Monsoon Summer (14 page)

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CHAPTER 17
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A
nto sat beside me in a pool of sunlight, freshly shaved, smelling faintly of limes, ridiculously handsome in his smart linen interview suit.

We were colleagues again, that's how it felt: friends, with unfolding but richly connected adventures ahead of us. In a voice low enough to exclude our driver, Anto apologized for what he thought had been his overbearing manner in the last few days and said he was feeling his way here too. I said I was sorry too, for being a drip and for crying, when it wasn't just the bat-in-the-net incident that had so thrown me but the general strangeness of everything.

We laughed like young lovers again, silly and inclined to laugh at anything, as he made a bat face and we held hands surreptitiously in the back of the car.

“This place is paradise.” I watched a flock of parakeets fly over soft green fields, towards the floating water, and up into the huge blue sky.

“I can't wait to show you everything,” he said. He put his cheek close to mine and said in a low voice that Amma hadn't turned a hair at the thought of my visiting the Home.

“Visiting? Is that how she thinks of it? Does she know it's a job?”

“With Amma, the drip-drip approach is best,” was his unsatisfactory answer. “She'll know when the time is ripe. Look, look!” He pointed towards a blurred green horizon. “That's where the tea plantations are. When I was eight my father took me there on my
own for a special treat. We stayed at a beautiful rest house in the Cardamom Hills. Down there”—he pointed south—“is Trivandrum; that's where the monsoon arrives. You'll never see anything like it in your life: first this massive cloud, then this roar. It comes over the horizon like a wild animal. Makes you feel so small, makes English rain look like the dribble from a tap.”

Oh Lord, he was sweet lit up like that: eager and boyish, longing to show me things, and his excitement was infectious. As we drove through the landscape of inlets and coves and bays and backwaters, we laughed like children at the adventures ahead.

On the outskirts of the city, birdsong and lapping water gave way to the mad jumbled music of streets. An old woman with a skeletal baby approached us at the traffic light and put one wrinkled palm through the window. The baby's face was covered in flies and dried snot. Anto felt my shudder as our car sped off.

“Those are the people you'll meet at the Moonstone,” he said quietly. “No disgrace if you decide it's too much.”

I forced myself to sound confident. “I'm actually sort of . . . really looking forward to it, I mean . . . obviously, well . . . I'm a bit on edge about it but—” Aware I wasn't making a good case for myself, I turned to him. “You must be nervous too?”

He gave an incredulous huff but didn't answer directly. “For you, there's no shame in giving up. It's different for me.” He squeezed my hand. “And I'm only saying this because I love you.”

The answers I could make to this odd declaration of love were to me so baffling and contradictory that I remained silent. It wasn't just Daisy who made me want to do this job, it was more twisted and deeper than that. My failure of nerve that night at Saint Thomas', my cack-handedness, haunted me. If I didn't have the motor skills and the kind of quick thinking it took to be a midwife, I still wanted to use some of my training to be useful again.

I knew too that much as I appreciated the peace and timeless
beauty of Mangalath—the long unhurried meals, the gently padding feet, the exploding sunsets, all of it—my motor (forward, quick, now!) was set at a different speed, and it was clear to me already that I could never be an Indian wife if that meant being the kind of smiling, docile presence I saw in, say, Mariamma or Amma.

“I can't go back on my promise to Daisy,” was the easiest way of explaining it. I had to shut up then or be sick, as our driver, Chandy, swashbuckled his way through a mass of pedestrians, ancient trucks, gharries, donkeys, and alongside us a hand-pulled rickshaw carrying a woman with three tiny children in her arms. I saw the hem of her sari flirting with the wheels, sparks flying, babies wriggling, and couldn't bear to look.

* * *

“It can't be!” were my first words when we arrived at the Moonstone ten minutes later. We'd parked on the edge of a crumbling pavement. The Home, once the offices of a spice merchant, or so Daisy had told me, was a tumbled-down pagoda-shaped slum. I saw a dangerously sagging roof with missing tiles. The mess of electric wires that bulged from the roof and crossed the street looked like a bad hernia. A skinny dog flopped in the bare front garden, exhausted.

