with
fear

We say Yes, Yes, Yes, because No,
No, No

Means more, more, more fear

Fear of losing our job, our
promotion, our son-in-law’s promotion, our bonuses, our upgraded housing
estates,
our good life

Fear of bringing the taxman
beating at our door, crying
‘Foul Fowl! Off to jail you go!’

Chicken Licken, Chicken Stricken

The sky is falling

And we can only go quawk quawk,
quawk quawk!

Fortunately for Big Bird intent on
delivering his message in full, the police arrived on the scene in twenty
minutes, longer than the usual efficient five or ten, to effect the entire
operation of issuing a note of warning to the offender, confiscating whatever
paraphernalia of offence they could find, hauling him off to the police station
since his offence was deemed serious enough, and dispersing the crowd.
Apparently they had had no forewarning of Big Bird’s demonstration in Middleton
Square, but one of them was alert enough to spot the camera held by the tourist
and instantly confiscated it.

Maria looked in the newspapers the next
morning for any report on the incident; there was none. Demonstrations were
rare; there had been one about a year ago, to protest some government policy,
which was widely reported in the local newspapers; The Straits Tribune made
much of the fine imposed on each of the three demonstrators, clearly as a
deterrent to future troublemakers. But every tiny incident of a political
nature which did not make it to the media created rumours that circulated
underground in the private gossip of the coffee shops and cocktail parties: the
chicken demonstrator was V.K. Pandy himself. That accounted for his absence in
the square that day. Maria doubted it; the man was too skinny for the robust
looking figure she had seen, and his voice was nowhere as loud.

She had as many questions to ask V.K. Pandy
as she had for Dr Phang, and one of them brought together the two men, whose
worlds could not be more different, in an intriguing possibility – was it true
that Dr Phang, civil servant and poster boy of the great TPK, had secretly
donated a large sum of money to help V.K. Pandy in his financial woes? There
were other questions of a more immediate and urgent nature: what was he going
to do now, what was happening to his poor cancer-stricken wife, was it true
that the great TPK once called him ‘vermin’, was it true that he was going to
get out of politics permanently, return to his native village in India and retire
there?

There was a question for herself, for which
she had no answer: for all her sympathy for V.K. Pandy, why did she not have
the courage to come out from her safe peeping place inside the dispensary and
join the crowd cheering Big Bird? Such questions came during what she called
the mirror moment, when she stood before the mirror in her bathroom and took a
good hard look at herself. She had started the practice, secretly, from the
first year of her marriage to Bernard, and now, as then, fear featured large in
the self-questioning. If it was not fear of the great TPK, was it fear of the
principal’s displeasure, especially after he had issued another stern reminder
to the teaching staff, clearly aimed at her, not to have anything to do with
opposition politics? Whether of the powerful TPK or of the principal of St
Peter’s Secondary School, it was still fear, and she was as much trapped by it
as any of the Singaporeans derided by Big Bird. Big Bird himself had hidden his
identity under an elaborate, all enveloping costume; he too was not free from
fear. It was a whole society in thrall; it was mirror time for a whole society.

I have a headache coming, thought Maria, the
headaches being an excuse to get away from too much thinking.

She was glad that only heart needed to be
engaged in the following days. She and the maid went on a shopping trip to one
of the large departmental stores with a section well-stocked with costume
jewellery, and came back with very convincing-looking jade earrings, bangles
and gold chains. Por Por laughed with happiness as they put the various items
on her, and stood before a mirror, admiring herself like a vain child decked
out for a party. In her quavering voice, she sang a song in the dialect of the
village of her childhood in China, making delicate movements with her hands and
fingers. Anna Seetoh gave practical advice, with the same sad expression as
when she had received the devastating confession of her adopted son’s gambling
debts: Por Por must not be allowed out on her own. The bad people out there
would mistake all that worthless stuff for the real thing. Anna Seetoh left
unsaid a bitter thought: she did not want to have one more family disaster to
cope with. Why was the Holy Virgin Mary not answering her prayers?

She woke up at five every morning to be in
time for the early morning mass in the Church of Eternal Mercy, remaining on
her knees throughout the one hour of the service, praying for her son, her
daughter, her mother. She prayed to her late son-in-law, believing him to have
served his purgatory and gone to heaven where he was in a position to help his
loved ones on earth, among whom, in his new saintly state, he must include even
his sinful wife.

‘No, there’s no need to accompany me,’ said
Anna Seetoh brusquely to her daughter, adding, ‘what’s the use. You stopped
believing long ago.’

‘I told you, Mother,’ said Maria patiently,
‘it’s bad weather this morning, and it’s a school holiday. Besides, it’s your
birthday, and after mass, we can go for breakfast to Tai Kee Restaurant for
your favourite pork porridge.’

Anna Seetoh was about to say No again when a
thought suddenly occurred to her which made her say instead, ‘Alright, if you
wish.’

This could be the Holy Mother’s answer to
her prayer to bring back the prodigal daughter, or at least a prelude to the
answer. She said, ‘Suppose Father Rozario thinks you’ve come back; suppose your
godma and the others ask. What shall I tell them?’

