Fragile Monsters Read online

  She lifts a hand in response and I turn back to pull out the next firework. I feel lighter now, with the kind of excitement I always used to have at Diwali. I choose the biggest firework in the bag to light next, something that looks a bit like a Catherine wheel. A couple of rockets have been tied together, and nailed loosely to a small wooden post. I set the end of the post into the dirt and hold a match to the rockets, but just like before they don’t burn immediately. The wooden post’s swollen in the damp air and the nail holding everything together feels hot to touch. I try with another match but the rockets just hang there in a sulk of reddened smoke.

  A movement at the window catches my eye. It’s Ammuma, putting her hands on her hips. Get on with it, Durga, she’s saying, those evil spirits don’t have all day. I scrape my damp hair back and light another match. This time I shove it deep into the body of one of the rockets, and there’s a little spurt of flame. The rocket moves – once, twice, and it’s spinning in a shower of golden sparks. They rise this time, in a blown breath of honey-coloured light. I can hear a ripping sound, and then I see that the end of one rocket’s come loose, flinging gunpowder into the air as it spins. A second later the whole rocket rips open, flaring up in a bright naphtha glare. It tumbles high as the palm trees, head over tail in a fizzle of sparks.

  I take a step back, my eyes fixed on it. And then it comes apart in the air, one chunk soaring towards the house and another flying back near the Jelai. I take a few steps to the back wall, pulling myself up to lean on the chest-high stones. I can see the fragment of firework that’s heading for the Jelai. It plunges down, high over my head but still spitting brave sparks. It looks like it’s going to land in the jungle and I hold my breath, but instead it plummets straight into the water. As soon as it’s extinguished, I can’t see anything. My eyes are dazzled from the flare, and the lights from the house seem fitful and dim. Not a success, they tell me quietly.

  I prop myself up on the compound wall. The light in Ammuma’s room has gone out – she’s not going to watch, not after that performance – and I turn back to the compound wall. The scrubland belukar stretches for fifty metres or so on the other side, and then the jungle takes over. Peony and Tom and I used to play a game out here, I remember, after dark. We’d climb over the compound wall into that scrubland and creep slowly towards the looming darkness. The winner was the first to reach the point – the infinitesimal, knife-edge point – where the jungle suddenly became grey and green and brown instead of featureless black. Where it stopped being terror and turned back into trees.

  I look back at the house, but Ammuma’s light’s still defiantly out. I sigh, dropping the bag. I’ll take a few breaths of air before going back, I think, before swallowing my pride and sparking up Tom’s fireworks. I trail my hand along the rough top of the stones, walking carefully until I reach the corner of the yard. The wall’s crumbling here, and there’s a pile of bricks that have worked their way loose. There could be scorpions in there, I think, there could be spiders and centipedes and who knows what else. It’s a Canadian thought, well scrubbed and careful.

  I look back at the house once, then step onto the tumbled bricks. They give way underneath my feet, sliding and shifting until I’m grabbing at the gritty wall. It takes the skin off my palms. As I pull myself up to sit sideways on the top I feel my nails tear, and then I’m over and in the wide spaces of Pahang.

  It’s the first time I’ve been out at night here since I came back. I never used to be scared. I’d been good at our game, sometimes making out the shapes of jungle trees while I was still in arm’s reach of the compound wall. Then a second later Peony would sing out in triumph – I see them! – and finally Tom with his pale, poor eyes. But I’m walking steadily forward now, and I must be nearly at the end of the scrubland but I still can’t see a thing. The house is round a bend and downhill, and even the lights from it are cut off. The river seethes behind its mudbanks on my left and there’s a rattle of wings as a guinea fowl takes off from somewhere. I can hear the trees – I can even feel them in the slap of cool air as the wind forces their leaves up and out. I just can’t see where I’m going.

  I turn and my foot slips on the mud. I stumble forward, catching myself on my hands, and a squeeze of panic grips me. It’s wetter than I’d thought out here. I can feel leaf stems and rocks under my fingers, but I’ve lost all sense of direction. I don’t know whether I’m in the jungle or still in the scrub. Worse, I don’t know how close I am to the river any more. It might be metres away, or it might be tonguing at my feet with little wet laps. I feel as though I’m slipping downward, as if I’m clinging to the banks like a spider scuttled under a rock. I can’t move. There’s a blind terror waiting for me out here: something about the wet scent of trees and the way my skirt clings to my legs.

