Fragile Monsters Read online

I’m sitting next to Ammuma’s bed in a hospital emergency bay. The ambulance arrived quickly and two quiet Malay paramedics tucked Ammuma under a foil burns blanket. It wrinkled easily as milk-skin and I spent the whole journey squeezing the edge of it into a tiny, pleated ball. It’s only for shock, they explained, it doesn’t mean she’s burnt, and one of them gently took my hand away.

  The emergency department’s busy, with full beds in every bay and even some in the corridor. We’ve been waiting an hour, watching people be wheeled in with burns, with wounds, with heart attacks. Each one of them feels like it’s all my fault, because if Ammuma weren’t here then we’d never have seen them at all. I tuck the end of Ammuma’s dupatta in to the stretcher rail and she pats my fingers with a warning tap. Enough with all the fuss, Durga, that tap says. Not so special one, is it? She’s no time for hysteria; any moment now she’ll be informing me testily that plenty of people burn their grandmothers.

  ‘Ms Panikkar, I understand there’s a problem with your ICs.’

  Dr Rao looks tired, as though he has better things to do than ask about people’s identity cards. His eyes are red-rimmed like a toddy drinker’s and there are dark patches under his arms. There’s a nurse beside him who’s young and pretty in a taut sort of way. She’ll look good when she’s Ammuma’s age, I think. She’ll have a sensible pension and some satisfying grandchildren and a few dependable packs of fireworks for Diwali and lunar new year. I swallow past a raw lump in my throat.

  ‘I forgot the cards,’ I say. ‘I didn’t … I’ve been living in Canada. We don’t have ICs there.’

  He frowns. ‘Do you have any other identification? Any proof?’

  I have proofs coming out of my ears. I have theorems and lemmas and elegant little corollaries and none of them any use at all.

  ‘But she does live here,’ I say. There has to be a solution but I don’t know the words to ask for it any more. ‘Can’t I sign something, or make a statement or, or …?’

  ‘We need to check she isn’t an illegal,’ he says gently. ‘We’ll treat her, but we could admit her faster with her IC. Or even with someone to vouch –’

  ‘Dr Harcourt!’ I interrupt. ‘Tom Harcourt, he’s one of the doctors here. We were at school together, he knows her. Can you page him?’

  Dr Rao turns away to confer with the nurse. They bend their heads like herons, then she scurries away to the phone by the door. Dr Rao holds one finger up: wait. He pulls the curtains around the bed with an old-fashioned gesture that belongs in black-and-white movies and everything’s suddenly cut off. Even the noise of the Emergency Room seems fainter. From behind the curtains the glare from the rest of the department looks bright as a Dynamo advertisement.

  Ammuma’s still on her wheeled stretcher from the ambulance. Above her bed I can see the end of a sign directing people to other departments, to Neurosurgery and Spinal Care, to Cardiovascular and Chiropody and Podiatry. All those bunions and ingrown toenails. Serious enough, I daresay, if they’re all you’ve got.

  It feels like hours before Dr Rao comes back. He parts the blue curtains like a magician and gives me a tiny nod. He’s brought two porters, silent men who move slowly and carefully as they wheel Ammuma out.

  ‘They’ll take you to the wards, Mrs Panikkar,’ Dr Rao says loudly to Ammuma, then adds to me, ‘They’ll take her to the wards.’

  ‘Yes,’ I snap. ‘You told her already.’

  I hadn’t expected her to go to a ward; I’d thought there’d be a dedicated department like the others we saw. Burns, perhaps, or Smoke Inhalation or Careless Granddaughters. I wonder what Ammuma’s going to tell them, when her words come back. I wonder what she won’t.

  ‘Ms Panikkar.’ Dr Rao sits down on the other chair, across from the empty space where Ammuma’s trolley was. That space feels like a no-fire zone, a glassy reminder of where Ammuma isn’t. ‘I’m going to need some details from you.’

  He ticks them off. Home address, Ms Panikkar, your home address in KL please. And you’re here in Pahang for a week? Diwali visit, eh? Employment: university lecturer, since two months only. In Canada for ten years before that, I see, I see. Marital status?

  A maiden lady; that’s how Ammuma once said she was described at her marriage ceremony. A different sort of grandmother might have cackled at that – a different sort of grandmother might have had nothing to cackle about – but Ammuma always kept a straight face. She used to tell me a lot of stories; folklore and memories all knotted up in a glorious tangle. Is it true, Ammuma? I’d ask, and she’d snort, and say it was the telling that mattered.

