Monsoon Summer (26 page)

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CHAPTER 35
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W
hen I wrote to Daisy and my mother to tell them I was pregnant, I was heartily relieved when my mother, who was still living at Wickam Farm, canceled her proposed trip with the vague explanation that she didn't “do” babies and would “keep out of our hair” until ours was a little older.

Yes,
relief
is the word, but if I'm honest, I was hurt and disappointed too. In some locked corner of myself I must have been looking forward to seeing her.

I worked on at the Home for eight months of my pregnancy and was told I could come back at any time after the baby was born. Dr. A. assured me there would be plenty of willing and experienced hands at the Home who would help with a new baby.

Work was a good thing: like many midwives in their first pregnancy, I found in the first few months plenty to worry about and had to stop myself looking up stray symptoms in old textbooks and take comfort from Anto, who was radiant with happiness and who said I was as strong as an ox and not to worry about a thing.

And he was right—almost. Halfway through my pregnancy I felt as physically strong as I'd ever felt, but the memory of that boy's punch stayed in my mind like a bad bruise that would not fade.

When, at Mangalath, on the veranda, I felt the first cramps of labor, I felt as apprehensive as any woman having her first baby, and mightily relieved when Rema, the family midwife, trained in Madras and wonderfully efficient, came cycling up the drive and
walked into my bedroom. She had no idea I was a midwife, and I didn't care. All I wanted was her comfort and guidance, because once my own labor properly began, I might have laughed—had I not been doubled up in agony—that I, the almost-trained professional, felt swept away by forces that I could neither control nor understand. It was the difference, say, between understanding the chemical composition of snow and taking a sleigh ride at breakneck speed down a steep mountain. The sheer force of it shocked me: my own womb clenching and unclenching like a great jaw, and then the joy, the soaring sense of triumph, bigger, better, deeper than anything I had ever experienced, of having put a new human in the room who wasn't there before. Such a very ordinary thing to happen, but for me, my first miracle.

When, at three minutes past two in the morning, my first son, Raffael, was born, after a twelve-hour labor, the midwife part of me checked him over neurotically—two working legs, round little tummy, perfect toes like Jersey new potatoes, a face at first like a furious little tomato—while the mother part was ablaze with happiness. I'd known nothing about this: the helpless love you feel, the vulnerability, the joy and, in a weird way, the strength. If I could do this, I could do anything.

* * *

After he was born and we'd moved back to Rose Street again, Anto raced home every night to see him. Raffael was like a little fire burning in the house, and it was a happy time. I took a photograph of him and sent it to Josie, asking if she'd be his godmother, and she wrote back saying what a little corker he was, and she'd be proud to keep him away from damnation.

The only fly in the custard came, six months later, when a telegram arrived at Rose Street saying my mother had booked tickets on the
Strathdene
and would be arriving in Bombay in two months' time.

“So, how do you feel about Mummy finally coming?” Mariamma asked me, with a sugary emphasis on
Mummy
. We were at Mangalath for the weekend, sitting in dappled sunshine, side by side on the summerhouse veranda. I had the telegram in my handbag and was still experiencing its aftershocks.

“Terrified, since you ask,” I said. “I don't know what to think.” My milk was slowing down and Raffael was on my lap, sucking manfully on his new bottle. When he saw us watching him, he yanked the bottle away, his eyes bulging and affronted.

“Give that young man to me.” Mariamma took the bottle from his hand and burped him. “I don't blame you.” She put Raffie back on my lap, where he lay watching the sky through his fingers. “Mothers are terrifying—too much power is the problem.”

I ran my hand through Raff's soft, thick hair. “It's awful to admit this, but I was almost glad when she couldn't come. It's not that I don't love her, it's just . . . oh God, it's so complicated.

“Damn!” I could feel the slow trickle of Raffael's pee running through my skirt. He didn't wear nappies because Amma believed babies should be trouserless until they learned to potty train themselves. In Raffie's case, to my surprise, it worked about eight times out of ten, and I was learning how he paddled his legs and stretched his arms towards me when he wanted to use the potty.

Mariamma called to Theresa to take him to the house. Theresa, ten last week, was one of a number of his willing slaves. No shortage of them at Mangalath. Amma would spend hours walking him round the garden, showing him the new Leghorn chickens and collecting eggs with him, throwing alfalfa at the donkey, topping up water for Appan's new Tibetan mastiff dog.

As we watched Theresa walk importantly towards the house with Raffael in her arms, I told Mariamma I'd never even held a real live baby until I was eighteen.

“Don't be silly!” She simply wouldn't believe me. “You must have had relatives with babies—sisters, brothers.”

