Sail Upon the Land (35 page)

When she woke at four in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, she conjured all kinds of possibilities to test her own ability to bear them. She imagined that Leeta never had another child. That her glamorous arranged marriage didn’t work out or the ideal husband found out about her past. There was so much that could go wrong. You couldn’t just leave a living chunk of your life behind and move on all fresh and washed clean, could you? Not without damage.

By giving her own infant away, Damson had hoped to eliminate that dark and dirty tumble in the straw from her mind and life. But it didn’t work like that. It clung about you like a smell and affected all that you did and were.

She hoped Leeta was stronger than her. That leaving her baby with someone so closely related, even if relatively unknown, would work a magical charm on her psyche. That she might grieve without knowing it, but that the comfort would be there so that the existence of Hari did not distort her life. Damson had set up a password-protected image account online where she uploaded pictures of Hari that Leeta could access if she wanted. A small part of her didn’t want to share him, but the better Damson knew that she must and sent the login details to Leeta’s private email address.

Even if Leeta did change her mind, Damson knew that her own life was transformed. There was the faintest tinge of guilt that she and not his real mother should be having this joy, but there was nothing to be done about that. When he had finished his bottle, she lifted him up and sniffed his nappy. Nothing, just a little damp.

The rickety rack train with its angled wooden carriages slowed down. They must be approaching Hunters’ Halt by now. She strapped Hari back on to her chest and unpopped his cradle, attaching it to her rucksack and putting everything away. She stood up and pulled the window down, reaching for the door handle standing sideways to avoid squashing Hari.

Hunters’ Halt was deserted, the ticket office shut up with a rusty padlock. It looked as if no one had used the station for years. She stepped down, trying to remember what it had been like last time. Caroline had been there of course, complaining as usual.

She got her bearings and set off down the forest track that was the only visible path away from the station and led solely to the Vhilaki Guest House. Vegetation had narrowed it and she didn’t think a Jeep could get through easily now, there was certainly no trace of tyre tracks. She set off, swinging along the path over a thick carpet of fallen leaves with Hari lying against her breast. She could hear birds but little else, and stopped from time to time to rest, propping Hari on convenient perches like tree trunks and rocks to ease the weight. She was glad she was still fit.

At the bottom of the path was the gate with the guardhouse beside it. When she had last been here, a guard armed with a
lathi
sat on the little verandah, drinking
chai
and smoking a
bidi
. But there was no one there now. She went on up the drive, seeing the Guest House off to one side looking dilapidated. It hadn’t been pristine when she was last there, but it now looked like an abandoned farm building with at least one broken window. It was quiet, and she began to feel uneasy, wondering what she had brought herself and her little boy into.

Everything was very overgrown, and she realised that she had no sense there were any horses. She glanced over to the stable block. The big door was half open and she went over and pushed against it.

Even the smell of the horses was gone. Sunlight fought its way through dirty, cobwebbed windows. She couldn’t remember exactly which stall Ronny had led her into. She wandered slowly between them. Nothing was left, not even straw on the floor or traces of the meagre feed rations which was all the skinny horses were ever given. She didn’t want to be there and walked rapidly out through the door, leaving it open behind her.

She turned left and went up the main drive towards the Hunting Lodge itself, an incongruous red brick Tudorbethan pile in the middle of the jungle. Ronny had told her that it was built by one of his great-grandfathers to entertain British and Indian grandees for a spot of
shikar
up in the hills, and maybe a few
nautch
girls, champagne and revelry, well away from the
memsahibs
. She remembered laughing at the time. An enormous peepal tree had heaved the bricks apart and one corner of the house was becoming detached.

The front door was closed. Maybe it was less painful to find it deserted. What else had she expected, after all? It meant she would have to hang around for a few hours until the rack train slowly creaked down and stopped at her request around four o’clock. She and Hari could while away the time wandering in the woods, bird watching, eating a picnic and resting in the shade.