  ‘Your marital status, Ms Panikkar?’

  ‘Doctor.’

  He glances at me, puzzled.

  ‘It’s Doctor Panikkar. Not Ms. Doctor. Doctor of mathematics.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ His eyebrows say it all. ‘Single?’

  It’s barely a question, this time. A husband, those eyebrows imply, would have sorted things out. Would have fixed the Catherine wheel. Would have bought quality market fireworks to begin with.

  My eyes are tired and I rub at them. Outside these closed curtains there are desperate things going on, there are tiny quickenings and emergencies. Inside, though, everything feels muted. Stored medical kits look back at me with a helpless air, as though none of it’s their fault.

  ‘Cause of accident.’ Dr Rao stops, clicks his pen with a deliberate twitch. ‘Domestic fire. Cookery.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘We’re busy tonight,’ he says, without looking at me. ‘Lots of burns from people playing Diwali fireworks and we’re reporting most of them to the police. No permits, see? If it weren’t for Dr Harcourt …’

  He signs the form, then jams his hands into his pockets. His legs stretch out into Ammuma’s empty space as he gets up.

  ‘One of the nurses will take you through to the waiting room. Your grandmother won’t be long.’

  He opens the curtains, then looks back at me and smiles. It’s a cheerful smile, it makes him look ten years younger, and it’s as out of place in a hospital as a pink cocktail umbrella in the medicine glass. ‘Welcome home, Dr Panikkar,’ he says. ‘Selamat datang.’

  ‘Welcome!’

  It was the first thing anyone said to me in Ontario. I was in the arrivals hall, with my brown trunk-case strapped and labelled, and clearly wrong compared with everyone else’s wheeled cases. And there was an Indian girl near the doors, holding a big hand-lettered sign reading ‘International Students’ above her head and waving at everyone who came through.

  ‘You must be Durga, right? I’m Sangeeta. I’m the international students rep.’

  She stuck out a hand to shake, then pulled me into a hug. Sangeeta hugged everybody, I would find out later.

  ‘Sangeeta Nair? They told me to look for you,’ I said, and she grinned.

  ‘I don’t take much finding.’

  She was right. For the next ten years, Sangeeta flitted about the maths department, bright, untidy and fierce as a quarrel. She turned up to topology lectures in bell-bottom jeans and peasant shirts. She gave set theory tutorials wearing tight emerald trousers and shady hats. She was daring and rude, the type to attend protests and scrawl graffiti on the walls of an underpass. The type to get away with it too; she had the legs of a racehorse.

  After we graduated we shared an office, both of us crammed into a tiny grad-student room with lecture notes piled up on the floor. She would proofread my papers, scrawling a final, triumphant QED at the end in purple pen. I would cover her lectures, trotting to the department with snow banks high on both sides. I’d push my hands deep into my coat pockets and look up at the grey sky, canteen grease clinging to my tongue. They served hamburger loaf at the canteen, and Chinese chop suey that had nothing to do with China at all. It was at meal times I missed Malaysia the most.

  But in the lecture theatres, I felt as though I’d finally come home. I’d stand at the front, a sheaf of notes in one hand and a piece of chalk in the other. Co-limits, I’d write on the board,
and a hundred scratchy pens would copy it down. Categories, functors, equivalences: everything in its place and blackboard proofs that would always come out right. Sangeeta used to disapprove of those; she thought theorems were teacherly. Tidy little facts for tidy little minds, she said once and dismissed them just like that. Her words, like her trousers, tended to be undeniable.

  She persuaded me to give a department seminar one day. There weren’t many people there – it was a day full of rain and spiteful little gusts of wind – but the other post-docs had come. And right in the middle of the first row was one who’d enrolled only the week before. Deepak.

  ‘I liked your talk,’ he told me afterwards. He was older than the other post-docs, with two fine wrinkles that creased between his eyebrows. His hair was still black, though, and he had a sparse moustache like very fine pen-strokes. I watched that moustache move as he laughed, as he walked me to the staff common room, and offered to make tea. He brewed the tea with condensed milk and spices, the way I liked and nobody had heard of in Canada. That afternoon we sat on the common room’s tattered green sofas for two hours and after that, on the metal chairs in my apartment’s tiny kitchenette.

