Fragile Monsters Page 17
The trunks are smaller than I remember, bound with iron and faced about with teak wood. Under my fingertips the wood feels spongy, as though it’s got old without anyone noticing. I kneel down, just as Ammuma used to do, and shove at the lid of the closest trunk. It opens smoothly. Perhaps it wasn’t ever as heavy as I thought.
It’s filled with bulging plastic bags. I pick one up at random and hold it up to the light. It’s been marked with thick black pen: Francesca Birthday. Inside are trinkets wrapped in cellophane: glass bangles, some pink hair slides and a feather clip. Another one’s labelled Francesca Christmas. There are dolls in this one, all dressed in silk and satin like princesses. The cross-legged Indian doll lies on top. Ammuma’s carefully mended it so you can barely see where the cracks were. I didn’t know she had the patience for such painstaking work any more. There are picture books, coloured pencils, costume jewellery wrapped in red-and-gold paper. To Francesca, read the gift tags taped to every package.
Francesca. For a second it feels as though there’s somebody else here; someone who’s been walking a pace behind me ever since I came to Pahang. I’d thought she would be Peony, but it’s never that simple. She’s Peony, she’s Francesca, she’s a baby with a Little Twin Stars book and she’s a teenager with a best friend for ever. She’s all the missing girls of Pahang rolled into one.
For a brief, hallucinatory second I wonder whether my mother might really still be alive. Whether she could be living quite calmly by the Kampung Ulu swamp – fifty years old by now; large as life and twice as unnatural.
‘Amma?’ I whisper, and the sound of my own voice shocks me back to reality. These aren’t gifts for a fifty-year-old woman. Like the autograph book, these are gifts for the child she used to be. I can see the Amma-tin at the bottom of the trunk, dark-blue, with Huntley & Palmers in red writing. I hesitate. Locked up inside that rusted lid is a daughter, after all. No weightier than a breath, perhaps, but she’s there for all that.
I take the tin out onto my lap and pry the lid off. There’s a pop-up book lying on top, just like I knew there would be. Animals spring out from its pages: crocodiles with softened teeth and fish turned damp with age.
Francesca Panikkar, the inside cover reads.
Ipoh, Perak, Malaya, Earth, THE WORLD
It’s Ammuma’s elegant handwriting. The same as the lettering in the autograph book, crisp as a ruled line. There isn’t much else in the Amma-tin. A few strings of beads, with the thread nearly rotted away. A wooden toy cat, long-since stroked into smoothness. An unbearable pair of tiny pink socks and a roll of plain black cloth. The cloth’s wrapped around something slippery and yielding, and my fingers know what it is before I’ve even opened it. A small plait of hair slides out. It’s been carefully preserved, tied with a pink satin ribbon.
I know this plait of hair, although Ammuma never showed it to me even on her saddest days. It explains a lot, for its size. Why Ammuma might still be buying gifts for a long-vanished four-year-old daughter. How she must have felt, the night she cut that daughter’s hair off, and what the alternative might have been. Which is to say, not much of one at all.
20. The Princess Lost: 1941
The birth of Mary’s daughter was difficult, as first births generally are. Mary was alone in the echoing and expensive house in Ipoh except for an indifferent midwife. But then, she’d been alone nearly every day since moving to Ipoh. Rajan spent all hours working in the general hospital, and Mary herself had always found it hard to make friends.
So it was the midwife who helped her crawl between the bed and the marble floor, who held her hand through the pains. There weren’t any aunties or grandmothers or quiet, caring friends. When Francesca opened her eyes on the world for the first time, it held nothing but her mother.
The next three years were hard ones for Mary. Rajan plunged eyebrows-deep into political scheming, bringing home firebrand friends and conspirators well into the small hours. These friends squatted out on the marble verandah – Mary’d moved up in the world; she had a marble verandah instead of a concrete one, she drank her tea out of a bone-china cup and wasn’t a bit grateful for it. The friends smoked on that verandah and muttered out of the corners of their mouths. War, these friends muttered, and Japan and more and more they muttered invasion.
