Monsoon Summer (39 page)

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CHAPTER 56
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H
e'd lied. The newspapers had pounced on the story with the speed of a dog spying a fillet steak.

“English midwife may be held responsible for new baby deaths” was front-page news in the daily newspaper, the
Malayala Manorama
. The
Hindu
led with a picture of the charred remains of the Moonstone Home. “First arson, now baby slaughter. What next?” was the caption.

When Anto went to work on the following day, his boss, Dr. Sastry, looked grim. The conference organizers were furious that Anto hadn't presented his paper. Their research team would never be asked again. “This won't help matters.” Sastry stabbed at his copy of the
Hindu
. “Soon her name will be connected with yours. How many English midwives are there in Fort Cochin?” The same Dr. Sastry who had been so genuinely kind and welcoming was clearly frightened of contagion, and Anto understood why: research grants could be slashed overnight in the new India.

When Anto asked for three days off, Sastry agreed with bad grace, slamming the door behind him. Anto took a taxi and went at breakneck speed to Mangalath, to see Appan. As the car turned into the drive, he saw a pall of black smoke rising above the house, messing up the clear blue sky with cinders and soot.

“I got up early and burned all the newspapers I could find,” Appan told him in a furious whisper in his study, where the windows were shut. “If your mother sees them, she will die of shame.”

“Those are lies, Appan!” Anto said. “Do I really have to convince you of that? The important thing now is to get her out of jail.”

“All I know,” his father said, pale with rage, “is that up until recently, I have been systematically lied to about the true facts of your wife's occupation, and I find it hard not to blame you for not controlling her better.” Anto said nothing, just stared at his father and shook his head. The final betrayal.

“Are you saying you won't help?” he said at last.

Appan heaved an enormous sigh. “Here are the two possibilities: she could be tried for involuntary manslaughter, which is a serious offense.”

“I've looked it up,” Anto said, “but it doesn't apply: involuntary manslaughter means you have shown a callous disregard for human life, the same thing you might be charged for if you drove a motorcar while drunk or left someone old with a mad dog.”

“So, you're a lawyer now too, are you?” Appan's voice was a slap. “Some midwives are charged with this when things go wrong, but the other possibility is a charge of manslaughter and gross negligence. This could bring up to ten years in jail, if your wife had no license to practice. What was she thinking of?” His eyes bulged with disbelief.

Anto bowed his head.

“So reckless conduct is there too,” Appan continued, tapping one hand impatiently on the desk. “And you want me to put my whole career on the line for this? Well, I won't. All I can do is thank God her name is listed in the papers as Smallwood, not Thekkeden.”

“Well, what a wonderful relief!” Anto sprang to his feet. “As long as we're all right.”

“Who do you think you're talking to?” Anto saw two blue veins bulging in Appan's forehead, the glimpse of back teeth, a sure sign his father was losing his temper, but Anto no longer cared. Let the old bully boy rot in hell.

“I'm talking to you, Appan,” Anto said, “and what I have to say is this: my wife is innocent, but you don't give a damn about that, let's just worry about your reputation and the noble Thekkeden name.” A drop of his sweat fell on his father's blotting paper.

“Leave my house,” Appan said eventually in a quiet voice. “And don't come back if this is how you're going to be. I've spent my whole life in the service of the law. I won't throw it away.” He took a handkerchief from the drawer and mopped his face.

“She's innocent. She was asked to help.”

“Her innocence was dangerous and naive. How many warnings did you need?”

Anto picked up his coat. “I think we should end this conversation here. I won't come back until she's out.”

“Do what you want.” Appan shrugged. “Your mother is my main concern now. She's coming away with me to avoid the scandal. If your wife is charged, I'll tell the family she's gone to Madras to do more studying. That way, we won't have to talk about it.”

“If that's what you want.”

“It's what I want,” his father said, his eyes straight ahead.

Anto closed the door behind him and walked away.

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CHAPTER 57
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I
was tried at the High Court of Travancore-Cochin at Ernakulam at eleven o'clock in the morning of Friday, May 5, 1951. The date and the time are engraved on my mind. My crime: manslaughter for gross professional misconduct. Saraswati, who had expected right up until the last moment to be called as a witness, was not called. The sentence: three months at the Women's Correctional Facility, Viyyur, a prison seventy-four miles north of Fort Cochin. The judge said I was lucky to get off so lightly, that gross professional misconduct was a very serious crime.

Six inches of rain fell on the day my case was heard. From the dock, the whoosh of bicycles going through puddles, windows rattling, puddles forming from dozens of sopping umbrellas near the door, steaming bodies—I remember those details but surprisingly little of what was said. The court had a blue ceiling, wicker chairs. Anto sat staring at me, trying to look encouraging, looking desperate; Saraswati Nair beside him, concentrating fiercely, wincing at the shortcomings of the only lawyer we'd been able to find at such short notice, a Mr. Kurup, a cold-eyed man in a badly fitting shiny suit, who mispronounced my name and spoke so fast I could barely understand a word.

