Fragile Monsters

by Catherine Menon

  ‘Not this bathroom, ar.’ Ammuma stops at the bathroom door, her skirts gathered up ready in her arms. ‘Upstairs only.’

  ‘Ammuma, I can’t manage the cylinder on the stairs.’

  She sets her teeth, looks mulish. ‘Upstairs only,’ she repeats.

  I can feel the blood coming to my face. So easy to skid into a quarrel with Ammuma, and so hard to know better. Karthika looks at me with a malicious glare – See what I have to put up with, Durga-Miss? – and I slip my arm under Ammuma’s elbow.

  ‘Come on, then. I’ll help you.’

  It’s a struggle to get her upstairs. My armpits are damp with sweat by the time we manage it, and the sugar-starch at the hem of my sari’s marked with stains of dust. She’s lost her temper, I’ve kept a finger-grip on mine and Karthika’s downstairs listening avidly to the whole thing.

  Ammuma wants the bathroom cleaned before she’ll go in, so she props herself against the door while I upend the shower bucket. Water sloshes over the floor and she pushes past me, getting her feet and skirts soaked. Too dangerous, I’d have said any other time, too slippery for an elderly lady. In this mood, though, Ammuma’s more fierce than old.

  ‘Amma!’

  I jump. It’s a high shriek, coming from Ammuma’s bedroom. I hurry across and push the door open. It’s Karthika’s baby, Rajneesh, sitting on the floor with his face scrunched in outrage. The sleeping mats have been dragged out from the box room to make a little nest, and he’s there in the middle holding a tiny pewter horse. It looks familiar, and after a second I recognize it as mine. It was a birthday present from Ammuma the year I turned seven. There are other toys scattered about, too – a battered velvet puppet that was once my favourite, and a feathery pen.

  Rajneesh is in the middle of the toys, his face screwed up and his back arched, as though all he needs is the breath to scream. There’s a deep scratch on the back of one of his arms, the edges ragged and white. In a moment it’ll bleed.

  ‘What-all is happening?’ Ammuma appears at the door, still snappish with temper. ‘Durga, don’t bring that child up here.’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  Rajneesh gets his breath and lets out another full-blooded howl. Karthika must be able to hear, but she’s choosing to stay put. Ammuma ignores it all magnificently, wagging her finger and lecturing me although I can’t hear a word over the screaming. I should know better, she’s saying inaudibly. Giving those good toys to a kampong brat, letting the servant-girl bring him up here without so much as a by-your-leave.

  ‘Karthika must have given him the things from my room,’ I say, over the screams. ‘Rajneesh, hush!’

  I scoop him up, wrapping his cut arm in a fold of my best blouse. All this morning’s excitement of clothes-hair-makeup seems so far away; I should have known better than to pin my hopes on a good sari and some goldwork thread. Rajneesh pushes his face into my neck, then opens his fist. Something falls to the floor with a crack.

  ‘What?’

  It’s a shard of china. I toe the blankets away, and find the cross-legged Indian doll from the box room underneath. He’s broken it accidentally, cutting himself on the jagged edges.

  ‘What’s that?’ Ammuma snaps, and I move so that she can see.

  ‘A doll, Ammuma. I found it in your box room yesterday. I think it’s Karthika’s –’

  I stop. She’s turned pale.

  ‘Ammuma? Are you OK?’

  ‘Fine, fine.’ She bats my question away and shuffles closer, edging me out of the room.

  ‘Typical servant-girl,’ she adds. ‘Giving him your toys, and can’t even keep his own out of the house. You take him away, Durga.’

  ‘I’ll be right back, I promise. You can’t stay here, Ammuma. It’s dirty.’ I’m almost at the door now, with Ammuma’s not-quite-pushing.

  ‘You go now, Durga,’ she says again, more insistently. ‘You stay downstairs, with the child. I’ll tidy up.’

  And the door closes in my face. Rajneesh is a damp and sobbing weight in my arms. He’s stopped screaming now, but his breath still comes raggedly and he’s pressing his wet face into the crook of my elbow. He wraps his legs round my waist as I carry him downstairs, then lets out a shrill yelp. He’s seen Karthika through the dining-room doorway.

  I set him down on the floor and he toddles towards her. She’s still cross-legged on her chair and doesn’t look up.

