Monsoon Summer (32 page)

I felt a flush of heat race through my body. “You know I don't, Dr. Annakutty. I am a fully qualified nurse but two deliveries shy of the full midwifery qualifications. I told you that on the first day I was here. You told me that when the time had come, you'd ask the government for full accreditation. I should have asked for that. I didn't. But why, if I didn't have it, did
you
let
me
deliver babies?”

She gave me her basilisk stare. I may as well not have spoken.

“I have no record of it.” She opened the leather accounts book and shook her head regretfully. “I took you on in good faith. I'm not saying they will check you, but they might: the gorement now are very fussy about the correct paperwork.”

“This is not fair,” I said, “and you know it.”

“Which is why,” she sailed on, “I tried to suggest earlier that
money from Daisy Barker would be a better way than trying to get money out of a gorement already squeezed. Do you understand that?”

I did.
Blackmail
: ugly word, ugly feeling.

* * *

I was down by the harbor half an hour later, sitting on the seawall by myself, absorbing the shock of all this, when Maya sat down beside me. She placed at her feet the small canvas bag that usually held her lunch tiffin and gave me a sideways conciliatory look as if she wanted to make up.

“What did she say?” she asked. Her eyes darted nervously over my shoulder.

“I think I'm in trouble, Maya,” I said. “But I don't really want to talk about it.” I wanted to tell her about the scrap of my blue dress they said they'd found and the petrol. I wanted to tell her about the boy in the park, but I didn't know who to trust now or what to say.

“Dr. Annakutty doesn't always put things well into words,” she said at last. “But she has no family supporting her, and no children. She's given up everything for this, and she is a fine doctor.”

“I know.” I was almost too low to speak.

“You should see the home she lives in.” Maya peered at me.

“I doubt I will.”

“I liked working with you,” she added softly. “You were a good nurse. We learned a lot.” The past tense saddened me more than I could say.

“So you think it will close too?”

“Yes.” Maya scrabbled in her bag. “Sorry.” She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.

When I thought of what it had cost Maya to work at the Moonstone—the nights spent studying under streetlamps in Madras, the cramped dormitories, the terrible food, the beatings from her husband, her bravery at riding it out—my right foot kicked out in frus
tration and sent Maya's bag flying. A roll of bandages unfurled and a jar of Germolene cream shattered in the dirt.

“Don't do that,” I said. She was kneeling in the dirt, trying to scoop some of the cream onto a shard of glass. “I've got some at home. I'll give you a new jar.”

“Don't worry, ma'am.” Maya carefully wrapped the piece of glass in her handkerchief. “I can use this too. It's for my aunt. She's hurt her foot.”

“I'll bring it tomorrow,” I said. “Don't cut yourself.”

“I won't be here,” she said. “I'm coming next week, for the cleanup.” This was something we'd all agreed to do before the meeting broke up.

“What will you do after that?” I asked.

“I don't know.” She glanced at me. “Stay home with husband,” came the bleak reply. “He doesn't want me to work again. He'll be glad.”

As I watched her small, upright figure walk towards the ferry that would take her home, I wanted to scream. I can't presume to understand the thoughts in her head, but I knew they would run along the lines of all this being part of God's plan for her, her punishment even for getting above herself, or for sins committed in a past life.

I admired the stoicism. I hated it too: the meek surrender of all that training and hope and energy. She was a fine midwife; India needed her. Why did it have to be so hard?

-
CHAPTER 43
-

O
n the day of the cleanup, I kissed Raffie good-bye and told Kamalam what to give him for his lunch. I was about to leave for the Moonstone when my mother, after a prolonged cough and an “Oh blast!” said, “Have you thought any more about what I told you?”

“About what?”

“About Ooty?” My mother clung to the veranda railings and took several shuddering breaths. She had dizzy spells now.

“Oh, Glory,” I said. “Isn't it all too much?” The very thought of Ooty made me go blank with terror.

