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

Stephen that’s unmistakable. When Luke turns out to know the tiger-prince story too (from his mother, because Paavai, just like Mary, is in the habit of telling tales) they’ll become fast friends. Both will have their crosses to bear – mad mothers, dead mothers, mothers who never wanted to be mothers anyway – and together they’ll roam the jungle, throwing stones at any nearly drowned women who cross their path.

13. Monday, 4 p.m.

Stories twist through the past like hair in a plait. Each strand different, weaving its own pattern and ducking out of sight just when you’re following it. Like category theory, in a way. Like families. They don’t stay put either.

Don’t believe me? Think of your family; picture them right down to the details. Eyes, smiles, the thumbnail your brother chews. If you’re lucky then you know them off by heart. If you’re not, the heart won’t come into it at all. (Don’t cry; there’ll be time for all of that later.)

They’re a category, your family, and the objects are simple enough. Aunties, uncles, cousins. A grandmother, if you want to court trouble. But this category changes. Just wait and cousins turn into aunties, uncles become disgraced, babies grow up and brothers grow apart. In a few years the aunties will be dead, the uncles will have forgotten their children’s names and those grandmothers will have become quite another proposition altogether. (Don’t cry; it’s too late for all of that now.)

All the heartache of going from then to now – all that growing up and growing old, all those first grey hairs and last cold wrinkles – that’s your history, right there. Perhaps you don’t like it now you’ve got it, perhaps you’d rather it had all turned out differently. You might dream of if-only-I’d, and he-should-have-done and what-if-she’d-listened – all those little pleas and quarrels. They’re a category in themselves, your set of missed chances. They’re how things might have been.

‘You need to come back.’

It’s Anwar Goneng. He’s the head of the mathematics department in KL, a haggard Malay with an emaciated face and a bulging body that doesn’t match it. When he talks he pats his mouth with a folded white handkerchief, as though he wants to clean away any residue of bad news – and it always is bad. I can hear him now, blotting up the words.

‘You’ve had your week’s leave. We were expecting you back today.’

‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t … I mean, my grandmother’s been in hospital. Didn’t you get my message?’

‘If you need some compassionate leave, you can apply for this after your probation.’ There’s a bite to Anwar’s words that’s the furthest thing possible from compassion. ‘There’s a process, Dr Panikkar.’

I flinch. It would be so easy for this job to disappear in a puff of bureaucracy.

‘I’ll come back,’ I say quickly. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realize …’

‘Ye – es.’ Anwar concedes this magisterially. His English is excruciatingly correct. ‘Mistakes are easy to make. But we need you here, Dr Panikkar. The lectures, you see. The classwork.’

I twist the phone cord around my finger, letting it grow purple. Through the hall window I can see everything outside flattened under that golden light that means the afternoon rains have missed us. You don’t get that light in Canada.

‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ I say. I slide down the wall, knees to my chest amongst a tangle of telephone wires and paper clips on the floor. ‘I’ll leave tomorrow morning and be there in time for afternoon lectures.’

Anwar smiles. It’s a dignified sort of smile and I can hear it all the way from KL. Before he hangs up he says he knew he could rely on me. It feels strange, as though I’ve started to turn into someone different here. Like one of Ammuma’s stories, like a drowned girl becoming a ghost or a princess becoming a leper. I need to get my grip back on Dr Panikkar, while I still remember who she was.

The afternoon reshapes itself after that, turns into lists of tasks to be ticked off and belongings to be organized. Finding my suitcase, packing dirty clothes because there’s no time to send them to Letchumani, and clean clothes because I’ll have no time to do washing at home. Ammuma takes the flurry surprisingly well.

‘This job of yours, Durga. Worth doing well, no point letting the goats go after they’ve bolted.’

She’s imperious while I pack, getting me to fold and refold clothes so they don’t crumple. She scolds Karthika for slopping the dishpail, then pokes around the kitchen for dirt, enjoying herself hugely. She goes in for complicated arguments, the sort that start out one-sided and finish over the kitchen table five hours later in a welter of broken crockery.

By evening the rooms are full of mosquitoes that hover in thick clouds under the furniture. The wind’s too strong for them outside and the air’s full of rain. When I go out to feed the chickens I see the Jelai smacking at its banks, high and so fast it’s almost solid. There must be a flood further up the valley.

A big flood, too, because a few minutes later we’re plunged into blackness. A power cut. There are a few scurrying, shouting minutes while Karthika and I find the hurricane lamps. They flame into frothy yellow light as I line them on the edge of the verandah. A flittering ring of insects gathers and Ammuma starts giving her bony shins vicious slaps. Under her chair a green mosquito coil crumbles to dandruff and powders my bare soles.

I’m not used to power cuts any more; they’re not part of the rhythm of my life and I’ve forgotten how to take them in my stride. Perhaps it’s something more than a power cut, I think, perhaps it’s bad luck and bad omens whistled up by Ammuma’s drowned women in their wells. There might be