Fragile Monsters

by Catherine Menon

  Or at least, if Stephen’s scrupulously truthful, he saw slices of Radhika through the iron gate: a round arm, a face, a lock of hair over a teal-blue sari. Nobody could feel passion for slices of a girl, but that dizzying shade of blue is a different matter. It’s a wistful colour, a colour to remind Stephen of sun and sky and first love in Blackpool. A colour that doesn’t wear well, not that Stephen would know. He fell in love with Radhika’s clothes first, and only now, an hour later, does he start to appreciate her oiled hair and the way her bare feet swirl tiny, alert puffs of dust from between her toes. The thought of those toes excites him beyond bearing, and he leaks a little stuffing.

  ‘Stop it!’ Mary glares at Rajan, who’s taken over her game and is tweaking the toys into compromising positions. Mary would like this to be a love story, a tiger-prince and his warrior princess, whose son will be flawless. She’d like hearts and henna, she’d like sweets and sangeet. She’d like a happy ending, because that’s the whole point.

  But it’s too late; Rajan grabs the toy rabbit from her. He strokes its ears with a cool, firm grip; he smears mud in places no self-respecting rabbit would allow. Then he fluffs up its fur, leaves it staring and excited, and tumbles it down with the Sarah-doll into a damp hollow where the earth smells thick with sap. So – thanks to Rajan – Stephen and Radhika will think of lust instead of love and out of that lust will come sex and out of sex will come Mary and her removable clothes in the canna lilies. Rajan thinks ahead.

  Under Rajan’s sneaking fingers, Radhika obediently lifts her arm to point the way back and Stephen’s mouth dries up. There’s a small rip under the sleeve of her sari blouse, showing him an armpit creased with baby-fat and hair springing loose in tempting curls. The path she’s pointing out is hardly more than a jungle trail, a sort of fold in the lushness of all that growth. No doubt it’s full of hidden dangers, but Stephen summons up his courage. He takes her arm, bows, and offers to guide her along a path she knows perfectly well already.

  Told the way Mary wants, her parents’ courtship would be awash with nobility. Mary’s fond of fairy tales, and she’s done her reading. She knows that princes and princesses always get their happy endings. Their perfect children.

  Rajan’s different; he’s a doctor’s child, after all. He knows about blood, about bones, about shit and gristle and everything that holds a person together. If he weren’t so good-looking he’d be terrifying. Perhaps he is, as he takes the toys from Mary’s hands with a charming smile. Under his command her stories start to spin a little out of control, and her happy ending’s looking further and further away.

  Stephen, after his first meeting with Radhika, is determined to do the honourable thing. He’s going to ask her for her hand in marriage. Two weeks later he hops up to her clean white house, his proposal already rehearsed. He calls a cheery greeting to the chauffeur, dark-skinned Joseph, oiling the last flecks of dirt from the gleaming sides of a bright red limousine.

  ‘No, I only want my toys in the game. Not yours,’ Mary objects, screwing up her face. She doesn’t mind the bright red model car Rajan’s brought along, but that flesh-coloured stick that he’s set next to it is another thing entirely.

  ‘It’s a man’s … you know,’ Rajan tells her boldly. ‘My father amputated it from a patient, after a leech stuck to it during the flood. It swelled up until my father had to cut it off.’

  In fact, that purpling lump is only a rubber model that his father keeps as a prop for anatomy exams. It fascinates Mary. It’s so different from Anil’s harmless finger-length waggle at bath-time and different, too, from that enticing stir between Rajan’s legs when she plays the doctor-and-nurse game. That game is certainly becoming serious – becoming thicker and hairier by the month – but it’s nothing to this fleshy fistful.

  ‘It can be the chauffeur,’ Rajan says. ‘Someone’s got to drive the car.’

  And indeed, somebody does. Because Radhika’s mother and father welcome Stephen into the house with open arms. Over the next few weeks, Radhika’s parents will embrace Stephen as part of their family, sending that hapless driver to tailors, to sweetshop owners and jewellers and bankers in preparation for their daughter’s wedding. They love Stephen, they trim the dirt from his paws and the kinks from his fur, and give their daughter up into his hands.

