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

jungle untroubled by anything but malaria and starvation. Others only run as far as their neighbour’s abandoned house where they rifle the rooms for furniture and valuables. Refrigerators are migrated from wealthy mansions to huts that don’t even have electricity, almirahs are shifted with the clothes still in them, and several families simply move themselves into the mansions instead and save on all the heavy lifting. It reminds Mary of the floods she saw as a child, where wives and children were abandoned in favour of goats and cold, wet coins. She knows that if she and Francesca are to make it out at all, she’ll have to be braver than most.

And then one night when Rajan’s been absent for twenty-four hours straight, a note in his handwriting comes to her door, delivered by one of those dubious friends. Get out, is all it says, and for a moment she thinks of refusing. But Mary’s a hard-headed woman now, and something in those two frantic words convinces her.

As Mary gathers Francesca’s belongings she hears a bullock cart go thundering past her windows. Somebody’s set up a spotlight outside and it twists wildly. A beam of light bounces off her marble floors and sets the cats yowling. In that flitting light she can see others leaving too, rushing out of their houses with nothing in their hands. Across town, cooler heads are prevailing; the wives and children of British mine-owners are packing suitcases and closing up their shutters. By dawn, and all through next week and the next, cars will purr up to those British doors, silent Rolls-Royces and Daimlers smelling of leather and polished wood. As the days pass, the last wave of fleeing Europeans will jostle in their cars on the narrow streets, ramming each other off roads and the few bridges left intact. Their Rolls-Royces and Daimlers will rub together like potatoes being washed – as the Japanese will later say – while those same Japanese calmly cycle down the peninsula on borrowed bicycles. And two weeks later those bicycles will reach Ipoh and there’ll be no point in Rolls-Royces or Daimlers or any cars at all, because dead people can’t drive.

So Mary makes an escape of her own. By dawn she’s pulled on her clothes, she’s scooped up Francesca and she’s walking out along the steep road that leads to Ipoh’s limestone caves, twenty-five kilometres away. At each road junction she finds a dishevelled knot of people, huddled in the brown light. Fires are burning across the country and, although she asks everyone she meets, nobody’s come from anywhere near Kuala Lipis. Mary isn’t panicking – not yet, not yet – but in the distance she’s sure she can see a column of advancing dust.

It takes Mary two days to reach the Ipoh caves. Francesca’s only three and she can’t walk far, so Mary makes the journey with her daughter cradled in her arms. By the time they arrive there are already people scattered through the caves, people crammed into passages and shallow scoops of rock. Mary climbs up to where the largest cave opens up to the sky and finds a cluster of worried faces.

‘Hello?’ she says. At first nobody answers.

‘My girls. They just – took – my girls.’

Mr Thivappuram’s come from across the valley. He’s a bone-setter, the type of man Rajan would sneeringly call a quack. He looks lost now, his eyes red in their sockets. Mary sits down and Mr Thivappuram reaches out a smoke-stained and bruised hand to caress Francesca’s head.

‘What do you mean, they took them?’ Mary lets go of Francesca’s hand and watches her scamper around the pile of rubbish and sleeping figures.

‘All the girls. When the soldiers arrived, they took all the pretty girls. Even the children.’

Nobody says anything. Mr Thivappuram’s own daughters are famous beauties, two thirteen-year-olds with flower-petal mouths.

‘From my village, too.’ It’s Mrs Chang, who’s come north from her kampong because she thought her family would be safe in Ipoh. Last week she married her three plain daughters to the neighbour’s boys, hoping that their status as married women would keep them from harm. But both Mrs Chang and Mr Thivappuram are here alone, with bruises and blood and no daughters at all, whether penny plain or tuppence coloured.

Mary looks over at Francesca, nestled against Mr Thivappuram more happily than she’s ever been with her father. Francesca loves strangers; she’ll gladly take the hand of a passing hawker or demand a cuddle from a taxi driver. When she wakes from nightmares she never calls for her Amma or her Appa, but always shouts names that Mary’s never heard before, people from her storybooks or simply out of her own head. Francesca loves the unfamiliar – the strange, the different – and Mary wouldn’t put it past her to walk right up to a Japanese general and ask for a piggy-back ride.

‘Fran, though … she’s too young. Of course she’s too young. Isn’t she?’

Mrs Chang and Mr Thivappuram look worried. Young, yes, they say, but who knows with these devils? Already rumours are flying about: rape and pillage and horrific injuries being visited on babies and grandmothers alike. Nobody is safe, Mr Thivappuram says, and looks at his empty hands.

‘Francesca! Come here.’ Mary claps her hands, commands her daughter away from Mr Thivappuram and into her own arms. ‘Listen to me. Listen very carefully. We have to hide, do you understand? From the bad people.’

‘You can’t be a little girl any more,’ Mr Thivappuram says suddenly, and turns to Mary. ‘In the villages,’ he says, ‘they are chopping their daughters’ hair. To make them look like boys.’

He touches Francesca’s plait. There’s a second of silence, then his meaning filters in and Francesca begins to scream.

‘No! My hair! My hair. Amma, my hair!’

She’s only three, but she kicks so fiercely that she almost escapes Mary’s grasp, almost pulls free and runs all the way back home where she knows the bad soldiers have never come and her father