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

Told the way Mary wants, her parents’ courtship would be awash with nobility. Mary’s fond of fairy tales, and she’s done her reading. She knows that princes and princesses always get their happy endings. Their perfect children.

Rajan’s different; he’s a doctor’s child, after all. He knows about blood, about bones, about shit and gristle and everything that holds a person together. If he weren’t so good-looking he’d be terrifying. Perhaps he is, as he takes the toys from Mary’s hands with a charming smile. Under his command her stories start to spin a little out of control, and her happy ending’s looking further and further away.

Stephen, after his first meeting with Radhika, is determined to do the honourable thing. He’s going to ask her for her hand in marriage. Two weeks later he hops up to her clean white house, his proposal already rehearsed. He calls a cheery greeting to the chauffeur, dark-skinned Joseph, oiling the last flecks of dirt from the gleaming sides of a bright red limousine.

‘No, I only want my toys in the game. Not yours,’ Mary objects, screwing up her face. She doesn’t mind the bright red model car Rajan’s brought along, but that flesh-coloured stick that he’s set next to it is another thing entirely.

‘It’s a man’s … you know,’ Rajan tells her boldly. ‘My father amputated it from a patient, after a leech stuck to it during the flood. It swelled up until my father had to cut it off.’

In fact, that purpling lump is only a rubber model that his father keeps as a prop for anatomy exams. It fascinates Mary. It’s so different from Anil’s harmless finger-length waggle at bath-time and different, too, from that enticing stir between Rajan’s legs when she plays the doctor-and-nurse game. That game is certainly becoming serious – becoming thicker and hairier by the month – but it’s nothing to this fleshy fistful.

‘It can be the chauffeur,’ Rajan says. ‘Someone’s got to drive the car.’

And indeed, somebody does. Because Radhika’s mother and father welcome Stephen into the house with open arms. Over the next few weeks, Radhika’s parents will embrace Stephen as part of their family, sending that hapless driver to tailors, to sweetshop owners and jewellers and bankers in preparation for their daughter’s wedding. They love Stephen, they trim the dirt from his paws and the kinks from his fur, and give their daughter up into his hands.

But the fly in the ointment – the silverfish in the teal-blue sari – is that same driver. Joseph’s a shy man with the instincts of a monk who’s been employed by Radhika’s parents for the last fifteen years. He keeps his eyes down when he passes girls, he takes ice-baths in winter and rice porridge in summer. He binds his loins with tight, swaddled cloths and tries to put lust out of his mind altogether, and despite all this he still throbs at every moment with a searing, carnal passion.

Unfortunately, Stephen himself doesn’t. On his wedding night he’s certainly panting, overcome with the night’s heat and humidity and the sight of Radhika as creamy and sweet as toffee under her iridescent wrappings. At the same time, though, he can’t help feeling a stab of regret when she slips out of her clothes. That sari was so colourful; it was ice-creams and innocence and suntan lotion on milky, freckled arms, and Stephen feels quite nostalgic over it. Naked, Radhika’s desire is forceful, dripping and quite unladylike. Stephen does his best, which isn’t quite enough, and the two roll apart in mutual frustration. Over the next few weeks he flails with an increasing desperation in bed each night, then rises red-eyed and irritable in the mornings to shower and go to work. Radhika prepares his lunch and waves goodbye without ever changing her threadwork frown. She hadn’t been expecting a lack of passion in her marriage, and wonders if it’s all her fault. She’s started to doubt her body; her flexible limbs have stiffened and that frown is now definitely a scowl. She’s begun to prefer reading magazines to books; she talks with a rather dreadful cheerfulness and she eats a little too much in the evenings. Life, it seems, has passed Radhika by.

It isn’t until an ordinary day of marketing and housekeeping that things begin to change. She’s leaning back on the leather seats of Joseph’s car on the way to temple, fanning herself and spreading her thighs to catch the cool air. Joseph averts his eyes as he drives past a group of prim, tucked-in schoolgirls, and catches sight of Radhika in his rear-view mirror. She’s neither prim nor tucked-in; she sprawls across the back seat with her legs splayed and a drop of sweat running down the valley of her breasts. Joseph loses control. He brakes, wrenches the car into a dusty dip where buffalo wallow in the summer and hurls himself onto the back seat.

It’s a turbulent, thrusting moment; all biting and licking and eyes wide-open. Radhika surfaces for air, spreadeagled on the back seat with her clothes ripped off and her mouth swollen from kisses. Her limbs are bending and her smile’s coming back and she’s almost on the verge of happiness.

‘What are you doing? That’s disgusting! Give her back!’

Mary’s wandered off to the swamp at the bottom of the garden, scratching at her ankle under one sloppy sock. She’s not interested in all this sex and lust, not yet, although she did feel a stir of interest as she watched Rajan’s fingers glide over that flesh-coloured prop. She wouldn’t have minded touching it herself (and it would have done you no harm, Mary, being rubber through-and-through and a sight less dangerous than the alternatives) but she didn’t want to say. So by the time she sees what Rajan’s up to, he’s already involved her toys in some distinctly adult behaviour.

‘Stop it!’ She’s been playing skip-hop with some flattened rocks,