“I just thought it might be a nice break for you, darling,” she said sunnily. “You've had a perfectly horrid time here recently and it's nice and cool up there.”

After work, I took Raffie out in his pram and continued a bitter conversation with her in my head. Oh, a nice break indeed, meeting a father I had never ever seen, who'd been successfully buried by my mother till now. A lovely little hols, tracking him down and filling the black hole of his absence with what? Shock? Embarrassment? Remorse? Or something worse and more damaging: bitter, bilious rage at how he's successfully ignored us for years and years and years?

But another part of me had also leapt into life at the thought of meeting him, and as I walked, I ran a film of him in my head. He was wearing a tweed jacket, tall, distinguished, a kind smile. He was my twin, only older and a man. He was hugging me, saying father things,
My God, my little girl
.
My darling, after all these years
. Crying at the waste of us; hugging Raffie too, the grandson he never knew he had.

When Raffie's bellows interrupted this train of thought, I took him out of his pram and cuddled him. He was teething again and unusually miserable and demanding. Any normal grandfather would hand him right back. That's what I said to myself, trying to make things normal again. I put Raffie on my knee, grateful for the solid reality of his plump little body, now patting me on the lips, then wriggling to be let go, and I thought, This is my life now, and if I met my father and it all went wrong, it would set the cap on one of the worst months of my life. And yet . . . and yet . . .

All these thoughts were spiraling and somersaulting in my head when someone ran up behind me and made me jump.

“Miss Kit. Miss Kit.” It was Neeta Chacko, breathless and agitated.

“Please, I beg you to help me. They have caught my boy Pavitran. They have taken him to the police station and beaten him severely there, and now he is in the jail on Tower Road. They came to our house this morning.”

“Neeta!” She'd seemed so petrified the last time I saw her, I'd assumed her plan was to scuttle back into hiding. Now she was gray with fear and trembling.

“What did he do?”

“They say he torched the Home. I know he didn't. They are definitely making him a scarecrow.”

“A scarecrow?”

“A scapegoat.”

She looked on the point of collapse. I led her to a bench and we sat down together. Raffie, worn out with teething problems, fell asleep in his pram.

Neeta resumed her story. “Husband says to leave my son there, but if we do, he will die. He is a harmless boy who loves his animals, his family.”

“Who says he did it?”

Neeta shook her head violently; she either couldn't or didn't want to say.

“I know he didn't do it, Miss Kit.”

She was crying properly now, and in between gasps and sighs, the whole story tumbled out. She said she knew he didn't do it because the boy had had one of his spells that week, and they always left him very weak.

“What do you mean by spells?” I asked her.

Glancing around her, she said the dread word, “Epilepsy,” a condition I knew from Maya was sometimes mistaken here for possession by evil spirits.

“My husband tied him to the bed afterwards. I didn't want him to do this, but he says we must and I obeyed him.”

Neeta looked at me then and put both hands together in prayer. “Please help me, Madam. I have no one else to go to, and I need money to get him out of the prison. I'll pay you back. I'll go away again after that.”

I looked at her, and then at Raffie, who was stirring again. I opened my bag and collected the few rupees I had there.

“This is all I've got,” I said, handing them to her. “I'll ask my husband later, when he comes home. We'll do what we can, but we're not rich people.”

She snatched at my handful of notes. “I'm going there now,” she said. “If you come with me, it would help. They will see an Englishwoman and be ashamed of their wickedness.”

I doubted this very much, and seeing I was under suspicion, I didn't want to go. But after dropping Raffie off at home, I tagged along with her.

* * *

The jail on Tower Street was a twenty-minute walk from our house, a large gray two-storied building with barred windows and
crumbling plaster. Looking up from the rubbish-strewn garden in front of it, I saw the glint of eyes peering down at me from behind barred windows. The reception area, a dungeon of a room, was lit by a naked bulb. It was hot and stank of urine.

A large, frowning man was sitting in a kind of cage to the left of the entrance. I saw Neeta disappear into the cage, heard her sobs and pleading. Five minutes or so later she came out again, ashen-faced but with a shaky smile.

