Fragile Monsters

by Catherine Menon

  ‘Mary-Madam isn’t here?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ I say, and she drops her mop and walks away into the kitchen. Her bare feet slap on the hall floor. She doesn’t ask any more questions; it’s all the same to her whether Ammuma’s in KL or buried in the canna lilies. She’s learnt to set boundaries, to keep out of things.

  She wasn’t always like this. I remember her arriving bundled on Vellaswamy-cook’s hip, back when I was four years old. In those days she was all smiles and chubby arms, stealing off with my favourite dolls. And I remember pre-teenage Karthika, too, giggling with me as she Blu-tacked magazine movie-star pictures to the kitchen walls. But this grown-up Karthika is a blinking, resentful shadow in a blouse a size too big. She got herself pregnant – worse, she got herself talked about. Could be her own father, own brother, Ammuma told me over the phone last year. These Tamils, ar, live like kampong cats. There’d have been a certain smacking of lips over it, a licking of chops.

  After a few seconds I hear the grainy sound of Milo being spooned out. Ammuma would slap her for that, would smack the Milo tin from her hands and throw the spoon onto the rubbish. I walk into the kitchen and she doesn’t look up. She’s sucking dry Milo off the spoon and holding the tin clutched tight. I want to tell her I’m on her side, to ask if she remembers those baby days when she roosted herself down next to the water buckets and made faces at me through the kitchen window. Possibly she doesn’t; the memory has a slippery quality to it. A fragility, as though it might not stand up to recollection.

  ‘Would you like biscuits, Karthika?’ I ask. ‘Or soft drink? Tea?’

  I see her shoulder blades tense. ‘What you wanting, Durga-Miss?’ she asks in Tamil. ‘You wanting me to clean it?’

  She points at a thickening line of ants under the table and slips the Milo tin further under her arm. ‘You have to clear, first.’ She folds her other arm over her slack belly and nods at the table.

  ‘No, I mean, I wasn’t going to ask …’

  I trail off, and we both stare down at the table. It’s littered with things I picked up as I pottered about yesterday. Books, gold dupatta thread, a pair of tarnished earrings that had once been favourites. Some of them might even be the same trinkets Karthika and I once played dress-up with; licking sequins and clapping them to our earring studs as make-believe jewels that were shinier than any Karthika owned. We were friends of a sort, for as long as the sequins stuck.

  ‘Here, Durga-Miss.’ Karthika gets heavily to her feet, picking up her Milo tin and spoon. ‘I show you how.’

  She gathers a few spoons up from the table. Ostentatiously, exaggerating each gesture: this is how you keep a house clean, Durga-Miss. If you had one to clean, that is. By Karthika’s lights I’m one step behind her; no house, no husband and not even a baby to show for it.

  ‘See, I’ll wash.’ She takes the spoons to the stone sink then stops abruptly. Her ashy elbows brace outwards under her slippery yellow blouse.

  ‘Wrong mug you used, Durga-Miss?’

  She holds up Tom’s coffee mug from yesterday. I’ve left it in the sink, not being quite ready to scrub the print of his lips off.

  ‘Oh! That was … a friend of mine. He came for coffee,’ I say.

  Karthika raises her eyebrows. ‘Tom-Mister was here?’

  ‘Oh, you know … of course you do. Yes, he was here.’ Of course she knows Tom.

  I reach out to take the mug from her but she doesn’t let go, not until our fingers meet on the cold china handle. She pulls away then, glaring up at me from mutinous eyebrows and muttering a sullen apology for touching.

  ‘When did he come?’ she asks. She doesn’t look at me, just picks at a scab on her chin as though the answer either matters far too much or not at all.

  ‘Yesterday,’ I say again. I give her a tentative, appeasing smile, the way I’ve seen rich ladies do to beggars in the Ontario train station.

  ‘There was a fire,’ I say. ‘That’s what made all the smoke, all this stuff we’ve got to clean up.’ Pointing at the walls and the floor in a kind of dumb show. I can tell I’m too loud, too excruciatingly patient and I tumble into sarcasm. ‘You did notice?’

  ‘Sorry, Durga-Miss.’ She shakes her head, half-insolent and wholly polite. It’s not her job to notice things.

  ‘I took Mary-Madam to hospital, and Tom came here afterwards,’ I explain. It sounds reasonable, put like that, but Karthika bristles, puffing herself like a fighting cock.

