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cousin’s innocent call to her husband’s hotel
room in Tokyo that was picked up by a woman with a sleepy voice.
    The rumours affected Miss Seetoh not at all,
but the guilt did, guilt of the kind that disturbed her to the innermost depths
of her being, because it had broken the most fundamental laws of human decency:
she had rejoiced over the death not only of another human being, but one whom
she was bound by tradition’s strongest sanctions to honour and respect. A wife
was happy because her husband was dead. The guilt was the greater for the joy
being so soon, so real and persistent. It was an unthinkable obscenity, yet to
deny it would be intolerable falsehood. Till death do us part. It was bad
enough if the widow bounced back to her normal routines too quickly. She had
heard of women going back to work the day after the funeral, even remarrying
within a year.
    A sudden frightening thought had occurred to
reinforce the guilt, as she sat quietly reading a novel in her bedroom, in a
first delicious taste of solitude: could husbands be wished to death? Could
despairing wives’ secret wishes, if they were strong enough, cast a spell and
induce an accident, a terminal cancer? Miss Seetoh had once watched a TV
documentary about a certain aboriginal tribe in Australia; their leader met his
death several hours after an enemy from a rival tribe ceremonially lifted his
face to the sky in pouring rain and sang out a curse. Heaven forbid! Had her
wish, secret though it was, resisted though it was all the way with every
decent fibre in her body, been such a curse? Miss Seetoh, who from childhood
would go out of her way to pick up wounded birds and kittens and nurse them
back to health, was so horrified by the thought that her hand went limp and the
book dropped to the floor.
    The thought – superstitious nonsense though
it was – would not go away. This time it induced a slight shuddering which Miss
Seetoh, sitting at the staffroom table ostensibly going over the lesson notes
for the following day, hoped no one noticed. She was proud of her capacity for
rational thinking, developed over years of serious reading and reflection,
against the myth-sodden worlds of her upbringing, first of her
ancestor-worshipping grandmother Por Por with its pantheon of frightful temple
gods and goddesses, and then of her fervidly Christian convert mother, with its
equally bewildering collection of intercessory saints, angels and martyrs. For
a while she shuttled between two worlds in conflict, between church holy water
and temple-blessed fire, between a gentle god who died to save mankind and a
lightning god who directed his bolts against those guilty of filial impiety.
Torn between her grandmother and mother, she was saved only by Por Por’s
dementia which ended the tussle for her soul between the Tua Peh Kong Temple
and the Church of Eternal Mercy.
    It alarmed her that in the sanity of
adulthood, her sound mind could be invaded by the most outrageous childhood
superstitions. The fear persisted with another example, much closer to home.
She remembered an aunt from Malaysia telling her about a relative who visited a
cemetery in the darkest of nights to conjure up the ghost of an ancestor to
take revenge on her husband and his family for throwing her out into the
street. The husband contracted some fearsome disease and died soon after.
    Miss Seetoh vigorously rubbed the sides of
her forehead to dispel a headache that always came with bad thoughts, throbbing
with vicious intensity. Her memory with its ready store of recollected images,
like her imagination with its created ones, came to her rescue. A nun had
taught her as a child to quickly picture a certain scene in times of temptation
– Good Thoughts wearing white angelic halos fighting Bad Thoughts wearing black
horns, and driving them screaming back to hell. The nun had meant the sinful
images of sex that young girls were often tempted with; for Miss Seetoh, the
one thing to be feared was fear,