“Honest truth,” I said. “I was an only child and my mother worked for a living. We traveled a lot.”

I'd said almost nothing to Mariamma about my strange childhood because, if I'm honest, it still gave me a queer sick feeling when I thought about the dead-to-me row I'd had with my mother when I'd married Anto. The family would be mortally offended and I didn't want that, plus it only seemed fair to let my mother arrive with a clean slate.

Now I had my own baby, so many of the things that had once driven me mad about my mother—her anxious protectiveness, her hovering, her fudging the truth about so many things—I now understood and felt a sort of anguish about. I should have been kinder.

I changed my damp skirt. Theresa came back with Raffie wearing a strip of cloth worn like a loincloth, both ends tucked into a silver chain clasped around his waist. She put a rug underneath the mango tree and he lay in the shade testing his fat legs for pinginess and stretch. He put a thoughtful toe in his mouth, and took it out again so he could imitate the sounds of one of the birds.
Brrrr brrr, cheep chee.

He was a sublimely contented child, with a filthy chuckle. He liked nothing better than to be here at Mangalath, handed from lap to lap. On the day he was born Amma looked at him with tears in her eyes and said,
“Entey kochu rajakumaran!”
My little prince. Next Anto had asked Appan to dab gold and honey on his tongue, saying he hoped the baby would inherit his father's brilliant mind, his tenacity, generosity. On the twenty-eighth day, the silver chain was clasped around his waist to tuck the loincloth in.

Happy days, but it was Mariamma I was most grateful to. She was the one who insisted on staying up with me on the first blurry and alarming nights of having a baby of my own to keep alive. She brought me teas and little snacks. When I needed to bathe, Theresa sat with him. When Anto came home, weary often from the
hospital, we were free to spend hours lying with him between us, floating in the sweetness of his presence. Nourishing meals arrived, helping hands at every turn. When I thought of my own mother in her isolation, I was ashamed.

“So tell me more about your Mummy.” Mariamma threw the ball again, soft but insistent. “What part of India did she hail from?”

I'd shared with her the fact that Ma had been born here in the early days but said almost nothing else. Mixed blood, as I was perfectly aware by now, was not a great calling card in India.

“Well . . .” I dipped a finger in my coconut juice and put it in Raff's mouth. “She's lived for years in England, but I think she went to school in Pondicherry and married my father over here. It's all a bit fuzzy.”

“A bit fuzzy,” Mariamma crooned, running her fingers through Raffie's thatch and pretending it was his hair we'd been talking about.

“We can question Grandma when she comes,” she told him. She smoothed his hair down, kissed the back of his neck.

And this was my dread. I could too easily imagine my mother's cornered looks, the strange replies that could sound so haughty.

“Will you show her around the Moonstone?” Another quick glance.

“Maybe,” I said. My mother had agreed to arrive with some new obstetrical equipment for the Home. Nothing big: scissors, forceps, petri dishes to be packed and stored in the hold. “But maybe not. She never liked my being a nurse.”

“Even during the war?”

“No.”

“Will she mind your work here?”

“Probably.”

“She wanted you to be ladylike?”

“The exact words my mother would have chosen,” I said. In the silence that followed, I had the small revelation that I had chosen a profession guaranteed to make me least like my mother.

“Do you miss it?” I could feel Mariamma watching me.

“No,” I said, “because I'm definitely going back to work soon.” I'd decided it was time the week before when I'd made an appointment to see Dr. A. “I'll do two, maybe three shifts a week. They're short-staffed and they have a government inspection coming up. I can take Raffie if I want to, and Kamalam is at home all day and like a second mother to him.”

“Oh dear.” She could not hide her dismay. “Do Amma and Anto know this?”

“Amma no, not yet,” I said. “Anto yes, of course! He's happy about it.” Not entirely true, but at least he understood. “He's told me to go ahead.”

“And your Mummy when she comes—will she mind?”

“I don't know,” I added more truthfully. “We'll have to wait and see.”

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CHAPTER 36
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I
started with only two shifts a week. Raffie, who often came with me, enjoyed playing court to a circle of admiring women. Maya was glad to see me, numbers had grown at the clinic, and her husband was angry with her again because she was often home late and his own mother had to come over and cook his rice. Sometimes she looked so weary and crushed, I wondered if he was beating her again. By this standard, Anto was a peach of a husband, except that three days into our new regime, we had a shocking row as sudden as a summer storm.

Anto was lying on the bed, Raffie on his chest, playing the game that Raff loves: “Atishoo, Atishoo, we all fall down.” Anto, who still loved to teach me things, was explaining that the song began when people were falling like flies from the plague. Raffie, who hated when people talked to anyone but him, flung his arms around Anto's neck and covered his face in kisses, steering him away from me.

