Monsoon Summer (19 page)

“Sit down.” She guided him towards a small stool with a cork seat. She stood in her half slip and bare feet and washed his back and arms and kissed the nape of his neck.

“It's mad hot,” he said. “No one should speak before the rains come. This is a very ancient monsoon custom,” he said, lifting her slip and sponging between her breasts.

“Bloody liar.” She leaned towards him and closed her eyes. The purple sky was humming when they went to bed, the light dappled, distorted. A line of sweat ran down his cheek as he kissed her, and afterwards, lying on his back and looking at the ceiling, he was dimly aware of the swelling sounds of a procession passing in
the street outside. Drums, cymbals, a cracked trumpet, the gobble-­gobble sound of human voices.

“Feast of Indra,” he told her sleepily. “The god who makes the monsoon come.” An hour or so later, rain rattled against the windowpanes.

“Is that it?” she asked. “Has it come?”

“Not yet.” He was longing for its release. “The newspapers predict in two days' time.”

“How will we know?”

“The sky will get even darker, the birds grow quiet, the air is electric.”

“If only we were so predictable,” she said.

He thought about this silently later. From certain angles, human beings were that predictable: the wild changes of adolescence, the longing for children, the nine months gestation period, the loss of hair and teeth in old age.

“When the rains come,”—he was falling asleep—“the beaches will be crammed with people dancing, shouting, celebrating . . . It is . . . it is . . .” His voice became a vague blur and then tailed off.

When he woke an hour or so later they made love again, with a violence and abandon he had never experienced before. When it was over, he got up, sat on the side of the bed, and smoked a cigarette.

He went to the window, where a thin muslin curtain was fluttering. From there he saw black skies, more wildly flying birds. He could feel the sea vibrate the floor under his feet. The monsoon was gathering force.

-
CHAPTER 25
-

A
t breakfast the next morning, our waiter, with an air of barely suppressed excitement, brought a copy of the
Hindu
to our table, so we could keep up with news of the monsoon, which the front-page story confidently announced, would arrive, “in full power and glory,” at around three ten that afternoon. The town, it said, was “full to bursting” with visitors: there was no more room at the government guesthouses. There would be parties tonight, and bonfires, great celebrations.

Anto looked up, his eyes gleaming. He looked film-star handsome that morning—his hair still wet from the bath, and a white shirt on, restored, or so I thought, by our lovemaking. I sat for a while enjoying the sight of him, my limbs heavy and sweet, but then, aware I knew so little of what he'd been up to in the last few weeks, I asked him again what the work was like at the refugee center and saw the light go out in his eyes and regretted it immediately. Bad timing. He played listlessly with the eggs and bacon he'd ordered, pushed his plate aside.

“Obviously, don't tell me yet unless you feel like it.” I had my interview voice on, but there wasn't much I could do about that with his face so set. He rolled up his napkin, unrolled it again.

“It feels wrong to describe it, eating all this food,” he said.

“Oh, come on, Anto.” I felt anxious again and ready to be irritated. “It's me you're talking to; I think I should have some idea.

So he told me, at least some of it: as if he were reading a police
report, looking but not looking at me as if there were a pane of glass between us.

“I had no idea how bad it was, and worse up north: thousands of homeless people crammed into tents. Gunshot wounds, cholera, TB, smallpox, women having babies. We did three clinics a day. Shit up to our knees.”

“Why on earth didn't you tell me you were there?” I said. He looked so angry. “Do I really strike you as being that selfish?”

He ignored this. “Kit.” He pushed his plate away and put his hands on the table between us. “We were living in a fool's paradise in England, all that guff about the happy end to the Empire. It was a shambles. These people have been left with nothing.”

“Fool's maybe,” I said, “but not a paradise. There was the small matter of the war on in England.”

“I didn't ask enough questions.”

“No one here asks us about the war in England: it's what people do to get by,” I said to comfort him.

“Maybe.” His hands were twisting; he was unconvinced.

“Will you go back?”

“I don't know, because here's the point,” he said, still not looking at me. “There are jobs up there. I was hoping you might come with me.”

And then he did look at me, so hopefully that I knew what I was supposed to say, that I would go with him to the ends of the earth, if necessary, but we were not in a film.

