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

shoulders relax. I’ve brushed against the almirah door and it’s swung open. The thought of Tom’s bag of fireworks on the top shelf comes to me, and I reach up to push it further back. I wouldn’t put it past Karthika to pry.

I shove the bag back amongst the left-over cutlery and tin cups, pushing a little too hard. It falls, rockets and pop-pops spilling out onto the floor in a scatter of bright plastic. Some paper falls out too – a permit, so he did have one all along – and something that looks like a small notebook. It’s a pink autograph book, a child’s toy. It’s decorated with pastel angels which I recognize from Sanrio adverts as Little Twin Stars. It looks new but the cover’s stained with dirt and towards the back the pages feel sticky and clumped.

I turn it over, puzzled, and open the inside cover. There’s a piece of paper glued there and inscribed in Ammuma’s swooping handwriting. This Book Belongs To: And then, below, a name.

Francesca Panikkar.

Kampung Ulu, Pahang

Malaysia, Earth, THE WORLD

I stop. My heart feels suddenly louder, a thumping drum against my ears. My mother, my Amma. Francesca.

I stand like that for a moment, until the sound of Karthika’s noisy washing-up brings me back. Ammuma used to keep a tin of Francesca’s toys and books in the box room – the Amma-tin, I used to call it – and perhaps this is something from that collection. But I’m nearly sure that it fell from Tom’s bag, not the almirah shelf. I frown and turn to the front cover to read the address again.

Kampung Ulu. Peony, my mind hisses, but I tamp that down. Kampung Ulu’s only an hour away from here, but Francesca – unlike Peony – wouldn’t ever have gone there. When my mother was young enough to have a book like this Malaya would have been under Japanese occupation. And then after the war, during the Emergency, Kampung Ulu was in the middle of the black areas. Nowhere you’d go on a pleasure trip.

I look at it again, more doubtfully this time. I remember all Francesca’s books in the Amma-tin being faded, but this one looks brand new. Perhaps it’s been preserved for all those years, hidden away here from silverfish and moths on the very topmost shelf. But no, it can’t have been. Little Twin Stars is modern. It wasn’t around when my mother was small. It wasn’t around when she died, come to that.

I shiver. This is a new book, one which never belonged to Francesca at all. Ammuma must have asked Tom to buy it, just like the bowl of sweets and the flowers on the shrine. It’s an offering. It’s a present. It’s a reason to write her daughter’s name.

I close the cover slowly. There’s a curl of guilt inside me, shifting and layered as milk ice. When I was a child I’d always assumed Francesca was mine: my mother. I’d never thought about her being a daughter too. And then I flew off to Canada, leaving Ammuma alone with her ghosts. Well, she’s got her revenge, at least. I have my own ghost now – Peony, behind my eyes and under my skin – and I can finally see what Ammuma must have known all along. Francesca and Peony are the holes in our story; the silence between our words.

There’s a sudden cry from the kitchen and I jump. It’s high-pitched, and doesn’t sound like Karthika. I shove the book and the fireworks back into the almirah, latch it tight and hurry through the doorway. Karthika’s still standing by the sink. The soles of her feet are flat on the cool concrete floor and her shoulders gleam where her blouse has slipped off. She’s holding a baby, strapped tight to her body under that oversized yellow shirt.

She doesn’t look at me as I come in, setting the child down onto the ground with a queer, head-ducking defiance. He’s a scrap of feet and fists swaddled in cloth and I feel a rush of pity for her. A hundred years ago Karthika could have explained a baby away with no harm to her reputation: the father was a prince; the father was a ghost; the father was an orang minyak, an oily skinned jungle spirit who terrified young girls at night. But not nowadays. Pahang’s always had time for stories, but these days the villains are girls like Karthika themselves. The baby howls, beating at the floor with tiny, furious slaps from inside his wrappings. She pulls the swaddlings away from him and lets him crawl out of the kitchen before giving me a sly, slipping smile.

He’s not what I expected. Karthika’s skin is ashy and dark, but the child has blunt-nosed features and skin pale as rice-paper. It looks like Ammuma was wrong about one thing, at least; Karthika’s found herself a lover as far removed as possible from her brother or her uncles. This baby looks like a Mat Salleh. He’s almost white.

‘Karthika? He’s …’

‘He’s what, Durga-Miss?’

Not what I expected. Our eyes meet and she knows just what I’m thinking. I don’t need words to tell her that a half-white baby must have spelt trouble for someone like her. She doesn’t need words to understand it either. That baby has a story behind it, and one that won’t have a happy ending.

Karthika hangs her wet tea-towel over the tap carefully, then turns away from me and walks out without a word.

‘Rajneesh!’ she calls.

The baby’s crawled through the front room and out onto the verandah. I watch from the front-room doorway as he totters over to the prayer-room door. Karthika strolls over, her footsteps loud, and bumps the prayer-room door open with her hip. Rajneesh thrusts one hand out to the sweets in front of Francesca’s shrine, but she doesn’t even look down at him. She’s watching me instead.

‘Your great-great-grandmother slept in there, Rajneesh. In the prayer room.’ She says this loudly, in Malay, slow enough