  ‘You shouldn’t see him alone, Durga-Miss,’ she says with a veiled prudishness. ‘Mary-Madam wouldn’t like.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ I tell her, more sharply than I’d meant. ‘You don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘I know Tom-Mister,’ she snaps back. ‘He sees me, too, he likes to see me, Durga-Miss. He visits me too, not Mary-Madam only.’

  She says this with a sly smile, standing there barefoot in her oversized blouse and picking at her teeth. It’s hard to tell what she means; Karthika’s English isn’t good, and after ten years my Tamil’s worse. To visit, she said, or perhaps – but surely not? – to stay with. To involve; a reflexive verb that implies choice. You got yourself into this, on your own head be it.

  She turns her back, dumping the plates into the sink and scrubbing them viciously. I set the mug back down on the table. Tom was holding this only yesterday, I think. Before we kissed, after we had sex. Before Karthika greased her smile all over the memory.

  ‘Clean all this up, please,’ I tell her, raising my voice. ‘This kitchen’s too filthy to cook in.’

  She doesn’t reply. She used to eat our leftovers, I remember, always one meal behind us and never mind where it was cooked. I’ve whipsawed from too lenient to too harsh; I’m out of place and she knows it. Quarrelling with the servant-girl, just like a foreigner would.

  I take a deep breath.

  ‘Karthika,’ I say. ‘I found that doll of yours. In the box room. Is it for your … the baby?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No, Durga-Miss. I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘The doll, Karthika. The one in the box room. In the plastic bag?’

  ‘Not mine,’ she says again. ‘I don’t know this doll. Ask Mary-Madam.’

  And then she turns her back, busying herself with the kitchen. She picks everything up; turns the cups round and moves the plates an inch to the left. She isn’t dusting or reorganizing; she’s just leaving her mark. It’s a kind of graffiti: I was here. She’s proving herself, in front of me.

  I step back into the dining room and I can see her shoulders relax. I’ve brushed against the almirah door and it’s swung open. The thought of Tom’s bag of fireworks on the top shelf comes to me, and I reach up to push it further back. I wouldn’t put it past Karthika to pry.

  I shove the bag back amongst the left-over cutlery and tin cups, pushing a little too hard. It falls, rockets and pop-pops spilling out onto the floor in a scatter of bright plastic. Some paper falls out too – a permit, so he did have one all along – and something that looks like a small notebook. It’s a pink autograph book, a child’s toy. It’s decorated with pastel angels which I recognize from Sanrio adverts as Little Twin Stars. It looks new but the cover’s stained with dirt and towards the back the pages feel sticky and clumped.

  I turn it over, puzzled, and open the inside cover. There’s a piece of paper glued there and inscribed in Ammuma’s swooping handwriting. This Book Belongs To: And then, below, a name.

  Francesca Panikkar.

  Kampung Ulu, Pahang

  Malaysia, Earth, THE WORLD

  I stop. My heart feels suddenly louder, a thumping drum against my ears. My mother, my Amma. Francesca.

  I stand like that for a moment, until the sound of Karthika’s noisy washing-up brings me back. Ammuma used to keep a tin of Francesca’s toys and books in the box room – the Amma-tin, I used to call it – and perhaps this is something from that collection. But I’m nearly sure that it fell from Tom’s bag, not the almirah shelf. I frown and turn to
the front cover to read the address again.

  Kampung Ulu. Peony, my mind hisses, but I tamp that down. Kampung Ulu’s only an hour away from here, but Francesca – unlike Peony – wouldn’t ever have gone there. When my mother was young enough to have a book like this Malaya would have been under Japanese occupation. And then after the war, during the Emergency, Kampung Ulu was in the middle of the black areas. Nowhere you’d go on a pleasure trip.

  I look at it again, more doubtfully this time. I remember all Francesca’s books in the Amma-tin being faded, but this one looks brand new. Perhaps it’s been preserved for all those years, hidden away here from silverfish and moths on the very topmost shelf. But no, it can’t have been. Little Twin Stars is modern. It wasn’t around when my mother was small. It wasn’t around when she died, come to that.

  I shiver. This is a new book, one which never belonged to Francesca at all. Ammuma must have asked Tom to buy it, just like the bowl of sweets and the flowers on the shrine. It’s an offering. It’s a present. It’s a reason to write her daughter’s name.

