Fragile Monsters by Catherine Menon (100 books to read in a lifetime txt) 📕

‘And I’m supposed to be back in KL on Monday,’ I say. Despite everything, I can feel myself calming down. This is familiar ground, at least. ‘I’ve got lectures. They’ll have to find a substitute for me. One of the post-docs or something, and God knows how he’ll teach the proofs.’

Sangeeta laughs. ‘That’s the important thing, is it, Durga? How he teaches the proofs?’ She sounds twice her age, coarse with the cigarette she’s just lit. Sympathetic, too. ‘If only I were there, I’d have taken your classes.’

‘You never did at Ontario.’

Sangeeta laughs. She’s not one of nature’s substitutes. She’d fill the lectures with love-smitten teenage boys, I tell her, and Malay government officials who’d want to check on her credentials. I can picture her, handing out lumps of plasticine and Moebius strips made with bright yellow sticky tape. Those methods don’t work here, not like they did in Ontario. I remember my first lecture in KL two months ago, tearing off a triumphant lump of clay to prove a cube and a sphere were the same thing under the skin. The students – Malay, Indian, Chinese – looked doubtful and made tiny, cautious notes. The skin, after all, has some significance in Malaysia.

‘The post-doc’s just like you,’ I say. ‘He’d end up teaching Yoneda’s lemma using paper planes or something like that.’

She laughs dutifully, and then there’s a silence.

‘Durga?’ she says finally. ‘It’s five o’clock there, isn’t it? You didn’t ring me at crack of dawn to talk about maths. You’re not OK, are you?’

For a moment I don’t say anything, watching a well-dressed Sikh man walk out of the hospital. His polished shoes clip smartly on the tarmac, his turban’s neatly tied, and he’s dapper right down to the waistcoat under his jacket. Except that jacket’s buttoned on the wrong holes – as though he’s put it on in a hurry – and it doesn’t match the suit. Perhaps he’s been wearing it for a week without noticing, sitting by someone’s bed. Perhaps he thought bad news couldn’t happen in his best clothes.

‘Two months ago,’ I say quietly, ‘I’d have called Deepak.’

Sangeeta snorts. She thinks I should still call him. Get into a blazing, gorgeous quarrel with his family for urging him back to that shoulder-padded wife. Make a plan – apologies (for them), divorce and a trans-Pacific flight (for him), a wedding and babies (for me). She approves of all that, being a girl for drama.

‘But don’t do it now,’ she adds quickly. ‘Not at five a.m. I mean, it’s evening here, he might even still be in his office … but you weren’t really going to, were you, Durga?’

I shake my head, forgetting that she can’t see. I’ve had a lot of practice at not calling Deepak during the small hours. For the last two months I’ve been lying awake in my tiny apartment in KL instead, eyes closed and imagining my Ontario apartment. That empty can of his pineapple cologne that nestled in the bin, a single sports sock, that jar of chutney he spooned out at every meal. The KL apartments are flimsier than Canadian ones and all night I listen out for thuds from someone upstairs breaking a glass, a vase, a heart. By dawn, I’m usually calculating the exact thickness of these thin walls between neighbours. A single blow would be enough to knock them down, I’ve worked out. To leave us all in our singlets and sarongs, squatting a careful arm’s-length apart and staring into each other’s faces. Imagining all our nose-hair and unpicked spots suddenly exposed to view.

‘Haven’t even thought about him,’ I say, and Sangeeta laughs.

The beds in Ammuma’s ward have filled up overnight, and a trolley full of breakfasts sits outside. I can hear her complaining from down the corridor. If I’d been away ten minutes longer I daresay she’d have discharged herself and stamped her way back home over the rattan patches. A real pioneer, Mother Agnes used to call Ammuma when she walked down the jungle paths to pick me up from school. Pioneer; it was a word I associated with covered wagons, with circling horses. With trouble, which was Ammuma through and through.

When I push the door open I see each bed has an old woman in it, identical grey cobwebs who barely make a dent in the pillow. Not Ammuma, though, who’s jerking her head from side to side and cross as a traffic policeman.

‘No good, this one. You bring from home, Durga.’ Ammuma pokes a disparaging finger at the omelette she’s been given. If she were at home she’d be gobbling belacan, filling the house with its unapologetic smell. She’s kept her taste for that kind of thing: bitter-tannin tea, rendang curries. Rural life. Take out the bones, Dr Tok Pek from the clinic in Lipis advised her ten years ago when Ammuma and I both went in for check-ups. From her food, he meant, but Ammuma got up from her plastic chair and walked straight out. She spat complaints from behind her seatbelt all the way home. ‘Bloody Malay, ah,’ she muttered. ‘Village boy only, go back to the kampong.’ Tok Pek lives in town and drives a Mercedes, but Ammuma’s wrath is glorious and doesn’t care for details.

‘Mary, good morning.’ Dr Rao comes up on noiseless feet behind us. I jump. Ammuma glares.

‘Are you still having some difficulty with breathing?’ he asks.

‘Breathing fine, lah. No problems, no need for fuss.’

He looks dubious. Ammuma’s voice is hoarse, her throat puffing out with each sip of air, but she won’t admit it. She’s not like the other women in the ward, hooked up to oxygen tubes and ventilators. They haven’t managed breakfast; they’re breathing by machine and digesting via tubes and Ammuma wouldn’t lower herself to anything of the kind.

‘We can try some more sedative.’ He’s frowning, creases netting his forehead from a sleepless night. ‘We have to soothe those lungs