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

It’s Stephen’s favourite threat. His own school was a chilly Manchester institution, full of vicious masters and thuggish boys. He believes it was the making of him. It probably was, one way or another.

‘I won’t go to school,’ she insists. ‘I won’t! You can’t make me.’

Radhika nods vaguely, reaching out to stroke her daughter’s agitated head. At dinner Radhika ignores her family and their arguments. She smiles as though she’s looking through glass, as though the glittering silver and the civet-cats in the roof are all one and the same to her. In a sense they are; Radhika’s taken to chewing too many packages of betel nut, to smoking opium from a delicate long-handled pipe. She sits down with the gin earlier and earlier each day, and by dinner she’s in a comfortable, softened world.

‘Yes, of course you stay here, dear,’ she says.

Stephen grunts and shoves his chair back. His soup was cold, there wasn’t enough palm sugar in his coffee and even the nuts tasted strangely of his own cigarette ash. He’s hungry and unsatisfied, and to make it worse, his authority’s being challenged right here in the dining room he built himself. Stephen was once besotted with his chubby baby daughter, even insisted on naming her after his own mother. But Mary’s baby stage was brief, and now at six years old she’s all angles and elbows and arguments. No wonder Stephen’s aggrieved.

‘You’re going, young lady, and no backchat. Whatever your mother thinks’ – and he casts a contemptuous glance at Radhika – ‘it’s high time you had some discipline.’

Mary scowls as he stalks out of the room and Radhika sighs. I’ll poison him, thinks Mary, who has far too much imagination. I’ll grow old and shrivelled and unloved, thinks Radhika, who hasn’t.

Anil, who isn’t expected to think anything at all, slaps at the side of his crib. He coughs and splutters with a throatful of angry little whines. Mary escapes from the room to carry all her worries to the sympathies of Maniam-cook and Stephen sips whisky in the drawing room by himself. Radhika, left alone, pinches out the candles. Sighing, she slips her sari blouse up and flumps out a breast for Anil with her ashy fingers. She’s quite a force, my great-grandmother, sitting there in the darkness with her milky nipples, her silent son tucked under her arm and her paan-stained teeth grinning out across the silverware. A survivor, like her daughter. They’ll both stand it longer than anyone would have thought.

3. Thursday, 9 p.m.

‘Durga? Durga Panikkar? I’m Dr Rao.’

I’m sitting next to Ammuma’s bed in a hospital emergency bay. The ambulance arrived quickly and two quiet Malay paramedics tucked Ammuma under a foil burns blanket. It wrinkled easily as milk-skin and I spent the whole journey squeezing the edge of it into a tiny, pleated ball. It’s only for shock, they explained, it doesn’t mean she’s burnt, and one of them gently took my hand away.

The emergency department’s busy, with full beds in every bay and even some in the corridor. We’ve been waiting an hour, watching people be wheeled in with burns, with wounds, with heart attacks. Each one of them feels like it’s all my fault, because if Ammuma weren’t here then we’d never have seen them at all. I tuck the end of Ammuma’s dupatta in to the stretcher rail and she pats my fingers with a warning tap. Enough with all the fuss, Durga, that tap says. Not so special one, is it? She’s no time for hysteria; any moment now she’ll be informing me testily that plenty of people burn their grandmothers.

‘Ms Panikkar, I understand there’s a problem with your ICs.’

Dr Rao looks tired, as though he has better things to do than ask about people’s identity cards. His eyes are red-rimmed like a toddy drinker’s and there are dark patches under his arms. There’s a nurse beside him who’s young and pretty in a taut sort of way. She’ll look good when she’s Ammuma’s age, I think. She’ll have a sensible pension and some satisfying grandchildren and a few dependable packs of fireworks for Diwali and lunar new year. I swallow past a raw lump in my throat.

‘I forgot the cards,’ I say. ‘I didn’t … I’ve been living in Canada. We don’t have ICs there.’

He frowns. ‘Do you have any other identification? Any proof?’

I have proofs coming out of my ears. I have theorems and lemmas and elegant little corollaries and none of them any use at all.

‘But she does live here,’ I say. There has to be a solution but I don’t know the words to ask for it any more. ‘Can’t I sign something, or make a statement or, or …?’

‘We need to check she isn’t an illegal,’ he says gently. ‘We’ll treat her, but we could admit her faster with her IC. Or even with someone to vouch –’

‘Dr Harcourt!’ I interrupt. ‘Tom Harcourt, he’s one of the doctors here. We were at school together, he knows her. Can you page him?’

Dr Rao turns away to confer with the nurse. They bend their heads like herons, then she scurries away to the phone by the door. Dr Rao holds one finger up: wait. He pulls the curtains around the bed with an old-fashioned gesture that belongs in black-and-white movies and everything’s suddenly cut off. Even the noise of the Emergency Room seems fainter. From behind the curtains the glare from the rest of the department looks bright as a Dynamo advertisement.

Ammuma’s still on her wheeled stretcher from the ambulance. Above her bed I can see the end of a sign directing people to other departments, to Neurosurgery and Spinal Care, to Cardiovascular and Chiropody and Podiatry. All those bunions and ingrown toenails. Serious enough, I daresay, if they’re all you’ve got.

It feels like hours before Dr Rao comes