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

father builds them, but Stephen barely notices him, and most mornings Anil wakes to the sight of a blue sky and his father dismantling the roof. For Mary, it’s worse. She’s not yet twenty-one; she still needs Stephen’s permission to marry and she doubts very much she’ll get it.

‘You’re looking spiffy, old girl,’ Rajan says. The slang is a recent affectation, as are the waistcoat and soft hat, an attempt to slather colonialism over his dark skin. He pulls himself up onto the branch and squeezes close to her broderie-anglaise skirt.

Mary gives him a sharp look. It’s flattering to have Rajan’s full attention, but every time she looks at him she sees wan-eyed, round-faced Cecelia. And she can’t leave that thought alone.

‘Do you miss her?’ Mary asks, compulsively. ‘Cecelia?’

Rajan knows by now to ignore these questions of Mary’s. ‘Come for a walk with me,’ he says, and takes her hand.

The pair of them slip down out of the tree to land on the padang grass. A few children are playing cricket on the padang, and their screeching laughter echoes over the field.

‘How sweet,’ Mary says, although she thinks nothing of the sort. ‘I love children, don’t you?’

Rajan beams. He considers this an entirely proper view for a woman. He slips his arm around her waist, guiding her onto a jungle path. They brush aside ferns and low, sliding stalks of rattan. A leech fastens onto Mary’s ankle, filling with blood. She feels hot and itchy, like she might want to cry. Something momentous is about to happen, or perhaps it already has.

Rajan turns to her in that dappled light and puts his hand behind her head. He pulls her close to kiss her and she feels light and air-filled, as though balloons are colliding inside her belly. The blood rushes to her lips, leaving the rest of her drained and empty. Her fingertips go white and she shifts uneasily from one foot to another, knocking the leech off her ankle in a spatter of crimson blood.

Rajan pulls her dress off her shoulders, kissing the tip of each collarbone. His own clothes are coming off too, and Mary shudders. She pulls him to her, then gives a little scream as he drops to one knee. He looks up at her, half-naked, his shirt-tail hanging loose and one sock flashing pristine white against the mud. He’s holding a ring, and Mary fights back a desire to giggle. She’d always assumed proposals would be fully dressed affairs. The sort you might tell a granddaughter about.

‘Mary. Will you marry me?’

When Rajan slides the ring onto her finger her heart beats faster, drumming its heels. That drumming warns Mary that she’s on the verge of disaster, that this is the biggest decision of her life and she must make it now. She thinks of lonely, celibate Sister Gerta; she thinks of trudging to market with a heavy fish basket; she thinks of her future shut up with an incomprehensible mother and an intolerable father and of growing old with nobody to rescue her. And then – because Mary’s open-minded and sees all sides of a question – she thinks of Cecelia, lonely exiled Cecelia who was Rajan’s true love. She thinks of Anil, and how her marriage would leave him alone to face the frailties and doubts of the world. And then, too, she thinks of a durian fruit hurtling down towards a dark-skinned servant-woman who predicted just this dilemma. Bearing all that in mind – and bearing in mind that Mary at twenty is still very young, that she thinks she’s in love and that she has a history of impulsive decisions – she looks up at Rajan to answer.

‘Come here, Mrs Doctor Balakrishnan!’

It’s too late; he’s taken her silence for agreement. He surges to his feet for a gluey, satisfied kiss. His trousers are still at half-mast, her blouse is still around her waist and whatever she was about to answer has been lost in a press of lips and bodies.

In half an hour’s time they’ll walk back on that jungle trail. Mary will be carrying her shoes in one hand and a spray of bougainvillaea in another. The flowers don’t suit her; their colour clashes with her pale skin and she looks washed out and tired. She’ll look much better in orange blossom, in photos the colour of old tea and a finger-tip veil. She’ll look brave and pure and ardent, as only a young bride should, and for the rest of her life she’ll wonder what might have happened if Rajan had waited just a heartbeat longer.

‘Mary. Mary,’ Anil croons. She’s left Rajan at the top of the drive and come back to find Anil sitting on the verandah. He’s rocking himself in a raw and shining new rattan chair and she runs to him, takes him in her arms and feels him wriggle away. He stares at her ankle, where the blood’s soaking through her sock, and his eyes widen.

‘It’s just a leech,’ she says, and then – because this should be a celebration, because she needs to share the news with someone – ‘Anil, I’m getting married!’

Tradition and the law say Rajan should have asked Stephen for her hand in marriage first, they both know that. But tradition also says the mothers should have arranged the match, Radhika and Mrs Balakrishnan putting their glossy heads together over tea and sweets. Plotting so much money in return for Mary’s fair skin, so much kicked back for Rajan’s unsavoury political leanings. Perhaps the wedding wouldn’t have come off after all; Radhika might have smiled sadly, gulped her gin and kept her daughter well out of it all. Perhaps Rajan himself would have taken fright. He might have learnt about Mary’s true character; he might have heard whispers in the markets and five-foot-ways that Cecelia Lim was never that bad, and Mary Panikkar knew it.

But since Mary and Rajan have arranged it for themselves, there’s nothing to stand in their