Fragile Monsters

by Catherine Menon

  ‘No good, this one. You bring from home, Durga.’ Ammuma pokes a disparaging finger at the omelette she’s been given. If she were at home she’d be gobbling belacan, filling the house with its unapologetic smell. She’s kept her taste for that kind of thing: bitter-tannin tea, rendang curries. Rural life. Take out the bones, Dr Tok Pek from the clinic in Lipis advised her ten years ago when Ammuma and I both went in for check-ups. From her food, he meant, but Ammuma got up from her plastic chair and walked straight out. She spat complaints from behind her seatbelt all the way home. ‘Bloody Malay, ah,’ she muttered. ‘Village boy only, go back to the kampong.’ Tok Pek lives in town and drives a Mercedes, but Ammuma’s wrath is glorious and doesn’t care for details.

  ‘Mary, good morning.’ Dr Rao comes up on noiseless feet behind us. I jump. Ammuma glares.

  ‘Are you still having some difficulty with breathing?’ he asks.

  ‘Breathing fine, lah. No problems, no need for fuss.’

  He looks dubious. Ammuma’s voice is hoarse, her throat puffing out with each sip of air, but she won’t admit it. She’s not like the other women in the ward, hooked up to oxygen tubes and ventilators. They haven’t managed breakfast; they’re breathing by machine and digesting via tubes and Ammuma wouldn’t lower herself to anything of the kind.

  ‘We can try some more sedative.’ He’s frowning, creases netting his forehead from a sleepless night. ‘We have to soothe those lungs of yours.’

  ‘You mean you want to drug her?’ I interrupt. ‘Send her to sleep?’

  ‘No, no. Not to sleep. Just to relax her. Slow her breath down.’

  Ammuma gulps down the tiny white tablets he gives her and rejects the glass of water he brings over.

  ‘Too chilling, eh, to take cold water in the morning. Need heating only, you didn’t learn this?’

  I sit back down by her bed, feeling that beige chair mould itself to my thighs again. Her hand’s dry when I reach for it, and I can feel her muscles twitching in long streaks over the bones. The burn on her forearm looks redder and rawer than it usually does. She stares at it for a minute, as though she’s never seen it before. Dr Rao moves on to the other patients, recording medications and checking their charts. Ammuma and I drop into a deep silence, then she suddenly jerks upright.

  ‘Francesca?’ she asks. She grabs the blanket, then lets it go. ‘Where’s Francesca?’

  Dr Rao doesn’t turn. He doesn’t want to be bothered with her, I think angrily. He only wants to know about her body, about the machinery of her blood and breath. He’s not interested in anything else; not Francesca or the Emergency, or the fact that Ammuma’s never eaten eggs for breakfast, or that she keeps her water-glass on the other side of the bed, not where this officious nurse has put it, or –

  ‘Durga?’ I look up. Everything’s vivid, clear and glassy in the light from the window. A nurse has come in, and she’s twisting the blinds open. Sunlight bounces off Dr Rao’s gleaming hair and into my eyes.

  ‘Durga,’ he says again. ‘You need to go home. Have some sleep, change your clothes. She’ll be discharged on Sunday at 1 p.m. Please don’t worry,’ he adds. ‘She’ll be just fine here.’

  I know I should stay, but I’m more tired than I thought possible. My head’s starting to ache and my eyes feel raw, loose-boiled in my skull. I stand up and give Ammuma a kiss, but she doesn’t move. Her forehead’s warm and she smells of soap and smoke. She looks at me, though, whispers something that I can’t quite make out as her eyelids droop and finally close. Perhaps she does see Francesca, I think, from under those swags of skin. Perhaps my mother’s been here all along, waiting for me in Pahang. She’s an imaginary number, a limit, an infinite sum. She’s here all right, we just can’t get our hands on her.

  Half an hour later I’m waiting at the hospital bus stop. A few stray dogs hang around begging for food. A decade ago they wouldn’t have bothered me, but now I eye them nervously. They’re mangy things with anxious eyes and teeth on show, and I know how they feel. When the bus arrives some people settle for the long haul, bringing food and hot drinks out of carrier bags. Somebody pulls out a gold-dusted packet of laddoo and for a second I’m taken aback. I’d almost forgotten it was Diwali.