Had everyone gone? There was no way of finding out what had happened up here, but she assumed it was too remote now to be viable. That no one like Ronny had emerged who wanted to live in shabby semi-feudal splendour in the middle of nowhere in the twenty-first century.

She tried the door, turning the cast-iron ring with both hands and pushing. To her surprise it gave and she found herself in the baronial hall with chequerboard tiled floor across which drifted dried leaves.

As she stood looking around in the dimness, she heard a very faint sound and tensed. Where had it come from?

She ventured across the hall floor her arms wrapped around Hari’s warm little body and pushed open the door to one of the reception rooms. The sound became louder and she identified it as gasping breaths. She could also smell vomit.

‘Is anybody there?’

She moved over to the window where heavy velvet curtains were open a crack, and pulled them back, looking round the room to see where the sounds came from. Whoever the sufferer was, they didn’t sound in a fit state to mount an attack.

Beached on a chaise longue in one corner was a mountainous man. His hand waved feebly at her and dropped back, his eyes were half shut and his mouth slightly open. She hurried over, dodging the pool of vomit on the floor beside him, her doctor’s instincts kicking in. She noted that the man was elderly and a dreadful cheesy colour under the natural tan of his skin, his body a great collapsed heap against the worn cushions.

She backed away from him, popped up Hari’s cradle and laid him inside, zipping it up to keep him safe. Reassuring him, she went straight back to the man.

‘What’s happened here? Do you know what’s wrong with you?’

He muttered and groaned but could not articulate. ‘I’m a doctor,’ she said. ‘I can examine you and perform some first aid, and then we must get you to hospital. Is the telephone connected? If not I might be able to get a signal on my mobile.’

He didn’t answer. She opened her medical emergency bag and took out the stethoscope, noting that his heartbeat was very rapid. His face, although pale, looked symmetrical.

There were several possibilities for this kind of collapse, but a faint memory stirred and she asked, ‘Are you diabetic?’

The man’s head rolled but he seemed to be nodding. Could it be? There really was only one person it could be. All power and prosperity, that had fuelled Ronny’s disregard for the rules of post-Independence India, were gone. The house was grubbier than ever and much more neglected. It was pitiful to see the devastation that time had wrought on Ronny’s once fine and muscular body, the flesh sagging off in great folds. He was dreadfully dehydrated. When she pressed her thumb into his arm it left a thumb-shaped pit. She thanked providence that she’d brought so much disinfectant gel with her to protect Hari, and she moved the baby’s cradle further away.

She didn’t have time to sterilise water from the taps, so she gave him
nimbu paani
from her thermos which he tried to gulp down. She had to ration it to stop him choking. Hari gurgled and she marveled at his patience. She could see him through the netting reaching for his bare toes.

The man managed to drink two cups over about fifteen minutes before she was able to stop. She stepped back and looked down at him.

She’d no idea what Ronny had been thinking more than twenty years ago when she’d arrived with Caroline – probably nothing very coherent. Perhaps he’d spotted the cracks in her confidence and separated her from Caroline like a leopard cutting out an antelope from the herd. Maybe it had just been a whim to woo her because he liked well-educated English girls, and they were thin on the ground at the Vhilaki Guest House – but then things had got out of hand. One thing she was sure of, she’d said no and meant it. Now he was helpless. She could just walk away and leave him lying there – the perfect revenge for a ruined life. Except that she couldn’t and wouldn’t. She was a doctor and her life wasn’t ruined at all.

She turned away, her eyes filling with tears. It might not be a ruined life, but what would it have been like if she’d left with Caroline and dodged her fate? A husband and family of her own? Self-pity darkened her thoughts.

Like the sun coming up, the reality of Leeta and Hari pushed aside the darkness in her mind. She remembered Ronny carrying her through the warm night and into this house. Not locking her into a room, just leaving. She even remembered him saying ‘Sorry’. Sorry didn’t really cover it.

Whatever had happened then, right now Ronny was in need of her skills.

