Monsoon Summer (40 page)

CHAPTER 58

A
t the end of my second week, I woke to find the ex-schoolteacher with the gray crew cut rhythmically pummeling my face, her yellow teeth bared. It was early morning; I was half-asleep. Two guards, hearing my yells, rushed in and dragged her away, but not before she'd kicked me hard in the head. When I woke next, I was lying in the prison hospital, a large Nissen hut on the edge of the exercise yard. There was a nauseating pain in my temple, and my mouth and right cheek felt bruised.

Coming round was like swimming to the surface of a scummy lake, full of the dirty rubbish in my head. When I looked up, Saraswati Nair staring down became, for a few weird moments, part of my dream, like déjà vu in reverse. Her face was still and unsmiling.

“Is Raffie all right?” I said. My spit tasted of copper.

“Don't worry.” She knelt down beside me. “Kamalam and Anto are taking good care of him. Now listen carefully”—Saraswati's glasses were painfully bright—“because I have only ten minutes to talk to you; this is important.”

She brought her face close to mine and spoke slowly and distinctly. “There will be a retrial. I have more than one hundred and eighty-three signatures on a petition from Moonstone patients. I am visiting government offices, twisting arms. I am insisting they call me as a witness next time; the trial was a grave miscarriage of justice. Are you listening to me?”

“Thank you, Saraswati,” I said feebly, sure she was making it up.

“What kind of talk is thank you?” she said fiercely.

“I shouldn't have done it . . .” I wanted her to stop my head from banging, to take her bright glasses away.

“Listen,” she hissed, moving her face an inch or so closer. “You have your husband on the warpath, also the many lion-hearted women in our community, and I am roaring with them. Don't forget this either: you never lied to Dr. Annakutty about your qualifications. She passed you as competent, but don't waste your breath on that, what we need now is money.”

“We don't have it,” I told her. “Anto spent all our savings on the lawyer, much good he did us. I wish I could have had you, Saraswati.”

“I would have blown the case to smithereens,” she admitted modestly. “But back to the money: your family is wealthy, let them pay.”

“They won't pay.”

“Won't pay?” She could hardly contain her frustration.

“Won't bribe—not all Indians are corruptible, you know.” Ignoring this sad joke attempt, she jerked back her cuff and looked at the man's wristwatch she wore.

“I have five minutes left, and it's important you understand this is not a good time to be an Englishwoman in prison: that madwoman may strike again.” She broke off suddenly. “What's this?” She grabbed my right hand and stared at it in horror. It was crisscrossed with dried blood and small cuts.

“It's the reeds.” I felt ashamed, like a child beggar parading her leg irons. “We do basket weaving, for the magnificent sum of one rupee a week.”

“Those stupids. What a waste!” Saraswati smacked the side of her head, looked around her. “I'm going to talk to the doctor in charge.” She flounced out of the room and came back with a middle-­aged man with a set smile, baggy exhausted eyes, and a stethoscope around his neck.

“Dr. Zaheer,” she said, “is the chief physician here.” They talked over my head for a while, Saraswati translating. “He says the prison
and the hospital are overflowing. He's never known it so busy. They have a tent in the garden to deal with the extra patients; medical supplies are running out.” She broke off for another fusillade of words.

“Show him your hands. I'm asking him if that is a way to treat a state-registered nurse. Where did you train? Saint Thomas', where Florence Nightingale worked, am I mistaken? No. One of the finest hospitals in England. Correct?”

“It's certainly . . .”

“Now I'm telling him that you have safely delivered many children.” I was shaking my head before she finished.

“Saraswati, stop! Stop! Stop! Please! Tell him exactly why I'm here.” My lip still felt enormous, as if I were talking through an inner tube. “No false pretenses.”

As she jabbered away for a while more, I saw a faint light dawn in the doctor's tired eyes. He ran his hands over a bristling chin and talked without drawing breath for several minutes.

“So here's the thing,” Saraswati said. “He wants you to understand this facility here once had a very high reputation; he wants it to be like that again. I told him that was exactly how we felt about the Moonstone, that we were very proud of it, that we were doing everything we could to make it work. Sometimes we cut corners, not because we were stupid or cruel, but because we've had to, and this time we paid the price. You in particular.”

“That's nice,” I said wearily, not feeling anything but pain in my head, my mouth. When I woke up again, she was gone.

* * *

It turned out that Dr. Zaheer spoke excellent English.

“Miss Smallwood,” he asked me four days later, with the same slightly unnerving set smile. “Do you have a certificate of nursing qualifications. Yes or no?”

“Yes, from Saint Thomas', it was just the midwifery I hadn't quite—”

“That's all I need to know.” He got out a pad and started to write
busily. “I'm signing you off for three days' convalescence; after that I want you to report here every morning at six thirty. We are badly in need of more help with the women's clinic, general ­gynecological problems, plus several deliveries a month. I will clear it with the governor. Your basket-making days are over.” This time the smile made it to his eyes, and I tried to smile, but it hurt too much, and anyway, I saw that if I proved too useful, I could just possibly get stuck in another kind of trap.

