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

‘I’m perfectly well. Never been better.’ Mary coughs again, and Agnes flinches slightly.

Of course you are, she prints diplomatically.

By 1954, Agnes isn’t living in the convent any more. The building’s fallen to ruins, mossed with butterflies and wild frangipani. A damn good thing, Mary says, and Agnes is diplomatic about that, too.

She’s sitting with Mary on the verandah, both sipping glasses of well-water and listening to the evening. It’s so still that sounds can be heard from a mile away: children playing with kites in the padang, Mrs Varghese slapping out her chapatti dough and the slippery noise of Arif-the-postman relieving himself on the trunk of a handy teak. In 1947 this peace would have seemed impossible, but since then the Emergency has come and – largely – gone. A handful of deaths in the valley; a handful of resettlements behind the barbed wire of the New Villages. Registration for most, deportation for some and food shortages for all. But life’s nearly back to normal now. A few black areas still bristle with roadblocks and heave with Communists, but none in this valley. There’s room for the smaller things in life here, room for chapattis and poor hygiene.

Why don’t you go and see the doctor anyway? Agnes persists. She doesn’t like the sound of Mary’s cough, or the way her friend has to squint into the fading light. TB can take your eyesight, Agnes knows, but Mary sets her jaw and shakes her head firmly at the suggestion of a doctor.

Or a bomoh … But at that Mary stands and claps her hands sharply together.

‘Francesca!’ she calls. ‘Go to the kitchen. Now!’

‘No,’ floats back an answer from the corner of the compound. Francesca’s huddled against the wall and digging her way along the side path. Tunnelling out, or in, depending on how you look at it.

Francesca’s a large girl, now. She’s sixteen years old and heavy-limbed with it. Every night Mary cleans her daughter’s teeth and tucks her in under the mosquito net, buttoned into a fresh pink nightgown with her hair plaited. And every morning Mary wakes to the sound of digging as Francesca – naked, her hair filled with mud and twigs – tries to scrabble under the compound walls and get back to her jungle home. Francesca’s determined to get away and Mary’s determined to keep her here, whatever the cost in pink cotton nightgowns.

‘Don’t talk about bomohs in front of her,’ Mary snaps.

Because Francesca’s already seen a bomoh. Of course she has. What else would you do with a girl who can’t even read, a sixteen-year-old who spends all her time drawing or digging? She’s no interest in books or boys or even the lipstick Mary had hoped to forbid her from wearing. Francesca thinks like a child; she likes pencils and toys and satin ribbons; she likes party frocks and sweets that make her almost too large to fit in them. Mary only got her to the bomoh by bribing her with laddoo and sugary burphi. The bomoh was underwhelming: a gentle man in spectacles and a link-detached house. He greeted them with courtesy and a mild insistence that Mary put Francesca into an institution. ‘No!’ Mary told him, and he raised his eyebrows as though he’d realized where Francesca got it from.

So Mary’s had quite enough of bomohs and doctors, one way or another. But something’s upsetting her tonight, more than usual. Perhaps it’s the strangled quality of Francesca’s grunts, or the way the shadow of a sapling durian tree nudges her daughter’s feet. Perhaps it’s the tricky evening light, the sound of Arif’s bicycle; perhaps it’s nothing at all but hindsight when she tells this story forty years later, but Mary suddenly stiffens.

‘Agnes,’ she says quietly, bolt upright in her rattan chair. ‘Someone’s coming.’

Both women freeze; the Emergency isn’t so far gone. Footsteps come down the drive. Strange, dragging footsteps, from feet without any toes. From club-feet, the nails long since pulled off – and the fingers, too, and the lips and tongue that he barely used anyway, and –

‘Anil!’

Standing on the drive is a figure that Agnes wouldn’t have recognized. He’s dressed well, in a suit too large and too thick for his frame. It could conceal a lot of things, a suit like that. Wasted limbs, ulcerous skin, muscles that don’t work and nerves that work only too well.

Mary flies off the verandah to Anil, wrapping him in a hug. He’s so thin that her arms go around him twice, and she has a sudden ugly panic that when she takes them away he won’t be there at all.

‘Where have you been? What’s happened?’ Mary’s hands flutter over him, registering his changed shape. A bulge here, an unaccountable hollow there. Behind her, on the verandah, Mother Agnes knows only too well. She writes a single word on her paper and stands up – tea and handbag tipping to the floor, her armpits moist and her lacquered nails catching the last of the sunset – and she holds up her page.

Leprosy.

Because of course Agnes knows, given the peculiar circumstances of her own birth. She’s delivered her message at last; twenty years too late she’s come out with a prophecy that’s enough to knock the very breath from Mary’s lungs. Leprosy. It means something worse than death, it means shame and isolation and loneliness for ever. It means Mary can’t expect any more visitors, ever, not even Arif-the-postman, who’ll start leaving the letters on a tree stump where the mites and silverfish will get to them before Mary does. No more visits to the night market, no more sharp words with the butcher over his propensity to stretch out the chicken with year-old mutton. No, Agnes thinks, Mary’s life will be changed for ever, and the best thing Anil could have done for his sister is to have stayed away and drowned himself quietly in the Jelai.

‘Don’t be horrible.’ Mary can see all this in the single flicker