And then, before Mary knows it, it’s 1941. Francesca’s three years old with a charming lisp and two dimples in her chin and a howl that can stand plates on end. And those plates are empty, more often than not. Rice is rationed these days, as is milk and salt. Mary has very little spare to feed Rajan’s friends but they’re not, by now, the type of men to sit around a dining table. A few of the more cautious ones have already sent their wives to Australia or India or even Singapore, which is impregnable and which will never, ever fall. Occasionally the visitors include a few British soldiers, grim and over-clean men who make three-year-old Francesca cry and wriggle in Mary’s arms at the sight of their pale skin.
‘What a good thing you never met your grandfather,’ Mary tells her daughter, thinking of Stephen’s blustery red face. Stephen would never have approved of such a rebellious girl-child; didn’t approve, in fact, when he had one.
Mary hasn’t seen her parents since the wedding. She’s exchanged letters, of course, the sort of buttoned-up, good penmanship letters that don’t say anything at all. Her father’s replies – Radhika, by now, is too far gone in betel-nut dreams to do anything so mundane as write to her daughter – talk about the weather. The expected rain. The expected heat. These letters are so bloodless, so lacking in muscle, that Mary’s almost surprised to find the paper doesn’t turn blank as soon as she’s read them. Francesca will have more love than that, she resolves, and hugs her daughter tight.
‘Come on, Fran,’ she says. ‘Leave your father in peace now.’
Truth be told, Rajan is playing an even more dangerous game these days than Mary knows. It isn’t just old friends he’s inviting into his house. He’s inviting single-minded, single-eyed men agitating for Indian independence; he’s inviting disaffected Malays who want their sultans back in Malay palaces and their rice paddies back in Malay hands. He’s even on occasion invited a few meek and unthreatening Japanese men: a photographer, or a barber or a dentist. Harmless men, he would say, but no matter. Collaboration will, in any case, soon stop being a choice.
So when the rumble of planes overhead increases in frequency, when exploratory bombs start to be dropped over Ipoh and leaflets tumble down in every language known to man, Rajan’s been expecting it. The general hospital has already started discharging patients in preparation for war casualties and the streets around are filled with one-legged men, with women recovering from hysterectomies and children with skin complaints. Mary goes about with pans of what little rice she can spare, and worries that Francesca will catch something awful from her new and leprous playmates.
Mary’s looking thin and haggard these days, wearing herself out with war preparations. She stalks through the streets during trial blackouts, tutting over the tiniest chink of light and knocking at houses where hurricane lamps still glimmer. There aren’t many of these houses, in fact, because half of Ipoh is doing the same and when one night the trial blackout is interrupted by a glorious mass of fireflies bursting into light in a nearby orchard, the brilliant streets are found to be packed with scurrying, scolding women.
But when the Japanese finally land at Kota Bharu at the end of 1941, all that preparation and worry become worthless. The British run, fleeing in their hundreds in cars and lorries. And it’s not just the British running; it’s Chinese, who know which way the wind is blowing, and Indians, who can sniff trouble from a mile away. One by one they slip into paddy fields with all their worldly goods tied to their backs, planning to live out the next few months in the jungle untroubled by anything but malaria and starvation. Others only run as far as their neighbour’s abandoned house where they rifle the rooms for furniture and valuables. Refrigerators are migrated from wealthy mansions to huts t
hat don’t even have electricity, almirahs are shifted with the clothes still in them, and several families simply move themselves into the mansions instead and save on all the heavy lifting. It reminds Mary of the floods she saw as a child, where wives and children were abandoned in favour of goats and cold, wet coins. She knows that if she and Francesca are to make it out at all, she’ll have to be braver than most.
And then one night when Rajan’s been absent for twenty-four hours straight, a note in his handwriting comes to her door, delivered by one of those dubious friends. Get out, is all it says, and for a moment she thinks of refusing. But Mary’s a hard-headed woman now, and something in those two frantic words convinces her.