  But the fly in the ointment – the silverfish in the teal-blue sari – is that same driver. Joseph’s a shy man with the instincts of a monk who’s been employed by Radhika’s parents for the last fifteen years. He keeps his eyes down when he passes girls, he takes ice-baths in winter and rice porridge in summer. He binds his loins with tight, swaddled cloths and tries to put lust out of his mind altogether, and despite all this he still throbs at every moment with a searing, carnal passion.

  Unfortunately, Stephen himself doesn’t. On his wedding night he’s certainly panting, overcome with the night’s heat and humidity and the sight of Radhika as creamy and sweet as toffee under her iridescent wrappings. At the same time, though, he can’t help feeling a stab of regret when she slips out of her clothes. That sari was so colourful; it was ice-creams and innocence and suntan lotion on milky, freckled arms, and Stephen feels quite nostalgic over it. Naked, Radhika’s desire is forceful, dripping and quite unladylike. Stephen does his best, which isn’t quite enough, and the two roll apart in mutual frustration. Over the next few weeks he flails with an increasing desperation in bed each night, then rises red-eyed and irritable in the mornings to shower and go to work. Radhika prepares his lunch and waves goodbye without ever changing her threadwork frown. She hadn’t been expecting a lack of passion in her marriage, and wonders if it’s all her fault. She’s started to doubt her body; her flexible limbs have stiffened and that frown is now definitely a scowl. She’s begun to prefer reading magazines to books; she talks with a rather dreadful cheerfulness and she eats a little too much in the evenings. Life, it seems, has passed Radhika by.

  It isn’t until an ordinary day of marketing and housekeeping that things begin to change. She’s leaning back on the leather seats of Joseph’s car on the way to temple, fanning herself and spreading her thighs to catch the cool air. Joseph averts his eyes as he drives past a group of prim, tucked-in schoolgirls, and catches sight of Radhika in his rear-view mirror. She’s neither prim nor tucked-in; she sprawls across the back seat with her legs splayed and a drop of sweat running down the valley of her breasts. Joseph loses control. He brakes, wrenches the car into a dusty dip where buffalo wallow in the summer and hurls himself onto the back seat.

  It’s a turbulent, thrusting moment; all biting and licking and eyes wide-open. Radhika surfaces for air, spreadeagled on the back seat with her clothes ripped off and her mouth swollen from kisses. Her limbs are bending and her smile’s coming back and she’s almost on the verge of happiness.

  ‘What are you doing? That’s disgusting! Give her back!’

  Mary’s wandered off to the swamp at the bottom of the garden, scratching at her ankle under one sloppy sock. She’s not interested in all this sex and lust, not yet, although she did feel a stir of interest as she watched Rajan’s fingers glide over that flesh-coloured prop. She wouldn’t have minded touching it herself (and it would have done you no harm, Mary, being rubber through-and-through and a sight less dangerous than the alternatives) but she didn’t want to say. So by the time she sees what Rajan’s up to, he’s already involved her toys in some distinctly adult behaviour.

  ‘Stop it!’ She’s been playing skip-hop with some flattened rocks, and without thinking, she hurls one of them straight at Rajan’s head. The rock smacks straight into his forehead, splitting the skin open and sending a trickle of blood down onto the toys. It isn’t a horrific cut, nothing that a bit of mercurochrome and a bandage won’t heal. But a few drops land in the toy car, on the very spot where Radhika’s virginity has left a crimson spatter on the upholstery.

  And, of course, that crimson spatter is going to spell trouble. Blood on the back seat can only mean one thing, when there
’s a wife who’s still a virgin. Even more so when there’s a chauffeur with lustful tendencies he’s tamping down like a firework. Stephen finds that giveaway blood on the back seat of the car on a sunny summer’s evening, and he leaps to conclusions that are regrettably correct. Hands are raised, voices are raised, tempers are raised. Six months later, he and Radhika will leave for Malaya in a welter of tearful apologies and unspoken resentments.

  ‘You’ve ruined my game,’ Mary says. ‘You’ve ruined the magic.’

