“Mum, why are you jumping to such conclusions?” George said, exasperated. “You haven’t even met her!”
“Well, I don’t intend to! Look at all these beautiful girls here,” Tua Siah said, flipping through the glossy society magazine. “Daughters of hotel empire owners, businessmen, MPs. These are the kind of girls who will advance your career and social standing. Not good enough for you or what? What for marry someone with no fortune, no social status, no future! What can it bring you?”
“Happiness?” suggested George wryly.
Chapter 7
It is May 2014. If she were still in England, Pansy knows she could enjoy one of the loveliest times of the year, when the clocks have already gone forward, making the days last longer. It is such a delight to sit outdoors or take walks in the light evenings. The promise of summer is just round the corner and there is anticipation of warmer sunshine, the return of migratory birds and bursts of colour. The pansies, which come in various hues, would be out.
“Pansies—a sure sign of spring. You are my heart’s ease,” George had said every spring, reiterating one of the meanings of her name. “I shall love you forever.”
Now, the only place for her to see a fresh growth of pansies here in Singapore is in the Flower Dome, a small cluster of some yellow and deep blue ones, looking a bit forlorn to be so far away from home. It’s the little things that remind Pansy of George, and make her regret her loss anew. But what is disturbing her lately is that she is beginning to lose the memory of the timbre of his voice. How did he sound when he said that? Did he inflect on the word ‘spring’? Or ‘heart’s ease’?
Pansy tries to remain upbeat. ‘Forever’ gives her hope. The ebb and flow of the seasons remind her that life is a moving cycle. Nothing is static or permanent. What appears to be the death of plants and trees in winter is in reality only a period of rest and renewal. We see the bodily demise of a person and believe him to be conclusively dead, only because we do not have the capacity to see where the essential living part of him has gone. It is our limitation that makes us unable to see the bigger picture. The body becomes a corpse only because its real essence has left. The body is only a vehicle that carries the essential part of our being. It is not the driver.
Pansy is convinced of all these and is certain she will be reunited with George and her parents. Perhaps she has got into this frame of mind because it is Vesak day, a celebration of the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and transcendence. In Singapore, the auspicious occasion is a public holiday, to give Buddhists time to go to the temples to reflect, worship and perform various rituals. Pansy’s temple is in nature.
In this region, there are no seasons to break up the monotony of the year. The equal days and nights give a certain reassurance, yet this unremitting routineness and predictability is also stifling. Like laws that keep the country safe and prosperous but straitjacket creativity and passion. Nearby, the Indonesians are burning their rain forests to plant the more lucrative oil palms. The fires blow a grey pall over Singapore, its fine soot making people sneeze, cough and gag, its thin film coating the tops of cars, toilet bowls, sinks and shelves. Seeds of future respiratory disorders are insidiously planted. It gets so bad that people have to wear face-masks. There is a continual display of the PSI reading on television, an indication of the Pollutant Standards Index to show the level of pollution in the air. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has sent a delegation to Indonesia to try to assist the Indonesians in remedying the situation.
The layer of dense ash hovering over the island seals in the heat. It is hot and muggy, making Pansy feel like she’s suffocating under a damp blanket.
Pansy’s heart is weighed down by the callousness of people who destroy huge tracts of rain forest for a few pieces of gold. Trees take in carbon from the atmosphere. The loss of trees is a loss that affects each and every one of us. When we breathe in, we breathe in the trees’ outbreath and when we breathe out, the trees breathe in our outbreath. It’s a natural rhythm of giving and taking to sustain the intricate balance of life. Without this mutual exchange and without the wealth of plants and trees that surround us, our health will be the poorer, our chi weakened, our connection to the essential part of us diminished or severed. As Wordsworth said, We are out of tune.
There is something that has gone subtly askew in the world. There are too many incidents for them to be coincidental: tsunamis, landslides and earthquakes beside the manmade ones like civil conflicts and wars. Pansy is very upset by the loss of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, now into its sixtieth day, and the sinking of Sewol, the South Korean ferry. Hundreds of passengers are still missing, others drowned and hundreds more unaccounted for, lodged in their watery graves. The fact that there are so many schoolchildren on board made the sinking of the ferry a double tragedy. Their families