Long before the judge—an old foe of Appan's—sentenced me, I had a swooping feeling that I'd started down the path of my own destruction. When the sentence was read out, I felt light-headed: this was happening to someone else.

When Anto came to see me afterwards in my cell, we agreed that he should tell Raffie that night.

“But I'm not going to tell him for how long.” He tried to smile. “Saraswati says it could be much shorter than that. She says it's a slap on the wrist.” The smile was even less successful this time.

Before he left, I said, “Can you bring Raffie to see me?”

He said, almost curtly, that he'd see what he could do. “It may upset him more.” And that was it. I longed for him to touch me, to say something, but this unbelievable thing had left us both stunned and disconnected.

“So, I'd better go home now,” he said, even though the guard hadn't asked him to.

“Yes, go.” I said. “Give Raffie a kiss from me. Tell him I love him.”

He tried to give me strength then: to tell me he was starting to understand the laws of manslaughter as well as any professional lawyer. That a retrial was inevitable, that it might only be a matter of days and weeks before I was set free. I heard these words as if through a thick pane of glass. He was surely talking about someone else.

And then he did kiss me, our arms and heads in a desperate tangle of love and sorrow.

“I'll be back tomorrow,” he said.

* * *

I was taken in a prison van to Viyyur, a drive of roughly three hours from Fort Cochin, still too shocked to think straight. Before, I'd imagined that Appan with all his powerful friends would pay some fine, pull some string, or that Saraswati with her administrative genius would do something, or even, in my wildest dreams, that Dr. Annakutty would appear and admit that she had asked me to do the deliveries, and we had done them well. Now I felt like the most credulous idiot alive.

I thought about all the unremarkable things I normally did as part of a day's work. Getting up, getting washed, playing with Raf
fie, then housework, the meals, the study, the letter writing, the walks with Anto, all the seemingly unimportant acts that make up a life. All shut down. The Department for Correction owned me now—my body and my time. A terrible thought.

When we stopped south of Thrissur for petrol, the guard in the van put his hand on the diary I kept from time to time. “What are you writing?”

“Nothing,” I said. “A journal.” And then, with as winning a smile as I could muster, “You can read it if you like.”

For the few seconds his hand hovered over the pages, I almost stopped breathing. Then he sniffed, his face contemptuous, and turned away. Why would an important man like him want to read a stupid diary?

“They may take it away in prison,” he warned, when the van had coughed into life and we were moving again. I decided then and there I had to hide it, and hide it carefully. Started on this path of my own destruction, I needed an outlet, and for the time being this would have to be it.

* * *

First sight of the prison: worn earth, tired buildings, barbed wire, birds, blue sky, only the tips of trees.

As we drove down its long central road, the guard threw me a few scraps of information. This was mostly a prison for long-term male prisoners locked up for murder, for robbery, for theft. The women's prison was contained in two blocks: F and E in the center of the jail. There were two factory buildings where the women made baskets and clothes for a small wage every week. There was a prison garden.

When the van stopped, I was led down a long corridor into a tiny windowless room lit by one naked bulb. The cell had a charpoy, a thin pillow like a bolster, a gray regulation blanket with Property of Viyyur Prison on it. A bucket in the corner of the room.

An older man wearing stained overalls appeared with a bowl of water and a cloth. He told me to take my clothes off. He turned off the overhead light and locked the door. When I told him a woman should do this, he shook his head as if he didn't understand me. He didn't look at me as he ran his hands over my thighs, my stomach, my breasts, and finally between my legs. It was very mechanical, thank God; in fact, he treated me with some distaste, a contaminating white woman. He took away my dress and my shoes, and gave me a coarse white sari and a white loose blouse to wear. When I asked if I could keep my diary and a pencil, he rustled officiously through its pages, sniffed, and to my surprise, handed it back to me.

He looked at the wall while I was changing, then told me, in a high staccato voice, that I would stay in this cell for one or two nights and then I would be moved. He told me the cell was the regulation size, “with sufficient breathing air.” The very idea of there being officially recommended air to breathe made the blood fizz in my veins.

* * *

On the next day, a new guard, young and with smallpox scars on his face, came into my cell, handcuffed me, and led me down the corridor and across a square to the women's prison on F block. I stood at the door, blinking and very frightened, as another man drew aside a series of bolts and led me into a large communal cell, about twenty by twenty feet, coir matting on the floor, high, stained walls. A gravy-colored light came from four or five smeared windows set in the roof.

When my eyes adjusted, I saw fifty or so women, some sitting on the floor, one or two vacantly staring, some asleep on thin mattresses on the floor. Most, I found out later, were there for long-term offenses: illegal alcohol making, vagrancy, prostitution, murder. There were three small babies in the room and five girls under ten.