“I love my boy,” Anto crooned, “but he's getting spoiled. He needs six brothers and one or two sisters.”

“Why not twelve,” I said, “enough for a cricket team?”

He held Raffie high above his head and said, “I'm serious, Kit. We're in another phase of our lives now.”

He'd explained this to me before: the Hindu belief that a man's life should fall into four distinct phases, the first being Kaumaram, the South Indian word for youth. The next was Brahmacharyam, or celibate student phase—well, Anto had missed that boat—then
Grihasthashramam, the householder stage, in which a man devoted himself to earning a living and having his children, and finally Vanaprastham, the hermit stage, when you left off worldly ties and pleasures and lived as an ascetic sage in the wilds. As a blueprint for life it all sounded intriguingly tidy and purposeful, but from a Western wife's point of view—how could I put this?—claustrophobic.

“So next stop, sackcloth and ashes,” I said.

“Don't joke about everything, Kit.” He let go of my hand. Raffie had fallen asleep, so he kept his voice low.

“I'm not,” I said. It was no surprise to me to know that he wanted lots of children. The Thekkedens saw them as one of life's greatest gifts. I liked that about them and agreed. Up to a point.

When he added, “I want as many as possible,” was it wrong of me to suddenly feel like a great big breeding cow? The argument that followed was loud, and when Raffie started to bawl, we continued it in angry whispers in bed.

From me: “Of course I love him, of course I love you—but can't I have any other life at all?”

Him: “You're being dramatic: you have another life now. I don't mind that, but can't you change?”

Me: “Why must I change? For you life is the same now with Raffie here, but better.”

Him: “Rmmnnph.” The Indian version of
harrumph
. “Don't play games with me, Kit. You're a woman. I can't have our babies.”

Me: “I'm not so different from you, or at least, not as much as you'd like to think: I like challenges, I like excitement, I like getting better at things, I like seeing things grow. I'm proud of what we do at the Moonstone.”

It was true what I said about the Moonstone. This scruffy, frustrating, life-giving place, with its inadequate facilities and bewildering days, had connected me to India in ways I didn't even understand. I wanted to stay part of it, to watch it grow.

Him, shouting now: “Watching your own children grow, what could be better than that?” And there was more and it hurt us both. What I should have said loud and clear was that I had seen in my mother the fury and the fate of the untrained woman moving from one menial job to another and hating them all.

And he would have said, “But you're not your mother, and I love you, and I won't leave you.” I wouldn't have believed him because my sense of men's being abandoners was so deep-rooted. The father who left me, whom I was forbidden to talk or think about, has followed me through life like a bad smell. I've tried my best to ignore him—it makes no sense to miss someone you've never met—but he's there.

* * *

I was examining Valli, a village woman who had presented with premature leak of her amniotic fluid, when I heard a tremendous crash in the street outside, as if someone had dropped fifty trays. When the windows trembled, Valli shrieked and disappeared under the sheet.

When I ran into the hall, Jalaja, one of the midwives, yelled, “Ma'am! They're cutting down a tree!”

Outside, I saw Maya shaking her fist at three men stripped to the waist and sitting in the trees branches. She looked white as milk and very frightened. “It's the neem tree; they're cutting its branches. A government department just turned up this morning. No one told us they were coming. They said disease was there and the tree unsafe.”

“Do they need to tell us?” The tree, strictly speaking, was on the boundary between our land and the empty building plot next door.

“Very definitely we should know.”

I had no strong feelings about the tree losing one or two branches. I enjoyed crunching its pods underfoot because they gave off a refreshing aroma and it was a nice tree to sit under at lunch,
but for Maya, this was a catastrophe in the making. The neem, she'd already told me, was a god amongst trees, a shade giver, a maker of creams. Rags soaked in its oils were used as contraceptives. Now, on the verge of tears, she said that the workmen had ignored vital rituals. If the whole tree must go, the axmen must pour ghee over the stump and say, “May you grow with one thousand shoots.” Otherwise they would offend the powerful spirits and gods that lived in the tree.

“But what if it's only a branch?” I said stupidly because I was not sure how to comfort her.

“Then you must beg pardon for its injuries,” she said. “I have done that now.”

As we stood in the blinding light looking up at the tree, my eyes moved to the right, and a strange jangling began in my brain.

A small crowd of curious onlookers had gathered to watch the axmen. Standing apart from them was the boy with the thin mustache. He wasn't looking at the tree, he was looking at me.

I told Maya I was going inside but she didn't hear me. She was praying distractedly, as if something terrible had already happened.