“When were you thinking that might be?”

“As soon as you could.” He pushed his half-eaten breakfast away.

The waiter darted towards us with more chai and was waved off impatiently.

“I can't,” I said. “We start our first midwife classes at the Moonstone next month. I've promised to be there.”

“Ah.” I could not read his deliberately blank stare, but I suddenly felt like Maya, a woman doing a distasteful and unpopular thing.

He heaved a big sigh, put his chin in his hand, and looked at me.

“Well, this is a nice holiday,” he said. “Two hearts beating as one.” I was shocked at his childishness.

“Anto, be fair,” I burst out, to the considerable fascination of the waiter, ostentatiously dabbing a table nearby. “I promised Daisy to see this through. I told you that last night.”

“I know,” he said, and gave me a look of such bafflement and misery that I felt like the worst heel on earth.

* * *

We were so sad and ill at ease with each other again, it felt good later that day to join the crowd of mildly hysterical people on the seafront.

Clutching the railings, we moved down to the beach, where the wind was making a singing noise in the flagpoles, and the sky was dark and electric. At around three fifteen, there was a combined gasp, and Anto grabbed my arm as the drums started to pound. It was the most astonishing sight I had ever seen, this cone of blackish cloud starting to mass and change shape and charging now like a live animal towards the shore. Birds were spiraling round and round like feathered tops; children were held tight lest they blow away. My dress was flapping like a sail, and my feet were moving to the sound of drums and cracked trumpets and crashing waves, and the louder and louder whine of the wind, and I was lifted out of myself. When I looked at Anto, his eyes were shut and his face twisted as if he was drinking it in.

Buckets of rain started to fall. “Do you mind getting wet?” Anto shouted. His hair was soaked, his face ecstatic, his shirt clung to his rib cage. I felt a great wave of desire for him.

“Not at all,” I shouted back. “I love, love, love it, and I love you.”

* * *

And there we stood, two dumbfounded savages, watching the rain pelt down and the wind roar, and the birds going backwards, and
the great waves boom as they crashed on the beach. Soaking wet, we ran back to the hotel together, toweled each other off, and spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, with the wind still howling outside and the rain bashing down. I knew he was still upset, and so was I, so our lovemaking didn't feel like a truce or an escape, but something deeper, sweeter: an acknowledgment that human beings had their own weather and couldn't always control it. Something like that anyway.

Afterwards, when he lay back on the pillows with his arms above his head. I could almost see the thoughts traveling from his unblinking eyes to his mouth.

“Don't start thinking again, Anto,” I pleaded, partly to make him smile. “I like it better like this.”

“I have to.” He squeezed my hand. “I wish I didn't.”

“So try talking to me.”

With his face partly concealed from me, he said, “Do you miss your mother?”

“Yes, “ I said, surprised. I thought for a bit. “More than I thought I would.”

He put his arm round me. “Write to her?”

“I've tried, she doesn't answer.”

“Keep trying, it's only pride in the end.”

“D'you really believe that?” I was on my elbow now, looking at him and feeling so sad.

“I do. You know, Kit, you can't escape it. I've tried with my own family, and now I know how deeply embedded in me they are.”

He went on to say he would be away again for the next month. He would be working in the camp. It was work he would be paid for—not much, two hundred and fifty rupees a month—but he could save all of it and send some home for all of us. After that, he'd come back to Travancore and take any job he could find.

“There must be a job for you here.” I was trying not to cry because I felt he was in flight and there was nothing I could do.
“And I know it's hard, but why have you stopped telling me things? In England, you told me things, and I liked that. Isn't that the point, or part of the point, of being in love: a sort of unveiling, someone to tell your secrets to?”

He looked at me and gave a small smile. “Do you keep secrets from me?” he said at last. “I think you do.”

“I try not to,” I hedged. But it wasn't entirely true.

The air had cleared, around us and inside us, and during the next sweet night, we made love, made promises, made up names for children we might have. It didn't last: over breakfast the next day, Anto told me we must go home on the following morning. When I looked surprised, he said, “Some roads will be flooded already. We can't get stuck.” A peremptory Indian husband, firing out orders.

