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

Mary tells Anil. ‘Listen, when the princess saw the tiger-prince faint and turn into this awful monster she ran to help him. She fell in love with him too!’

Anil’s lost interest, though. His eyes are turned up to the durian tree. The branches should have had gunny sacks tied over them a week ago to catch the falling fruit, but Stephen hasn’t bothered. Every night the weight of dew gets too heavy for the largest and ripest fruits. One by one, they droop, they tremble and they eventually come loose and hurtle down to smash into the ground or straight down the well with heavy, resounding thuds. The fruits drop every night, regular as the whistling Lipis train, and when on dry evenings the dew doesn’t fall and neither do the fruits, the whole family’s kept awake by the unaccustomed silence.

‘Anil, Anil – listen! The princess knew her father wouldn’t let her marry a monster, so she disguised the prince. She cut off his nose, and his lips and his ears.’

(Shades of leprosy again, shades of that disease that’s already bounding down Mt Tahan with its slobbery face turned towards the kampong.)

‘Then the princess rolled him in clay and sand so he ended up looking just like a man. And then the tiger-prince and the princess ran away, while he was disguised enough to fool everyone. They ran all night, and bits of sand kept dropping off him. The sand turned into roads and bridges and houses. By the time the sun came up they were high in the mountains, with a whole city all to themselves. And then in the sun, of course, he turned back into a tiger-prince.’ She finishes triumphantly. ‘And when the sun came up, they knew that they were safe.’

It seems, on the face of it, unlikely. Mary’s left her prince and princess stranded in the wilderness, on top of a mountain famed for its ghosts and devils. They’ve got no food, and she doesn’t seem to have thought that in a few days the tiger-prince will be eyeing those delicate veins in his princess’s neck. That’s what you get with stories; you get consequences. Mary’s lovers are unlikely to get out alive.

‘All nonsense, Mary-Miss.’ Paavai stands up, tucking her sari high around her spindly legs. Radhika’s instructed her to clear out the stones and fruit rinds that clog the bottom of the deepest well on the property, under the durian trees. It’s dangerous work and really needs a team of men, but Radhika’s insisted that Paavai do it alone: ‘The girl’s putting on weight, haven’t you seen that belly of hers? She could do with the exercise.’

‘Such a waste to tell stories to Anil-Mister.’ Paavai hoists one leg over the stone coping and points at Anil. ‘Can’t understand a thing, that one.’

She wouldn’t normally speak like this to the children, but she’s desperately jealous. Paavai’s prettier than both children put together and at least half as clever again. And yet they sit there on a padded velvet seat telling stories, while she’s sent down to unclog rubbish.

‘Anil-Mister ought to be in a home,’ she goes on. ‘Nobody will marry you, Mary-Miss. Not with something like that to take care of.’

And with that, Paavai drops herself down into the yawning, blackened well on the end of her coconut-fibre rope.

‘You – you dirty keling, you coolie, how dare you, how dare you!’ Mary’s furious. She shouts herself hoarse, leaning over the well and spitting all the insults she’s ever heard in Malay or English or Malayalam. Halfway through, she recollects herself and claps careful hands over Anil’s ears.

Mary loves her young brother, she’s fiercely protective and can’t stand the thought of him being hurt. She’d never abandon him to get married, she insists. Never, she repeats, and she sounds less sure each time.

Mary’s lonely, that’s the real problem. After failing her Junior Cambridge she hasn’t gone back to school, while Cecelia passed with flying colours and is now in the top standard. Rajan’s gone back to his Singapore college, in between tearing around Pahang agitating for Indian nationalism, Malay nationalism and home rule for any other country that cares to ask for it. Mary still plays the occasional solitary game of marbles, she still wanders up to the convent on the hill to see Sister Gerta. But there’s no getting away from it; Mary’s ripe for marriage and nobody’s come to ask.

Later, everyone will agree that it was dangerous to send Paavai down that well. It was unsafe, with the well-stones crumbling every time a durian fruit bounced off the coping. True, Paavai went down at noon, when durian fruits hardly ever fall. But still, everyone agrees, Stephen should have known better.

Paavai wasn’t missed till twilight, by which time she’d been in the well for six hours. When she was hauled up she was limp as cloth and her mouth slopped full with water. And then there was that large, spiky bruise on her forehead, exactly the size and shape of a durian fruit. At first she didn’t say a word and then she wouldn’t stop. She babbled about two small heads that had appeared in the circle of light high above her when she was cleaning out the well; she chattered about seeing a durian fruit tumbling down on her, thrown by two small pairs of hands. She swore that she wouldn’t stay in the house with Mary and Anil one more moment, not even if she was paid triple. Radhika – who disapproved of her being paid at all – simply shrugged. ‘Then go,’ Radhika said, ‘and take your pregnant belly with you.’ Radhika doesn’t want Mary being exposed to a bad example.

‘And when the sun came up, they knew that they were safe.’

Mary will tell Anil the story of the tiger-prince and the fighting princess again and again over the next few years. As a teenager he’ll meet Paavai’s son: a coffee-coloured boy called Luke, with a resemblance to