  And then I see something. A glimmer, a sheen and lick of light all the way through the trees that I can suddenly make out, too. My eyes have adjusted, and the river’s a hundred metres away and safe behind its banks. I get to my feet, pushing hair out of my eyes and patting myself down. I’m on a sloping hill that leads from the house to where the convent used to be. It reassures me, recognizing this hill. For the first time since I came back I feel exact, sharp and clear and fitted into a single place and time. I turn and start slowly walking back down the slope. I can’t see the house from here, just a strange dullish red glow. Ammuma must have turned the hurricane lamps up and lit all the candles. She’s doing her work there, keeping the spirits away while I thrash through the night.

  I look over to my right, feeling my skinned palms with the tips of my fingers. I’m closer to the river now, and I can see it’s risen a metre since this afternoon. It’s black and muscular, littered with driftwood from upstream and matted with vines. Out here, I remember, floods happen fast as an ambush.

  As I stare at it the water glints and brightens. It looks as though there’s a tiny light underneath. Phosphorescence, I think, luminous fungi, but it isn’t any of these. It’s a hot, burning glow, getting bigger and bigger, just round the bend where the house is. It’s a reflection.

  I spin round. That dull red glow over the treetops is brighter now, and I can hear a hiss. Another sound, which I recognize slowly, stupidly, from public safety videos: the crackle of flames beginning to lick their way through wood. I stare at the glow in horror, but my legs won’t move. That rocket, notes some tiny, ice-cold part of my brain, it went towards the house. I start to run. I trip when I’m near the compound, but I’m up again with my hands bleeding and my throat thick with spit. I can see the house now. Flames are coming from one of the windows, inside a wing that Ammuma keeps sealed up. I scramble back over the wall, and now I can hear her voice over the snap and surge of the fire.

  ‘Durga! Get away!’

  She’s above me at her bedroom window, fumbling at the shutters. A piece of wood drops on my shoulder, flaming, and flies off in a burst of pain. I hesitate at the kitchen door – Is it hot? Is there anything left inside except Ammuma, unbelievably in the heart of the fire? – but the door’s cool and solid. The kitchen and dining room are clear, without even any smoke, and I run through into the hall. Out here I can smell burning paraffin wax, as the fire gallops along Karthika’s polished, deadly floors. There’s a crash and scream from Ammuma’s room and smoke blurs my eyes as I race upstairs.

  I tug the door to Ammuma’s room open. There’s a screen of smoke in here, with a red, snarling core at the side where the wall’s been broken through. My eyes are stinging and my throat’s raw and I’m pushing through the blackness, just like out in the jungle. I’m blundering forward, with my breath screaming and my eyes wide open, trying frantically to reach somewhere – some infinitesimal, knife-edge somewhere – where I’ll finally find Ammuma behind the smoke.

  2. Once Upon a Time: 1922

  ‘Mary-Miss! You have to be nice.’

  Mary looks up from the full stretch of her six-year-old height to consider this. She’s not so different even now from the grand
mother she’ll grow up to be. She’s snappish, small, with fierce knees and uncompromising elbows; a little bit more trouble than anyone wants to take on.

  ‘No,’ she says, having given her amah’s plea all the consideration she thinks it deserves. Her hair is in two satiny plaits, her fists are on her hips and she’s standing over her new baby brother.

  ‘It’s my house,’ she tells Anil, stamping a tiny foot. ‘You don’t even live here. You don’t even have a bedroom. It’s just the old rattan-patch.’

  ‘Mary-Miss!’ Ah Sim, her amah, gasps. Technically Mary’s right. Her father, Stephen, flung some floorboards on the termite nests when he found his wife was pregnant again, nailed up a wall or two, slapped a roof on the whole thing and called it a day and a nursery. But it’s the way Mary says it that sticks in Ah Sim’s throat. Ah Sim’s a black-and-white amah – white blouse, black trousers, that’s all she ever wears – from mainland China. She’s left her own baby brothers behind and she misses her family dreadfully. She’s used to sons being treated like little gods, and Mary’s cavalier attitude shocks her.

