Monsoon Summer (20 page)

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CHAPTER 27
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A
nto wrote this morning to say his old tutor at Exeter College has recommended him for a yearlong research project at the Holy Family Hospital in Kacheripady. “It sounds,” he wrote, “almost too good to be true, so only dare to be cautiously optimistic. But how wonderful it would be if it happened.”

I burst into tears when I got the letter. At last, what sounded like the perfect job for him, and I was missing him badly: my days were crammed with activity, but nights at Rose Street got long and lonesome. I wrote straight back, happier than I'd felt in weeks, and with an edited version of events in our midwife classes.

We'd had such a funny morning when Maya announced, “Today, we're going to have our first Mother Moonstone baby. Who will be mother?”

Rosamma levered her considerable bulk on the floor, lay on her back, rolled her eyes, and groaned like an injured calf.

Maya chose Kartyani, a frowning, dark-skinned girl, to be midwife. So far she'd refused to join in with any group, and yesterday when I tried to persuade her, she'd said angrily, “My head is bursting with new information. It is not helping me.” Maya thought she was simply homesick. Sister Patricia said she was dim.

Maya ignored Kartyani's scowl. “Our patient is having her first baby. She's been in labor now for fourteen hours, nothing is happening.” From the floor Rosamma rolled her eyes convincingly and
clutched her belly. “
Owwwwwwww
. Oh dear. No baby comes.” The class tittered.

“What will you do now to progress the baby?”

“I don't know,” Kartyani said sulkily, and shook her head.

“Hurry up,” Rosamma commanded from the floor. “I am paining badly.”

In a mutinous drone, Kartyani began. “First, I would go to her house.”

“Of course.” Rosamma was irritated by this glimpse of the obvious.

“I would loosen her hair and her bangles,” Kartyani said in the same unwilling monotone. “I would open all her cupboards and doors.”

Maya peered up at me through her big specs. “This is psychologically helpful to a woman: it opens everything up.”

“Then this.” Kartyani sank to her knees and rubbed her hands expertly around the rim of Rosamma's belly.

“What is she saying?” I asked. Rosamma was rolling her eyes lasciviously, shimmying her shoulders.

“That I can't translate.” Maya was blushing. “Too crude.” Even Kartyani couldn't resist a faint smile at this.

Before the lesson ended,
pop!
Rosamma produced a plastic baby from the folds of her sari, and everybody cheered except Kartyani, who ran out of the room.

“She is not happy here,” Maya whispered in the corridor later. “She says the teaching is too Western, and that she doesn't want to share her own secrets with us or with low-caste village people. I think she is a spy from the government.” She laughed to show me she was joking, but it wouldn't have surprised me.

* * *

I wrote to Daisy about what happened next but left it out of my letter to Anto.

Kartyani refused to leave her room. She reiterated that her head
was bursting with all this new information, that she wanted to go home.

“Stay there then,
mundi
stupid idiot,” Dr. A. barked at her. “
Nee orikkalum nannavilla
, you will never improve.”

“Write that down,” Maya instructed me. “It's a good insult.”

Kartyani missed that afternoon's lively debate on menstruation and contraception. Shanta, a sprightly young woman who had delivered umpteen babies, stood up and said, in her shy, piping voice, “I will share my knowledge with you. Monthly bleeding was originally given to the man, but God found it was too hard for the man, so he gave it to a woman.”

“Do you all think this?” Maya asked the other women. They bobbed their heads in the yes-no Indian gesture.

“How you behave with your monthlies will depend on what caste you are in,” said Subadra, noticing my confusion. “A Brahman woman must stay apart from her family during this time, wash many times, and not meet with her husband. She cannot take part in celebrations.”

“A Dalit, an untouchable, will go about life as usual.”

“In our family, we are very careful not to stop the period,” Shanta piped up, unwilling to relinquish the floor. “If you do, you could become poisoned and lose your sight.”

Maya listened patiently. “So now I am going to show you what really happens,” she said. She opened the cupboard and took out a three-foot-high wall chart of the naked woman Daisy and I had christened Vera.

