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

back. He parts the blue curtains like a magician and gives me a tiny nod. He’s brought two porters, silent men who move slowly and carefully as they wheel Ammuma out.

‘They’ll take you to the wards, Mrs Panikkar,’ Dr Rao says loudly to Ammuma, then adds to me, ‘They’ll take her to the wards.’

‘Yes,’ I snap. ‘You told her already.’

I hadn’t expected her to go to a ward; I’d thought there’d be a dedicated department like the others we saw. Burns, perhaps, or Smoke Inhalation or Careless Granddaughters. I wonder what Ammuma’s going to tell them, when her words come back. I wonder what she won’t.

‘Ms Panikkar.’ Dr Rao sits down on the other chair, across from the empty space where Ammuma’s trolley was. That space feels like a no-fire zone, a glassy reminder of where Ammuma isn’t. ‘I’m going to need some details from you.’

He ticks them off. Home address, Ms Panikkar, your home address in KL please. And you’re here in Pahang for a week? Diwali visit, eh? Employment: university lecturer, since two months only. In Canada for ten years before that, I see, I see. Marital status?

A maiden lady; that’s how Ammuma once said she was described at her marriage ceremony. A different sort of grandmother might have cackled at that – a different sort of grandmother might have had nothing to cackle about – but Ammuma always kept a straight face. She used to tell me a lot of stories; folklore and memories all knotted up in a glorious tangle. Is it true, Ammuma? I’d ask, and she’d snort, and say it was the telling that mattered.

‘Your marital status, Ms Panikkar?’

‘Doctor.’

He glances at me, puzzled.

‘It’s Doctor Panikkar. Not Ms. Doctor. Doctor of mathematics.’

‘Oh, yes?’ His eyebrows say it all. ‘Single?’

It’s barely a question, this time. A husband, those eyebrows imply, would have sorted things out. Would have fixed the Catherine wheel. Would have bought quality market fireworks to begin with.

My eyes are tired and I rub at them. Outside these closed curtains there are desperate things going on, there are tiny quickenings and emergencies. Inside, though, everything feels muted. Stored medical kits look back at me with a helpless air, as though none of it’s their fault.

‘Cause of accident.’ Dr Rao stops, clicks his pen with a deliberate twitch. ‘Domestic fire. Cookery.’

‘I …’

‘We’re busy tonight,’ he says, without looking at me. ‘Lots of burns from people playing Diwali fireworks and we’re reporting most of them to the police. No permits, see? If it weren’t for Dr Harcourt …’

He signs the form, then jams his hands into his pockets. His legs stretch out into Ammuma’s empty space as he gets up.

‘One of the nurses will take you through to the waiting room. Your grandmother won’t be long.’

He opens the curtains, then looks back at me and smiles. It’s a cheerful smile, it makes him look ten years younger, and it’s as out of place in a hospital as a pink cocktail umbrella in the medicine glass. ‘Welcome home, Dr Panikkar,’ he says. ‘Selamat datang.’

‘Welcome!’

It was the first thing anyone said to me in Ontario. I was in the arrivals hall, with my brown trunk-case strapped and labelled, and clearly wrong compared with everyone else’s wheeled cases. And there was an Indian girl near the doors, holding a big hand-lettered sign reading ‘International Students’ above her head and waving at everyone who came through.

‘You must be Durga, right? I’m Sangeeta. I’m the international students rep.’

She stuck out a hand to shake, then pulled me into a hug. Sangeeta hugged everybody, I would find out later.

‘Sangeeta Nair? They told me to look for you,’ I said, and she grinned.

‘I don’t take much finding.’

She was right. For the next ten years, Sangeeta flitted about the maths department, bright, untidy and fierce as a quarrel. She turned up to topology lectures in bell-bottom jeans and peasant shirts. She gave set theory tutorials wearing tight emerald trousers and shady hats. She was daring and rude, the type to attend protests and scrawl graffiti on the walls of an underpass. The type to get away with it too; she had the legs of a racehorse.

After we graduated we shared an office, both of us crammed into a tiny grad-student room with lecture notes piled up on the floor. She would proofread my papers, scrawling a final, triumphant QED at the end in purple pen. I would cover her lectures, trotting to the department with snow banks high on both sides. I’d push my hands deep into my coat pockets and look up at the grey sky, canteen grease clinging to my tongue. They served hamburger loaf at the canteen, and Chinese chop suey that had nothing to do with China at all. It was at meal times I missed Malaysia the most.

But in the lecture theatres, I felt as though I’d finally come home. I’d stand at the front, a sheaf of notes in one hand and a piece of chalk in the other. Co-limits, I’d write on the board, and a hundred scratchy pens would copy it down. Categories, functors, equivalences: everything in its place and blackboard proofs that would always come out right. Sangeeta used to disapprove of those; she thought theorems were teacherly. Tidy little facts for tidy little minds, she said once and dismissed them just like that. Her words, like her trousers, tended to be undeniable.

She persuaded me to give a department seminar one day. There weren’t many people there – it was a day full of rain and spiteful little gusts of wind – but the other post-docs had come. And right in the middle of the first row was one who’d enrolled only the week before. Deepak.

‘I liked your talk,’ he told me afterwards. He was older than the other post-docs, with two fine wrinkles that creased between his eyebrows. His hair was still black, though, and he had a sparse moustache like very fine pen-strokes. I watched that moustache move as he laughed,