As Mary gathers Francesca’s belongings she hears a bullock cart go thundering past her windows. Somebody’s set up a spotlight outside and it twists wildly. A beam of light bounces off her marble floors and sets the cats yowling. In that flitting light she can see others leaving too, rushing out of their houses with nothing in their hands. Across town, cooler heads are prevailing; the wives and children of British mine-owners are packing suitcases and closing up their shutters. By dawn, and all through next week and the next, cars will purr up to those British doors, silent Rolls-Royces and Daimlers smelling of leather and polished wood. As the days pass, the last wave of fleeing Europeans will jostle in their cars on the narrow streets, ramming each other off roads and the few bridges left intact. Their Rolls-Royces and Daimlers will rub together like potatoes being washed – as the Japanese will later say – while those same Japanese calmly cycle down the peninsula on borrowed bicycles. And two weeks later those bicycles will reach Ipoh and there’ll be no point in Rolls-Royces or Daimlers or any cars at all, because dead people can’t drive.
So Mary makes an escape of her own. By dawn she’s pulled on her clothes, she’s scooped up Francesca and she’s walking out along the steep road that leads to Ipoh’s limestone caves, twenty-five kilometres away. At each road junction she finds a dishevelled knot of people, huddled in the brown light. Fires are burning across the country and, although she asks everyone she meets, nobody’s come from anywhere near Kuala Lipis. Mary isn’t panicking – not yet, not yet – but in the distance she’s sure she can see a column of advancing dust.
It takes Mary two days to reach the Ipoh caves. Francesca’s only three and she can’t walk far, so Mary makes the journey with her daughter cradled in her arms. By the time they arrive there are already people scattered through the caves, people crammed into passages and shallow scoops of rock. Mary climbs up to where the largest cave opens up to the sky and finds a cluster of worried faces.
‘Hello?’ she says. At first nobody answers.
‘My girls. They just – took – my girls.’
Mr Thivappuram’s come from across the valley. He’s a bone-setter, the type of man Rajan would sneeringly call a quack. He looks lost now, his eyes red in their sockets. Mary sits down and Mr Thivappuram reaches out a smoke-stained and bruised hand to caress Francesca’s head.
‘What do you mean, they took them?’ Mary lets go of Francesca’s hand and watches her scamper around the pile of rubbish and sleeping figures.
‘All the girls. When the soldiers arrived, they took all the pretty girls. Even the children.’
Nobody says anything. Mr Thivappuram’s own daughters are famous beauties, two thirteen-year-olds with flower-petal mouths.
‘From my village, too.’ It’s Mrs Chang, who’s come north from her kampong because she thought her family would be safe in Ipoh. Last week she married her three plain daughters to the neighbour’s boys, hoping that their status as married women would keep them from harm. But both Mrs Chang and Mr Thivappuram are here alone, with bruises and blood and no daughters at all, whether penny plain or tuppence coloured.
Mary looks over at Francesca, nestled against Mr Thivappuram more happily than she’s ever been with her father. Francesca loves strangers; she’ll gladly take the hand of a passing hawker or demand a cuddle from a taxi driver. When she wakes from nightmares she never calls for her Amma or her Appa, but always shouts names that Mary’s never heard before, people from her storybooks or simply out of her own head. Francesca loves the unfamiliar – the strange, the different – and Mary wouldn’t put it past her to walk right up to a Japanese general and ask for a piggy-back ride.
‘Fran, though … she’s too young. Of course she’s too young. Isn’t she?’
Mrs Chang and Mr Thivappuram look worried. Young, yes, they say, but who knows with these devils? Already rumours are flying about: rape and pillage and horrific injuries being visited on babies and grandmothers alike. Nobody is safe, Mr Thivappuram says, and looks at his empty hands.
‘Francesca! Come here.’ Mary claps her hands, commands her daughter away from Mr Thivappuram and into her own arms. ‘Listen to me. Listen very carefully. We have to hide, do you understand? From the bad people.’
‘You can’t be a little girl any more,’ Mr Thivappuram says suddenly, and turns to Mary. ‘In the villages,’ he says, ‘they are chopping their daughters’ hair. To make them look like boys.’
He touches Francesca’s plait. There’s a second of silence, then his meaning filters in and Francesca begins to scream.
‘No! My hair! My hair. Amma, my hair!’
