Ovidia Yu [Yu - Miss Moorthy Investigates

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westland publications ltd

MISS MOORTHY INVESTIGATES

Ovidia Yu has written over thirty plays as well as novels and short stories. One of her earliest plays, Round and Round the Dining Table, which was also adapted for television, featured her good friend Rani Moorthy who was the inspiration for the first Miss Moorthy mystery. Now, almost twenty years later, Rani is still acting and Ovidia is still writing.

Ovidia Yu received the NAC Young Artist Award (Drama and Fiction), the Singapore Youth Award (Arts and Culture), and the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry Singapore Foundation Award. She attended the University of Iowas International Writing Programme (1990/1991) on a Fulbright Scholarship.

westland publications ltd

61, II Floor, Silverline Building, Alapakkam Main Road, Maduravoyal, Chennai

93, I Floor, Shamlal Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002

First published in India by westland ltd 2012

Copyright Ovidia Yu 2012

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-93-81626-54-2

To Rani Moorthy and Kate James

remember our happy Singapore yesterdays!

Contents

PROLOGUE

Why here?

Its so dark here.

I can hear the city traffic somewhere below us.

Suddenly. Around my neck. Drawing tighter.

I cant breathe. Choking.

Blackness rises.

Now I know.

Too late.

If you have to step out of your apartment, walk down three flights of stairs, trudge twelve minutes to the bus stop where you wait to catch a 200 (a notoriously slow and irregular bus service along the winding South Buona Vista Road), push your way off it then back onto the next city-headed bus, squeeze your way off that bus, cross two roads and walk up the equivalent of more than five flights of steps (and this is the shortest, steepest and therefore most student-infested of three possible routes) to the top of Mount Emily and that venerable institution, the Mount Emily Girls School... if you have to do all this before 7:15 every weekday morning, and if you were not chosen as one of natures early risers, youll understand why Miss Moorthy, first thing that Monday morning, took her place in the Mount Emily Girls School staff room without having read The Straits Times .

This is particularly striking as, in 1975, newspapers were second only to gossip as a source of current and mostly accurate information.

Though Miss Moorthy had a mind which could, in ten minutes, grasp with ease the salient points of twenty-four hours of national and international news as presented in newsprint, this admirable faculty was not yet switched on at that time of day. Until she reached Mount Emilys, Miss Moorthy functioned as an automaton.

The Straits Times had been on the dust-trap mat when Miss Moorthy left #03-01 Greenleaf Lodge. Without even a glance at its front page, Miss Moorthy tossed it into the apartment behind her and locked it in. It would be picked up by Connie later.

Constance Chay was Miss Moorthys flatmate. She was not one of natures early risers either but, not being a secondary school teacher, did not suffer as much for that most mornings.

Being a teacher had always been Miss Moorthys dream. This had not been encouraged by her family (Mother: former Hindi recording star; father: ex-coordinator of inflight music, MSA) who could see no future for their daughter in the teaching profession and wanted her to make the most of what they saw as her considerable talents.

Miss Moorthy had behaved as any sensible well-bred Singapore girl would. She spent two years in the joint campus at Bukit Timah and emerged with a decent university degree and a handful of admirers; she established herself as a musical personality at Cats Corner, the two-year-old establishment that had so rapidly become the haunt of Singapores discreetly sensational residents; then, she enrolled at the Institute of Education.

As Miss Moorthy pointed out, quite reasonably, she had given conventional life a try and now wanted to do something for herself. After all, it was the 1970s hippies were being replaced by environmentalists, China had been admitted into the United Nations and the world was definitely changing.

Throwing your whole future away! her mother sobbed, in her best Hema Malini impression. Even though she kept up with the very latest in fashion, Miss Moorthys mother believed that classical styles were never outdated.

Let her get it out of her system, her father advised. Young people want to try everything. Shell come back to music and settle down after she gets done with this.

After she marries some useless desk clerk and gets five children!

All this was conducted in high drama, which was where Miss Moorthys family was most at home. Miss Moorthy enjoyed the exchanges as much as anyone else, but after she got her first posting to Mount Emily Girls School, it was a little traumatic to face her mother every morning at 6 a.m. preparing her aloo poha in tears. (To think I would live to see the day when a daughter of mine leaves the house at this hour! Why arent you finishing your poha? Do you want some more chiwda ? Are you sick?) It was even more distressing to hear her father casually mention six or seven desirable bands that were desperately in search of a talented woman singer with personality. Though her parents were not early risers either, and at that hour they had the advantage of not yet having been to bed.

Miss Moorthy decided to move out on her own.

As luck would have it, an old schoolmate of hers, Connie, was newly sans flatmate. Miss Moorthy looked over the tiny two bedroom apartment, liked it, and they had been contentedly splitting the rent and taking turns to clean out the kitchen and bathroom ever since.

Connie was a Senior Executive Producer at Radio Television Singapore, the youngest of the few women who made that rank (or indeed any rank above secretary in that organisation), and was single-handedly responsible for conceptualising the wildly successful English language dramas that were already rivalling Chinese soaps in popularity. This was an unprecedented happening and it threw the upper echelons of RTS into a tizzy, the reign of the Chinese soap having been secure till then.

But capable as Connie might be at work, she was hopelessly haphazard domestically and that was where Miss Moorthy came into her own. Not in domesticity she disliked cleaning toilet bowls as much as the next woman but in organisation. At home, in school, or in Cats Corner, with infallible instinct, Miss Moorthy marshalled people, facts and domestic bric-a-brac into exemplary patterns within which they could function at maximum efficiency. It was a hobby and an overwhelming interest of hers, and an object out of place had the same dissonance for her as a note sung off key. Perhaps this had influenced her choice of vocation; what better time to advise and influence young minds than before they got set into bad habits for life?

One might deduce that Miss Moorthy was difficult to live with, but this was not true. Miss Moorthy was one of those big (both literally and metaphorically), good natured, well-intentioned, bursting-with-natural-energy souls that other weary city spirits naturally gravitated towards.

Though Miss Moorthy and Connie were very happy with their flat sharing arrangement, at least one person other than Miss Moorthys parents thought that things might be arranged better. This was Miss Moorthys friend, Anthony, an ex-Mission Chinese School, Pre-University classmate, and currently a Forensic Pathologist with the Singapore General Hospital, more commonly referred to as SGH. Dealing with cadavers all day made Anthony Tan even more enamoured of Miss Moorthys liveliness. Anthony thought the best thing Miss Moorthy could do was marry him and move into his brand new Barossa Garden townhouse.

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