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

But Mary knows better. She crouches over Francesca, pinning her daughter with her knees, while down in the valley Ipoh burns. Mr Thivappuram has brought a knife, which everybody agrees, immediately, not to question. He hands it to Mary. It’s clean and oiled with a blade that feels as cold as she’s ever known. With Francesca squirming to get free, Mary takes her daughter’s plait in one hand, pulling it tight. She slides the knife underneath, waits for a heartbeat, and slices.

As soon as her hair falls, Francesca stops screaming. She blinks, putting up her hands to feel at her shorn neck. She’s had long hair all her life, ever since she can remember, and now that she feels it bobbing and short, a slow smile spreads on her face. Francesca – who loves the unfamiliar, who prefers people she’s never met and places she’ll never go – has found herself to be somebody completely different.

‘Joseph!’

Now here’s the sting in the tail. If Francesca’s pretending to be a boy, then she needs a new name. Mary’s already brought one Joseph into things when she was twelve years old and inventing her mother’s indiscretions with a Kerala chauffeur. Why not another? she must have thought. Why not, indeed.

So here’s another Joseph, a tiny three-year-old one with a ragged pink blouse and a mop of short hair. Mary’s wrapped her daughter’s plait in silk and stuffed it into her own pocket, until she feels ready to look at it again.

‘Joseph, stay with me.’

Mary and Francesca-Joseph have come out of the caves by now. The Japanese have come down the Malayan peninsula, the British have come a cropper at Singapore, and everybody has come to their own conclusions about what life is now going to be like. Soldiers and civilians are scattered about the streets, all as worried as each other. Mary’s been slapped twice for forgetting to bow to a Japanese sentry and now she keeps her eyes fixed firmly on the ground. Another soldier has shown her the photographs of his own small children and the rest have ignored her completely.

But now she’s back at her sprawling, marble house and she’s facing up to facts. She’d hoped to find Rajan here but there’s no trace of him, and she daren’t go out again to inquire at the hospital. She wanders through the spacious rooms, noting where an item of furniture’s gone missing or a corridor’s been strafed with machine-gun fire.

‘Where’s Appa?’ Francesca-Joseph asks, and Mary hushes her.

This is, she suspects, a dangerous sort of question to ask. Men have certainly died in the invasion, or fled or been captured. But not men like Rajan, with his slippery good looks and his fingers in every sort of political pie. Rajan’s in the jungle, Mary suspects, his face blackened and his legs encased in puttees, fighting with the Communist guerrillas. Or he’s on a rubber estate, posing as a worker and inciting the Tamils to riot. He’s sipping tea with a Japanese general; he’s lying in a Johor brothel with Mr Thivappuram’s daughters; he’s everywhere and nowhere and will watch Mary for the rest of her life. Men like Rajan don’t get themselves killed, she’ll say darkly in a few decades’ time. More’s the pity, she’ll add.

Mary and Francesca-Joseph don’t stay in Ipoh long. It’s hard, with no husband and not even a garden where Mary can grow vegetables. And then, too, there’s her half-white skin. Eurasians are being watched across the country, being asked to register or report to Japanese holding offices that not everyone comes out of. Mary’s dark enough to pass for Indian, luckily enough. There’s not much of her father in Mary, except for his rages and his stubbornness and his surprisingly strong will. But she worries about being caught, about being taken away, and then what will happen to Francesca? As food gets scarcer – as Mary starts to barter for rice and Francesca to steal it – it becomes clear that there’s only one solution. They’ll have to go home.

Not, of course, that it’ll be easy. There are travel permits to get. There are letters to be written, bribes to be paid and Francesca-Joseph’s hair to be cut as short as possible. By the time Mary and Francesca are on one of the irregular buses that have just started to run to Lipis again, Mary’s exhausted and very worried indeed. She doesn’t know what she’ll find at home, not having heard from her parents in weeks.

After a four-hour journey the bus humps itself over the mountain roads to a stop just outside Lipis. Mary’s anxious to get off; she’s in a fever of worry and can barely wait for the doors to open. She scoops up Francesca, settles her on her hip and begins the long trudge out to the house. The jungle’s been scorched in places, cut back in others, and Mary’s sure she can see flitting dark shapes in the trees. Perhaps Japanese soldiers, perhaps Communist guerrillas, and she doesn’t know which would be worse. The Tiga Bintang, the three star resistance fighters, have taken some tips of their own from the Japanese and are shooting any collaborators they can get hold of.

It’s dark by the time she reaches the driveway, and Francesca’s long since fallen asleep. Mary pauses, shifts her daughter to her other hip and takes a deep breath. She walks into the plastered courtyard. She sees the concrete verandah and the banana trees leaning over yet another extension. She sees one of the wells she used to play near and the strange boxy prayer room. And then she sees Anil.

He’s sitting in the rattan chair, curled with his knees tight to his chest. He’s thin and a scar runs down his face. For a moment she can’t believe that he’s alive and breathing, because the house itself is dark and all about her is the smell