She’s only three, but she kicks so fiercely that she almost escapes Mary’s grasp, almost pulls free and runs all the way back home where she knows the bad soldiers have never come and her father is waiting and nobody will chop her own, her very own, hair off.
But Mary knows better. She crouches over Francesca, pinning her daughter with her knees, while down in the valley Ipoh burns. Mr Thivappuram has brought a knife, which everybody agrees, immediately, not to question. He hands it to Mary. It’s clean and oiled with a blade that feels as cold as she’s ever known. With Francesca squirming to get free, Mary takes her daughter’s plait in one hand, pulling it tight. She slides the knife underneath, waits for a heartbeat, and slices.
As soon as her hair falls, Francesca stops screaming. She blinks, putting up her hands to feel at her shorn neck. She’s had long hair all her life, ever since she can remember, and now that she feels it bobbing and short, a slow smile spreads on her face. Francesca – who loves the unfamiliar, who prefers people she’s never met and places she’ll never go – has found herself to be somebody completely different.
‘Joseph!’
Now here’s the sting in the tail. If Francesca’s pretending to be a boy, then she needs a new name. Mary’s already brought one Joseph into things when she was twelve years old and inventing her mother’s indiscretions with a Kerala chauffeur. Why not another? she must have thought. Why not, indeed.
So here’s another Joseph, a tiny three-year-old one with a ragged pink blouse and a mop of short hair. Mary’s wrapped her daughter’s plait in silk and stuffed it into her own pocket, until she feels ready to look at it again.
‘Joseph, stay with me.’
Mary and Francesca-Joseph have come out of the caves by now. The Japanese have come down the Malayan peninsula, the British have come a cropper at Singapore, and everybody has come to their own conclusions about what life is now going to be like. Soldiers and civilians are scattered about the streets, all as worried as each other. Mary’s been slapped twice for forgetting to bow to a Japanese sentry and now she keeps her eyes fixed firmly on the ground. Another soldier has shown her the photographs of his own small children and the rest have ignored her completely.
But now she’s back at her sprawling, marble house and she’s facing up to facts. She’d hoped to find Rajan here but there’s no trace of him, and she daren’t go out again to inquire at the hospital. She wanders through the spacious rooms, noting where an item of furniture’s gone missing or a corridor’s been strafed with machine-gun fire.
‘Where’s Appa?’ Francesca-Joseph asks, and Mary hushes her.
This is, she suspects, a dangerous sort of question to ask. Men have certainly died in the invasion, or
fled or been captured. But not men like Rajan, with his slippery good looks and his fingers in every sort of political pie. Rajan’s in the jungle, Mary suspects, his face blackened and his legs encased in puttees, fighting with the Communist guerrillas. Or he’s on a rubber estate, posing as a worker and inciting the Tamils to riot. He’s sipping tea with a Japanese general; he’s lying in a Johor brothel with Mr Thivappuram’s daughters; he’s everywhere and nowhere and will watch Mary for the rest of her life. Men like Rajan don’t get themselves killed, she’ll say darkly in a few decades’ time. More’s the pity, she’ll add.
Mary and Francesca-Joseph don’t stay in Ipoh long. It’s hard, with no husband and not even a garden where Mary can grow vegetables. And then, too, there’s her half-white skin. Eurasians are being watched across the country, being asked to register or report to Japanese holding offices that not everyone comes out of. Mary’s dark enough to pass for Indian, luckily enough. There’s not much of her father in Mary, except for his rages and his stubbornness and his surprisingly strong will. But she worries about being caught, about being taken away, and then what will happen to Francesca? As food gets scarcer – as Mary starts to barter for rice and Francesca to steal it – it becomes clear that there’s only one solution. They’ll have to go home.
Not, of course, that it’ll be easy. There are travel permits to get. There are letters to be written, bribes to be paid and Francesca-Joseph’s hair to be cut as short as possible. By the time Mary and Francesca are on one of the irregular buses that have just started to run to Lipis again, Mary’s exhausted and very worried indeed. She doesn’t know what she’ll find at home, not having heard from her parents in weeks.