“Two days!” I said after a long and fuming silence. “For a holiday!” Anto looked up from his dosa. “Kit, I tried to explain this to you: Mangalath is losing money, and we must all save for it now.”

The air between us sizzled with unsaid things and I hated his patient expression. I told him in a tight voice I was more than happy to contribute to the family coffers, but we deserved a break occasionally. He blew out air, looked out the window, chewed the inside of his lip. We went up to our room in silence.

* * *

It got worse. An hour later, while I was packing, he came out of the bathroom with my diaphragm in his hand. I'd washed it, powdered it, and in the excitement of the night before, left it in its plastic box on a high windowsill.

“Why didn't you tell me?” He put the box on the bedside table.

After a long silence I said, “I wanted to wait until you'd found a job closer to home. I didn't know how much of a Catholic you were. I was a coward. I'm sorry.”

He barked with frustration and flew apart from me.
He's going to hit me
raced through my mind, he looked so angry. But he just
blew out breath, put his head in his hands, and said, “And you say I keep secrets from you!”

* * *

It can't have been that much of a secret, I thought, sitting in the back of the car on our way home, feeling like a criminal—an angry criminal. When we'd made love during our first days at Mangalath, he'd sometimes withdrawn abruptly as if terrified of what might follow, and I'd understood, knowing how confused things were between us. Also, I raged inwardly, had he never wondered during the times he'd stayed inside me why I hadn't got pregnant? He was a doctor, after all: he must have known. While I seethed, the car skidded and sloshed down a broken road with waving wet palm trees on either side, trying to stay ahead of a monsoon that was moving northeast now. Chandy, angry, or so I imagined, at having his own holiday cut short, had his foot down.

The car stopped. Chandy got out to pee. Anto, who'd hardly spoken a word, turned to me and said, “So what are we going to do?” He rubbed his eyes and looked so weary and confused that my rage disappeared and I felt his sadness.

“Give me a month or two,” I said. “That's all.”

I told him in a rush what was true, that I loved him, that I longed for his babies. All I needed was a little more time. He took my hand and squeezed it tightly. “If you mean that, and I hope you do,” he whispered urgently, “I am begging you not to stay beyond the point of safety at the Moonstone. You don't know the country well. Kill one baby and they'll kill you.”

He stopped talking. Chandy had appeared from wet bushes and was jogging back towards the car. When he was close enough to see our faces, he stopped and stood waiting in the rain.

-
CHAPTER 26
-

A
letter was waiting for Anto when we got home, offering him a two-month locum at the TB clinic near the refugee center at Quilon and a proper working wage of four hundred rupees a month plus accommodation. He was to start in four days' time.

The offer of a job would normally have been a cause for celebration, but we took the news warily, both of us still badly shaken by the row in Trivandrum.

Two days after my husband left, Appan called me into his study at Mangalath, where we began with a cat-and-mouse conversation about Anto, Appan hoping I supported him, “because family is at the core of everything we do.” He knew it was hard for a “young wife to be left alone so much.” It had been for Amma, which was why she was so sensitive.

He lit a cigarette, looked at me through his hooded eyes, and said I was lucky that I had a career in South India which was advanced in its support of women's gaining professional qualifications. It was the future, but everyone had to be sensitive to the changes.

Finally, he grilled me about the Home, my work there, my training. “I'm assured it's a place the family can be proud of,” he said, fixing me with the famous stare, “and that your work is mainly administrative there.” In his next breath he told me I would be allowed to stay for two weeks in a family house near Fort Cochin Beach. The house, which belonged to Appan's cousin Josekutty, another lawyer, was used only as a holiday home. He showed me
the location on his map, and I could hardly stop smiling when I noticed it was on Rose Street, two blocks away from the Moonstone and not far from the Chinese fishing nets—a lovely part of town. Two trusted family servants would look after me there.

When he saw me smiling, he became stern. Two conditions were not negotiable: number one (rigid finger in the air) that I come back to Mangalath without fail on both weekends I was away. Number two (finger pointing at me) that I never discuss my new freedoms outside the family.

“I don't want any gossip about you.” The terrifying eagle-like glare reminded me of Anto's stories about the strap in the desk, the thunderous rages. As urbane and charming as he could be, you would never want to cross this man.