  ‘Karthika! Didn’t you hear him screaming upstairs?’

  She looks up then, gives me a slow stare and closes her eyes. ‘Not allowed in the bedrooms, Durga-Miss. I can’t come.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ I’m cross, my blouse is bloodstained and there’s a damp mark on my hip from Rajneesh’s nappy. Karthika doesn’t notice any of these things: for her, they’re ordinary life.

  She turns away to take something Rajneesh is handing her. It’s the feathery pen that he’s been clutching. She tucks it neatly into the pocket of her skirt without even turning a hair.

  ‘That’s mine!’ I burst out.

  She blinks up at me. Something about that monkey-like cringe irritates me and for a second I have to fight back an urge to slap her. Send her packing. A girl like that; what could anyone have expected?

  ‘Karthika, you know you can’t take anything from here. All those toys … and that doll of yours. Upstairs, he’s broken it now. I told you not to leave it here.’

  ‘I didn’t, Durga-Miss. I wouldn’t have bought a doll like that. Such poor dress, a sari for old-fashioned only.’ She sneaks a glance at my own sari, then strokes her red nylon skirt complacently.

  ‘Don’t lie. And give that pen back,’ I add.

  She clenches her teeth and I can see her jaw move. She sits very still, then turns away.

  ‘Karthika, give it back. Now!’ I stride over to her, blocking her view, and hold out my hand. ‘What do you want with it anyway?’

  You can’t even write. I stop myself, which is nearly as bad as saying it. She flushes and brings the pen out of her pocket. It clatters onto the table and her eyes are jealous and gleaming as it rolls across the surface. It’s almost comical, how much she wants a cheap glitter pen. Almost.

  ‘Tom-Mister says I can go into the bedrooms, anyway,’ she says, with a vicious little sneer. ‘He showed me yours, Durga-Miss.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you’re in Canada, Durga-Miss. He showed me the bedrooms while Mary-Madam sits on the verandah.’

  I stare at her. Her smile’s worming back over her face. Karthika, shit-smelling and scandalous with it, in my bedroom with Tom. Nonsense, I tell myself quickly. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. He took her up there to clean the toilets or move the furniture. To polish the floors; Karthika on her hands and knees in front of Tom. He wouldn’t.

  ‘Karthika!’ Ammuma calls from upstairs, making us both jump. ‘Stop your chatter-chatter, paid to clean the floors, isn’t it?’

  Ammuma’s scolding brings reality back. Carrying a servant-girl off to bed is something that only happens in Karthika’s highly coloured movies. Not in real life, not in all the drabness of the here-and-now, where she can’t even refuse.

  I give Karthika a tentative, forgiving smile but she doesn’t look at me. She unfurls her legs from under the table and hefts Rajneesh onto her hip. As she walks into the kitchen, she tugs the refrigerator open. Tupperware and bowls are piled high in there and it’s full of smells I remember but can’t name any more. I see fried prawns with belacan, mustard seeds, muscly rendang curry. She must have spent all morning making Ammuma’s favourite dishes. There’s nothing an elderly woman ought to have, but everything Ammuma wants. It’s a peace offering, and something I’d never have thought of.

  I reach out to the incense stick and pinch it off, feeling the quick sting of the embers. Rajneesh giggles from the kitchen, and I hear splashing in the stone sink. Karthika and I used to paddle in there, ankle deep as we sat on the windowsill. We had a name for that game – Going to Sea? Swimming Away? – but that’s another thing I�
�ve forgotten.

  I look over at the almirah, with Tom’s bag and that Little Twin Stars notebook inside. It feels better to have the door closed, to feel it locked safely away as I climb back up the stairs. Perhaps this is how people felt after the war, like everything that used to be familiar had changed. Perhaps it’s how Ammuma felt after Francesca died. And thirty years later she’s still searching out books and sweets and offerings. Would you have liked this, Fran? How about that? Will this one bring you back? The women in my family take motherhood hard, being demanding or dead and quite frankly not much better than daughters.

  Upstairs, the bedroom door’s wide open and I can see through into the box room. Ammuma’s in there, her oxygen cylinder propped against her leg. She’s laid the smashed doll on a shelf at waist height and she’s piping glue onto the shards. She doesn’t look old, not now, she looks alert and strong enough to hold up the sky. The sun strikes through the charred boards of the wall in hot slices and the faint scent of incense floats up from downstairs. Everything feels very still, thick with the smell of dust and a faint undertone of ash.

