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

that I’ll understand. ‘You’re not allowed in there, not now. Durga-Miss thinks I’ve been leaving dolls and toys around for you. She thinks you have toys.’

‘Karthika …’

‘But your great-great-grandmother went in there, Rajneesh. With Mary-Madam’s father, to sleep.’ She raises her voice, buttoning up her blouse with a sneer. ‘She was a pelacur. She had a baby, a little one just like you.’

A pelacur, she says. A whore.

It nearly – incongruously and unforgivably – makes me smile. Karthika first told me about that wicked great-grandmother of hers when she was barely older than Rajneesh herself. She’d overheard it, hanging around Vellaswamy-cook’s knees in his village while the adults talked. It became our delicious secret, this knotting together of grandparents and great-grandparents in an olden-days romance.

As we got older though, it turned into an injustice. We ought to be sisters, Karthika started telling me, I’ve just as much right here as you. Ammuma banished her from the dining table to eat with Vellaswamy-cook off a tin plate in the compound yard, but that didn’t stop her from talking when we were alone. It ought to be her playing with the toys and dolls, Karthika used to say, it ought to be her putting out the puja offerings and giving the servant-girl some watered-down Milo. Ammuma slapped her for that, sending her dinner on its tin plate flying.

‘Don’t listen to her,’ Ammuma warned me sternly after that. ‘There’s no relationship, nothing that counts in the blood and in the bone. She’s not your sister. She’s trouble, through and through.’

10. The Faithful Nun: 1930

Go back fifty-odd years and Mary’s in trouble of her own. She’s fifteen years old, it’s the morning of her Junior Cambridge exam and things have taken a difficult turn. It’s a dull and heavy day, with a jungle haze thick as twice-boiled sugar. Mary’s sitting in the nursery – the latest nursery, a green and sappy room at the end of a hallway that Stephen keeps adding to and lengthening – and she’s clutching Anil’s hand. At nine years old Anil still doesn’t speak much, but he’s learnt to hold his breath when things don’t go his way. His face purples, darkens, takes on the waxy look of dead flesh. He’s rejecting everything from the outside world, even its air.

Radhika’s finally given up on him and handed the entire problem of motherhood over to her own daughter. You deal with him, Mary, she murmurs nowadays, and turns away. These days she sees much more of the servant-girl than her own children. The servant-girl is a runaway, a teenager called Paavai who turned up begging one evening and never left. Paavai sleeps in the room just off the verandah, when she isn’t wanted by Radhika to wash dishes or clean out the drains. She smells of blood, of meat that’s been left to ferment and coins that have tarnished. Of bomoh magic, Mary thinks fearfully. She doesn’t trust Paavai, not day-Paavai who shovels out the chamber-pot or night-Paavai who giggles behind closed doors.

Mary and Anil have become much closer in the last few years. Mary visits the nursery every morning before school, easing Anil into the dawn by reciting lists of kings, of historic victories and longest rivers and the twelve-times table. On this particular morning, she tucks the mosquito net up over his bed and only realizes she’s late when she catches sight of her father’s watch hooked over a twig by the windowsill.

Stephen has a habit of taking off his watch and cufflinks while he works, tapping a floorboard here and hammering a wall-panel there. The house has become his hobby. He could go to the newly opened Pahang Club instead, a haven for Europeans to drink gin pahits and bemoan the state of the rubber market. But Stephen, with his Indian wife, his not-quite-pretty daughter and his silent son, doesn’t fit in with the Pahang Club. So instead he hammers away at his house, shirtsleeves rolled high. He ignores Mary, and barely even notices Anil. But Anil loves his father nonetheless and scuttles from room to room each evening in search of him. Nowadays Mary often finds her brother sleeping in a corridor she could swear she’s never even seen, with his undersized fists forlornly clutching a watch and cufflinks.

Mary picks up the watch and blows a kiss to her brother’s bed. It’s nine o’clock, and she hoists herself hurriedly out of the window. It’s not ladylike, but these days – with new corridors curling round the place, with fathers and sons lost between one room and the next, with mothers and wives and servant-girls squabbling on the verandah – well, quite frankly, it’s easier to get out from a window than find the front door.

Mary hurries away from the house, trampling ferns and touch-me-nots as she runs down the jungle path towards school. Leaves fall into her collar and itchy pitul seeds cling to her skirt, but she doesn’t have time to shake them off. She’s late, and by now all the other children will have gathered on the edge of the padang for the Junior Cambridge examinations. They’ll all be clutching slide rules and pencils, they’ll all be murmuring formulae and dates. Mary takes a flying leap over a hidden ditch and stumbles out amongst them all onto the short-cropped grass of the padang. There’s Anna Fuertes, who’s fifteen years old and already promised to the convent. There are Kumar and Kaya, poverty-stricken twins from two districts away. There’s Cecelia, sitting cross-legged on the grass. And there, sitting next to Cecelia and quizzing her from her mathematics book, is Rajan.

Rajan isn’t taking the Junior Cambridge examination today; he already passed three years ago with flying colours and is now a first-year medical student at Raffles College in Singapore. He should be in his own classes right now, probing a tumour on a beggar-woman or helping stitch up an