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

Because the soldier’s just pulled out a delicate cream-coloured envelope, lying innocently in the post-office bag and uncensored. Unchopped. Unimaginable.

‘Aha!’ The soldier kicks Anil again, holds up the envelope in triumph. ‘Illegal,’ he screeches. ‘Illegal!’

Mary screams as the soldier kicks Anil again. Blood pools on the road and on the soldier’s boots, which seems to upset him. He takes a step back and slips the gun off his shoulder.

‘Stupid. Foolish postboy,’ he says, and brings the rifle into position. Anil lies still on the ground with his legs at an impossible angle and the soldier tightens his finger on the trigger and then –

‘I did it,’ Mary says. ‘I put the letter in.’

23. Tuesday, 5 p.m.

Ammuma’s voice gets slower and slower, till she falls silent.

‘Cannot remember next,’ she says, looking me in the eye. A few missing facts. A few missing brothers, and sisters, and daughters. Not worth remembering, those daughters. They’re just footnotes in history.

She pulls in on herself after that, settling ostentatiously to sleep. And I go back to standing by the door, watching the sun set and the green mosquito coils shiver into fragments under the kitchen table. I shut the door and then open it again just to feel purposeful. There’s a coppery tang to the air, like coins fished from a well. Perhaps the floods are going to miss us after all, sweep out to the eastern plains and leave only the stink of mud and river bones.

I don’t know how long I stand there. The sun sets and the air turns salt-bright, trembling on the edge of calm. I think about Ammuma, about Peony and Francesca. About equilibrium, and tidy mathematical games which have a winning strategy for every player. In real life, it turns out, the ghosts are always a few points up.

‘Ammuma?’ It’s almost dark now on the verandah. Shadows bleed across the concrete floor and Ammuma’s sari gleams in the dusk. ‘Are you awake?’

Her head lolls to the side. One eye opens in a slow, sightless blink and she lets out a windy belch. There’s a rustle as papers flutter off the low table. I can’t see where they land. The corners of the room are pitch black, as though the light’s been wrung out with two hands.

I kneel down and pat at the floor, expecting at any moment the sizzle of an earwig or the dryness of a chik-chak or even – and the thought comes without asking – the stamp of Ammuma’s heel.

My palm skims something soft. It’s cloth, the black roll wrapping my mother’s plait. I find the autograph book on the floor too, with the pages dog-eared. Ammuma must have been picking over it while I was in the kitchen. Rummaging through, sniffing and tasting and peering at every blank page.

Next to it I find the envelope of photographs. It’s split open and the frayed edge rasps like a friendly tongue. My palms pad over gritty dust and the occasional cool sheen of a photograph that’s fallen out. Perhaps there are more I haven’t found: pictures blown down cracks to puzzle some young girl-cousins in thirty-fifty-a-hundred years’ time. I’d wish them good luck, those futuristic flawless cousins with gleaming hair and space-age skin, but I doubt they’ll need it. Women like that can look after themselves.

When I’ve gathered everything I can find, I bundle it all up and take it into the hall. Ammuma keeps a torch on the table in here, for days like this when the power goes out. It sends a feeble beam into the front room. The furniture leaps out at me: chairs and tables and bamboo pictures looking affronted in the sudden light.

By torchlight Francesca seems calm and unflappable in her handcuffs. She’s so hugely swollen that she must have given birth not long after this photo was taken. Me. And then she died, but that can’t have been like I’ve always thought. No clean white sheets or gentle nurses: my mother would have burnt alive in those handcuffs. Peony once showed me the news photographs about the San fire – the famous ones, in the Straits Times. Shadows burnt onto padded walls and faces melted to chicken fat. Ammuma refused to have those pages in the house: Death and foolishness and God-knows-what, child, ten years ago it is now, why don’t you leave it alone? She’s wary of history, Ammuma. She had a daughter, once, before all that history.

I shove the autograph book in one of my skirt pockets, and then the photograph and Amma’s plait in the other pocket. I’ll need these things; they’re the only proofs I’ve got right now. The torch flickers and I cup my hand over it, blood-veins and bones showing through. I pad back through the front room to peer at Ammuma. Her head’s sunk back and her skin is loose around her exposed collarbone. No blood-veins for Ammuma, no insides showing. She keeps her secrets.

But there’s someone else who doesn’t. Someone who deals in gossip, which Ammuma likes, and facts, which she’d never stoop to. Someone who was there from the start, keeping order and always giving a straight answer in her coloured exercise books. What’s the height of a triangle, Mother Agnes? What does this word mean? Why did Francesca end up in the San? Now there’s a question, Mother Agnes. They don’t make dictionaries big enough for that one.

Ammuma doesn’t wake as I tuck the blanket up over her hips. She doesn’t stir – I think – as I buckle my shoes on. Her eyes surely don’t snap open and stare into the darkness behind my back. She isn’t sitting there – she couldn’t be – watching me tiptoe down the steps.

Once I’m outside I switch the torch back on. A circle of light leaps out and everything else drops dizzyingly away. The