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CHAPTER 59
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C
linic hours at the prison hospital were from eight to twelve in the morning. Nobody stuck to them. Our stream of patients came with every imaginable complaint from boils to stomach upsets to secondary syphilis to broken bones. On my first week there, I treated one woman for vaginal tears that had been the result of a violent rape. Dr. Zaheer told me pointedly that she had been assaulted twice: this time by a prison guard, who had been severely punished, the time before that by a British soldier, on the week before Independence. Whether this was true or not, I had no idea.

Dr. Zaheer, whose mirthless smile looked more like a death's-head grimace every day, said the facility was close to collapse. Our main ward held twenty people comfortably, but we often had twice that number, making it hard to move between the beds.

But I respected this conscientious man, doing his best in difficult conditions. He was nice enough to me—even complimenting me on my stitching of the vaginal tear, an hour-long job—but he made it crystal clear I had no choice about being here, particularly as two local nurses were off sick. He also insisted I speak to the patients in Malayalam. “That's our state language, is it not?” he asked me sarcastically.

After a month I could speak whole sentences without having to think about them, not necessarily phrases you might use in polite society—“Have you tried to strangle yourself before?” “How many
men have you lain with?”—but it pleased me to be able to speak more fluently.

The ward nurse, a good-looking, hard-faced woman called Kali, was, I was pretty sure of it, sleeping with Dr. Zaheer, a kind of droit de signeur arrangement that was not uncommon in Indian hospitals—another reason, I imagined, why the Thekkedens found my profession so distasteful.

When I stumbled on them once in the dispensary, they sprang apart, and afterwards, when I didn't understand her instructions, she widened her eyes in fury, like the wicked witch in a panto.

In my third week there, when one of the new prisoners came in almost fully dilated, I was ordered to help a local midwife, Chinna, who came to the hospital whenever she was needed. With no time for formal introductions, we rushed the shrieking woman into a side ward and performed what Sister Tutor would have called a textbook vaginal delivery together. Thanks to the Moonstone, I understood all the words, and we were a good team, and when the baby shot out, Chinna gave me a sort of thumbs-up look which meant “good, competent.” That poor baby would spend most of its life in captivity, as the mother was in for the murder of a bullying mother-in-law and was lucky, Dr. Zaheer told me, to avoid being lynched in her village.

By the time I got back to F block, I'd been gone for almost ten hours and I was dizzy with exhaustion. When the guard appeared and told me I had a visitor in the reception area, I felt nothing but frustration.

* * *

Anto couldn't hide his shock when he saw me.

“Are you eating?” He grabbed my hand. “You've lost so much weight. What are they giving you to eat?”

I told him that the nursing food was miles better than the ordi
nary prisoner's diet. That there were dosas in the morning, and fresh fruit, but I was never very hungry in the morning.

“Kit.” When Anto ran his thumb gently along my hand, a guard leapt forward; they're always on red alert for “immoral acts” during visiting hours. “Please eat breakfast.”

I didn't answer. I was trying to work out whether I should tell him then and there my suspicions about other possible reasons for my paleness. On the days leading up to my sentencing, we'd made love several times with the kind of desperate intensity that reminded me of our early days at Wickam Farm, and now I'd been sick for two mornings in a row and my breasts were tender. I'd put my three-week-late period down to anxiety, hoping this was so. I couldn't think of a worse time or place to celebrate a possible new life. I didn't want to raise his hopes either, so instead, I asked for news of Raffie.

“Sad,” said Anto at last. I could see him processing this thought, trying to find a way of answering this without lying to me, which is one thing I'd always loved about him: how he tried to tell me the truth, however hard.

“He misses you.”

“Still not sleeping?”

“Not brilliantly.” Anto gave a long shuddering sigh.

“Any help from Amma?”

“Not yet.” When he looked up, I saw purplish black circles under his eyes. “She's still away with Appan, but don't worry, Saraswati and I are full steam ahead, it won't be long, I promise you that.”

“What frightens me now,” I said, “is I may have become too useful. They're desperately short of staff.”

I blurted this out without thinking, my mind on the pregnancy test I would insist on tomorrow. When I saw the look of anguish in his eyes, I wanted to grab the useless woman I'd become by the shoulders and say, Don't say those things to him! Don't add to
the misery of the one person in the world who really needs your support.

A long silence fell between us, Anto with his head resting in his hands.

“How is your work going?” I asked him. An inane question.

“Not bad,” he said. “I got my paper in.”

“Any news about the promotion?”

He looked up. “Didn't get it.”

This was definitely my fault. Before my conviction, Dr. Sastry had said it was a certainty.

“Any point in saying I'm sorry?”

“No, there's always another train.”

