Animal's People (19 page)

To this Zafar replied, “Bear it a little more, for all our sakes.”

Later, he told Nisha that he felt full of sadness for the suffering of the people, since he too was learning what pain was, just lately his stomach had been in continuous agonising cramps.

“Elli, what will you do if people don't come?” This question's pressing like a stone on my brain. It's after my second examination, she's taken blood and piss, talking we're on her roof's like a scented jungle, in big oil tins she has planted jasmine creepers, roses etcetera, scarcely three months has she been here, already they're swarming up into the mango tree, same one I climbed, it grows right by her building and hangs its branches over the roof.

“What can I do? Guess I'll have to pack up and go home.”

“Home to Amrika?”

“Nowhere else to go.”

“What about me?”

“My number one patient.” We are sitting on a mat spread on the ground in the shade of the mango. I'm backed to the parapet wall, legs to one side, she is cross legged in front of me, I'm having a hard time keeping my eyes off the part where the blue cloth's stretched tight.

“Don't worry,” says Elli, she smiles and reaches over to touch my shoulder. “I don't plan to leave here without accomplishing at least one good thing.” Needs a few more tests, she says, plus X-rays, when she has enough info she'll send it to a specialist in this big hospital in Amrika.

“I don't know what he'll say. Maybe like you've been told, nothing can be done. But let's hope things work out, we may be able to get you over there for an operation. I won't make any promises save this one, that whatever happens, even if I go back to Amrika, I will do my best for you.”

I dare not think of her leaving. “People really want to come to your clinic. They're just confused.”

“They're
confused?! What about me?”

“See Elli, here's the problem.” Surely she must by now know the reason for the boycott, but in case she doesn't I've tried best as I can to explain.

“Collecting data to help the Kampani? What idiot thinks this?”

“Many idiots.” Careful I'm not to mention names, but she's guessed I must mean them across the road for she says, “Tell your friends, anyone who thinks a health study worth a damn can be done by one doctor in three months needs their head checked. It's just not possible.”

My fear of her leaving is being disturbed by risky thoughts. When you are trying very hard not to look at something, the eye keeps creeping to it, then skipping off. Quite uncomfortable I'm feeling, how can she not notice?

“The idea that I've come in response to a court decision, it's just ludicrous, I've been struggling at least eighteen months to set up this clinic, and as for conspiring with politicians I wish they knew the problems I've had. Guess how many letters I wrote to people here in Khaufpur? To Zahreel Khan? To the health ministry in Delhi? How many replies did I get? Go ahead, guess!”

“One?”

“None. Explain that! I wrote to the Chief Minister. I said, I'm baffled, so many sick needing help, in comes a genuine offer and you ignore it!”

“What did he reply?”

“He ignored it.”

“But you're here,” I point out. “So someone must have listened.”

“Weirder still,” says she. “One day, after months of zilch, a letter came. It said, permission is granted. Just like that. It said I should come to Khaufpur as soon as possible to…it had some quaint way of putting it…resolve all needful modalities. And this was from your Mr. Zahreel Khan.”

“He is not my mister, how much investment did you make to him?…Investment fee,” I've explained, seeing she looks blank.

“There wasn't a fee.”

“Then there's your answer. Pays to invest.”

“God.” Elli closes her eyes, sighs. “Why did I ever come here? I should have known right off it wasn't going to work. First the politicians, now this boycott. People in Khaufpur don't want help. I should have stayed home and raised chickens.”

“They do want help, I swear it.” I've told her about Hanif, blinded and coughing, about Aliya whose lungs are inflamed, Shambhu who hardly can breathe, the ulcer of Yusuf Omar, about I'm Alive and his dead neighbours.

“So to help these folk, who do I have to bribe?”

“Bribes are for politicians, police etcetera. This is a question of trust. Why haven't you told people of the difficulties you faced?”

“One, badmouthing politicians who could close me down, not a good idea. Two, who'd believe? Three, no one's asked.”

Elli's story just deepens the mystery of why she wanted to come here. She's saying she has nothing to hide. I'm fishing in the gaps between her words, but all I catch is darkness and unease.

“I swear I don't understand Khaufpur,” says Elli. “At first I thought it was just the strangest place I'd ever been. Never before have I lived in a town where milk's sold by the spoonful. Where people buy cigarettes one at a time and ride three to a bicycle.”

“What three? Four, peacefully.” If we're to boast of Khaufpuri achievements then let's get it right. “One's arsed to handlebars, two's on the crossbar, three's pedalling, four's behind on the carrier.”

“Plus bhutt-bhutt-pigs going by with ten hanging off the back…But you know what's the oddest thing of all? When the sun sets the city vanishes.”

“Sorry, don't understand.” Bhutt-bhutt-pig, it's a big three-wheeler, carries twenty people, front's snarled like a pig's snout, name's from the motor's going bhutt-bhutt-bhutt. But a vanishing city?

“When the sun sets the streets are gone, they're like unlit canyons with crowds moving through in darkness, at least half the traffic runs without lights, there are dozens of accidents.”

“Yes, but what's so odd?”

“That people tolerate it. This is the strangest thing of all about Khaufpur, that people put up with so much. Take a look. It's not just blacked out streets and killer traffic, people in this city tolerate open sewers, garbage everywhere, poisoned wells, poisoned babies, doctors who don't do their jobs, corrupt politicians, thousands of sick that no one seems to care about. But wait, let someone come along with an open-hearted offer of help, these same citizens can't tolerate it, in fact find it so intolerable they must mount a boycott. People in this city must be either blind or mad. I don't get the way Khaufpuris think.”