  The night we first slept together, I thought about Tom. Deepak was propped on his elbows above me, the glow from my lava-lamp turning his mouth a reddish pink. He kissed me, and suddenly all I was thinking about was how Tom’s lips used to dry out in the Pahang summer wind. How he’d rub Vaseline on them, and how Peony thought it was disgusting and dolloped Tiger Balm into his Vaseline pot. How he used to lie on the riverbank and talk about the snow he’d seen in England in the hope that she’d be impressed. How his dry lips felt on my own, too, and that sneaking sunrise joy that Peony would never know it wasn’t disgusting at all, but tender and bare and more grown-up than we could have possibly imagined.

  ‘Durga Panikkar? Your grandmother’s ready for you now.’

  It’s Dr Rao. He leads me out of the waiting room and through to a ward with ordered beds. Ammuma’s in the closest one, and she’s far more alert now. She’s been brushed and combed, she’s been propped up against starched white pillows and her words tear out the instant she sees me.

  ‘Can we go home now?’

  She doesn’t look happy; all this fluorescent light and soap doesn’t suit her. She likes things dark and cramped; she likes yesterday’s sweat on her sheets. She reaches for her false teeth, in a glass of water by the bed.

  ‘Of course, Mary, we just need to keep you under observation for a day or two.’

  Dr Rao straightens his collar as he approaches her and pulls his cuffs straight. He’s trying to be respectful, but Ammuma just rolls her eyes.

  ‘In hospital and this boy thinks his clothes is the problem one.’

  Dr Rao coughs, resettles his glasses. ‘How are you feeling? Do you have any pain?’

  She shakes her head, folds her wrinkled lips over those too-bright teeth. They look like fangs, I think, not teeth; surely they’re far too big for teeth. My head’s spinning. Ammuma looks very small and far away on those pillows. She could be anybody at that distance. Someone from one of her own stories: a drowned woman in a well or a tiger-prince behind a mask. She could be dangerous.

  Dr Rao bends over her bed. He pushes back the loose sleeve of her hospital gown and examines a weeping patch of pink skin. A bruise, on her wrist. He pauses at an old scar she’s had as long as I can remember, puckering the skin of her forearm.

  ‘She’s had it for years,’ I say, and he nods.

  ‘A burn, I think. She would have got it from kerosene, hot oil, something like that?’

  ‘She’s here, ar,’ Ammuma snaps. ‘Can ask yourself.’

  Dr Rao steps back, lowers his voice a little. ‘Dr Panikkar? Durga?’

  We move a few steps from the bed. Ammuma loses her focus, peers a little and then falls back. Her eyes droop and she tosses her head, frustrated. She’s blinking, picking up her blanket and turning it over and over with a look of intense concentration. It seems to be brand new to her every time.

  ‘It’s the sedative,’ Dr Rao explains, seeing my frown. ‘It takes them like that sometimes.’

  He draws me closer, drops his voice. ‘Her lungs are a little damaged, Durga. There’s smoke damage, but this is something more. She’s never had TB, has she?’

  ‘No … no. She’s never mentioned anything like that.’

  He nods, then looks at Ammuma again. He raises his eyebrows, gives her a reassuring smile. She glares right back at him.

  ‘Mary, have you ever had TB? Consumption, in your lungs?’

  ‘No,’ she snaps instantly. ‘No TB. So much questions, lah. Who are you to ask?’

  ‘I’m a doctor here,’ he answers patiently. ‘Dr Rao.’

  She looks away fretfully, then wipes at her mouth. ‘Francesca, ah,’ she mumbles. ‘Francesca wants the doctor, isn’t it, not me? Go see my daughter.’

  Dr Rao looks at me. He steps back from the bed, telescopes his neck into his shoulders like an animal sniffing something it doesn’t quite like.

  ‘A daughter?’ he asks quietly.

  ‘She’s dead. My mother’s dead.’ I consider this, turn it around for him with care, like a child stacking wooden blocks. I’m tired, and my tongue feels clumsy in my mouth. ‘She was Francesca.’

  Ammuma hears this and starts to mutter, beating softly on the bed with both hands. ‘Francesca, in the black areas. You find her. In Kampung Ulu.’

  My mouth dries. Kampung Ulu. It was where Peony died. Peony, laughing by the banyan swamp. Peony, one limp hand fathoms below the surface. Dr Rao gives me a questioning glance and I pull myself together.