  It’s a half-hour drive back home. When I step out at the top of our road the smell hits me again, a wet stink of rot and ripped vegetation. It’s the banyan swamp, which stretches out for miles all the way from Kampung Ulu. Four days here and I’m still not used to it. When the wind’s in the right direction, everything smells like the day Peony died.

  I push the gate open and see the churned-up mud left by the ambulance last night. The sides of the yard are filled with glittering puddles of rain, and under the raised verandah there’s a slop of water as wide as the house. When we were small Peony swore she’d seen a catfish living under the school verandah, a monster that had been stranded there years before in a flood. ‘Fooled you!’ she’d told me after I’d crawled under to find it.

  As I walk up the steps the banyan swamp smell fades, to be replaced by the stink of smoke. I shiver. I’m lucky the fire didn’t spread; I’m lucky there’s even a house to come back to. But that doesn’t stop Ammuma’s rattan chair with its worn-out seat from staring accusingly at me.

  I turn away from that chair and start to pace the verandah. I’m exhausted, but far too much on edge to sleep. I need to reorient myself, like the pendulum equations I used to teach to first years. Back and forth I go, without ever finding home.

  Every time I pass in front of the low verandah table, I catch sight of Tom’s bag of fireworks underneath. On the third time I stoop down to pick it up, looping the string handles around my wrist. I don’t want to see it, not right now when my mind’s full of should-have-known-better. I walk quickly through the front room and the hall, still dim and tight-shuttered from last night, and drop the bag on the dining table. Karthika hasn’t arrived to clean yet, and everything’s still gritty with ash. The smell of smoke is so strong it feels like I could grab the air in two hands and wring it out. I go back out into the hall, tracing my finger along the grimy wall. At the bottom of the stairs I take a deep breath. It won’t be as bad as you think, I tell myself.

  And I’m right, it isn’t. The smoke settles in my nose and on my skin, and I stop noticing it so much. The stairs creak just like they always did and for a second it almost feels normal. I pass the door that leads into one of those winding, looping wings that Ammuma closed off years ago. Karthika’s paraffin-polished floors would have smouldered and caught in there, and who knows what sort of state it’s in. But out here the bathroom’s untouched, and so is my bedroom and the roofless little box room next to the attic ladder. The only real damage in this wing turns out to be one wall of Ammuma’s room, where the fire broke through from one of the closed-off corridors. The wall panels are charred and her wedding photographs have crumpled from the heat. I wonder how much she’ll mind. She deliberately hung those photographs facing away from her bed. She’d had enough mornings with my grandfather to last a lifetime, she said, and at his age he was hardly going to sneak up when her back was turned.

  I close the door behind me. Even if Ammuma doesn’t mind, those ruined pictures tap the guilt inside me. I wonder if she has any copies, perhaps in the prayer room. The prayer room’s a small, dark alcove just off the verandah downstairs, with her shrines inside. She keeps things she doesn’t need in there: spare green mosquito netting, my old picture books and even her wedding sari tangled up in an ice-cream tub full of Flit sprays. She doesn’t go in for sentiment either, doesn’t mind a few spots of grease on the past.

  When I push the prayer-room door open it looks smaller than I remember. Shabbier, too. In Canada I got used to measuring the importance of things by how new they were, how outsize and shiny. Not here in Pahang. I’d never noticed before just how tarnished the shrines are.

  Ammuma never used the prayer room much when I was young, but these days she spends so many hours in front of the shrines it seems like
even the floorboards hold a memory of her knees. There are three shrines: one for her husband, Rajan, one for Anil and one for Francesca. No shrines for her own parents, who were killed in the war. She’s never found out how they died and she won’t put up a shrine, she says, until she knows for sure. She misses them more than I can understand in some complicated, angry way, like grief sewn together out of little patches.

  My grandfather’s photograph is the biggest. It’s a pre-war portrait, Rajan looking clean-cut in sepia. Ammuma dutifully lays marigolds before it every morning. Rajan is, after all, a respectable memory – he was a government doctor, whatever unsavoury things he might have got up to off duty – and Ammuma always spent their wedding anniversary fasting for him. She used to love anniversaries and auspicious days, and she wasn’t fussy about which religion they belonged to. Diwali, Christmas, lunar new year; she’d dip into the calendar and pull out a plum stuffed full of prayers and complicated rituals I’d have to fumble through.