“Don't be angry with the poor,” says I. “Since when did they have power to change anything?” I am experiencing again those feelings of upheaval I'd had when she said the Nutcracker was erected by an earthquake.

She will change your life
, says the voice inside.
See her bed here on the roof, draped in mosquito netting, that's where you and she will—
Shut up, shut up, shut up. I know now how she will change my life and it is not that way. Yet, as well as the tight jeans, Elli doctress is wearing a thin shirt. Being able to catch other people's thoughts it amazes me that she can't see mine, which are so blatant. However I try to conceal it I'm as bad a bloblo c'est à dire lolo ogler as Zahreel Khan.

“Not the poor,” says innocent-of-all Elli. “Those who should know better.” She starts telling me about this friend, a doctor who lives in a house up by the lake, must be the one Dayanand spoke of. His neighbours are a poor family who've attached to his wall a plastic sheet weighed by stones to make a kind of tent. In this they sleep, cook, do needlework, outside it they wash their pots, their naked kids play in the dirt. “I felt worried about them, so I mentioned it to him. Can you guess what he said?”

She pauses, gives me a this-you-won't-believe look. “He said, ‘Please don't concern yourself, the police will soon move them on.'”

Well this in no way surprises me, but I've shaped various grimaces which satisfy her. So then she starts on about other things this friend's told her such as how Khaufpur once had a high cultural life, and a remarkable history, famous it was for poets, politically progressive, a haven for refugees including a large community of Afghans. I think her friend must have meant Farouq's lot, the Yar-yilaqis, who are really Uzbegs. He complained how all these things are forgotten because nowadays when the world hears the name of Khaufpur it thinks only of poison. “I curse the day the Kampani came here because its disaster erased our past.”

“Also erased thousands of people,” said Elli.

“Forget about the disaster,” her friend said. “Let it go! Let's talk of anything but that painful night. Let go, I say, it's been nearly twenty years. Let it rest. Maybe there are some people in the slums who want to keep the agitation going. Every year they burn effigies of the Kampani bosses, they daub slogans and chant. What does this achieve? Nothing. Meanwhile the rest of us, citizens, city council, chamber of commerce, everyone, we all want to move on.”

“But what about those people? The ones still waiting for justice? The ones who are suffering without help? Do you move on and leave them behind?”

“Please don't think worse of me if I tell you the truth. Those poor people never had a chance. If it had not been the factory it would have been cholera, TB, exhaustion, hunger. They would have died anyway.”

“That's such a harsh way to think.”

“I prefer to call it facing facts,” he said. “Elli, you will eat your heart out for them, but you'll get no thanks for it.”

He's rung a bell for his servant to bring more whisky, ice etcetera. Eyes, I should say it was night, they were sitting on his terrace, which looks out over the lake. The water was black, high above all was a cold white moon. The old doctor touched Elli's shoulder and pointed. “Here's something the books don't tell you. On that night the moon was two-thirds full. It was shaped like a tear and as it appeared through the clouds of gas, it was the colour of blood.”

“You know what I should have said, Animal? I should have said, ‘I am a doctor, I know about blood.' Instead I sat there drinking his whisky listening to him reduce the terror of dying people to a moon in a second rate poem.”

So bitterly does Elli tell her story about the old doctor, I'm scared she has come to hate Khaufpur and will surely go back to Amrika.

“Elli, there are many good people in Khaufpur.”

“Oh yes? Like who? The authorities who don't care? The rich who want to move on? The poor who kick you in the teeth when you try to help?”

“I could take you to meet them. Good people. Poor people, the ones who are sick. Like me. We people need you, please don't give up.”

“Ah, like you Animal,” she says, now softer's her voice. “Well, I am glad I met you. Yes, you are a good person.”

Putain con! Just shows how wrong an educated person can be, but I am not going to contradict her, nor tell what memories were just now in my head of her naked, bending for soap. “Elli, everything will be okay, just you must convince people you have not come from the Kampani.”

“And how do I do that?”

“Tell them why you wanted so much to come here.”

“What? Like I heard about what's happening in Khaufpur and thought it was shocking, I hate injustice, I felt moved, I had the skills, nothing better to do with my life, plus I was stupid enough to think I'd be welcome. Which of these reasons do you think they'll believe?”

Full of sincere anger is this speech of Elli doctress, but again I'm getting that uneasy feeling, of something being held down beneath the surface.

“You need something they can check.” I'm thinking of Zafar.

“Or someone who'll believe me?”

It's now I have my brilliant idea. It can solve everything, why didn't I think of it before? “Elli, the trouble you had making your clinic, plus these other things, there's a very decent person you could speak to, it's Somraj Pandit.”

I don't know what response I'm expecting, Elli just looks surprised. “The music teacher? I hardly think so. Dayanand says it's him and his friends behind this boycott.”

“Dayanand's a sack of pus. Somraj Pandit has nothing to do with it, I swear on my life.”

“Truly? Is that so? Interesting you mention him. Such a serious man. I see him in his garden, we exchange hellos, that's it. I get the feeling he'd rather not speak to me, he avoids my eye, not once has he ever smiled.”

“He never smiles at anyone.”

“Well, I guess it's more like he's shy, sort of clenched.”

“Shy around ladies,” says I. “Because of what happened to him. His wife.”

“I hoped it was some kind of misunderstanding,” says Elli.

I'm wondering should I tell her that Somraj spoke against the boycott of her clinic, but it would mean fingering Zafar and already there's been betrayal enough. Instead I've started on how Somraj used to be a singer but his lungs were fucked by the gases on that night. Being a doctor she's interested in this. “Maybe if I offered to help? Could nothing be done for him?”