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

monster like something pulled from a riverbed. The way the sun came up, Durga-child, and then they knew that they were safe.

She used to tell me this story every night before bed. Sometimes with more characters, sometimes with a different ending, but always the same story underneath. It’s the bones of a lemma, this tale, the meat and muscle of a proof. It’s history, getting the last word in first.

12. A Servant’s Tale: 1930

‘Once upon a time,’ Mary begins, ‘there was a tiger-prince.’

Eight-year-old Anil claps his hands. He’s delighted for several reasons: partly because Mary’s curled up with him on her lap, partly because she’s telling him his favourite fairy tale, and partly because there’s no room for Paavai to come and sit next to them. All three of them are in the back of the compound, in a dusty and crumbling corner under the durian tree. Anil and Mary sprawl on a raggedy seat that might once have been a piano stool, while Paavai squats nearby in the sun. She’s leaning against the stone coping of the oldest well, the one with half its bricks gone for rubble. Anil stretches his legs out onto the shady seat where Paavai isn’t, and babbles with joy. It doesn’t take much to make him happy, unlike his sister.

‘Ma-ry,’ he says, carefully. He’s taken to speaking, these last few months. Not very much, just the odd word or two. Mary catches his socked and kicking feet in the palm of her hand and, looking up, meets Paavai’s eye.

Mary and Paavai don’t get along. For a start, there’s the question of just what Mary should call her. At seventeen, she’s only a year or two older than Mary herself, so she can’t be Paavai-Amah. She isn’t Paavai-Auntie either, because the children needn’t respect her, and they know it. She isn’t even a servant, not really, although sometimes Radhika will wake up in a foul mood and order Paavai to perform an immense and unimaginable task. Cleaning out the wells; re-tarring the attap roof. These demands happen like lightning, usually when Radhika’s heard her husband stumbling from Paavai’s verandah room in the small hours. He’s been doing a bit too much of that, these last few months, and the inevitable has happened. Paavai’s waist has begun to thicken and her belly to bulge in an alarming and unmistakable way.

‘The tiger-prince fell in love with a princess,’ Mary tells Anil. ‘A beautiful princess. With long hair, of course’ – the two children glance at Paavai’s short-cropped head – ‘and creamy skin’ – they giggle at the soot-blackness of Paavai’s calloused knees and elbows – ‘and the prettiest face in the world. So pretty she had to wear a mask so people would leave her alone.’

(Mary doesn’t know it, but that mask hints at something rotten beneath her story. Leprosy or beauty, it doesn’t much matter which. Both come down to fending people off.)

‘The princess didn’t love the tiger-prince back, though,’ Mary goes on, ‘so he challenged her to a duel. And if he won, he would get to marry her.’

Mary’s stories all involve rape and pillage, given a shake of sugar and retold as true love. It doesn’t bode well for her future, sitting there in her white dress and eyelet socks. She might be able to tell stories, but she’s failed her Junior Cambridge exam and her schooldays are over. From now on, she’ll have to make her own way.

‘So the prince and the princess battled! And just as the tiger-prince was about to win, the princess took off her mask. And he dropped down in a faint because of how beautiful she was.’

Paavai gives a loud snort. She’s pulling fibres from coconut husks and twisting them in her rubbed-raw hands to make a rope. She tugs it, testing the strength.

Paavai’s been in the house a year now. When she isn’t working, she slips through the darkened passages and spends hours hiding in one room or another, trying to take possession of something. Mary’s found her hunched in the kitchen gnawing on a lump of sugar cane and Anil’s surprised her in the moonlit bathroom staring at her own reflection. Radhika’s had even worse shocks. She and Paavai are the same height and same skin colour, and when they meet unexpectedly in a dark corridor, at first Radhika thinks she’s seeing her own ghost.

‘The tiger-prince fainted because of how beautiful the princess was without her mask,’ Mary repeats. ‘And while he was fainted, he turned into a huge frog-monster! That was his secret, that whenever he slept he turned into a beast. He had a mouth like this’ – Mary stretches her lips open – ‘and eyes like this’ – she squints her eyelids shut – ‘and a little pug nose just like …’ The two children look at Paavai and giggle.

‘Time wasting, Mary-Miss. All these stories,’ Paavai sneers. She flicks a length of coconut fibre up into the durian tree, making the huge spiked fruits wobble on their fleshy stalks. Dangerous, to be walking under a durian tree when the fruits are falling. Everyone says the fruits never fall in daylight hours but nevertheless, Paavai’s being careless.

Mary grits her teeth, though, and doesn’t say anything. She’s trying to be more ladylike these last few months, and biting back any swear words that spring to her tongue. She doesn’t want to be like Paavai, who swears like a soldier whenever she spills hot water on herself. Ladies don’t talk like that, Mary tells Paavai loftily, and grinds her own teeth instead of cursing. All this jaw-clenching restraint has taken its toll, and Mary’s teeth have grown noticeably shorter and weaker. By seventy she’ll need false teeth, she’ll slop biscuits against her gums; she’ll suck at sambal petai that Paavai’s great-granddaughter Karthika cooks for her and take her long-awaited revenge by sending the girl to mop up shit.

‘Ignore Paavai,’