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

rainy months to coax their charges out of baskets somewhere drier. Mary’s hard-headed; she’s counting her pennies and counting her blessings and counting on George’s proven cowardice.

And, indeed, after a few pre-matrimonial scuffles, Mary prevails. George is still in school himself, he’s young enough to be quixotic and old enough to be romantic and he doesn’t stand a chance against Mary when she’s made up her mind. An engagement is announced and a house is bought, just on the outskirts of Kampung Ulu. There is, in time, a measured amount of rejoicing. Henna is painted, auspicious dates are forecast and there’s a certain pleasurable bickering over the fit of Francesca’s wedding sari. Mary’s in her element and she has things under control, right up to the point Francesca gives birth three months earlier than she’d foretold, and ruins the fit of her wedding sari for good and all.

Ammuma’s Tale: The Conclusion

Conclusions, now – conclusions are where the real difficulties start. You don’t like where you’ve finished up, you don’t like how it’s all been left. And who are you going to blame? The storyteller, that’s who. The mathematician. The monster.

Ammuma always finished this story with a single phrase: ‘You can’t count your chickens without breaking eggs.’ And the way she told it, something does break inside Francesca. Francesca dies three days after the birth, almost peacefully. Ammuma says there’s even a smile on her face, which is wildly unlikely. Ammuma’s story concludes that I’m a gift. A mistaken gift – the kind of present you’d never have asked for – but one that was somehow welcome all along. No wonder Ammuma steers clear of logic, she’s worried I’ll disappear in a puff of it.

So that’s Ammuma’s story, and she’ll stick to it for as long as it’s convenient. But let’s postulate – let’s hypothesize – that there might be another story. One that fits the facts better – one that has Francesca ending up in the San in handcuffs, for a start. This story won’t have the same shine, because I don’t have Ammuma’s imagination. I don’t have her ability to add two and two and come up with five or seven or something else entirely. All I have is logic, and a photograph I’m beginning to wish I’d never seen.

Durga’s Tale: The Premise

In this other story, perhaps it would all begin badly, right from the start. Mary and Francesca would be at loggerheads, and Mary ironed flat with grief. In this story Anil would have died in prison, his body dumped at the house by an indifferent official. Francesca would have nightmares for weeks, the sort of nightmares that mean she inevitably ends up in her mother’s bed, or a friend’s bed, or any bed at all.

Durga’s Tale: The Inference

‘You’re so old-fashioned!’

Mary and Francesca are snappish with each other these days. It’s hard for them both, as Francesca’s breasts have swollen and Mary’s flattened, as Francesca’s dreamt of love and Mary’s drunk strong coffee to keep away any dreams at all.

‘That’s enough out of you, young lady,’ Mary retorts. Francesca’s sitting at the dining table eating hard-boiled eggs and dropping the shells for the kitchen cats. Mary’s tired these days, sagging under her own sparse flesh. She should feel liberated – like the younger ones do – but as far as Mary’s concerned, the Emergency’s nothing but another war.

She has a point. Malaya’s barely looked around from celebrating the end of the Occupation before another load of would-be soldiers have plunged them into trouble. The MPAJA – the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army – who coordinated those fluid raids against the Japanese occupiers, stabbing with venomous fangs before gliding back into their jungle camps: well, they’re still here. They’re the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-British Army now, they’re the three-star Bintang Tiga, they’re a liberation army and a Communist militia; they’re bandits and folk heroes and, according to Mary, a bloody nuisance.

And now the British have begun to uproot whole kampongs and march the villagers away to resettlement areas. These areas are barbed-wire swamps of mud and tree roots, where families labour to build houses only to find next morning they’re six foot deep in floodwater. The resettled villagers are caged in by wire and sentries and searched each morning to stop them smuggling out a single grain of rice for the Communist jungle fighters. When the villagers arrive at their rubber-tapping and farming work empty handed, those same Communist jungle fighters aren’t happy. The British are hanging everyone who smuggles food, goes the saying, and the Communists are shooting everyone who doesn’t.

‘That’s enough out of you,’ Mary repeats. Francesca doesn’t answer and Mary stamps away to the kitchen. She opens the cupboard by the chapatti oven, pulls out her pans, and only then notices that the sack of rice that lives behind them is missing.

‘Francesca?’ she calls. Francesca’s left the table in a litter of discarded eggshells and gone out to the verandah to do her calculus homework. Francesca’s sixteen, she’s smooth as butter in her starched school blouse and blue pinafore, her temper says she’s trouble and her brassiness confirms it. She’s Mary all over again, and it’s no wonder things aren’t going well.

‘What’s happened to the rice?’ Mary asks, folding her arms by the doorway. Francesca pauses, licks the point of an impeccably sharp pencil and begins to write. Proof, she sets down, and then looks up.

‘I gave it to the People Inside. The Communists – the fighters. They came here yesterday looking for supplies.’

Theorem, she writes delicately, a slice of pink tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.

‘Francesca! How could you!’ Mary’s aghast. The jungle around the house isn’t hospitable enough for a Communist camp, being full of vicious rattan spines and slippery, unexpected holes where Stephen dug his many abortive wells. But once Francesca starts giving the fighters food, Mary knows they’ll never leave.

‘Like mice,’ she snorts. ‘Like rats,’ and Francesca slams down her pencil.

‘What do you know?’ she bursts