  And so he has. Mary’s been trying to start again, to rewrite history and hope it turns out better this time. But the problem with history is that it gets its own way, somehow or other. And now, thanks to Rajan, Mary’s right back where she started with two miserable parents and a little brother who can’t speak. Or perhaps not quite where she started, because from now on she’ll know to keep a tight grip on her stories. Dead daughters and absent granddaughters and speechless schoolteachers notwithstanding, Mary’s going to fight history every step of the way.

  9. Saturday, 8 a.m.

  ‘Your schoolteacher was born without a tongue? How on earth did she teach?’

  It’s Sangeeta, latching on to the least important part of yesterday. She’s comforting to talk to, but the longer the conversation goes on, the stranger I feel. Her Canadian accent, a radio playing Madonna in the background, even the muffled sounds from the tennis courts outside her apartment. It’s all familiar, but it doesn’t fit into now. It’s like something I’ve seen in a movie. I settle back onto the old cotton sofa where I used to read comic books, and prop the telephone receiver against my shoulder.

  ‘She wrote on the board. Threw chalk, if we were talking. It wasn’t really a problem, she was just Mother Agnes. Anyway,’ I add, ‘she doesn’t teach now. She does charity.’

  ‘Oh yes, you said.’ Sangeeta opens one of the Cokes she’s always drinking. I can hear the hiss and snap of the chilled can. ‘The left-alones or something?’

  ‘Left-behinds. Fallen women, I guess you’d call them. A lot of them were girls who never got to go back to school when everything reopened at the end of the war. Or girls who got raped, or took up with Japanese soldiers.’

  Disgraces, in other words. Sangeeta – who prides herself on being a bit of a disgrace too – clicks her tongue.

  ‘Those poor women.’

  Sangeeta sympathizes most easily with victims, with frail and fragile women a safe distance away. But men can be left-behinds too, though it’s harder to explain. Sons who never got over the war, perhaps, or fathers who didn’t even try. They’re not a lost generation, because lost implies finding, lost implies the possibility of a happy ending. The left-behinds, on the other hand, have been completely erased. Out here, people will look you in the eye and say loudly they never had a daughter, never had a son, no father at all. A neighbour, perhaps, or a cousin – they’ll unbend so far as to admit one of them might have disappeared, but they’ll keep their howling behind closed doors. Grief strolls undercover in Pahang.

  ‘So anyway, tell me about this Tom guy. You knew him when you were a kid?’

  She’s most interested in Tom, of course. He’s real, with his beginnings all nicely explicable. He doesn’t need a history lesson to be understood.

  ‘Best thing you could do,’ she’d said roundly when I told her I’d had sex with him. But I’m not so sure. In Canada it might be fine to replace Deepak straight away – Sangeeta’s own boyfriends come in such quick succession that occasionally they’ve overlapped – but not here. Things don’t move slower here, whatever Sangeeta thinks. Virtue, for example, goes quicker than you can think.

  ‘Do you think it’ll go anywhere with you guys?’

  I don’t know, I tell her, staring at a chik-chak scampering across the wall. This conversation’s hard work for us both. So many good intentions, but none of them quite getting across.

  ‘Still, it’s great to hear your grandmother’s doing good,’ Sangeeta says cheerfully. ‘She’s being discharged tomorrow, right?’

  ‘I hope so,’ I say. ‘I left a message with the university in KL. I said I’d be there on Tuesday at least, maybe Monday.’

  She laughs. ‘You’re neurotic about that job. Like that postdoc – Peter? From last year here, the one who barely left his office. I kept finding him asleep under his desk at 4 a.m. surrounded by McDonald’s wrappers.’

  I do remember, though quite what Sangeeta was doing in Peter’s office at 4 a.m. herself was never explained. She’s the kind for assignations, for secret meetings with unsuitable men, and I’ve half-suspected she might have been under the desk with Peter and the cheeseburgers herself.

  When we talk about her instead, the scratchiness between us dies down. This is something we have words for, at least. Sangeeta’s had a paper accepted; she’s got another one planned. She’s had an argument with her current boyfriend, something complicated about a sports game that ended with Sangeeta going off to a bar with the entire losing side. ‘He said I could at least have picked the winners!’ she complains, and laughs in lovely, clean lines. She tells me about an outside world humming with hockey matches and love matches and when she rings off, I feel brighter than I’ve done in days.

