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

her own father, own brother, Ammuma told me over the phone last year. These Tamils, ar, live like kampong cats. There’d have been a certain smacking of lips over it, a licking of chops.

After a few seconds I hear the grainy sound of Milo being spooned out. Ammuma would slap her for that, would smack the Milo tin from her hands and throw the spoon onto the rubbish. I walk into the kitchen and she doesn’t look up. She’s sucking dry Milo off the spoon and holding the tin clutched tight. I want to tell her I’m on her side, to ask if she remembers those baby days when she roosted herself down next to the water buckets and made faces at me through the kitchen window. Possibly she doesn’t; the memory has a slippery quality to it. A fragility, as though it might not stand up to recollection.

‘Would you like biscuits, Karthika?’ I ask. ‘Or soft drink? Tea?’

I see her shoulder blades tense. ‘What you wanting, Durga-Miss?’ she asks in Tamil. ‘You wanting me to clean it?’

She points at a thickening line of ants under the table and slips the Milo tin further under her arm. ‘You have to clear, first.’ She folds her other arm over her slack belly and nods at the table.

‘No, I mean, I wasn’t going to ask …’

I trail off, and we both stare down at the table. It’s littered with things I picked up as I pottered about yesterday. Books, gold dupatta thread, a pair of tarnished earrings that had once been favourites. Some of them might even be the same trinkets Karthika and I once played dress-up with; licking sequins and clapping them to our earring studs as make-believe jewels that were shinier than any Karthika owned. We were friends of a sort, for as long as the sequins stuck.

‘Here, Durga-Miss.’ Karthika gets heavily to her feet, picking up her Milo tin and spoon. ‘I show you how.’

She gathers a few spoons up from the table. Ostentatiously, exaggerating each gesture: this is how you keep a house clean, Durga-Miss. If you had one to clean, that is. By Karthika’s lights I’m one step behind her; no house, no husband and not even a baby to show for it.

‘See, I’ll wash.’ She takes the spoons to the stone sink then stops abruptly. Her ashy elbows brace outwards under her slippery yellow blouse.

‘Wrong mug you used, Durga-Miss?’

She holds up Tom’s coffee mug from yesterday. I’ve left it in the sink, not being quite ready to scrub the print of his lips off.

‘Oh! That was … a friend of mine. He came for coffee,’ I say.

Karthika raises her eyebrows. ‘Tom-Mister was here?’

‘Oh, you know … of course you do. Yes, he was here.’ Of course she knows Tom.

I reach out to take the mug from her but she doesn’t let go, not until our fingers meet on the cold china handle. She pulls away then, glaring up at me from mutinous eyebrows and muttering a sullen apology for touching.

‘When did he come?’ she asks. She doesn’t look at me, just picks at a scab on her chin as though the answer either matters far too much or not at all.

‘Yesterday,’ I say again. I give her a tentative, appeasing smile, the way I’ve seen rich ladies do to beggars in the Ontario train station.

‘There was a fire,’ I say. ‘That’s what made all the smoke, all this stuff we’ve got to clean up.’ Pointing at the walls and the floor in a kind of dumb show. I can tell I’m too loud, too excruciatingly patient and I tumble into sarcasm. ‘You did notice?’

‘Sorry, Durga-Miss.’ She shakes her head, half-insolent and wholly polite. It’s not her job to notice things.

‘I took Mary-Madam to hospital, and Tom came here afterwards,’ I explain. It sounds reasonable, put like that, but Karthika bristles, puffing herself like a fighting cock.

‘You shouldn’t see him alone, Durga-Miss,’ she says with a veiled prudishness. ‘Mary-Madam wouldn’t like.’

‘That’s enough,’ I tell her, more sharply than I’d meant. ‘You don’t know anything about it.’

‘I know Tom-Mister,’ she snaps back. ‘He sees me, too, he likes to see me, Durga-Miss. He visits me too, not Mary-Madam only.’

She says this with a sly smile, standing there barefoot in her oversized blouse and picking at her teeth. It’s hard to tell what she means; Karthika’s English isn’t good, and after ten years my Tamil’s worse. To visit, she said, or perhaps – but surely not? – to stay with. To involve; a reflexive verb that implies choice. You got yourself into this, on your own head be it.

She turns her back, dumping the plates into the sink and scrubbing them viciously. I set the mug back down on the table. Tom was holding this only yesterday, I think. Before we kissed, after we had sex. Before Karthika greased her smile all over the memory.

‘Clean all this up, please,’ I tell her, raising my voice. ‘This kitchen’s too filthy to cook in.’

She doesn’t reply. She used to eat our leftovers, I remember, always one meal behind us and never mind where it was cooked. I’ve whipsawed from too lenient to too harsh; I’m out of place and she knows it. Quarrelling with the servant-girl, just like a foreigner would.

I take a deep breath.

‘Karthika,’ I say. ‘I found that doll of yours. In the box room. Is it for your … the baby?’

She shakes her head. ‘No, Durga-Miss. I don’t know what you mean.’

‘The doll, Karthika. The one in the box room. In the plastic bag?’

‘Not mine,’ she says again. ‘I don’t know this doll. Ask Mary-Madam.’

And then she turns her back, busying herself with the kitchen. She picks everything up; turns the cups round and moves the plates an inch to the left. She isn’t dusting or reorganizing; she’s just leaving her mark. It’s a kind of graffiti: I was here. She’s proving herself, in front of me.

I step back into the dining room and I can see her