* * *

When I saw the house on Rose Street, I fell in love immediately. Here was the perfect place for Anto and me to live together and have the new start I longed for.

It wasn't a bit smart. It had the look of a tiny, slightly dilapidated Chinese temple, with its sloped tiled roof, and it had a deep veranda with a swing on it—a piece of wood fixed with thick coir to the roof. A cool corridor led straight through the house to a central courtyard scented with jasmine and mimosas.

The two servants—Mani, the odd-job man, and his wife, Kamalam, cook and maid, with their seven-year-old son, Uni—were all very sweet and proud of the house. They showed me a primitive but adequate kitchen and the four bedrooms, all of which had carved wooden beds, plain furniture, and tiled floors.

The timing, for once, was right too. On the day after I moved in, and after much consultation with astrological charts, Madhavan Thambi, the new Minister for Health and Family Welfare, came with the promised year's grant from the Cochin Medical Foundation (Dr. A. still wouldn't say for how much), which he
handed over in an envelope after a short ceremony. He also gave us a shiny plaque for our waiting room, noting wryly that it hung next to a picture of the Goddess Bhadrakali of Kerala, a woman with three eyes, twelve hands, flames flowing from her head, and from her mouth a small tusk created to kill demons with the aid of a largely female army. “I won't cross her,” he said roguishly, and we all laughed politely.

Thanks to our new funds, we now had a staff of twelve: Dr. Annakutty, Maya, myself, four nurses, four staff for general cleaning and cooking, and a part-time helper, Sister Patricia, a raw-boned Irish nun of about forty who came twice a week from a local convent.

To prepare for the opening, Maya had mounted a fierce raid on the rats in the roof, now mostly dead; the Home's new purple, red, and yellow sign was hung and clearly visible from the road. And most importantly, Mr. Namboothiri, our local hero and tireless donator of paint, had driven off in the middle of the night in the smoking, paint-splattered bus we called Cyclops—one headlamp missing—to collect our first ten midwives, who arrived five hours later looking dusty and petrified. Most had never been in a bus before or left the network of small villages where they practiced. One tiny, pockmarked woman wrestled an enormous bedroll; several carried tiffin boxes, worried they might not get enough to eat here.

Some local musicians had been drafted to give the ceremony some oomph, and after drums and twiddly flutes, incense was lit, petals strewn. During Mr. Thambi's long and droning speech, the midwives sat at his feet, barefoot and on the new coir mats, staring at him in frank amazement.

Dr. A. jumped up next, her nose quivering importantly, and in her usual rat-tat delivery gave a stirring speech, which Maya translated for me.

“You women are the future of India. Some of you have more
knowledge in your little fingers than the male doctors at the hospital.” Shy giggles at this; a tremendous frown from the Minister for Health. “But we have new things to teach you here: hygienic methods, greater understanding of physiology. Crisis alleviation.”

When they'd finished the course, they would gain this certificate—she brandished a crackling sheet of cardboard—plus their very own sterile midwife kit. Maya opened a small tin box to show a tantalizing glimpse of its contents: small scissors, swabs, a small bottle of iodine, soap, and a clean towel.

Sister Patricia watched this with her head on one side and a fond smile on her face. “Look at their little faces,” she whispered to me. “Trilled to bits, poor dears.”

Shortly after this, Mr. Thambi, who'd been furtively checking his watch since the ceremony began, roared off in his government car. The midwives were given a small breakfast of steamed bananas with uppuma, a semolina-type dish, and the teaching part of the day began.

Each pupil was asked to give her name and age, the length of time she'd practiced, the number of babies delivered, and her marital status.

A few looked mulishly suspicious at this and refused. Then a small, stooped woman with dust on her elaborately tattooed bare feet, stood up and said in good English (what a relief) that her name was Subadra and that she came from Nilamperur, where she was a senior midwife. She had learned her English at a mission school there.

So far, she said, she had resisted the government's attempts to retrain her, because, she added, with considerable pride and a hint of challenge, she had “delivered hundreds and thousands of healthy babies.”

“Hundreds and thousands?” Maya peered at her over her big specs. “For our study, how many exactly?”