“It's done,” she said. She patted her empty purse. “It was mistaken identity.” Or maybe, she admitted later, his illness frightened them.

I heard footsteps disappear down a dark corridor, the clank of a door, a man shouting. When Pavitran came out, unshaven and blinking, he flung himself at his mother and hugged her hard, mumbling and crying. He was so happy, and so was she. When he looked up I saw he had a swollen eye, and a small cut over his right eye, but otherwise seemed fine. Neeta said he had had another epileptic seizure in jail: his trousers were wet in front and he looked bewildered.

During the interminable paperwork and rubber stamping that followed, the boy looked on placidly like a large, well-trained domestic animal and held his mother's hand. Two hours after we had arrived, we were in the streets again in the merciless flat light of midday. Neeta beamed and told me, “God is good.” I was not so sure. She told me never to tell anyone what I had witnessed that morning in the jail.

* * *

But I did tell Anto that night about Neeta's son and my worries about Dr. A. and her vague threats to me. It did not go well.

“I don't want you to go back to that place when it opens again,” he said. “It's too dangerous. If you won't do it for me, do it for Raffie's sake.”

“I don't want to stay away,” I said. “I can just see you abandoning your work at the first sign of trouble.”

“I'm not talking about me. You're my wife.”

He didn't even bother to keep his voice down, as on and on the argument raged, and we were back where we were at Trivandrum during the monsoon, like two angry strangers who had collided in a freak accident.

“Do one thing for me, if not for you,” he said, holding my hand when we had both calmed down. “Take a holiday with your mother. Go and see your father. You know that's what you want to do, really, and if you don't, you may regret it forever.”

“A holiday!” I said. “Hardly.” His words had made me feel instantly tearful, and I didn't want to cry. “It's true I do think about him, a lot.” I was childishly grateful for his hand in mine. “But what if it's not true? What if he's not there?”

Anto stroked my hair. “I think it's genuine: Amma told me Glory had hysterics when you were taken to the hospital. She thought you'd died.”

“She didn't tell me that.”

“Well, she wouldn't, would she?” he said. “She's Glory, but what if she's changed? What if she really wants to do this for you?”

I hadn't properly considered this. I'd thought for so long that my job was to protect her.

-
CHAPTER 44
-

S
eptember 27, 1950.

I marked the date we left for Ooty in my diary, thinking if we did find him, I'd want to remember it, and then I wrote, “Fat Hope”
and underlined it twice, just to keep myself straight.

“So, darling, off we go,” my mother said brightly, as we stood on the platform at Mettapalayam waiting for the seven-ten train: the same words she'd spoken with the same upward inflection at the beginning of so many trips, to so many jobs when I was young, as if to light the touch paper on some splendid adventure.

And the usual fudging about any difficulties involved, because Ootacamund turned out to be much farther away from Cochin than Glory had said. It had begun with a bone-crunching, boiling eight-hour drive to Mettupalayam to catch the Nilgiri Blue Mountain train. When we got to the station, Glory, wheezing and pale, sat with her head in her hands in the ladies' waiting room, looking so ill my heart began to thump.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked. “We could just go home.”

“Don't be stupid.” She gave me one of her famously frosty looks. “We've bought our tickets; we have to go.”

Our bright-blue train was tiny and narrow, like a toy train, with uncomfortably upright seats, but as we rose higher and higher, often at an agonizingly slow crawl, my mother seemed to revive. When she began to gasp out facts and figures about the sixteen tunnels
we'd pass through, the nineteen bridges we'd cross, I remembered the endless games of I Spy we'd once played to distract me from friends I was leaving behind, or a cat I'd loved, a house, another fading scene.

It was stifling hot in our carriage; if you put your cheek against the window it stuck and burned. When she stopped talking suddenly and fell asleep, the journey took on a nightmarish quality for me: the darkness of the tunnels, the heat, my mother's gargling cough, the screech and cries of the train, lurching views into the steep ravines. Everything was unstable and chaotic and hot as hell.

