Monsoon Summer (29 page)

It was hot. The fan in the reception room had broken, and I felt a sudden primitive urge to strike Suleka round the head and let loose myself.
Ungrateful bloody baggage, what have I ever done to you?
That would have put the cat amongst the pigeons, or am I the pigeon here?

“That mundi. Don't bother with her.” Maya's eyes had narrowed into spiteful slits. She walked over to where Suleka was standing, put her face close to the woman, and gave her what sounded like a furious tongue lashing.

“She is life dust,” Maya informed me at last. “Not worth talking to.”

“Tell me what she said, Maya,” I said. “Else I won't know, and my reports will be pointless.”

“Nothing to tell. She says she wants money for the days she has wasted here, and money for transport home. She's taking her skinny friend with her, she says she has had a horrible time here also.”

So, class dismissed. Five minutes or so later, on our way back to the wards, we giggled nervously when Maya confessed, “I wanted to strike her too. So rude, so ungrateful, plenty more to take her silly place.”

“But I can see her point, sort of,” I said. “If a group of Indian doctors came to England and talked about sterilization, it might cause a bit of a rumpus.”

Maya, like me, was bored with being fair. “She is a rude woman,” she repeated. “Please get her sterilized before she has rude children.”

-
CHAPTER 40
-

A
nto felt grumpy when he got home from work. He'd had a long, fruitlessly busy day trying to penetrate layer upon layer of government bureaucracy to get a simple answer about funding for his research. No time for lunch. Kit was late getting home from the Moonstone. When he walked in, his mother-in-law leapt up, gave him a nautical salute, and said in a silly drawl, “Ah, sailor returns.” She was sitting in his favorite chair on the veranda.

When Raffie toddled in, gave a reckless gummy smile, and ran into his arms, all Anto wanted to do was to lie on the floor with him and do the pretend wrestling Raffie loved, and smell his sweet skin.

But for Glory, dressed up and lipsticked, this was, as she announced gaily, “the
chottapeg
moment.” A gin and it for her, and one for him. He'd tried gin, once at Oxford, hated its taste of old perfume, but she insisted on it: “I don't want to feel like some frightful old lush.”

While they were drinking, he looked at her closely. A stunning beauty she must have been in her day, but the prominent cheekbones were growing sharper; her eyes looked bruised.

“How are you feeling, Glory?” She'd insisted on being called by her first name, but he still slipped sometimes and called her Mother. “Did you have a good sleep today?”

“I'm absolutely fine.” She moved the ice around with her finger. “I shan't hang around much longer.” She dipped her head, took a quick suck of her drink.

“What do you mean?” He was genuinely bewildered.

“I'll get out of your hair. Hotel, go home . . . something.”

“Glory,” he said gently, “you're not in my hair. You are my mother now too, and always welcome.

“But I'm thinking,” he went on quickly, because her chin was puckering violently and she was plucking at her skirt, “you should definitely get your cough checked—an X-ray maybe. No shortage of doctors in our family.”

“You're terribly sweet.” She took another sip of her drink, recovered quickly, and looked at him grandly. “But you know, when you're old, you expect bits to drop off. So, tell me something funny about your day.”

Oh Lord, he thought, the English thing. His tutor used to call them “the Western Orientals.” So exhausting sometimes, quenching the laughter, the tears. He understood it only too well, it was part of his own routine now, and while he wracked his brains for a bit of light relief, she rattled on gaily about old people and their ailments and how extraordinarily boring they could be, telling him how Oscar Wilde had only allowed self-pity in the half-hour between three thirty and four. He laughed politely and watched her. She'd come here to die, he knew that: her pallor was growing day by day, and at night there was that gravelly cough. A few nights ago Kit had lain rigidly awake beside him, listening to her gasping and coughing. “I can't go in, can I?” she'd said, her face white in the moonlight. “She wants me to pretend I haven't heard.”

And the dying were entitled to their secrets, so pouring another gin, waving the Angostura bitters over the drink just the way she liked, he told her about Arjunan Asan, an insufferable civil servant who'd dropped in to check on their department today and, puffed up with professional pride, told Anto that for the next few weeks he, Arjunan Asan, would be so busy that Anto would only have time to say good morning to him; no other conversation would be tolerated.

“Oh, the pompous prat.” This went down a treat with his mother-in-law. “That
ullu ka patta
.” She laughed.

Son of an owl. It was the first Indian expression she'd used in front of him, and she looked as surprised as he did. More than surprised. It was Raffie's look when he thought he'd done something very wicked, like being caught with a hand in the sweet tin.

-
CHAPTER 41
-

I
got home late on the night of the next big drama. I was running across the small
maidan
, the square at the end of our street, panicked at the thought of Mother and Raffie waiting for supper (Anto was away in Bombay), when a man ran up behind me and shouted, “Madam! Stop!” It was Murali from the vegetable shop.

I'd only ever known him as a genial smiling presence waving to me or wrapping my vegetables, but tonight his eyes were bulging with fright, his shirt soaked with sweat, and I had the sudden terrible thought that a bad thing had happened to Raffie and he'd been sent to find me.