  As I watch, Ammuma picks up a broken sliver of the doll’s face, and lays it gently back into place. She presses it down and wipes the glue off with her forefinger. She’s humming softly as she picks up the next piece and muttering to herself.

  ‘Come on … come on, stick tight, just there. Next one, another one … Making it look right, just like a princess, like a tiger-prince. Once upon a time there was a tiger-prince – there you go, stick tight – and a princess. And when the sun came up they knew they were safe – stick tight, won’t you.’

  The stairs seem to shiver under me. The princess, beautiful and dangerous. The tiger-prince, with his mouthful of teeth and tiger stripes. The froggish monster like something pulled from a riverbed. The way the sun came up, Durga-child, and then they knew that they were safe.

  She used to tell me this story every night before bed. Sometimes with more characters, sometimes with a different ending, but always the same story underneath. It’s the bones of a lemma, this tale, the meat and muscle of a proof. It’s history, getting the last word in first.

  12. A Servant’s Tale: 1930

  ‘Once upon a time,’ Mary begins, ‘there was a tiger-prince.’

  Eight-year-old Anil claps his hands. He’s delighted for several reasons: partly because Mary’s curled up with him on her lap, partly because she’s telling him his favourite fairy tale, and partly because there’s no room for Paavai to come and sit next to them. All three of them are in the back of the compound, in a dusty and crumbling corner under the durian tree. Anil and Mary sprawl on a raggedy seat that might once have been a piano stool, while Paavai squats nearby in the sun. She’s leaning against the stone coping of the oldest well, the one with half its bricks gone for rubble. Anil stretches his legs out onto the shady seat where Paavai isn’t, and babbles with joy. It doesn’t take much to make him happy, unlike his sister.

  ‘Ma-ry,’ he says, carefully. He’s taken to speaking, these last few months. Not very much, just the odd word or two. Mary catches his socked and kicking feet in the palm of her hand and, looking up, meets Paavai’s eye.

  Mary and Paavai don’t get along. For a start, there’s the question of just what Mary should call her. At seventeen, she’s only a year or two older than Mary herself, so she can’t be Paavai-Amah. She isn’t Paavai-Auntie either, because the children needn’t respect her, and they know it. She isn’t even a servant, not really, although sometimes Radhika will wake up in a foul mood and order Paavai to perform an immense and unimaginable task. Cleaning out the wells; re-tarring the attap roof. These demands happen like lightning, usually when Radhika’s heard her husband stumbling from Paavai’s verandah room in the small hours. He’s been doing a bit too much of that, these last few months, and the inevitable has happened. Paavai’s waist has begun to thicken and her belly to bulge in an alarming and unmistakable way.

  ‘The tiger-prince fell in love with a princess,’ Mary tells Anil. ‘A beautiful princess. With long hair, of course’ – the two children glance at Paavai’s short-cropped head – ‘and creamy skin’ – they giggle at the soot-blackness of Paavai’s calloused knees and elbows – ‘and the prettiest face in the world. So pretty she had to wear a mask so people would leave her alone.’

  (Mary doesn’t know it, but that mask hints at something rotten beneath her story. Leprosy or beauty, it doesn’t much matter which. Both come down to fending people off.)

  ‘The princess didn’t love the tiger-prince back, though,’ Mary goes on, ‘so he challenged her to a duel. And if he won, he would get to marry her.’

  Mary’s stories all involve rape and pillage, given a shake of sugar and retold as true love. It doesn’t bode well for her future, sitting there in her white dress and eyelet socks. She might be able to tell stories, but she’s failed her Junior Cambridge exam and her schooldays are over. From now on, she’ll have to make her own way.

  ‘So the prince and the princess battled! And just as the tiger-prince was about to win, the princess took off her mask. And he dropped down in a faint because of how beautiful she was.’

  Paavai gives a loud snort. She’s pulling fibres from coconut husks and twisting them in her rubbed-raw hands to make a rope. She tugs it, testing the strength.