  ‘Kampung Ulu, Ammuma?’ I ask her. My voice sounds very level, very normal.

  ‘The San,’ she mutters, and I frown. I haven’t heard anyone talk about the San in years. It burnt down just before I was born, and in the playground we’d sometimes pretend we were lunatic patients escaped from its locked wards. Locks on the gates, I remember Peony singing, I’m coming to find you, ready or not!

  ‘In the black areas,’ insists Ammuma. ‘The Emergency.’

  ‘Of course, yes, the Emergency.’ Dr Rao soothes her. I start to dislike him, with the kind of irritation that innocent objects provoke when they get themselves in the way. Tables in the dark. Chair-legs. Good intentions.

  ‘Dr Panikkar,’ Dr Rao murmurs in my ear. ‘Can I have a word?’

  He ushers me a few steps away. ‘Does she often have confusion over time like this? Over dates?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She hardly ever talks about the Emergency, which lasted from just after the war until just after I was born. Our house was nearly in the middle of the black areas: a hundred metres further away and we’d have been thrown into a barbed-wire-fenced resettlement area by the British. But Ammuma doesn’t talk about it. That’s all in the past, she used to say dismissively, it’s all water under the blood. It used to annoy me, how she meddled with proverbs. And now I look at her in her bed, and wonder if she’ll ever get another one wrong.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say again, uselessly. ‘My mother’s dead, though. She’s been dead for thirty years, since 1955. She died having me.’

  His spectacles catch the fluorescent light, blank and glittering. I wonder what he’s thinking. This one is thirty already, perhaps. Past her best. Missed her chance. Ammuma watches us out of the corner of one slitted eye. She might agree but she’s not going to put up with any insinuations from a toddy-eyed young doctor.

  ‘We’ll have to keep her in for a few days,’ he says, pursing his lips. ‘This confusion, and the shadow on her lungs … are you sure she hasn’t had TB?’

  ‘She told you she hadn’t,’ I snap. Ammuma and I tighten our lips, stare past him to where the morning’s a glaring oily square behind the window blinds. I move back to the bed and feel for her hand under the blanket. She grips my fingers. We’re on each other’s side for once, even if we don’t quite know it.

  Dr Rao finishes his examination and
tells me she can go home on Sunday. Two days in hospital, he says, will see her right. Ammuma, who’s never considered she could be anything other than right, snorts at this.

  ‘Do you want to stay with her tonight?’ he asks. ‘We can put a chair by her bed and give you a blanket.’

  I nod. Ammuma’s always been one for dwelling on the past, having so much more of it than future. She’s always been inclined to ghosts and folklore, to mixing fairy tales with my bedroom stories and swearing the whole lot was true. Not easy to sleep after hearing some of those things: women drowned in wells, the tiger-prince and the frog-monster, demons and rakshasas and more devils than you can shake a happy ending at.

  We’ll pack them off together, I promise her silently. Tonight is Diwali and everyone and their god is out on the prowl, and those evil spirits will have to look sharp if they think they can get past us.

  4. A Prince and Two Princesses: 1924

  By 1924, Mary’s at school. It’s a mission school, run by the Sisters of the Holy Infant, and once Mary arrived the Holy Infant never stood a chance. Mary spends her time flicking pencil shavings down other girls’ necks, she coaxes fighting spiders into matchboxes and cheats her way through breathless games of marbles. She has things on her own terms these days, and she’s even made a best friend. Cecelia. Cecelia is Chinese, she sits two desks away, she’s the daughter of a cookhouse worker, and she’s a thoroughly bad example.

  ‘We’ll take him to the bomohs,’ Cecelia says. The girls are in the nursery at Mary’s house, hands on hips and legs apart under identical ruffled skirts. Cecelia’s watching Anil and Mary, to her surprise, finds herself watching Cecelia. She doesn’t trust those guileless eyes.

  ‘Why?’ she asks. Mary and Cecelia have seen a bomoh in action only once, when Mohamed-the-butcher’s teenage son went missing. The butcher called in a pear-shaped bomoh from Kedah, his face plastered with white mud and flowers strung through his hair. He paced, he flung coconut husks and he sat dirty-legged on a valuable carpet he’d demanded Mohamed drag out to the offal-strewn yard. Despite all that, the boy never appeared. Taken by a crocodile, was the verdict, and Mary and Cecelia shivered with a delicious, squirming horror whenever they slipped down the banks of the Jelai to look for fighting fish.