Anto looked at the piece of paper again and reeled off a question in Malayalam to the driver, who shrugged and pointed at the house.

“This is it,” he informed me curtly. “The Moonstone. Now listen, Kit. Please.” Anto clutched my arm. “I can't come in—I'll miss my appointment—but promise me you won't leave the Home until I pick you up. I'm not sure yet when that will be—I'll come as quickly as I can. Promise; you must promise.”

“That's fine, Anto,” I said. “I understand. I promise. Good luck.” And to show how perfectly all right I was, I gave him a cheery wave as he drove away.

* * *

And truthfully, I didn't want him there as I walked towards the house. The shock felt easier to absorb alone. There were goats in the garden munching at overgrown weeds, a rusted bicycle, a sign
oonstone
hanging from a dusty palm tree.

To be fair to Daisy, she had described it as “modest but serviceable,” but I'd foolishly imagined it pink-bricked and full of light (an image supplied by an old India print in the lav at Wickam), not a worn-looking shack. I was walking down the path when a slight figure on the veranda stood up and waved me towards her.

“I'm Kit Smallwood,” I said when I reached her. I'd decided to use my maiden name to save the family embarrassment. “I'm from the Oxford charity.”

“We've been waiting for you,” she said in a shy whisper. She wore a medic's coat and had a broom in her hand. “I am receptionist.” She led me through a beaded curtain into the dim recesses of the waiting room inside. Its cracked floor was painted in red oxide; walls covered in a selection of flyblown posters showing pictures of various bloodthirsty-looking gods and goddesses. Propped up on an artist's easel was a crudely drawn cardboard sign that read, in English, “Happy Birthday, Healthy Mother, Healthy Baby at the Matha Maria Moonstone Baby Clinic, Fort Cochin.” Matha meant mother in Malayalam.

On low benches around the wall, ten or so local women in various stages of pregnancy sat with an air of weary resignation, surrounded by children, grandmothers, mothers. All talk ceased when I walked in, feeling large and conspicuous and white.

“I've come to speak to Neeta Chacko,” I said to the girl. She stared at me for a moment, then shook her head vigorously and pointed towards a door with a cardboard sign on it: Dr. Annakutty.

“Neeta Chacko is not here,” she said.

“Are you sure? I think she is waiting for me.”

“No.” Gently, firmly. “She's not here, definitely. She has another job now.”

From behind a tatty door at the end of the room, two voices were clearly audible: one a hectoring machine gun, the other soft and sad and submissive, then the rat-tat-tat again. The thin girl, listening intently, tiptoed to the door, opened it an inch or two to say I'd arrived, listened to a hail of words, then shut the door quickly with the air of one crating a dangerous animal.

“Dr. Annakutty very, very busy today,” the girl told me. “She says you must wait. Sorry, madam.” She grimaced.

So much for Daisy's “Darling, they will welcome you with open arms.” I waited for over an hour, cushioned on either side by pregnant women, whom I examined furtively. Looking down, I saw cheap leather sandals, one or two held together by string; one had garnished her careworn toes with a silver ring. I saw one woman unwrap a picnic for her child that consisted of minute quantities of rice and vegetables wrapped in a leaf.

But what struck me most after the war and the grayness of London was their colorful clothes, their beautifully kept hair. To use one of my mother's favorite (often furious) phrases, they'd made an effort.

The girl on my left wore a flame-colored sarong-type garment with a tight short blouse, her eyes carefully made up with kohl, a flower in her hair. Poor as poor but her own work of art. The girl beside her, who looked no more than thirteen, was heavily pregnant and had huge purple rings under her eyes. Her pallor suggested anemia, but her hair was plaited as carefully as a show pony's, and she displayed book-on-head posture that Mother (why did I keep thinking of her?) would have applauded.

It was hard not to compare these women with the slovenly, exhausted women we saw in London. Their gray aprons, the scuffed shoes, the threadbare underwear.

But, I mentally slapped myself, no romanticizing. Anto had
warned me of that and so had Daisy. To fall into the trap of pink-light thinking would be fatal for me now.