  Not now, though. Last year she didn’t bother fasting at all until the Jelai flooded and she ran out of groceries. Killing two birds with one stone, she told me triumphantly down the telephone. Making the most of things. She’s good at that, using up bits and ends of rags, of food and left-over flowers. She’s good at shrines.

  Her brother Anil’s shrine has even more marigolds scattered on it than Rajan’s. She takes Anil more seriously, blood being thicker than marriage certificates, after all. And since he never learnt to speak he wouldn’t have even answered back; a point in his favour. Ammuma’s stories about Anil change depending on her mood; they shift and contradict and turn into different tales entirely. I know he was killed in the war, like Rajan. But Anil, Ammuma’s always said, didn’t deserve it.

  There’s a fresh-cut flower and a bowl of sweets in front of Francesca’s shrine. Your Amma always did love sweets, Ammuma says to me every Diwali, down crackly phone lines and clear-as-a-bell phone lines and phone lines that echo with sadness. And now I’m back here, topping up Amma’s bowl of sweets myself. Francesca looks about thirteen in her photo, and it’s strange to think I was born only a few years after it was taken. Francesca pregnant with no husband in sight, and who knows the tears and tantrums there were over that. And then three more feverish days and she was dead. Sixteen years old, with her stomach still swollen from baby weight she never had a chance to lose.

  I put the picture back firmly. Bad enough having to deal with my memories on this visit, without bargaining for Ammuma’s, too. Everything in here seems eerie, like a kind of trick photograph. With my Canadian eye it’s exotic and overdone, like a photograph on the wall of a travel agency. But with my Malaysian eye it’s real life.

  I turn away, and to my surprise there’s one more rickety table. It’s been pushed in at the back of the room and there’s a shadowy photograph on it. I pick the photograph up and tilt it closer to the light from the open door. My hands start to shake. It isn’t. It isn’t.

  But it is. I know this photograph. It used to hang on my bedroom wall, fifteen years ago. It was taken at the kampong school just a mile away: rows of children arranged on benches with our hands tucked behind our backs. We’re all teenagers and sulky with it, wearing pressed uniforms crisp as cellophane. I’m in the middle, my hair in two plaits, Tom’s in the back row with a smile and a bowl-cut, and then – yes, in the front. There she is, sitting cross-legged. Wrists covered in ballpoint tattoos and nails chipped from a game of five-stones in the playground. Peony.

  6. The Princesses Set to War: 1926

  In the year she turns eleven, Mary correctly spells the word importance. It’s the end-of-year class test, and this achievement should have lifted her into the standard above. In that rarefied atmosphere up there, they read Dickens instead of Alice in Wonderland; they parse sentences instead of telling stories. They are, in short, much better educated than Mary is right now and much better behaved.

  ‘Well done, Mary,’ Sister Hilda tells her. ‘Now, the definition, please. Importance means …’

  Mary hesitates. If she had read her Dickens already, if she already knew how to diagram sentences – in short, if she were better educated and better behaved – she’d say that importance is a state of mind. It’s her temper, and the impossibility of controlling it. It’s her yearning, unbearable desire to be grown up. Her bitten nails, the fried watermelon seeds she’ll eat alone in the garden and her luckiest five-stone that she keeps in her desk. She’d offered that stone to Anil yesterday, if only he’d talk. But of course, he didn’t.

  ‘Mary?’ Sister Hilda prompts.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mary answers, and seals her fate for the next school year.

  Sixty years in the future Mary will still have the temper, if not the bitten nails. She’ll be more than grown up; she’ll be old, which she never truly believed would happen, and is worse than she’d ever expected, and she’ll be alone again. When she tells this story to a bothersome grandchild, she’ll get the tenses wrong and the participles mixed up, because she never did learn to diagram sentences. And she’ll add a friend in, when she tells it later, to make it all bearable. A small friend, because Mary doesn’t – yet – meddle too much with truth. The kind of friend she might easily have missed in all that excitement. The kind who couldn’t do much harm.

  ‘I’m sure Anil won’t die,’ Cecelia tells Mary helpfully as she pokes her head over the garden wall. Five years after they first met, Cecelia and Mary are still best friends. But ever since the district got its government doctor – Rajan’s father, Dr Balakrishnan, bringing along his wife and two daughters and his tricky, sneaking son – the two girls have been eyeing each other with suspicion. Something’s happened.