Vera's fallopian tubes, womb, and major arteries were clearly marked in red; stomach, heart, liver, and kidneys in blue. Her face was concentrated and thoughtful, as if it was hard work keeping all this complicated machinery going.

“Is this an Englishwoman?” Kartyani said at last, as if this might explain Vera's elaborate plumbing.

“No,” Maya said. “This is what we are all like inside.”

“No, we're not,” Kartyani contradicted immediately. “I have seen other drawings done by ayurvedic doctors, and there are many, many more blood vessels.”

One or two of the midwives looked defiantly towards me as if I were the snake oil salesman here. When Maya took off her glasses and polished them, I could see that her eyes still had dark-purple bags under them. She worked far too hard. She took a deep breath and began her menstruation talk. She was five miutes into it when I looked up and saw Dr. A. standing at the door. She was beckoning me towards her.

* * *

It was the wrong end of a hot, exhausting day. I was longing for home, a bath, an early supper, and to finish my letter to Anto. But Dr. A.'s gesture was insistent, excited.

In the corridor she whispered in a quick cinnamon-scented blast, “We have a patient, Laksmi, in labor. Maya is busy; Sister Patricia's gone home.”

I assumed I was to assist her. Laksmi, with her slender child's body and her history of miscarriage, was anything but a straightforward case. Admitted to the Home the week before, very anxious, she had had a show of blood. Her husband was a local policeman.

“She asked for you this morning,” Dr. A. whispered as we sped down the corridor. “She said she wanted the English doctor lady to do the delivery.”

I stopped aghast. “But I'm not a doctor.”

“I am not the one saying it.” Dr. A. handed me a starched white doctor coat with a bland stare. “And neither are you. But Laksmi needs a good delivery this time. With this we can make her confident.” She put a stethoscope around my neck, patted me on the back. “Don't look so frightened.”

I should have said no. Instead, I buttoned the coat with shak
ing hands and walked towards the delivery room on rubber legs. I could already hear Laksmi's weak cries coming from behind the door.

Anto once told me he believed everything we were was the result of what we had thought, so I knew that in one sense I had led myself down this corridor and towards this test. Half of me had wanted it all along. I knew too that if this was a normal vaginal delivery, I had the skills to do it. After all, firemen and panicked husbands had managed in the past. C sections were very rare here.

“Maya will be finished with the class soon,” Dr. A. said, at the door. “She'll come and take over.”

“So, I'll call if there are any complications,” I said, in what I hoped was a calm voice. But she was already walking down the corridor.

“Yes,” she said when she reached the end.

* * *

The first thing I saw was Laksmi's small feet sticking out from the sheet, clenching and unclenching in pain. When her head reared up, I remembered her better: a small, undernourished woman, a two-inch scar from a burn on her right cheek. I recalled that she suffered from anemia, which was not unusual amongst the local women. Please God, don't let her start bleeding again.

Her mother—a wizened woman dressed in a widow's white sari—sat beside her, fanning her with the neem leaves thought to keep the angry spirits at bay. Then Subadra walked in.

“Dr. A. sent for me,” she said. “I know this girl and speak her dialect.”

Subadra took a damp flannel from the table and wiped Laksmi's forehead, which was filmed with sweat. The girl's eyes fixed on mine, and with a desperate expression, she poured out words. “She is very afraid,” one of the nurses said. “She thanks God you have come.”

“Tell her I am glad to be here,” I said, trying for a confident voice. “I'm going to have a look now, to see how her baby is.”

* * *

When I rolled back the sheet, her taut belly was covered in gray ash.

“Don't touch it,” Subadra said quickly. “Ash is put there for a boy.” Another gush of words from the girl made the mother nod vigorously.

“She says she will kill herself this time if she doesn't have boy. She has conceived”—she shot an extra question at the girl, got a tearful confirmation—“six times in the past eight years, only two children survived. She says if she has another girl, her mother-in-law will take it away and harm it.”

The girl moved her eyes from Subadra to me like someone watching a tennis match. Tears poured down her face; another fusillade of words.