‘Anything you like,’ said Maria cheerfully,
‘but this morning you’re going to have the best birthday breakfast!’

The last time she was at a service in the
Church of Eternal Mercy, her heart was heaving to the tumult of a hundred
conflicting emotions as she looked upon her husband’s coffin and joined in the
prayers for the repose for his soul. Now it was muted in its joy only by the
surrounding sombreness of the small early morning congregation, still
sleepy-faced, comprising mainly the middle-aged and the elderly bent over their
prayer books, responding to the priest in low murmurs.

Her own prayer could not come from any book,
only from a heart determined to be kind: God, if you really exist as everyone
believes you do, could you do something for Mrs V.K. Pandy? Also Maggie and
Angel. Maybe even Mrs TPK. For it was said that the prime minister’s wife was
suffering from some strange illness or combination of illnesses that
Singapore’s doctors seemed unable to cure. Maria thought, what an irony that
all the money, all the best medical help at her husband’s disposal – it was
said he had brought in top medical consultants from London – could not help
her. She was seldom seen outdoors; Winnie had once seen her in a departmental
store, accompanied by two maids, at the furniture section, buying some
bolsters, looking too old, bent and fragile for her age. She was said to be a
very good, kind woman, as compassionate as her husband was ruthless. Dear God,
if it is true that you care for every one of your creatures, you must help poor
Mother, and Brother Heng and Por Por and the maid Rosiah who says her husband
is squandering all her hard-earned money on a woman who is using black magic on
him. Maria then remembered Rosiah’s sister, living in a small village in
Indonesia, whose woodcutter husband had died from a fall, leaving her with four
young children. And a fellow maid Rosiah had told her about who was very
unhappy working for an abusive employer but had no choice but to stay, being in
debt to the agent who had brought her to Singapore.

Her heart went further afield to embrace a
man whose plight she had read about in the papers – a villager from Pakistan
who had come illegally to Singapore to work as a construction worker after
selling his farm, and had been brutally exploited by his employer; when he was
seriously injured at work, the employer, on the pretext of taking him to a
doctor, drove him to a deserted area and threw him into a ditch where,
fortunately, his feeble cries for help were heard by someone who happened to be
passing by. Her heart, now fully launched on its journey of connection with
fellow human beings, wandered even further to ask God’s help for the survivors
of a cyclone in the Philippines, the grieving families of a coal mine disaster
in China, children on the brink of starvation in a war-torn African state,
their skeletal legs hardly able to support their bloated bellies covered with
flies, the victims of a savage mass shooting in Washington that wiped out a
family of five, including a baby of ten months.

All this while, her head remained silent,
holding back thoughts that might disrupt the heart’s free roaming. God, if you
exist. If you are truly a Creator worshipped by his creatures as all powerful,
all good, all loving. If you are the someone in the great somewhere, celebrated
in those hymns of yearning, who hears every word. Why, why, why? In the
drowsiness induced by Father Rozario’s monotonous chanting and the billows of
incense smoke coming from his censer, all the large existential questions
disappeared into her own ridiculously trivial one: should she, or should she
not go to bed with Dr Phang? She felt too sleepy to answer the question and
surrendered herself to the overpowering soporific effect, as to a narcotic, of
the morning gloom and chill inside the Church of Eternal Mercy. She was having
a strange little dream in which she was standing in some desolate-looking
school compound, surrounded by naked, flag-waving children, when she woke up
suddenly to the sensation of a sharp nudge in her side and an abrupt jerk of
her head. She opened her eyes to see an amused smile on her mother’s face,
which made her smile too.

She had to work hard to make Maggie smile
again. The day before the appointed lunch at her place – Anna Seetoh had kindly
offered to fry noodles and bake a cake for dessert – she saw an envelope
addressed to her, laid on her teacher’s record book, and pulled out a note
saying ‘Miss Seetoh, owing to unforesee circumstance, I am not able to have
lunch with you this Saturday. Please accept very sincere apology from me.
Maggie.’

There was no mention of the story she was
submitting for the creative writing class, in a separate envelope, written on
three sheets of paper, also laid on the record book. At a glance, Maria could
see it was one of those hopelessly atrocious love-and-sex stories that seemed
to be Maggie’s staple; as she put it back into the envelope she was determined
to put it to good use in the next creative writing lesson, when she would
remember to assign only second place to Yen Ping. The two girls were still
avoiding each other, Maggie with a toss of her head, Yen Pin with her eyes on
the ground.

She saw Maggie in the canteen, again with
her sister Angel, again eating at Auntie Noodles’ table, and said, ‘Maggie, I
hope you will be around next Thursday, we’re going to have an interesting class
discussion,’ but the girl only smiled faintly and looked away.

Maria was almost envious of Auntie Noodles
for being the only one in the entire world of St Peter’s Secondary School whom
Maggie would talk to. Brother Philip had said that when he asked her to his
office and tried to get her to talk to him, she looked straight ahead all the
while, as impassive as a statue.