  To be precise, a lot has happened since then; Kuala Lipis now has a railway station, the Straits Chinese are agitating for political power and the Malay sultans are making treaties left, right and centre with the British to make sure they don’t get it. The Chettiar Indians are quietly lending money, the Kuomintang are recruiting Communists, and two years ago Rajan Balakrishnan clasped hands with Cecelia Lim in a flame-of-the-forest tree.

  But most importantly, Mary and Cecelia have lost their bond. They used to be almost two-in-one, to the extent that Mary’s measles bloomed on Cecelia’s skin and Cecelia’s mild typhoid half-killed Mary. Witchcraft, the bomohs would have said. But now Mary and Cecelia’s connection has faded and they’re just two ordinary girls. Plain, sturdy. Healthy, no thanks to those bomohs.

  As for Rajan himself, he’s a slippery character; head of his class with a heartbreaking smile. He has a habit of winkling people’s innocent secrets out of them and puffing those indiscretions up into monstrosities. Thanks to Rajan’s loose tongue, Mrs Abdul’s weakness for cigars swells into an opiate habit and the beef in Ah Chen’s satay is rumoured to come from stray dogs. His classmates aren’t spared either: when little Pok Mat defeats Rajan in a spelling test at school, he’s astonished to find himself carpeted for apparently gambling on cockfights he’s never even seen. Most of Rajan’s stories are harmless enough, although little Pok Mat sobs all afternoon following his beating, and is carpeted again for disturbing the class.

  Rajan can be charming, though, when he chooses. Cecelia and Mary are both half in love, taking every opportunity to slip a hand into his or finish his homework. At any other time Mary’s father, Stephen, would have put his foot down – Mary’s getting older, she’s always been wilful, and soon it won’t be homework books she’s opening for Rajan – but Stephen has other things on his mind. Anil is getting worse.

  Mary’s mother, Radhika, on the other hand, is perfectly capable of worrying over both children at once. It’s true that, despite being five years old, Anil barely moves and shows no inclination to babble. But it’s also true that Mary – and she must, Radhika complains to her friends, she really must stop Mary seeing so much of that Cecelia girl, not to credit market gossip but these Chinese tarts, eh? Sexy at nine years old and pregnant by twelve, isn’t it? – can still coax a smile o
ut of her brother.

  But that’s not enough to satisfy Stephen. He’s been disappointed in Anil since the day he was born – undersized, squalling, so dark skinned that only an Indian name seemed to suit. And to make it worse, the boy still doesn’t talk, so today Stephen has booked an appointment in the top hospital in KL. He and Radhika will get to the bottom of this, he’s resolved, will force some words out of Anil and some backbone in. They’ll be gone until tomorrow and as a special treat Mary’s been allowed to have Cecelia stay the night. The two girls are going to stay in the house by themselves tonight, with a lovely cold dinner and a stone bottle of orangeade. To make up for things, Radhika’s explained vaguely, and left Mary with the confused impression that Cecelia’s somewhat of a consolation prize. Shop soiled, so to speak.

  She’s not the only one in the kampong to think that, either. Cecelia’s been spending entire afternoons sitting in the flame-of-the-forest tree with Rajan, picking up bad habits. By now she’s tried some of Rajan’s cigarettes, she’s tried some of his bad language, and she’s certainly outdone him in spreading rumours. If Rajan’s stories were harmless then Cecelia’s certainly aren’t, and by now there are more than a few broken marriages after she’s lied about seeing an embrace under the mango trees or a kiss behind the fish stalls.

  It’s not so much the lies, but how Cecelia tells them. She has a penetrating voice, the kind that’s loudest when she’s whispering. And so when she sits placidly at her mother’s stall in the marketplace and whispers to Amir-from-the-market that she’s heard he feels more urges for his prize-winning goats than for his own wife, the whole marketplace hears. Not that Cecelia minds; she just gives her White Rabbit candy another chew, and says that if Amir buys her another bag of sweets she won’t tell anyone else. And when the little Varghese girls refuse to play marbles with Cecelia, she whispers so noisily to their mother that her daughters have lice – actual lice crawling in their shining plaits – that all of Lipis knows about it, and Mrs Varghese is forced to spend the rest of the night shingling the girls’ beautiful hair.