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

So, with one thing and another, Mary stayed locked in her makeshift Kempetai cell until the end of 1945. She’d hoped to find that Anil had already been released, but there was no trace of him. All she got for her pains was a chilly, official letter from the government, agreeing to make inquiries into his whereabouts. Didn’t she realize – the letter sneered through its mistyped address and ill-glued stamps – that there’d been a war on? Other people were missing, said the creased envelope. Mary would just have to wait, and the official stamp confirming this sloped halfway off the page.

In any case, Mary had no choice. She’d contracted TB in prison, her skin and lungs damp from stagnant water. She was released on a stretcher and taken to hospital, where it took her three months to talk and another three to stop screaming. And then she was handed her bus fare and a packet of nasi lemak wrapped in a banana leaf. And she came back to Pahang.

The house, when she arrived, was swarming with monkeys. They’d pulled down her father’s ramshackle rooms and moved into the cellars. They’d uncovered the wells, they’d made cubbyholes behind the doors and tucked themselves into the rotting beds. Mary flung them out in furry armfuls and kept right on looking for Anil and Francesca.

She searched for two years, knocking on doors and questioning street-beggars. Francesca? Four years old when … do you remember her? Did you see her? Did you help her? She got nowhere. Mrs Varghese had fed Francesca for a week until her rice supplies ran out and her own children chased the girl back into the jungle. Agnes would have taken her in, of course, but Agnes was in a prison camp herself in Kedah. Yoke Yee wouldn’t have helped, Noor Abi might have but didn’t, and everyone else in the village was mired deep in their own bad endings. Mary ripped that government letter to shreds, set her teeth, and refused to conduct a funeral for her husband or her daughter. Rajan could manage that for himself, she declared, and Francesca – well, Francesca wasn’t dead.

And so on, until an ordinary day in 1947. Mary was in the garden, hacking with a changkol at the tapioca plants. She wasn’t even thinking about Francesca when she heard the voice.

‘No!’

There was a figure standing at the edge of the compound, where the walls had crumbled. A naked figure, stick thin and scarred by ringworm; hair tumbled into a bird’s nest and a distended belly caked in dirt. Mary will never be able to explain how she knew it was her daughter straight away, how every molecule in her blood leapt nearly out of her veins, how she found herself on her knees in the mud with her arms around her daughter and the tapioca plants gone to glory.

It only took a week at home before Francesca made her preferences clear. Pencils instead of dolls. Dal instead of tapioca. A bedtime story she wanted again and again.

‘And when the sun came up,’ Mary repeats obligingly, ‘they knew that they were safe.’

‘No!’ Francesca says again, squirming off her mother’s lap. She squats in the dirt at Mary’s feet, poking at ants with her finger and repeating, ‘No!’

Francesca doesn’t say much else, but that’s hardly surprising. She’s nine years old, and four of those have been spent hiding in the jungle. She’s seen war from a thicket of rattan spines and peace from a vine-fringed ditch. She’s seen her mother taken away and come back to find her bony and utterly, utterly changed. No! is the only word life needs, so far as Francesca is concerned right now.

Mary picks Francesca up and takes her to the shower room. It’s only been in the last few days she could bring herself to let her daughter out of her arms long enough to bathe her. And she repays the effort. She’s beautiful, Mary thinks. She’s the most gorgeous little girl there’s ever been. There’d be no hiding her now, no passing her off as Joseph-the-boy, should it be needed. But it isn’t needed, Mary knows, it isn’t, and she could nearly explode with the sheer, fizzing joy of that.

‘No,’ Francesca observes, splashing the water in the shower-bucket. She squirms against Mary’s knees as Mary trickles palmfuls of water over her. Mary rubs her daughter with a piece of old serge, then braids and plaits her hair. One-two-three, twist, with Francesca protesting all the time. Tonight Mary will tuck her daughter up under the only mosquito net, which by now has holes large enough for a civet-cat to get through. Not that it matters; those years in the jungle have toughened Francesca’s skin until any mosquito would break its nose on her carapace. Francesca will lie there, batting placidly at huge, soft moths. And Mary will tuck her dupatta over her head and finish the story of the tiger-prince and the princess, the one which ends with the sun coming up and everyone safe.

‘No,’ Francesca will say. ‘No.’

(‘But Ammuma,’ I interrupt. Because I can. Because this is, after all, a story. Liable to interruptions, to corrections, to obfuscations and lies and tiny changes. ‘You said you got out of prison quickly. You said it was only –’

‘Didn’t say, Durga. Always with assumptions.’ She gabbles this out triumphantly, sounding uncannily like me. Score one, I think, to Ammuma.

‘And Dr Rao. You said you’d never had TB. He asked –’

‘Yes, and now telling, isn’t it?’

‘But they could have treated you. It was important. You should have said.’

‘Secrets, isn’t it.’ She looks stubborn and mulish. ‘No need for telling secrets.’

Hypocritical, when she can’t hold anyone else’s long enough to melt on her tongue. She pats my hand and settles back against the hospital pillow. One big breath and then she gives a deep, rattling cough. A consumptive cough, weak in the lungs and