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

I look at myself in the hall mirror and see a face that’s softer than I remember. No monsters creeping round the edges of that skin, no leprosy, not even any crow’s feet. Just a few aches from rolling under Tom on the prayer-room floor, and I grin at my reflection. I tie my hair up in a plait, put my prettiest skirt and blouse on. I’d wear emerald trousers if I had them, I’d wear Cutex nail polish and a John Lennon haircut. It’s that sort of a day.

I fill two buckets of water at the sink and hunt around for one of Karthika’s scrubbing brushes. We’ll need to scrub the walls down, as high as we can reach, and drag the wooden benches and settees out into the compound yard to air. Luckily, the fire was caught and held in the closed-off wings that nobody ever goes into, but everything still stinks of smoke. Upstairs, the door leading to those shut-up corridors is blackened and cool. I try not to think of what’s behind it. Mountains of soft ash and clinker. Remains, destruction. Things that used to be things, before I stepped in.

I dip the scrubbing brush in the water and let it trail a dribbling stream behind me until I get to the stairs. Scrubbing helps, a little, and as the smoke moves from the walls to the dirty water in my bucket I start to feel happy again. Perhaps this is something that can be fixed after all.

After an hour I stop, emptying my last bucket outside. The Jelai’s subsided back behind its banks, after being subdued upstream with sandbanks and earth walls. Licking its wounds; it’ll be back. In the meantime, though, it’s quiet and a stiff breeze swoops over it and takes the smoke from the rooms.

I stack the buckets by the kitchen door and go back to the scrubbed-clean stairs. Ammuma’s being discharged tomorrow, and I’ll need to find somewhere for her to sleep. Her room’s coated in a deep grey soot, and even if it were intact I don’t know if she can manage stairs. I remember she always used to keep sleeping mats in the box room upstairs, and on the way there I stop to peer through a circular window set at ankle-height on the landing. It’s the only one in the house with glass instead of wooden shutters and it was once my favourite place in the world. I used to sit here to do my arithmetic homework, when that was all I had to worry about.

Looking through it now, I see Ammuma’s had covers nailed over both the wells outside. She used to tell stories about ghost women living in those wells, long-haired girls still clutching broken crockery or the sarong kebayas they were trying to wash. Perhaps they’re the reason for the covers; ghost women aren’t the sort of thing you want popping out at you, not at an age when your own reflection can give you a nasty turn.

The box room’s a tiny partition off Ammuma’s room, next to the attic ladder. I push the door open and the sleeping mats are right there, piled against three rickety shelves. It looks like she’s been storing hardware in here too. Two of the shelves jostle with bottles of glue, screwdrivers and plastic tubs full of batteries.

The third shelf is empty, except for a clean plastic bag with something sticking out of it. I peer closer at it, and nearly scream. It’s hair – a hank of hair – and then I see it’s attached to a china doll inside the bag. The doll’s brown-skinned and Indian, in a glittery blue satin sari. It has brown glass eyes and it’s moulded into a cross-legged shape like someone about to pray. They used to sell these dolls in the shops in Lipis, I remember. I haven’t seen one in years.

There’s a sudden clatter downstairs and I jump. ‘Hello?’

‘Mary-Madam?’

It’s Karthika, arriving for the day. Of course, I remember, she has a baby now – she must have bought this toy for him. I hurry out of the box room, closing the door behind me.

Karthika’s downstairs, wearing a red nylon skirt and a yellow blouse too big for her. She looks awkward, lumpish and bulging at her waist. Pregnant again, I think, and clamp down on the thought.

She’s dragging her mop into the hall bathroom with its scoop-bucket shower and squat toilet.

‘Oh, Karthika – please don’t – don’t worry about cleaning that bathroom today,’ I tell her. ‘We’ll need to scrub upstairs and air the furniture out in the yard. I’m sorry, I hope that’s OK …’

Her mouth hangs open, with a sullen question flat on her tongue. I’m still uneasy with her after four days back here. She was part of my world, like Ammuma and the kitchen cats, and now I can’t even remember how to talk to her. I’m too tentative – I ask her if she’d mind doing things – and she resents it. She prefers Ammuma, who scolds and blames impartially. A girl knows where she is with Ammuma.

‘Mary-Madam isn’t here?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I say, and she drops her mop and walks away into the kitchen. Her bare feet slap on the hall floor. She doesn’t ask any more questions; it’s all the same to her whether Ammuma’s in KL or buried in the canna lilies. She’s learnt to set boundaries, to keep out of things.

She wasn’t always like this. I remember her arriving bundled on Vellaswamy-cook’s hip, back when I was four years old. In those days she was all smiles and chubby arms, stealing off with my favourite dolls. And I remember pre-teenage Karthika, too, giggling with me as she Blu-tacked magazine movie-star pictures to the kitchen walls. But this grown-up Karthika is a blinking, resentful shadow in a blouse a size too big. She got herself pregnant – worse, she got herself talked about. Could be