Instead he told me, between gulps of air, that his young wife, Kamalakshi, was in very great pain. She was in the seventh month of her pregnancy. She had lost two babies already. “It will break our hearts to lose another.”

I knew Kamalakshi only as a pair of dark eyes peering above a veil from a shadowy room at the back of the shop. Whenever she saw me, she backed away, like a beetle disappearing into the cracks.

“Can you get her to the Matha Moonstone?” I said to him. “I work there with the local doctors.”

He squeezed his eyes shut to stop the tears falling. “Please, Madam, help me take her there.” He clasped his hands together in prayer. “My son has a rickshaw.”

In the heartbeat that followed, I thought of dinners going cold, Raffie bellowing for his good-night kiss. I was longing for
bed, and a million miles away from being the saint he imagined me to be.

“There's a doctor on duty there tonight, and good nurses. They'll look after you. Try not to worry too much.”

He tugged at my sleeve. “Please.”

Kamalakshi was lying on a large pile of empty hessian sacks at the back of the storeroom when we found her. She was shaking, crying, holding her stomach. At the back of the room there was a lurid goddess statue, propped up by cans of cooking oil. When I asked if I could look at her, she wailed, but when Murali spoke crossly to her, she stared at him and moaned her assent. A few moments later, I got into the rickshaw with her, and with Murali behind, we sped off to the Home.

When we arrived at the Moonstone and bashed on the door, Parvati, one of the midwives, let us in.

In the surgery, Dr. A., gloved, gowned, brisk, and comfortingly bossy, did the preliminary investigations, removing the loincloth that women here use for their periods. With her hand on Kamalakshi's stomach, she delivered the good news.

“Everything is fine, baby is still there. Find her a bed for the night. This baby is impatient to be born.”

Murali said he didn't want his wife to stay overnight, but Dr. A., inflating like a puff adder, said this was not for discussion, it was imperative. Parvati would watch over her, and so would she. Treatment could not be finer.

Murali gave in with the relief of a tired child ordered to bed. His gratitude poured out.

“
Nunni valarey,
valarey nunni
,” Thanks, much, much thanks. He insisted I take his rickshaw home, but even so, it was well past midnight when I arrived. Apart from a faint light coming from my mother's room, the house was cloaked in blue darkness. In the distance, I could hear the hoot of a steamship.

When I crept up the stairs and into Raffie's room and stroked
his hair, I felt puffs of air coming from his mouth onto my hand, and the simple fact of his being alive seemed in that moment to be the most stupendous gift. I kissed him, adjusted his nightshirt, and he, involved in some lip-smacking dream of his own, barely stirred, except to kick out one fat honey-colored leg.

“I love you, Raffie,” I whispered. “I love my boy.”

* * *

I went out like a light after that, until
meesskweet, misssskweet
 . . . Coming up with the greatest reluctance through various levels of sleep, I thought at first I heard birds chirruping and then my name. When I opened my eyes, the predawn light was blue and full of shadows. I heard a jumble of voices in the street and, when I opened my eyes, the rickety sound Raffie makes when he's woken suddenly.

“Miss Kit!” The voice outside was panicked and thin. When I ran to the window, Maya's gray face looked up at me.

“Hurry, Miss Kit, hurry,” she said. “The Home is on fire and I can't find Dr. Annakutty.”I felt perfectly blank with shock as I buttoned my dress and put on my shoes, as if everything around me would break if I didn't remain perfectly calm. I was calm too when I gave Kamalam instructions about Raffie and my mother's breakfast. During my training at Saint Andrew's, we'd had fire drills aplenty and lots of false alarms, but at the Moonstone, there had been no training and no warnings. I should have thought of that.

Outside on the street, Babu from the grocery shop had arrived, unshaven, groggy with sleep, and in his night lunghi. Maya, crouched near the bushes, was crying and pleading and speaking broken sentences that made no sense. She point-blank refused to get into Babu's rickshaw, so we raced, hand in hand, towards the Home.

The street was shadowy and dark, the sky still full of pin-bright stars. When I caught my heel on a broken pavement and fell headlong, Maya jerked me up roughly. “Hurry, Madam, come.”

At the corner of Main and Tower Streets, we came to a skidding halt. It was a terrible shock to see our Home crackling and burning and the sky above it full of a rosy and unstable glow in which black objects floated and swirled.

“Oh my God. Oh my God.” Maya wailed and clutched my arm. She'd tried to reassure me on the way that the fire engines would get there before we did.

I felt myself go cold. We'd tried, before the government inspection, to keep patient numbers down, so we could clean and whitewash the wards, but this was our worst nightmare: we had four patients inside: one woman about to deliver, two for observation, and Murali's wife, possibly with a new baby.

At the gate I was stopped by two young policemen with
lathis
in their hands. “Don't go there,” said one. “You will burn to death.” They weren't exaggerating. From fifty yards away, I could feel the fire's tremendous heat. The flames surged and died and surged again, and when they surged, the small crowd gathered by the gate went “Oooh” and shrank back; one or two of them even laughed as if this were a child's game.