  ‘The jungle spirits brought him, Mary-Miss,’ she says. Fairy tales like this are supposed to be appropriate for girls of Mary’s age. Truth without the bones in, as the bomohs say.

  ‘Well, I don’t want him. And if he doesn’t stop crying, I’ll – I’ll drown him in the banyan swamp.’ Mary glares at baby Anil, who screws his face up in a terrified howl.

  ‘Mary-Miss!’ Ah Sim’s hand flies to her mouth and she glances around, worried that Mary will bring vengeful spirits flying in through the windows. Stephen’s built this house like an Indian bungalow to make his wife feel at home, and all the doors and windows lie in straight lines. Once a spirit gets into a house like this, Ah Sim knows it’s going to be hard to get it out.

  ‘The jungle spirits won’t like that,’ Ah Sim tries to reason with Mary. ‘They’ll cry too.’

  ‘Well then, I’ll drown the bloody spirits,’ Mary snaps, and her mother, Radhika, walks in just in time to hear her.

  If Radhika had taken more time to reflect, she probably wouldn’t have boxed Ah Sim’s ears for encouraging that sort of language. And if she hadn’t slapped Ah Sim then the amah might have stayed and taught young Mary a thing or two. She might even have spotted what was wrong with Anil before it was all too late. But Radhika’s not a woman who thinks ahead, and so she slaps Ah Sim – and Mary, for good measure – packs one off to the servant’s room and the other off to bed, then sits down to cry. The sound of his mother’s sobs gives baby Anil the fright of his life. Shock fills his gummy mouth and he gasps. Gulps. Swallows his own howl once and for all. For good, as it turns out.

  When Radhika unlocks the door an hour later, Mary hurtles out with her mouth set to quarrel. She’s bursting to tell her mother what’s what, to insist it’s all her fault. It’s always Radhika’s fault, according to Mary.

  ‘You scared Anil! Look at his little face! Ah Sim-amah doesn’t teach me bad language, I just know it. All by myself.’

  ‘Mary. Go back into your room.’

  Mary stares her down, three feet of defiance. An hour ago she’d have slapped Anil herself, but she won’t stand for her mother feeling the same way.

  ‘You don’t like either of us! You hate us!’

  It’s a lucky guess, and Mary doesn’t realize how right she is. Radhika’s life hasn’t turned out quite as she imagined. She met Stephen in her hometown in Kerala, married him and sailed out to Malaya with hopes so high she can barely remember them. Like any good Kerala girl she’d have liked a fine, manly boy-child to light her funeral pyre; she’d have liked a sweet, pretty girl-child to carry on the family name. Come to that, she’d have liked love, too, a comfortable house in town, a husband who didn’t mumble as though he were speaking a foreign language. Radhika – who is speaking a foreign language, who will eventually lose her mother tongue and die out here with a hundred forgotten words in her mouth – can’t quite bring herself to comfort Mary. She does her best though, holds out her hands and lifts her daughter to perch on the windowsill.

  ‘I daresay it’ll all get better,’ Radhika says doubtfully, somewhere over Mary’s head. She takes a package of betel nut from her pocket and starts to wad it against her gums.

  Mary wriggles down and stands on one leg, irresolute. The crickets are screeching outside, Ah Sim’s sobbing in the servant’s room and a tok-tok bird is sounding its mechanical call. There’s something ominous in all this din, some note that’s missing. She looks at her baby brother, lying here in the nursery and pawing at his mouth. Amongst all this noise, this chewing and birdsong and sobbing, she realizes – he hasn’t made another sound.

  ‘Cook’s excelled himself tonight. Soup looks almost good enough to eat.’