The guard said something about me that I didn't understand but which made some of the women mutter and look suspicious and made me even more nervous about the night ahead.

When he left, a woman with a lopsided gait and her hair cut as short as a GI's, sat down on a mattress opposite me and sneered. I discovered later that this ex-schoolteacher had been one of a group of women rounded up during the riots, taken to the officers' mess, and raped repeatedly. The shame of being raped, and subsequently disowned by her family, had driven her mad. She should never have been there.

As soon as the guard left, the air was full of noise, a parakeet shrieking that shredded the nerves. None of the women spoke English, or if they did, not to me.

It was hot in the room and thick with smells. The madwoman sat staring at me until an older woman with an air of authority touched my arm and led me to a bed on the other side of the room. She held up her finger: Wait! and a few moments later came back with a cup of water for me to drink. She didn't smile when I tried to thank her, but I was grateful nonetheless.

I was hungry, having had almost nothing to eat the day before, but when the gothambu unda, the prison breakfast, a large round dumpling made of wheat—a gritty kind of wheat that smelled old—arrived, I couldn't eat it. I'd imagined, hoped, that after breakfast we'd be given a job to do—factory work, basket weaving—but we all sat for the next two hours, the air soupy and hot. It was impossible to sleep to pass the time, but I lay down on my bed anyway, worried that in this thick fug of perspiring, leaking, coughing bodies, I would catch something and die and never see Anto or Raffie again.

* * *

On my third day there, after breakfast of kanji, a kind of rice gruel made from chaakkari, the lowest-quality rice available, we were lined up and made to march across a concrete yard, where we were taken to a room stacked with baskets. A thin woman with a hard, weary face and few teeth gave me a bundle of prickly reeds and machine-gunned instructions to me in Malayalam. I felt as gorm
less as some of the Moonstone midwives must have felt listening to me. I did my best, but three hours of sitting cross-legged on the floor made my back and hopelessly slow fingers tremble with tiredness. When the toothless one saw my horribly made basket, she held it up and jeered at it and made the other women cackle.

I made baskets for six days, and when, on the seventh, a guard suddenly appeared saying, “Husband is here,” I didn't know whether to cheer or weep. I hadn't slept and had a permanent crick in my back. I felt dirty too. When I asked the guard if I could wash myself first, he snapped, “Full female ablutions are on Friday.” But then he relented and brought me a basin of water and a small pot of sticky black soap.

Anto was sitting in the visitors' room when I walked in, very pale and still. Raffie was there too—a huge mistake. He leapt at me and covered my face in kisses, then lay on the floor and sobbed so hysterically that the guard warned us he would have to leave if he couldn't stop. Anto knelt down beside him.

“The man says we'll have to go if you cry,” he warned. He cradled him in his arms, but the sight of Raffie's brave little face struggling for control broke my heart.

“Mummy smells funny,” Raffie said, when he could speak. When he took his thumb from his mouth and touched the ends of my hair, I could feel his heart jumping in his chest.

Anto, watching us, said, “How on earth did we get here?”

“I don't know,” I replied. What I wanted to say to Anto was I love you, I miss you, I'll be home soon, but I felt so degraded and ashamed, the words wouldn't come out right. Instead I told him it had been a mistake to bring Raffie, and he hissed in a low voice, “You're not living with him.”

Raffie wriggled off my lap and sat on the floor in the gloomy light.

“You're a very good boy, darling,” I said. “I'll be home as soon as I can.”

When he started to cry again, Anto said I looked pale and had lost weight. He was worried about me. I told him about the basket making, trying to make him smile, then I asked him to bring a Malayalam dictionary the next time he came.

“It won't be for much longer, you do know that?” He cupped my face in his hands.

I looked at him properly for the first time since his arrival. “I'm sorry I told you off about Raffie,” I whispered. “Is he sleeping?”

“Not much . . . don't worry . . . not really,” he said after a pause. “He misses you.”

“Can't Amma have him for a day or two?”

“No. She's . . . Appan's taken her on a holiday.”

“Really?” This sounded so unlikely. Amma was as much a fixture at Mangalath as the rocks or the trees, but there was no time to explain, and not much else to say that didn't feel either trivial or freighted with unsaid things. The rhythms of our lives together had changed already: no more laughs, no shared conversations, no tasks to do together, no teasing, just this shared humiliation.

“Saraswati and I are sure we can get you out soon,” he said before he left. “I'll tell you more next time.” He stared at me intently. “You're not alone,” he said. “You're not alone,” he repeated. “Do you believe that?”

I nodded numbly. When he hugged me, I wanted to imprint every part of him on me: his chest, his arms, the lemony woody smell of him, but later that night, sleepless and boiling hot in my cot, I felt a desert growing inside me. We had very little money left now after the bad lawyer, and little support, I suspected, inside the prison, so what realistically could he do?