She bent down close to him and asked: ‘Do you have a proper insulin kit, and if so where is it?’ His sunken eyes opened slightly and rolled towards the door. ‘Upstairs?’ she asked. He nodded.

She took Hari out of his cradle and tucked him under her arm, running out of the room and up the staircase. She’d never been into his bedroom of course, but imagined it would be at the front of the house. She tried various doors off the well-remembered corridor lined with trophies and found many of them locked. Then she saw one slightly ajar and made for it. Inside the room smelt badgery and looked neglected. The mahogany four-poster had a grubby-looking mosquito net draped over it and the sheets were grey and half off the mattress. This must be it. She glanced around the room, spotting what she needed on the bedside table. A red nylon zip-up case lay open, alcohol swab sachets and testing strips scattered on the floor and the bed. She was relieved to see he had a digital blood glucose metre, as well as pen-style syringes full of insulin.

He must’ve been struck with weakness while downstairs. Risky to live alone in a remote place but perhaps he was so used to his diabetes that he thought he could handle it. It can’t have been more than twenty-four hours since it’d started or he’d very likely be dead. He was lucky she’d arrived in time to reverse what was probably diabetic ketoacidosis or something similar. The symptoms were all there including the faint whiff of pear drops on his breath. She knew that confusion often led patients to misread the signals of onrushing disaster.

The presence of his kit could only help her diagnosis, and she gathered it all together with one hand and ran back down the stairs.

With Hari back in his cradle, she put on gloves and wiped Ronny’s hands with a swab before pricking his fingertip to add drop of blood to a test strip and read the results on his metre. As she had suspected, his blood glucose reading was high. She injected him with insulin. After a few minutes, while she monitored his return to full consciousness, she found herself cradling his grizzled head in her arm and encouraging him to take more sips of
nimbu paani
. First aid to begin with, then she’d telephone the hospital and get him cleaned up. A little colour was coming back into his face. She waited until his breathing was settled and he appeared more comfortable, and then she said:

‘You’re Ronny Viphur, aren’t you?

‘Yes indeed and who are you?’

‘I’m a doctor. I was passing and decided to come and visit the old place. Oh, you wouldn’t remember me. I was just some girl who stayed here years ago.’ She sighed and then said. ‘Do you think the telephone is working?’

‘I don’t know.’

His eyes began to close again. He was not acting particularly rationally and she worried that there was some other underlying issue. She picked up Hari again and hurried in search of a phone. She had her Indian mobile phone but in such a remote place a signal would be a lucky chance. She found an old black telephone with a corkscrew cord and lifted the receiver. No tone.

She switched on the mobile and began to walk about. She was relieved to find a single bar of signal in the hall which increased to four bars as she went up the stairs.

She went back to him.

‘We need to get you to a hospital. I’ve found a signal, who should I call?’

He was drifting again. She shook his shoulder and he looked at her bewildered, then seemed to come to and said. ‘Try 108 or 112. Same as English 999.’

‘I am sorry,’ he said. Just for one mad second she thought he had recognised her and remembered.

‘For the mess.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll clean that up while we wait for the paramedics.’

She was connected with remarkable speed to the emergency doctor at the hospital in Rikipur. She told her that she was with Ronny Viphur at the Vhilaki Hunting Lodge and described his condition. The doctor explained there was no road for an ambulance to get to isolated dwellings in the forest. Only an all-terrain motorbike could manage it, with two paramedics to carry Ronny to the rack train that set off back down the mountain at four o’clock.

Before describing the history as far as she knew it and probable diagnosis to the doctor, she mentioned that Ronny was very large and heavy, and to carry him on a stretcher all the way to the station would take two strong men.

The doctor said she would send such men, and agreed that she didn’t think Ronny was now in any immediate danger, although he would probably need intravenous rehydration. Damson explained that she would make him as comfortable as she could, and the other doctor told her to ring back at any time, and that the bike would be on its way soon.