  I close the cover slowly. There’s a curl of guilt inside me, shifting and layered as milk ice. When I was a child I’d always assumed Francesca was mine: my mother. I’d never thought about her being a daughter too. And then I flew off to Canada, leaving Ammuma alone with her ghosts. Well, she’s got her revenge, at least. I have my own ghost now – Peony, behind my eyes and under my skin – and I can finally see what Ammuma must have known all along. Francesca and Peony are the holes in our story; the silence between our words.

  There’s a sudden cry from the kitchen and I jump. It’s high-pitched, and doesn’t sound like Karthika. I shove the book and the fireworks back into the almirah, latch it tight and hurry through the doorway. Karthika’s still standing by the sink. The soles of her feet are flat on the cool concrete floor and her shoulders gleam where her blouse has slipped off. She’s holding a baby, strapped tight to her body under that oversized yellow shirt.

  She doesn’t look at me as I come in, setting the child down onto the ground with a queer, head-ducking defiance. He’s a scrap of feet and fists swaddled in cloth and I feel a rush of pity for her. A hundred years ago Karthika could have explained a baby away with no harm to her reputation: the father was a prince; the father was a ghost; the father was an orang minyak, an oily skinned jungle spirit who terrified young girls at night. But not nowadays. Pahang’s always had time for stories, but these days the villains are girls like Karthika themselves. The baby howls, beating at the floor with tiny, furious slaps from inside his wrappings. She pulls the swaddlings away from him and lets him crawl out of the kitchen before giving me a sly, slipping smile.

  He’s not what I expected. Karthika’s skin is ashy and dark, but the child has blunt-nosed features and skin pale as rice-paper. It looks like Ammuma was wrong about one thing, at least; Karthika’s found herself a lover as far removed as possible from her brother or her uncles. This baby looks like a Mat Salleh. He’s almost white.

  ‘Karthika? He’s …’

  ‘He’s what, Durga-Miss?’

  Not what I expected. Our eyes meet and she knows just what I’m thinking. I don’t need words to tell her that a half-white baby must have spelt trouble for someone like her. She doesn’t need words to understand it either. That baby has a story behind it, and one that won’t have a happy ending.

  Karthika hangs her wet tea-towel over the tap carefully, then turns away from me and walks out without a word.

  ‘Rajneesh!’ she calls.

  The baby’s crawled through the front room and out onto the verandah. I watch from the front-room doorway as he totters over to the prayer-room door. Karthika strolls over, her footsteps loud, and bumps the prayer-room door open with her hip. Rajneesh thrusts one hand out to the sweets in front of Francesca’s shrine, but she doesn’t even look down at him. She’s watching me instead.

  ‘Your great-great-grandmother slept in there, Rajneesh. In the prayer room.’ She says this loudly, in Malay, slow enough that I’ll understand. ‘You’re not allowed in there, not now. Durga-Miss thinks I’ve been leaving dolls and toys around for you. She thinks you have toys.’

  ‘Karthika …’

  ‘But your great-great-grandmother went in there, Rajneesh. With Mary-Madam’s father, to sleep.’ She raises her voice, buttoning up her blouse with a sneer. ‘She was a pelacur. She had a baby, a little one just like you.’

  A pelacur, she says. A whore.

  It nearly – incongruously and unforgivably – makes me smile. Karthika first told me about that wicked great-grandmother of hers when she was barely older than Rajneesh herself. She’d overheard it, hanging around Vellaswamy-cook’s knees in his village while the adults talked. It became our delicious secret, this knotting together of grandparents and great-grandparents in an olden-days romance.

  As we got older though, it turned into an injustice. We ought to be sisters, Karthika started telling me, I’ve just as much right here as you. Ammuma banished her from the dining table to eat with Vellaswamy-cook off a tin plate in the compound yard, but that didn’t stop her from talking when we were alone. It ought to be her playing with the toys and dolls, Karthika used to say, it ought to be her putting out the puja offerings and giving the servant-girl some watered-down Milo. Ammuma slapped her for that, sending her dinner on its tin plate flying.

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ Ammuma warned me sternly after that. ‘There’s no relationship, nothing that counts in the blood and in the bone. She’s not your sister. She’s trouble, through and through.’

