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

‘Yes … yes. For home.’ As I say it, I realize I’m going to keep it. I’m going to prop this bag up in the corner of my KL apartment where it’ll slump against the wall and point out my thickening waist and tiny crow’s feet. It’s going to be the first thing I see when I walk in and when I wake up. When Deepak calls to tell me he misses me so much that he’s had to start sleeping with his wife again, then Tom’s bag and I will huddle together and remind each other about all our bad decisions.

‘You’re ready to go?’ Ammuma peers up at me, her eyes bright. She hands me a box, wrapped and smelling of food. Keema, mutton curry, brinjal pureed with yoghurt and oozing in its Tupperware. ‘Won’t have time to buy lunch at university.’

She pushes the food at me – Take, take – and then settles herself into her rattan chair. ‘Will miss you,’ she says quietly.

She looks tired, sitting tipped sideways with her head resting on her arm. The scar on her forearm looks red, like it always does when she’s exhausted. A memory comes back to me of the hospital, her face all yellow bone and her smoke-sore voice.

‘Ammuma,’ I say, then stop.

I want to tell her I know she misses Francesca. I want to tell her I miss Peony. I want her to admit that china dolls won’t help, nor autograph books – nor raking up the past, come to that. Perhaps that’s what I’ve come back to learn; the ghosts in Malaysia are for good. They’re fragile monsters, these nothings of ours.

Ammuma just shakes her head. ‘Aiyoh, Durga, always so worry. Of course you should go.’

‘You’ll keep putting the dressings on?’ I wrench myself back to the present. ‘And take the antibiotics. They’re in those little boxes for each day. You will remember, won’t you?’

‘Yes, yes, the antibiotics.’ She rolls the word around in her mouth, pleased despite herself. She likes all the fuss of her dressings, the little bottles and finger-dabs of liniment. So far from the Minyak Angin Cap Kapak and Tiger Balm that she usually uses, or the Benedictine Karthika buys from the Chinese grocers.

‘And if there’s anything, then you just ring. Any time is fine, Ammuma, the office or at home or …’

‘Durga.’ She interrupts, putting her two palms on either side of my face. She smells like herself again, like Nivea and sandalwood soap. She drops a dry, hard kiss on my cheek then pushes me away. She’s on edge. Wanting to get going. Wanting me out so that she can settle down and miss me.

I go upstairs to change my clothes before I leave. Everything’s sharper today, as though I’m finally feeling at home. I’m starting to remember details that were hardly worth forgetting to begin with. The lace collar on my favourite yellow dress, the dread of school on hot, fresh mornings when I’d forgotten my homework, reading comics while Vellaswamy-cook made lunch. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll be back in KL. Buying yellow blouses that don’t flatter me, and watching the sky for Superman.

Ammuma waves me off from the verandah. At first the car won’t start, then it lurches forward. Unmarked assignments spill out of my bag into the footwell. They’ll get dirty and there’ll be complaints from students, objections that I’ve missed out a mark. I watch Ammuma recede into the background. She’s a white blur in the darkness of the verandah, and I’m leaving all my memories behind and looking forward, with a kind of joy, to complaints about marking.

Halfway to Lipis the traffic starts to thicken. The morning’s turned hot and damp as a mouth, and my hands leave palm prints on the steering wheel. Cars crawl along and motorcycles inch up the sides of the road. Everybody looks worried behind the glass of their windscreens. The traffic stops, and a family of children burst shrieking from their car. We’re not moving anyway, but a taxi driver waves at them – Get back in there! – with an impatient hand. Two cars nudge at each other’s bumpers and rage threatens to overflow.

The sky’s an ugly yellow, lumped with clouds that mean business. I can hear thunder rolling somewhere down in the valleys, and a wind like ripping cloth. A flicker of blue light comes from somewhere further down the road and all of us pause. The mother holding a naked baby. The father with food spilling from his hands. The taxi driver, now expressionless as a movie star. Into this sudden quiet comes a police motorcycle, working its way back against the traffic.

‘Turn round!’ he’s shouting. ‘Go back!’

Nobody moves, of course. There’s nowhere to go. We all sit, stupid and frozen behind glass with our tongues stopped in their chatter. My window’s down and the breeze stirs the papers scattered over the car floor. A drop of rain falls through with a single, ominous plop.

‘There are floods.’ The policeman’s stopping at intervals up the line, shouting through his cupped hands. His eyes pop slightly, and his thick neck strains under his turban. ‘The road’s blocked. Go back!’

‘Blocked?’ someone shouts.

‘Everywhere?’

‘To KL? To KL?’

The policeman doesn’t stop. A dismayed chatter rises behind him.

There must be a way to get to KL, they’re saying. Most of these people aren’t locals: they’re tourists or businessmen or simply lost. There must be a way out of Pahang, they’re insisting. It isn’t the sort of place you stay.

But there isn’t another road. The floods have come up fast, bubbling over from wells and drains, and we’re stuck. There’s a headache growing behind my eyes. All around me cars are slowly turning round, backing and filling and making their way along the grassy middle verge. The family dump themselves back into their car seats and the father begins to sound his horn in short, vindictive bursts. The back of my neck pinches, as though someone’s dragged the skin tight. I