I know how to do this in a different language

like Perl, which has very rich data structures for

scalars (strings, integers, floats), lists (arrays of scalars),
and hashes (arrays with a string index), 
including multi-dimensional ones....

What I want to do is to be able to store and recall

a symbol and also a list given an integer index.

Like given index 7 might return "SUS4" and [1 4 5(

and index 9 might return "MAJ7" and [1 3 5 7(.

I would be grateful to learn a PD native way of

dealing with data structures like this. 

Basically looking for

a) multi dimensional arrays (nice, but optional)

b) arrays which contain symbols, lists, or floats

c) persistence

Many thanks!

Vanilla solutions preferred,
but don't limit yourself to that :)