  Mary’s father, Stephen, makes this joke nearly every evening. They’re gathered in the dining room, under a buckling roof held together with nails and spit. The family still dress for dinner: Radhika in her saris of glittering thread, Stephen in his rapidly rotting dinner jacket and Mary buttoned into smocked gingham and good behaviour. Candles are set out on the table and the soup is tinned mulligatawny, with a dash of evaporated milk from another tin. Stephen’s determined not to go native – bad show, he mutters over his solitary evening whisky – just because he’s alone in a Malayan swamp with a couple of civet-cats fighting somewhere in the roof. It’s seven miles to the next kampong, and half of Pahang lies between him and the nearest Englishman. It’s all right for his wife and daughter, he thinks. Radhika’s Indian; she’s used to privation. And as for Mary – well, Mary’s a little hooligan.

  Stephen keeps his spirits up, though. He likes to take stock at dinner; he likes to make little jokes and tease his wife over laxities in the housekeeping. He’s earned it, after all. He’s extricated Radhika from the jungle and established her at the head of a table glittering with silverware. She can stand a little teasing.

  ‘But Daddy, we are eating the soup.’ Mary isn’t usually this demure. On bad days she refuses to speak English, insisting on using bazaar Malay and overturning her water glass. Not today though. Today she’s nervous. Anil still hasn’t uttered a single cry since the afternoon. He looks puzzled and miserable, doubling his fists and smacking the side of his head. Mary can hear trouble in the air, like a finger sliding over wet glass.

  ‘Hush, Mary. Children should be seen and not heard.’

  Mary scowls, pushes her hands into her lap and kicks at the leg of her chair. She isn’t hungry, having already gorged herself on ais kacang and kueh lapis in the kitchen with Maniam-cook. Maniam-cook is Mary’s best friend. She sneaks him cigarettes from Stephen’s private stash, gobbles palm-sugar lumps from his cupboard and brings him whatever gossip she’s heard behind the door at Radhika’s coffee mornings.

  ‘Mary!’ Her father snaps. ‘Stop kicking your chair and eat. If you can’t behave yourself, I’ll have you sent to school.’

  It’s Stephen’s favourite threat. His own school was a chilly Manchester institution, full of vicious masters and thuggish boys. He believes it was the making of him. It probably was, one way or another.

  ‘I won’t go to school,’ she insists. ‘I won’t! You can’t make me.’

  Radhika nods vaguely, reaching out to stroke her daughter’s agitated head. At dinner Radhika ignores her family and their arguments. She smiles as though she’s looking through glass, as though the glittering silver and the civet-cats in the roof are all one and the same to her. In a sense they are; Radhika’s taken to chewing too many packages of betel nut, to smoking opium from a delicate long-handled pipe. She sits down with the gin earlier and earlier each day, and by dinner she’s in a comfortable, softened world.

  ‘Yes, of course you stay here, dear,’ she says.

  Stephen grunts and shoves his chair back. His soup was cold, there wasn’t enough palm sugar in his coffee and even the nuts tasted strangely of his own cigarette ash. He’s hungry and unsatisfied, and to make it worse, his authority’s being ch
allenged right here in the dining room he built himself. Stephen was once besotted with his chubby baby daughter, even insisted on naming her after his own mother. But Mary’s baby stage was brief, and now at six years old she’s all angles and elbows and arguments. No wonder Stephen’s aggrieved.

  ‘You’re going, young lady, and no backchat. Whatever your mother thinks’ – and he casts a contemptuous glance at Radhika – ‘it’s high time you had some discipline.’

  Mary scowls as he stalks out of the room and Radhika sighs. I’ll poison him, thinks Mary, who has far too much imagination. I’ll grow old and shrivelled and unloved, thinks Radhika, who hasn’t.

  Anil, who isn’t expected to think anything at all, slaps at the side of his crib. He coughs and splutters with a throatful of angry little whines. Mary escapes from the room to carry all her worries to the sympathies of Maniam-cook and Stephen sips whisky in the drawing room by himself. Radhika, left alone, pinches out the candles. Sighing, she slips her sari blouse up and flumps out a breast for Anil with her ashy fingers. She’s quite a force, my great-grandmother, sitting there in the darkness with her milky nipples, her silent son tucked under her arm and her paan-stained teeth grinning out across the silverware. A survivor, like her daughter. They’ll both stand it longer than anyone would have thought.

  3. Thursday, 9 p.m.

  ‘Durga? Durga Panikkar? I’m Dr Rao.’