“What are they doing? What are they doing?” I yelled. I could see three or four boys running from the building, putting tables, chairs, a filing cabinet onto a waiting bullock cart. Maya dashed towards them shrieking and came back with her face black with soot.

“Where are the patients?” I yelled to her.

“Two out, two still there,” she shouted back. “They're moving them now. Fire has not touched the back ward.” She sank to her knees and put her head in her hands.

“Where are the fire engines?” I shouted. “Why aren't they here?”

Maya spat a black cinder into her hand and began to sob. “They were here, they went away. They ran out of water. They said they would come back.”

The crowd near the gate was growing. They were watching
smoke pouring from the roof and the porch. When Mr. Namboothiri's lovely yellow and purple sign started to blister and run, someone in the crowd gave a small cheer, and I wanted to punch him.

It was getting lighter now and the flowers, the geraniums we'd planted, stood out in a red haze almost surreally bright in the half-light of dawn. Murali appeared, sobbing with relief. His wife had a three-hour-old baby boy, and they had been rescued. He was taking her home. Then Maya dashed towards me, her big glasses rimmed with soot. She suddenly clapped her hand over her mouth.

“Oh my God, Miss Kit,” she said, “there's one more patient in the dispensary room. I don't know if they got her out, and the firemen have gone.”

“Do the firemen have the key?”

“I have it here,” Maya said. “We must go in.”

* * *

The policemen on the gate let us through, not eager to come with us. As we walked through the smoke, I saw the main part of the roof collapse in a jumble of wooden struts that stood out like ribs against the predawn light. I heard the murmur of the crowd behind us, as Maya and I covered our faces in our shawls and ran down the path towards the dispensary.

The wind changed as we ran, and when the smoke moved towards us, we started to cough. My legs had turned to liquid and my head was shouting, Don't make me do this! I don't want to die! but I was moving forward. When I looked at Maya she was praying.

“In quickly,” Maya shouted, waving the bunch of keys. “Out quickly. We can do it.” When we were less than twenty feet from the dispensary door, two local policemen appeared, one tall, one short, faces covered in the black slime that soot and sweat makes. At first they tried to push us back. They snatched the keys from
Maya. Then we all stopped. A baby was crying inside. A high-pitched wail. Maya started to scream and bang on the door.

The dispensary had been flung up as a temporary dwelling—tin roof, cheap door—to house a few patients while necessary repairs had been done to the main house. Its door had swelled in the last monsoon, and now the tall man was having trouble with it, yelling and kicking and shoving the key fruitlessly from side to side.

Maya grabbed the keys back. Now we could hear a woman's voice, a squeal of fear, and a baby shrieking. Maya swore and wrestled and grunted, trying the key this way and that. No luck.

“You try.” She handed me the keys. My eyes were streaming, my fingers felt swollen and useless. I tried one key after the other, sobbing, swearing, “Come on, you bastard, do it! Do it.”

After a few seconds that felt like a lifetime, I felt the lock swivel, click, give. A gigantic kick from Maya shattered the door and in we went.

The smoke was chokingly thick inside the room. We couldn't see anything at first, we could only blunder in the general direction of a screaming voice, a prolonged coughing fit. The baby had stopped crying. I paused for a moment, hearing the booming crash of the ceiling falling in another part of the building, and after a moment or two of stumbling around, I felt a hand clawing at me. A wild-eyed woman loomed into view, hair loose, face wet with sweat. She was clinging to the bed with one arm, and held the baby in the other. She was shouting over and over in a monotonous wail, “
Ayyoo
daivamey . . . Rekshikkaney
,” cries for help from God that I was familiar with by now.

The baby was screaming again. Maya wrapped her shawl around its purple face and the tiny body, which now lashed out convulsively.

“Get the baby out,” she shouted. “The back, not the front,” where the fire was still raging. The policemen, who had hung back, pushed us through the door that led from the back of the dispensary, over a small strip of concrete, and towards the seven-foot wall
that bounded our property. Glass and barbed wire had been put on top of the wall after the last break-in.

We stood for a moment, all of us, in the flickering red light. Three women, one postpartum and bent double, two men, and the baby, its mouth a dark red hole of protest.

“We can't do it.” I looked up at the wall, the red sky above it, the dark ash spiraling up. “We'll have to run back by the path.” I tried to take the baby, but the mother held her like a vise. Maya, shouting ferociously, wrenched the mother's arms apart and flung the baby in mine, a soft, light, shrieking bundle.

“Go first!” she screamed. “Open the gate, take the baby. God bless you.”

And then the weight of the baby in my arms. So light, so easily disposed of. I remember closing my eyes and the sensation of running. Quickly speeding through my mind: Anto, Raffie, my mother. Amma. Finally, sitting on the ground, the feeling of grit and earth underneath me, pain flaring in my arm, and bells ringing before the lights went out.