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

He frees the very last pitul from her waistband, and it drops to chafe her fat little thighs. Cecelia jumps, half-turns, and the full force of her lovely smile misses Mary and lands straight on baby Agnes.

Agnes has had a poor enough start in life, so far. She’s only a year old, but her problems began long before she was born. Her problems began, in fact, forty years ago, when leprosy first came to Pahang. It spread slowly at first, then snaked down Mount Tahan in an epidemic. Old men and women died of it, then the young. A few of the prettier girls jumped off cliffs or down wells when they saw the first lesions on their beautiful skins, and passed the disease through the water supply to their plainer sisters. Drowned women in wells: there’s always more than one explanation.

And into this welter of missing limbs and missing noses came baby Agnes, missing her tongue. Not that that had anything to do with leprosy, other than as the most unfortunate coincidence. Leprosy isn’t hereditary and babies aren’t born with it, but nevertheless that coincidence looked bad for Agnes. Here she was, lying on a blanket and playing with her toes, and it was anyone’s bet when one of them would come off, too.

The bomohs, of course, said her birth was a message. In those years, the bomohs said everything was a message. Babies in particular, especially those with missing limbs or a frill of superfluous fingers. According to the bomohs, those babies were saying: your padi-crop will fail; your wife will run off with the satay hawker; you will die of leprosy. An offering, the bomohs said – gold perhaps, or some tender roast meat or a brand-new jacket – might just avert the catastrophe.

Agnes’s parents, though, had nothing to spare. No gold, no roast meat, and the only new jacket was the one they’d bought for their precious baby daughter before they knew she would never speak. But keeping Agnes would be the utmost in bad luck, in sheer wilful carelessness. So they did the next best thing: parcelled Agnes up and turned her into an offering herself. Not to the bomohs, but to the newly opened convent.

So Agnes, only a year old when Mary first sees her, will grow up silent and religious. Owing to the nuns’ stern conviction that she was never a messenger – such a pagan idea – nothing she says will ever be believed. A storm is coming, she’ll write on her slate, and the nuns will ignore her and go out without umbrellas. Or Sister Margaret is stealing the communion wine, and nothing will be done until four weeks later Sister Margaret turns up dead drunk at Mass.

And then, when Agnes gets older, she’ll write: God is telling me to build a school. Sister Agnes – as she will be then – won’t even try to convince the other nuns of the truth of this. She’ll take herself off instead to a tumbledown house with blocked-up storm drains. Once there she’ll sweep the floors with palm leaves, darn up the holes in the attap roof and fill the desks with children. They’ll be straight-limbed children, all of them, with clear skin and no diseases at all. Because, at the same time as Mother Agnes is setting up her school, the government will start an initiative of its own.

The National Leprosy Control Programme will be born in the 1960s, designed to wipe out all those doomed, disfigured women and mutilated men. And as part of the programme, the government will import a doctor into Pahang; in fact they’ll import Dr Harcourt all the way from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine with his wife and ten-year-old son Tom. Tom, whose John Lennon hair will flop in the heat and who’ll kiss Mary’s granddaughter and Mary’s granddaughter’s best friend and anyone else who’ll let him.

11. Sunday, 12 p.m.

There are only a few spaces left in the hospital car park, all of them in the full sun. I’m baking in my best silk sari and a pair of jewelled sandals that have been in my room since I was seventeen. They’ve got tighter, or I’ve got fatter, and I can feel a roll of skin peeling off my heel. I spent an hour last night trying to wear them in, pacing up and down the hall that Karthika and I had swept clean. Time enough to talk myself into being more attracted to Tom than I am. Time enough to plan a happy ending, to decide it was love at first sight. By now I’m less certain, first sight being less reliable than hindsight.

But still, I’m excited enough to arrive early. My heart’s beating faster, with a smile trembling under my skin and a splash of jewels under my dupatta. The nurse behind the reception desk gives me a friendly look. Her white uniform’s too small, bulging at the seams, and her dark skin’s blotched with acne. She looks like someone I can cope with, someone I could even feel sorry for in this glow of best-frock-jewels-lipstick. Poor girl; she can’t help it; she’s doing her best.

‘Can I help you?’ she asks.

‘I’m here to see Tom Harcourt. I’m Durga Panikkar.’

She frowns. ‘Do you work here, Miss … Doctor? Panikkar?’

She sounds doubtful, as well she might. Doctors don’t shiver like this, like new milk over a flame. They don’t pulse and breathe inside gold-embroidered saris that are just a shade too tight. Doctors, unlike mathematicians, have their bodies sternly under control.

‘No, I’m a friend of his. He’s expecting me.’

She gets out a clipboard, running her finger down the list. She has good nails, neat and well shaped. She’s not the kind to bite at them, to worry herself to the quick. She reaches the end of the list, pauses, starts again at the top.

‘I’m sorry, there