I sat, I listened (padding feet, low voices, the grizzled cry of a newborn in some distant room), and started to panic as a stained clock on the wall ticked to ten thirty, eleven, eleven thirty. My hours of precious freedom were being gobbled up and I was still not called.

Hearing my impatient sigh, the woman on my left turned and smiled at me, and if a smile could pat your arm and massage your neck and give you something soothing to eat, she'd smiled it.

I was a sweating heap of frustration when Dr. Annakutty finally appeared, wearing a white doctor's coat, a stethoscope around her neck. She was a heavy-shouldered mannish woman with a short neck. “I can see you now,” she said.

She lowered her head and scowled—the first Indian woman to give me the evil eye. “Follow me,” she said curtly.

I followed her large, wobbling bottom through the waiting room, down a curry-smelling corridor, and into a dim office cum storeroom.

“Hello,” I said heartily, when she'd closed the door behind us. “I'm Kit Smallwood,” and then, like a twit, “Daisy sends greetings.” Very Dr. Livingstone.

“I can't shake your hand until I've washed mine,” she said, making me feel like a contaminant when she was probably simply being hygienic. That was my problem already: trying to judge each situation on so many different levels and according to rules I didn't understand.

Her office was tiny: no fan, no outside window, and the floor blocked by the three large packing cases, the same ones Daisy and I had packed up so carefully in Wickam, what felt like a lifetime ago.

She switched on a naked bulb, then sat behind the desk looking at me and breathing deeply. A big woman, with a big pockmarked nose, a big frown, and a big presence. You wouldn't want to put her back up, and it seemed I already had.

At first she spoke so fast it was like being lashed with hailstones, and I could pick out only the odd phrase: C
losed down, too late, not happy.

“
I'm sorry,” I said, overwhelmed by this avalanche. “I can't . . . could . . . would you slow down, please?” And then, rather ridiculously, “Has something gone wrong?” More pellets.

“I—am—sorry—too.” She spaced her words now as if to a complete imbecile. “Because we have a catalog of woes.

“First,”—she held out a stout finger—“when Independence came we were given many prior promises from your Oxford ladies that they would not pull out as quickly as the British pulled out of India. Then we heard nothing, not for months, then this comes.” She pointed towards the packing cases. “And I am given orders, from England, that I cannot open a single box until you come.”

Her eyes bulged with fury. “So we are left like dogs with the food up on a shelf: we can see supplies, we cannot get them. And the new government is telling us to cut our ties with you, so what to do? Close this place down, which has taken us years of work to build? Tell the women to go home and to their village midwives and take their chances? You're here now, you tell me.”

Daisy had warned me to “expect a few dicey moments,” but being told a thing and feeling it are very different, and in that stuffy room (where this woman had clearly overestimated my importance), I was getting my first inkling that this woman saw our fund not as the Bank of Toy Town but as a necessary and compromising evil. I was its condescending representative: a white maharani, determined to keep hold of the purse strings in the new India.

“Why isn't Daisy Barker with you?” she asked suddenly. “She is the one I must speak to.” I explained she had urgent business at home; it was impossible for her to come.

“Who are you?”

“I'm an English state-registered nurse, trained at Saint Thomas' Hospital in London.”

“You have midwifery qualifications?” She sniffed and looked at me.

“Not quite. I've done my part ones and most of my part twos, barring a few deliveries at Saint Andrew's in London.” Flunked one, my guilty heart added. “But I do plan to stay here, and I would like to work with you, Dr. Annakutty.” (Was this even true now I'd met her?)

When I stumbled on her name, she snapped. “Call me Dr. A. I don't have time for the other.”

Her chin made a bristly sound as she rubbed it. She tapped her fingers on the desk.

“What we need most is money to run this place. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, I do.” Rude bitch. She was starting to put
my
back up.

“If we give you a job, it will be for creating funds and for writing reports.” Dr. A.'s important nose quivered. “Nursing will come when I have assessed you. If you want to help now,” she added, “open the boxes. We have almost nothing left.”

“Of course,” I said sweetly. “Happy to help, but first, may I ask if Neeta Chacko is here? I think Miss Barker thought—she said she—”