  10. The Faithful Nun: 1930

  Go back fifty-odd years and Mary’s in trouble of her own. She’s fifteen years old, it’s the morning of her Junior Cambridge exam and things have taken a difficult turn. It’s a dull and heavy day, with a jungle haze thick as twice-boiled sugar. Mary’s sitting in the nursery – the latest nursery, a green and sappy room at the end of a hallway that Stephen keeps adding to and lengthening – and she’s clutching Anil’s hand. At nine years old Anil still doesn’t speak much, but he’s learnt to hold his breath when things don’t go his way. His face purples, darkens, takes on the waxy look of dead flesh. He’s rejecting everything from the outside world, even its air.

  Radhika’s finally given up on him and handed the entire problem of motherhood over to her own daughter. You deal with him, Mary, she murmurs nowadays, and turns away. These days she sees much more of the servant-girl than her own children. The servant-girl is a runaway, a teenager called Paavai who turned up begging one evening and never left. Paavai sleeps in the room just off the verandah, when she isn’t wanted by Radhika to wash dishes or clean out the drains. She smells of blood, of meat that’s been left to ferment and coins that have tarnished. Of bomoh magic, Mary thinks fearfully. She doesn’t trust Paavai, not day-Paavai who shovels out the chamber-pot or night-Paavai who giggles behind closed doors.

  Mary and Anil have become much closer in the last few years. Mary visits the nursery every morning before school, easing Anil into the dawn by reciting lists of kings, of historic victories and longest rivers and the twelve-times table. On this particular morning, she tucks the mosquito net up over his bed and only realizes she’s late when she catches sight of her father’s watch hooked over a twig by the windowsill.

  Stephen has a habit of taking off his watch and cufflinks while he works, tapping a floorboard here and hammering a wall-panel there. The house has become his hobby. He could go to the newly opened Pahang Club instead, a haven for Europeans to drink gin pahits and bemoan the state of the rubber market. But Stephen, with his Indian wife, his not-quite-pretty daughter and his silent son, doesn’t fit in with the Pahang Club. So instead he hammers away at his house, shirtsleeves rolled high. He ignores Mary, and barely even notices Anil. But Anil loves his father nonetheless and scuttles from room to room each evening in search of him. Nowadays Mary often finds her brother sleeping in a corridor she could swear she’s never even seen, with his undersized fists forlornly cl
utching a watch and cufflinks.

  Mary picks up the watch and blows a kiss to her brother’s bed. It’s nine o’clock, and she hoists herself hurriedly out of the window. It’s not ladylike, but these days – with new corridors curling round the place, with fathers and sons lost between one room and the next, with mothers and wives and servant-girls squabbling on the verandah – well, quite frankly, it’s easier to get out from a window than find the front door.

  Mary hurries away from the house, trampling ferns and touch-me-nots as she runs down the jungle path towards school. Leaves fall into her collar and itchy pitul seeds cling to her skirt, but she doesn’t have time to shake them off. She’s late, and by now all the other children will have gathered on the edge of the padang for the Junior Cambridge examinations. They’ll all be clutching slide rules and pencils, they’ll all be murmuring formulae and dates. Mary takes a flying leap over a hidden ditch and stumbles out amongst them all onto the short-cropped grass of the padang. There’s Anna Fuertes, who’s fifteen years old and already promised to the convent. There are Kumar and Kaya, poverty-stricken twins from two districts away. There’s Cecelia, sitting cross-legged on the grass. And there, sitting next to Cecelia and quizzing her from her mathematics book, is Rajan.

  Rajan isn’t taking the Junior Cambridge examination today; he already passed three years ago with flying colours and is now a first-year medical student at Raffles College in Singapore. He should be in his own classes right now, probing a tumour on a beggar-woman or helping stitch up an estate-worker’s severed hand. But he’s taken a leave of absence instead, and he’s been spending the last few weeks attending rallies up and down the length of Malaya. Rajan, in common with hundreds of other Malayan Indians, has been bitten by the bug of nationalism. He’s been marching with Tamils, with Malayalis, with Sikhs and Gujaratis – half of whom he despises and nine-tenths of whom he can’t understand – for Indian rule over India, a country he’s never even seen. He’s dropped into Lipis for a day on his way to a rally to support Ramasamy, the Tamil nationalist preacher. And Cecelia’s taking full advantage of it.