  I look at myself in the hall mirror and see a face that’s softer than I remember. No monsters creeping round the edges of that skin, no leprosy, not even any crow’s feet. Just a few aches from rolling under Tom on the prayer-room floor, and I grin at my reflection. I tie my hair up in a plait, put my prettiest skirt and blouse on. I’d wear emerald trousers if I had them, I’d wear Cutex nail polish and a John Lennon haircut. It’s that sort of a day.

  I fill two buckets of water at the sink and hunt around for one of Karthika’s scrubbing brushes. We’ll need to scrub the walls down, as high as we can reach, and drag the wooden benches and settees out into the compound yard to air. Luckily, the fire was caught and held in the closed-off wings that nobody ever goes into, but everything still stinks of smoke. Upstairs, the door leading to those shut-up corridors is blackened and cool. I try not to think of what’s behind it. Mountains of soft ash and clinker. Remains, destruction. Things that used to be things, before I stepped in.

  I dip the scrubbing brush in the water and let it trail a dribbling stream behind me until I get to the stairs. Scrubbing helps, a little, and as the smoke moves from the walls to the dirty water in my bucket I start to feel happy again. Perhaps this is something that can be fixed after all.

  After an hour I stop, emptying my last bucket outside. The Jelai’s subsided back behind its banks, after being subdued upstream with sandbanks and earth walls. Licking its wounds; it’ll be back. In the meantime, though, it’s quiet and a stiff breeze swoops over it and takes the smoke from the rooms.

  I stack the buckets by the kitchen door and go back to the scrubbed-clean stairs. Ammuma’s being discharged tomorrow, and I’ll need to find somewhere for her to sleep. Her room’s coated in a deep grey soot, and even if it were intact I don’t know if she can manage stairs. I remember she always used to keep sleeping mats in the box room upstairs, and on the way there I stop to peer through a circular window set at ankle-height on the landing. It’s the only one in the house with glass instead of wooden shutters and it was once my favourite place in the world. I used to sit here to do my arithmetic homework, when that was all I had to worry about.

  Looking through it now, I see Ammuma’s had covers nailed over both the wells outside. She used to tell stories about ghost women living in those wells, long-haired girls still clutching broken crockery or the sarong kebayas they were trying to wash. Perhaps they’re the reason for the covers; ghost women aren’t the sort of thing you want popping out at you, not at an age when your own reflection can give you a nasty turn.

  The box room’s a tiny partition off Ammuma’s room, next to the attic ladder. I push the door open and the sleeping mats are right there, piled against three rickety shelves. It looks like she’s been storing hardware in here too. Two of the shelves jostle wit
h bottles of glue, screwdrivers and plastic tubs full of batteries.

  The third shelf is empty, except for a clean plastic bag with something sticking out of it. I peer closer at it, and nearly scream. It’s hair – a hank of hair – and then I see it’s attached to a china doll inside the bag. The doll’s brown-skinned and Indian, in a glittery blue satin sari. It has brown glass eyes and it’s moulded into a cross-legged shape like someone about to pray. They used to sell these dolls in the shops in Lipis, I remember. I haven’t seen one in years.

  There’s a sudden clatter downstairs and I jump. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mary-Madam?’

  It’s Karthika, arriving for the day. Of course, I remember, she has a baby now – she must have bought this toy for him. I hurry out of the box room, closing the door behind me.

  Karthika’s downstairs, wearing a red nylon skirt and a yellow blouse too big for her. She looks awkward, lumpish and bulging at her waist. Pregnant again, I think, and clamp down on the thought.

  She’s dragging her mop into the hall bathroom with its scoop-bucket shower and squat toilet.

  ‘Oh, Karthika – please don’t – don’t worry about cleaning that bathroom today,’ I tell her. ‘We’ll need to scrub upstairs and air the furniture out in the yard. I’m sorry, I hope that’s OK …’

  Her mouth hangs open, with a sullen question flat on her tongue. I’m still uneasy with her after four days back here. She was part of my world, like Ammuma and the kitchen cats, and now I can’t even remember how to talk to her. I’m too tentative – I ask her if she’d mind doing things – and she resents it. She prefers Ammuma, who scolds and blames impartially. A girl knows where she is with Ammuma.