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

estate-worker’s severed hand. But he’s taken a leave of absence instead, and he’s been spending the last few weeks attending rallies up and down the length of Malaya. Rajan, in common with hundreds of other Malayan Indians, has been bitten by the bug of nationalism. He’s been marching with Tamils, with Malayalis, with Sikhs and Gujaratis – half of whom he despises and nine-tenths of whom he can’t understand – for Indian rule over India, a country he’s never even seen. He’s dropped into Lipis for a day on his way to a rally to support Ramasamy, the Tamil nationalist preacher. And Cecelia’s taking full advantage of it.

‘Cecelia, I thought we’d be partners,’ Mary bursts out. She and Cecelia always used to pair up in that tense half-hour before examinations in order to make use of the last – the very last – ounce of their failing bond. Mary would memorize the beginning of every equation and Cecelia the end, their lips moving unconsciously together. But these days, Cecelia won’t play.

‘I would have studied with you,’ Cecelia explains. ‘But you were late.’

Perhaps it’s not surprising. Cecelia, like everyone else in Kuala Lipis, has come to accept that Mary didn’t mean to leave her to the flood. But despite that, she’s still got a lot to forgive her old friend for and she’s always been the kind to hold a grudge. So now she looks right through Mary and turns away, thrusting her chemistry book and her bare knees under Rajan’s nose.

‘Test me again?’ she asks.

Mary turns on her heel with a sob. Her skirt swirls, and some of those irritating pitul seeds fly off to land on Cecelia’s bare knees. Serves you right, Mary thinks.

She stalks off into the schoolhouse. It’s a solid building, with arched doorways and low windows. The classrooms are bright with sun, and in front of one of the doorways is a nun sitting quietly in those sunbeams. It’s Sister Gerta, who’s come down from the hilltop convent to help supervise the examinations today. Gerta’s spent her whole life in one Malayan convent or other, wearing shirts of undyed cotton and skirts rough as gunny sacks. At twenty years old she sprouted a distressing and luxurious moustache, by twenty-five her chins overlapped and spilled down like dewlaps and now at thirty her face is peaceably ugly. She’s the kindest woman Mary will ever know, and right now her eyes are brimming with sympathy at the sight of Mary’s melancholy face.

‘Mary! Child, you can’t go in yet. That’s the examination room.’

The examinations are being set up in the rooms behind Sister Gerta and two masters inside chat unintelligibly as they lay out papers for the English conversation assessment.

‘Come, child, sit next to me here. Everything will be all right.’

Sister Gerta likes to console. She has a kind of grim cheerfulness, an invincible way of looking on the bright side. She gives Mary a radiant smile and bounces what looks like a bundle of rags on her lap.

‘What’s that?’ Mary asks. She sits down, crossing her legs in their sloppy white socks. Next to Sister Gerta’s thick and pasty shins, Mary’s ankle bones look delicate. She admires them for a second.

‘This? This is Agnes.’

Sister Gerta pulls back one of the folds of cloth on her lap, and Mary sees a little face peering out at her. Agnes looks about a year old, with a round Chinese face contorted into what ought to herald an ear-splitting scream. It ought to be loud enough to drown out the English masters, to overpower the murmur of dates and formulae from outside – if it weren’t for the fact that baby Agnes apparently decides against it. She waves her fists instead, she turns purple and arches her back; she has, in fact, a thoroughly satisfying tantrum, and all completely silent.

‘She doesn’t make a sound, the cherub. Not one word.’ Sister Gerta bounces Agnes up and down on her fat thighs, and gives Mary one of the sweetest smiles she’s ever seen.

‘Neither does my brother,’ admits Mary with a shamefaced little shrug.

‘Still, he’s God’s child, isn’t he? And what a good sister you must be to him, too.’

Mary doesn’t get much praise these days – she’s at that awkward age of knuckly hands and bony knees, of strange new breasts and hips that don’t stay within their bounds. She wriggles a little and blushes, letting Gerta coax out of her that she is looking forward to the examination being over, that she does like English conversational practice, that she would like to be a nun when she grows up. Anna Fuertes, standing at the end of the corridor, gives her a fierce glare; Anna is truly, deeply religious, and she knows all too well that impious little Mary is a sham.

Sister Gerta, on the other hand, believes Mary implicitly. All her chins beam with delight, and she digs into her scanty blouse to find a sweet and a string of rosary beads. She presses both into Mary’s hands.

‘For your darling little brother.’

Perhaps it’s the rattle of those beads that attracts Cecelia’s attention. Perhaps it’s Mary’s squeak of surprise. Perhaps it’s bad luck, pure and simple. But whatever the cause, Cecelia’s tangled black head pops through the low hall window opposite Mary.

‘Mary? Rajan wants you to come and study with us.’

Cecelia herself doesn’t want it, and she makes that plain enough. Her eyebrows are drawn together in a don’t-you-dare glare that pins Mary to her seat. But then Rajan comes up beside her, looking curiously at both the girls. Mary looks away, but Cecelia twitches her mouth into a witchy little smile. It’s an enchanting curl of her lips, calculated to tell Rajan she’s the sort of girl to forgive floods and failures and every scrap of guilt that’s ever flown into her best friend’s heart.

And it does the trick. Rajan – who’s practical, who likes his girls inclined to forgiveness and smiles – slips a groping hand under the pleats of her skirt.