“No idea,” said the woman, “maybe four thousand.” She sat down
heavily and muttered something under her breath to the woman next to her, who immediately tried to hide her face.

“You?” Dr. A. pointed to her. “Stand up. No need for shyness.”

The woman cast a fearful look towards the door and whispered something to Subadra, who translated for her.

“Her name is Bhaskari,” Subadra said. “She is from a Dalit family. Her only job is to cut the cords and to dispose of afterbaby.”

A low grumble broke out at this among one or two of the women. In some communities, I already knew, these women were regarded as the lowest of the low.

“You also have an important job, Bhaskari,” Dr. A. said, bestowing one of her rare smiles. “We will teach you here how to do it sweetly and cleanly. We must all learn to work together.” The one woman still muttering was given Dr. A.'s famous basilisk glare and visibly shrank.

“Sit down, Bhaskari,” Dr. A. continued smoothly. “We're very glad to have you with us.” One by one we took their histories, from the fat, the thin, young, old, bright, and stupid-looking. They were, as Sister Patricia whispered to me, “a bit of a job lot.”

Each midwife was then given a piece of paper and a pencil.

“Your first task,” Dr. A. announced, “is to draw what you think is inside a woman's body. Take your time. This is not a test, it's for knowledge sharing.”

I saw Bhaskari take her pencil, take her paper, and strike off immediately in a series of confident slashing circles. One tucked her pencil inside the folds of her sari and gave me a truculent why-should-I-tell-you? look.

After twenty minutes or so of pencil scratching, and sighing, and worried looks in our direction, Maya collected the sheets, adding names to the papers of the six women in the class who were illiterate.

Rosamma, who said she delivered up to thirty babies a month, piped up indignantly, “No one really knows what is inside the human body. You can only imagine it.”

Sister Patricia whispered to me, “Well, I wouldn't want that one to intuit me baby out of me.”

I left the Home exhausted and conscious of a mountain to climb.

* * *

Day 2.

The women returned to the classroom this morning looking far more relaxed. Rosamma, a fat lady with an exuberant smile, made everyone laugh when she said she would like to keep dancing all day because she was so happy to get away from her husband for a few days. Her good English and self-confidence had made her the group's leader and translator.

Today we asked the midwives to describe the work they did in their own village. It's possible that no one has ever asked them to do this before, because they listened to each other with open-mouthed fascination, and I thought, If we achieve nothing else here, they've been given the chance to talk to each other, because their lives, frankly, sound terrifying.

At first they were as furtive as criminals, but then Rosamma, settling in a comfortable cross-legged position and adjusting her large bosom, began.

There were two kinds of midwives in her village, she said, the visible midwives—the vayattattis—and the invisibles, who washed the mother after delivery and buried the afterbirth. Her voice dropped confidentially at this, and when one or two of the other midwives frowned, she said, with a note of defiance, “We are here to talk about these things.”

It was the vayattattis, she went on, who were blamed for everything.

“Many things stop a woman from having a baby,” she said, her voice warm with indignation. “Lack of good food for the mother to eat, and this year our rice crops failed,” she said directly to Sister Patricia. “No proper place to have the baby. In my village some are sent out to cow sheds.”

The gold bracelets jangled on Rosamma's right arm when she lifted it to cover her eyes. “Can you remember a time when you felt blamed or you were blamed?” Maya asked her softly.

I saw the expression on the women's faces change while they waited for her reply, and I wondered if Maya had made a mistake by asking for these intimacies too early.

“Last month,” said Rosamma after a long silence, “a woman died in my arms. She was in labor for nearly eighteen hours; the baby got stuck. There was no bullock cart to take her to the hospital: it belongs to the head man in our village, he needed it that day. The family blame me now. They refused to pay me and avoid me in the street. This is not fair, and this is why I am here, to get more government protection.”

The women murmured sympathetically. Rosamma said, “In my village, there is also much suspicion of me because I have the freedom to travel.”

Another said, “Some will never forgive me if baby comes and it is a girl, or if it is crippled or dies; they think maybe I'm bad luck and they should have gone to another vayattatti.”

“I am a poor woman,” she added, breathing heavily. “I don't do this for money, I do it because God wants me to.”