Subadra murmured a string of the words Maya had taught me. “
Saramilla pottey ellam sheriyakum, njaan illay.
It's all right, let go, don't worry, everything will be OK.” But the girl was crying again.

Subadra wrung out the flannel and sponged the girl's face and arms.

“She says she should have taken a drink of hot chilies, killed the fetus and herself before coming here. She knows it will be another girl.”

The girl let out a groan like that of a tree before it loosens from the earth and crashes to the ground. The tight brown dome of her tummy strained, and I could see the clearly defined shape of a baby's foot kicking out.

“Can you stop her crying?” I was terrified of hurting her. “Get her to breathe evenly?”

After the internal exam, I estimated she was two fingers dilated. If all went well, the baby would be born in a matter of hours.

By five past six, a buzz of insects were whirling around the light,
and beyond the barred window, the sky was growing dark. I could hear rickshaw wheels turning, a tea vendor yelling
chaya
,
chaya
, but the outside world felt distant and unimportant. What I most felt was the gathering of energy and concentration inside this small room, the glug, glug, glug of my own heart thumping.

Twenty minutes later when I examined Laksmi, my hand felt steadier, my head less swimmy. She was nearly three inches dilated, and her contractions, every eight minutes or so, lasted forty to sixty seconds. I mentally revised her delivery time to seven, seven thirty.

At eight fifteen, some rackety music struck up in the street outside. A dog barked somewhere. Subadra left the room and came back with food from a village stall: some pappadams and lime pickle, some spiced buttermilk, and a roll of banana leaves to use as plates. She washed her hands ostentatiously and, after a sneaky look at me, ate in the corner of the room near the sink. Maya, who'd spent yesterday morning on hygiene at the point of delivery, would have had kittens at this, but Maya had gone home, and I was so grateful for Subadra's presence, I said nothing.

I was aware of the vast stupidity of underestimating Subadra. Subadra knew how this girl talked and how she thought; the community she lived in, what she ate, who beat whom, who drank.

When darkness fell quickly outside, Laksmi's breathing between contractions became more relaxed and she seemed to sleep. Subadra put her fingers around the girl's birdlike ankle and, with her eyebrows waggling, said that this girl's mother-in-law was a very hard-hearted lady: she'd starved her of food.

“Why?” I was scandalized.

“She lost too many babies,” Subadra replied. She waved an index finger from left to right. “They thought the evil spirits were there.”

My old matron from St. Thomas' appeared in my mind again, wagging her finger. “Never ever gossip about patients in their presence.” Here it seemed par for the course.

“She's slow,” Subadra looked down at the girl, who was stirring
again, and whose brow was now corrugated and sweaty. “I would like baby here soon. This will bring it on.”

From her sari she produced a small bottle filled with an inky blue liquid.

“No! No, no.” I leapt forward. “You can't do that.”

In a brief flash I pictured the headlines:
Local Girl Poisoned by English Midwife,
and was wrestling the bottle out of her hand when Dr. A. stepped into the room so quickly I wondered if she'd been there all along. She looked shattered, and her normally neat gray plait was all mussed up.

She took the bottle from my hand. “This is good.” She sniffed it with her voluminous nose. “It's castor oil, gherkin root, cumin, and other things. We use it.” This surprised me: she'd told me earlier that the Brits had banned the use of local ayurvedic medicines and that she'd agreed with this.

She shuffled out, saying in a sleepy voice that she'd be in her office if we needed her. When she was gone, the girl's mother got down on her knees and began to pray.

“She's saying ‘Mother Goddess, please give us a boy,'” Subadra said. “Not long now.”

I knelt beside the girl, who was now having three or four contractions every ten minutes. At last she gave a hoarse cry, the muscles on her forehead corded; the baby's head started to crown.

“It's coming, Laksmi,” I said. “Hooray!”

Subadra smoothed oil between her hands and rubbed the girl's tummy in deft, gentle strokes, first clockwise, then counterclockwise, and finally, more firmly, down the side of her waist.

When I examined Laksmi again, she was fully dilated and had the intense look of concentration I'd seen on other mothers at this stage of their labor.