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

So Mary’s trotted on under the gathering storms, concocting her games by herself. Today, though, Rajan’s come to visit. He’s fourteen now, tricky as a civet-cat and what he believes about that night of the flood, Mary will never know. He’s leaning on the garden wall and watching Mary with a glint in his lazy eyes. She squats down, engrossed in positioning the scruffy blue rabbit she’s brought out from her old toy box. Her Sarah-doll is here too, the wooden one with fully bendable limbs. Mary’s too old to play with them, really, but right now she’s poised above them; her grubby knees are spread, her incisors are glinting, and everything is about to become her fault.

‘Appa,’ she whispers. The rabbit, now christened, has become her father, Stephen, and she sets him down on a patch of swampy mud. It seeps into his blue fur, leaving him instantly stained and bedraggled. Stephen will never have much luck with dirt after this, will spend the rest of his life sending shirts to the laundry where Letchumani’s father will turn in desperation to saltpetre and cuttlefish bile – firework ingredients if ever there were – to bleach them clean. Mary, you see, is already inclined to meddle.

While she’s doing that, Rajan grabs the Sarah-doll, bending her into obscene positions and smirking at the sight of her spread-eagled limbs. He’s old for his age, Rajan, and he’s already persuaded Mary several times to shed her clothes and play doctor down here on the rotting leaf-mould. His probing fingers glide over the Sarah-doll until Mary feels her stomach hum inside as though someone’s loosed a Catherine wheel between her legs.

‘Put her down,’ she demands.

Because the Sarah-doll will be her mother, Radhika, and Radhika’s a well-brought-up girl. She can sing, her English is flawless, her legs are fully bendable and – thinks Mary doubtfully – perhaps she’s hardly going to be impressed by a tatty blue rabbit with its ear half off.

Nevertheless, Mary hops Stephen up and over a bed of tufty fern and he leaps out into the sunlit flowers of Kerala, and back in time fifteen years. The doll and rabbit catch sight of each other and stop, bewildered by this sudden transformation.

‘I – good morning.’ Stephen knows he shouldn’t address an unaccompanied girl; his Manchester engineering firm spent an extravagant sum on training him before letting him loose on the Empire. But he’s hot; he finds the Kerala sun strangely penetrating as it soaks into his fine silky hair and steams his brain. Sweat trickles down his back and pools at his hips and all he’d like to do is get inside, away from all this liquid warmth. Into a cool, scraped-out burrow, he thinks vaguely and wonders why.

‘Can you tell me the way back to Trichur?’ he asks.

Radhika smiles. She’s been watching Stephen come up over that grassy hill for a while now; she knows exactly how he can best get back to Trichur because she’s followed him from there in the first place. She’s clever, Radhika, with her arms and legs.

She’s also – and this part is Mary’s invention, an extra egg to her mix of fairy tale and memory – the reason Stephen’s out in this heat at all. He left Trichur an hour ago, full of his English desire to take a good country walk. And in the middle of the cool backstreets near the outskirts of Trichur, he saw a white-walled villa barred with an iron gate. Unlike the baking dryness of the neighbouring houses, this one stood in cool, tar-black shadows that dripped like syrup from the coconut trees. A verandah ran around it, fenced in with lacy ironwork as delicate as frost. And behind that frost he saw Radhika.

Or at least, if Stephen’s scrupulously truthful, he saw slices of Radhika through the iron gate: a round arm, a face, a lock of hair over a teal-blue sari. Nobody could feel passion for slices of a girl, but that dizzying shade of blue is a different matter. It’s a wistful colour, a colour to remind Stephen of sun and sky and first love in Blackpool. A colour that doesn’t wear well, not that Stephen would know. He fell in love with Radhika’s clothes first, and only now, an hour later, does he start to appreciate her oiled hair and the way her bare feet swirl tiny, alert puffs of dust from between her toes. The thought of those toes excites him beyond bearing, and he leaks a little stuffing.

‘Stop it!’ Mary glares at Rajan, who’s taken over her game and is tweaking the toys into compromising positions. Mary would like this to be a love story, a tiger-prince and his warrior princess, whose son will be flawless. She’d like hearts and henna, she’d like sweets and sangeet. She’d like a happy ending, because that’s the whole point.

But it’s too late; Rajan grabs the toy rabbit from her. He strokes its ears with a cool, firm grip; he smears mud in places no self-respecting rabbit would allow. Then he fluffs up its fur, leaves it staring and excited, and tumbles it down with the Sarah-doll into a damp hollow where the earth smells thick with sap. So – thanks to Rajan – Stephen and Radhika will think of lust instead of love and out of that lust will come sex and out of sex will come Mary and her removable clothes in the canna lilies. Rajan thinks ahead.

Under Rajan’s sneaking fingers, Radhika obediently lifts her arm to point the way back and Stephen’s mouth dries up. There’s a small rip under the sleeve of her sari blouse, showing him an armpit creased with baby-fat and hair springing loose in tempting curls. The path she’s pointing out is hardly more than a jungle trail, a sort of fold in the lushness of all that growth. No doubt it’s full of hidden dangers, but Stephen summons up his courage. He takes her arm, bows, and