  Paavai’s been in the house a year now. When she isn’t working, she slips through the darkened passages and spends hours hiding in one room or another, trying to take possession of something. Mary’s found her hunched in the kitchen gnawing on a lump of sugar cane and Anil’s surprised her in the moonlit bathroom staring at her own reflection. Radhika’s had even worse shocks. She and Paavai are the same height and same skin colour, and when they meet unexpectedly in a dark corridor, at first Radhika thinks she’s seeing her own ghost.

  ‘The tiger-prince fainted because of how beautiful the princess was without her mask,’ Mary repeats. ‘And while he was fainted, he turned into a huge frog-monster! That was his secret, that whenever he slept he turned into a beast. He had a mouth like this’ – Mary stretches her lips open – ‘and eyes like this’ – she squints her eyelids shut – ‘and a little pug nose just like …’ The two children look at Paavai and giggle.

  ‘Time wasting, Mary-Miss. All these stories,’ Paavai sneers. She flicks a length of coconut fibre up into the durian tree, making the huge spiked fruits wobble on their fleshy stalks. Dangerous, to be walking under a durian tree when the fruits are falling. Everyone says the fruits never fall in daylight hours but nevertheless, Paavai’s being careless.

  Mary grits her teeth, though, and doesn’t say anything. She’s trying to be more ladylike these last few months, and biting back any swear words that spring to her tongue. She doesn’t want to be like Paavai, who swears like a soldier whenever she spills hot water on herself. Ladies don’t talk like that, Mary tells Paavai loftily, and grinds her own teeth instead of cursing. All this jaw-clenching restraint has taken its toll, and Mary’s teeth have grown noticeably shorter and weaker. By seventy she’ll need false teeth, she’ll slop biscuits against her gums; she’ll suck at sambal petai that Paavai’s great-granddaughter Karthika cooks for her and take her long-awaited revenge by sending the girl to mop up shit.

  ‘Ignore Paavai,’ Mary tells Anil. ‘Listen, when the princess saw the tiger-prince faint and turn into this awful monster she ran to help him. She fell in love with him too!’

  Anil’s lost interest, though. His eyes are turned up to the durian tree. The branches should have had gunny sacks tied over them a week ago to catch the falling fruit, but Stephen hasn’t bothered. Every night the weight of dew gets too heavy for the largest and ripest fruits. One by one, they droop, they tremble and they eventually come loose and hurtle down to smash into the ground or straight down the well with heavy, resounding thuds. The fruits drop every night, regular as the whistling Lipis train, and when on dry evenings the dew doesn’t fall and neither do the fruits, the whole family’s kept awake by the
unaccustomed silence.

  ‘Anil, Anil – listen! The princess knew her father wouldn’t let her marry a monster, so she disguised the prince. She cut off his nose, and his lips and his ears.’

  (Shades of leprosy again, shades of that disease that’s already bounding down Mt Tahan with its slobbery face turned towards the kampong.)

  ‘Then the princess rolled him in clay and sand so he ended up looking just like a man. And then the tiger-prince and the princess ran away, while he was disguised enough to fool everyone. They ran all night, and bits of sand kept dropping off him. The sand turned into roads and bridges and houses. By the time the sun came up they were high in the mountains, with a whole city all to themselves. And then in the sun, of course, he turned back into a tiger-prince.’ She finishes triumphantly. ‘And when the sun came up, they knew that they were safe.’

  It seems, on the face of it, unlikely. Mary’s left her prince and princess stranded in the wilderness, on top of a mountain famed for its ghosts and devils. They’ve got no food, and she doesn’t seem to have thought that in a few days the tiger-prince will be eyeing those delicate veins in his princess’s neck. That’s what you get with stories; you get consequences. Mary’s lovers are unlikely to get out alive.

  ‘All nonsense, Mary-Miss.’ Paavai stands up, tucking her sari high around her spindly legs. Radhika’s instructed her to clear out the stones and fruit rinds that clog the bottom of the deepest well on the property, under the durian trees. It’s dangerous work and really needs a team of men, but Radhika’s insisted that Paavai do it alone: ‘The girl’s putting on weight, haven’t you seen that belly of hers? She could do with the exercise.’

  ‘Such a waste to tell stories to Anil-Mister.’ Paavai hoists one leg over the stone coping and points at Anil. ‘Can’t understand a thing, that one.’