When we stopped for refreshments at a tiny hillside station, I had to wake her. I felt a clutch of my heart looking down at her; she looked so dangerously breakable, all sharp angles and delicate surfaces. Her hands clasped her handbag for dear life.

On the station platform, almost buried in misty trees, we were served fruitcake and tea by a winsome turbaned man who called out to her, “Hello, Mrs. Shakespeare,” which made us laugh. I was hungry enough to eat one of the curries another merchant offered, but Glory begged me not too. “They're riddled with germs.”

“I don't think they are, Mamji,” I said to her, using my facetious name for her. “I find many Indians are fastidiously clean, far cleaner than the Brits.”

Back on the train again, she became more and more silent and more and more fidgety as the train rose higher and higher. She took her purse out of her bag and counted all the coins very slowly. She lit a cigarette and stubbed it out. She strained to look through the window out on the hills where a light rain was falling on a coffee plantation, so green it looked as if it were underwater. She looked at her shoes and examined them from several angles. After the silence had stretched to about an hour, I took her hand.

“All right, Mummy?”

“Fine,” she said, in an echo of her brave young voice. “This is rather fun, isn't it?” I thought about this for a while, not daring to speak. Had she really said
fun
?

The train shrieked through another of its sixteen tunnels, and when it came out I said, “So . . . will you tell me more about him before I meet him?” as gently as I could. If there was to be an emotional outburst, I hoped for both our sakes it would be in private.

In the dark tunnel my mother's face flickered, went out. “You'll have to ask him yourself,” she said. “It was such a very long time ago.”

I could feel my veins go watery with alarm. I should never have come. More tea was served, this time on the train, delicious.

“Orange pekoe,” the chai seller told us proudly. “Special from here.”

“Your scar has healed nicely, darling,” my mother said, looking at my arm. “That was a very nasty do, wasn't it?”

She sipped her tea.

“You know, I've been thinking, and forgive me but”—she placed her cup elegantly on her saucer—“if the subject of your job comes up between you and your father, it might be cleverer to say you don't work.”

“Cleverer?”

“Wiser. Better.” Her tone implied she was talking to a halfwit.

“Why?”

“Do I really have to spell it out? If he's got any money, he—”

“Oh, Glory! For God's sake, no.” I was angry again. “Is that why we're here?”

“Shush.” She looked around the carriage. In her world, there were spies everywhere. The old man sleeping opposite did not stir, and our other companions, a peaceful-looking Indian family, carried on handing out oily-looking snacks to each other.

“Don't be ridiculous,” she said, “of course that's not why we're here, but there's something else I must say too. Now don't get angry, it has to be said that he will probably be put off by what you do. Birthing native women, it's all very new. I've had to”—she brushed a crumb off her chest—“to like it or lump it, but other people,”
she finished more firmly, “might see it differently. It will come as a shock to him.”

So we start with a lie, I thought bitterly, but did not say it. Another suspicion had grown during her speech. Had she even told him I was coming?

“Absolutely,” she said, when I asked her. “All the arrangements have been made, so don't go on about it now, darling.” Her lips had started to crumble. “This is not easy for me either, you know.”

We were nearly there. I hardly dared talk now, so full up with a feeling I could neither name nor understand. Fear and longing, fury, a kind of breathless anticipation, a homesickness for something I'd never had. Through the carriage window, I saw plumes of mist hugging the trees, peaceful green fields that shimmered and disappeared.

“Look.” My mother raised a feeble hand at the church spire that suddenly appeared, an artificial lake, a row of bungalows, all misted in a faint drizzle. “Snooty Ooty,” Anto had joked, “frightfully like parts of Surrey.”

A uniformed conductor ran through the train. “Ootacamund, Ootacamund. Train stops here.”

“Don't rush off.” Glory closed her eyes and panted lightly. “I'm a little bit breathless. I hope the old lungs can take this altitude.”