Miss Seetoh in the World by Catherine Lim Page A

church: as she sat with her mother in the pew, as she
moved down the aisle, row by row, with the collection box, midway through mass
(he invariably dropped a large note into the box), and as she walked behind her
mother to the communion rail, returning to her seat with bowed head and clasped
hands, arousing no suspicion whatsoever that within that body supposed to be
housing the divine presence was already forming a secret wish to be free from
it.
    Once he watched her help Father Rozario
conduct some catechism lessons for small children. Her earnest sincerity of
tone as she told Bible stories to the row of small faces turned up towards her,
impressed him; it would only be much later that he would learn that the
earnestness was even then already being claimed by the secret unholy stories of
her imagination. Bernard saw a purity he had never seen before, a complete
absence of the vanity and pretentiousness he had noticed in some of the women
he had courted and abruptly dropped. It was as if he had an evaluation sheet in
his head in which, one after another, women were systematically scored and
eliminated.
    He watched Maria Seetoh with increasing
satisfaction. The absence of make-up on her youthful-looking face, her simple
pony-tail, her slenderness, her sensible blouses and skirts pleased him
enormously. In a short while, indeed within a fortnight, she not only passed
the elimination test but rendered it no longer necessary. Bernard Tan was
convinced that he had at last found the woman who would make him happy for the
rest of his life. After a quick, discreet check with the parish priest Father
Rozario who had nothing but good to say of Maria Seetoh and her mother Anna
Seetoh, he was convinced of divine endorsement of his choice. The only thing
left to do was to hasten the pursuit and bring it to a fruitful conclusion. He
did not believe in wasting time.
    Such single-mindedness resulted in a
purposefulness of approach that no observant parishioner of the Church of
Eternal Mercy could miss. Everyone whispered that Maria Seetoh was a lucky girl
because Bernard Tan Boon Siong was eminently eligible, not only because of his
academic credentials as a first class engineer from the Singapore University,
and professional standing as a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence,
but, most important of all, as a fine Catholic with sterling moral qualities.
For it was known that he had postponed marriage to take care of his sickly
parents who died within a year of each other. Even the age was right; he was
six years older than Maria. Anna Seetoh’s god-sister, a very amiable woman also
named Anna, enumerated the good qualities on the fingers of one hand, then the
other.
    ‘You are a very lucky woman,’ everyone said
to Anna Seetoh who had been trying for years to get her daughter married.
    ‘Yes, I am, thank God for His mercy,’ said
the devout Anna, and did not think that her daughter’s feelings mattered in the
least. ‘You do not know your own mind,’ she scolded, ‘you have been too long on
your own, doing exactly as you like. Who will take care of you when I’m gone?
Now, thank God, there’s someone,’ and she thanked the good God again.
    ‘Help, he’s approaching,’ whispered Maria to
Meeta and Winnie, as they wrapped up the unsold pies and sandwiches to take to
an orphanage. ‘If he offers us a lift again, I’m going to say we’ve already got
transport. So you back me up.’
    But Meeta, who was looking forward to
witnessing yet more of love’s melodrama being played out, had uncooperatively
left her car behind, so the three of them, including Anna Seetoh, piled into
the back of Bernard’s brand new Toyota, leaving Maria to sit in front with him.
That was her assigned place; any other arrangement would have been the most
impudent disregard of the man’s obvious purpose when he offered the lift. Later
he took all of them for lunch in an Italian restaurant. During the meal, Meeta
was her loquacious self,