“You don't need another train, you need another wife.”

He tried a grimacing smile. His dark hair flopped over his forehead. I pushed it back.

To fill another silence, I told him I'd helped with two deliveries in the prison hospital.

“Good for your confidence, but do you trust them?” he said.

“Yes . . . no . . . I don't know. Dr. Zaheer is a good man, I don't think he'll twist it. I've asked him if these deliveries can be used for me to get my final certificate.”

“But you're still not covered.”

“I am. I've insisted they put it in writing that I wasn't the principal midwife. He's told me he'll write to the Royal College of Midwives and get them to rubber-stamp it.”

Anto didn't look convinced, and neither was I entirely, but I knew I had to trust Zaheer or go mad with anxiety. Anto opened his mouth to say something else when the bell rang, heart-attack loud; keys were officiously rattled, guards shouted. Visiting hour was over.

“The best thing about being married,” he'd once told me, “is you don't have to finish conversations on street corners.” Now we did, and when I tried to piece our words together later, they seemed
fragile and slippery, and I wished in a way I'd told him about our possible baby, the promise of something new, because when he stood up, I saw I'd aged him. He looked stiff, and there was a sprinkling of gray hairs I hadn't noticed before. He touched the side of my face very gently.

“I love you,” he said. “Don't forget that ever.” I reminded myself to smile, feeling as empty as the sky.

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CHAPTER 60
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H
e'd had enough, Anto decided, as he exited through the prison gates. Two days later, after a quick trip to Mangalath and some detective work with the servants, he arrived, shortly before lunch, at the Crown Hotel in Madras. His father was attending a conference there on the new constitution. At the gate, which was guarded by two uniformed lackeys, he stopped, confused: the hotel—dusky-pink walls, tiled courtyards, blossom-scented garden—was an unusually lavish choice for his normally frugal father.

He was shown to a room overlooking the garden, where he took a bath and dressed himself carefully and slowly for the showdown he knew must follow. At the front desk, the clerk, a smiling, obsequious fellow in a cherry-red uniform with braided shoulders, said Mr. Thekkeden, “a very great man,” was out every day, but he would almost certainly find his mother in the garden, where she usually sat in the afternoon.

When he saw his mother from a distance, his heart clenched. She was sitting under a mimosa tree on a green bench, a small and lonely-looking speck, so deep in thought she didn't look up until he sat down beside her.

“What are you doing here?” She sprang to her feet when she saw him. “What's wrong?”

“Amma,” he said, kneeling beside her and taking both of her hands in his, “I need to talk to you.”

“Are you sick?”

He'd hoped for a grace period to ease her into this: an exchange of pleasantries, a mental taking of her pulse, but she had led him immediately to the point of no return, and he told her fast, “Amma, we've been lying to you for months and months and months, and I can't do it anymore. Kit's not studying, she's been in Viyyur prison for nearly six weeks now.”

Her brown eyes widened. “Is this a joke?”

“No.” Telling brought no relief, only the shock of it again.

“For what?”

“Manslaughter. A trumped-up charge, for the delivery of a baby that died.” No point in fudging it now. “The full details I can tell you later.”

“Oh my God! Don't tell me the details!” Her face wrinkled with disgust. “I knew this would happen.”

He looked at her and shook his head. “If you could see your face now, you would know why we lie to you.”

She jerked as if he'd slapped her. “Who lies to me?” she almost shouted. “Who else knows?”

“It's been in the papers.”

“What papers?”

“You didn't see them, Appan's orders, but I'm telling you now because you're the one person who can really help me with Raffie. He's having a horrible time.”

“I knew something was wrong,” she said angrily. “I tried to discuss it many times with Appan. I said, ‘I think his marriage is on the rocks.' He said, ‘How many times must I repeat this: she's away studying. They are a modern couple doing things the modern way,' and now, nice to know everyone was laughing at me.”

“My marriage isn't on the rocks,” he said, staring vacantly at the terraces of the perfectly manicured garden around him: the orange trees, the mimosa, the rioting bougainvillea, underneath which gardeners had placed, with the precision of artists, dollops of horse manure. “But I need your help.” He pushed a mimosa blossom with his foot.

She shielded her face against the sun and stared at him. “Isn't Appan helping?”

“He can't or won't, and this is the point of no return for me, because I'm sick of protecting the family name at all costs.”

“Antokutty,” she cried, her eyes pleading. “Don't say these things to me. It breaks my heart. I nearly died on the day they sent you away.”

“I'm not talking about us, Amma. I'm talking about my wife, my family.”

“When you were little, we spent every moment we could together. I've never loved another person as much.”

“I'm a grown-up, Ma. I spent a lot of time alone.”

“So what can I do now?”

“I need help with Raffie; he's all over the place. I need money for a decent lawyer . . . Oh God, I hate this . . .”

“So give me time!” She put her hand on his arm. “I will think of something. I don't want to lose you again.”