Free Miss Seetoh in the World by Catherine Lim

He was fantastic in bed! He bought me the most beautiful
engagement ring from Hong Kong. He was only one of two persons to get a first
class degree from the university, and was offered a scholarship to do a PhD.
    All the absurd causes of her husband’s
annoyance and displeasure occurring almost on a daily basis – the porridge, his
futile calls to her in school, her forgetfulness about this or that, Mr Chin,
Brother Philip, her creative writing class, her meetings with the publisher,
the shoes not polished right, a wrong telephone call, anything at all – they
were laughably trivial, and under different circumstances could have had the
opposite effect of creating lively husband-wife raillery. A pet cat fussed
over, a little plant lovingly tended – her husband would have crushed them
underfoot for taking away the love that should be his. In the absence of love
in a marriage, anything could be a trigger for its grievance.
    For three years, he had laboured under that
grievance. If hate was the other side of love’s coin, then his was a huge disc,
daily flashed at her, glinting with menace. She told herself she did not, would
not, could not love him, astonished at the full range of the brutal
auxiliaries. What had she done to him? Within a year, his placid countenance had
hardened into a rictus of cynicism and frustration unsoftened even in sleep.
    He was exacting a price, and she was ready
to pay it. She had done injury to the sacred institution itself, and should, at
the least, accord it future respect by never marrying again. If she wanted a
new life, completely free of falsehood and all that it brought of confusion,
pain and shame, a life as radiant with joy, pride and certainty, as it was now
dark with deceit and torment, she would have to begin with nothing less than kneeling
before him with a devastating confession of the truth and bow her head to the
thunderbolts of his wrath. As he once knelt before her to declare the fullness
of his love, she would, by the same ultimate gesture, nullify and void hers. As
she was clearer in writing than in speech, she might write him a letter, a very
long one, to systematically apologise for the wrongs over three years,
beginning with the supreme one of agreeing to marry him. All the others had
simply flowed from it. It would not matter if every word in the letter became a
bitter pill forced into her mouth, to cleanse her heart of its ills, her soul
of its darkness, so that she could rise to a new brightness.
    She had once read a story of a woman who was
so unhappy in her marriage that she wanted to run away with a man whom she met
when she was thirty years old and who became her secret lover. But fear – of
her husband, their relatives, his friends, her friends, society at large – held
her back; she said goodbye to the lover and continued in her loveless, soulless
marriage till her death, thirty years later. Upon her death, she had the
following epitaph inscribed on her tombstone: ‘She died at thirty, and was
buried at sixty.’
    In her life she was to look many times, with
fearful, honest eyes, into the embarrassing truths about herself. With
missionary zeal, even from childhood, she had set out her life’s shining goal –
to be a really good, a really happy person – and then floundered all the way.
Be honest, be authentic, be yourself, she urged her students, and herself
turned away from the mirror of the myriad painful truths of her marriage. When
she summoned enough courage to do so, they became her own small humbling lights
on her own personal road to Damascus.
    Did you ever love me? Why did you marry me?
At the very end, she was forced to tell the truth: I felt sorry for you. Pity
was the least acceptable substitute for love. No man would accept it. He flung
it back at her. His pride rose to reject it as a lie. He did not, would not,
could not believe her. But by then it was too late.

Seven
     
    In July 1989, Maria Seetoh was helping her
friend Winnie in a great