Monsoon Summer (25 page)

“Are any of your family members coming in?” I asked when she was two fingers dilated.

“No.” Her mouth turned down. “My family don't speak to me now.”

“Why not?”

Mrs. Nair had begun to pant softly, like a marathon runner who knows there could be miles and miles ahead. I relaxed a little; she was a good patient.

“They are very traditional high-caste, so many rules . . .” She wiped her face with a towel. “Before my daughter was born, I had to stay with my mother-in-law for three months. Very boring, and I was not allowed out after dark. After the baby was born, I had to stay in for forty days. My parents-in-law wanted many grandchildren, so the whole thing would have taken up months and years of my life and made it impossible for me to work.”

“My husband and I have both broken with the past,” she continued after a pause. “We made our own wedding, and he supported all my law studies. Law is my language now,” she added fiercely, and then after a wince, “and this is my last baby.”

By eleven twenty-five Mrs. Nair, who at thirty-nine was an ancient mother by Indian standards, was still not in active labor. She lay on the bed, eyes wide open, looking pale and sweaty. After missing breakfast, I was starting to feel light-headed myself, and for one spiraling, panicky moment, my mind emptied as if I knew nothing, before I pulled myself together. I made myself breathe and wait.

“How is it going?” Maya poked her head around the door.

“Slow,” I whispered. “Contractions every ten to twelve minutes, lasting about fifty seconds. When will Dr. A. will be back?”

“Don't know. Do you want food? Your face is pale.”

“No, thanks, not hungry. A glass of water.”

But Maya sent a nurse for a tiffin anyway. “I'll sit with her for ten minutes,” she said, “if you need to rest.”

It felt too early to tell Maya or anyone at the Home that I might be having a baby too, but she was looking anxiously at me.

“It's very hot in here. Nurse, a fan,” Maya snapped at Anusha. Like Dr. A., Maya didn't waste her charm on underlings. “More towels too.”

I took a short break. When I got back, Mrs. Nair was crouched beside the bed, head resting on her arms, howling like a dog.

“A word, please,” Maya said curtly. We'd moved towards the end
of the bed out of earshot. “The baby has turned. I have a mother and daughter in the class,” she whispered. “Name of Charu and Ammini. They are very experienced in massage. I'm going to get them.”

When the door closed, I turned to Mrs. Nair, held her damp hand, and heard my own heart beating.

“How are you feeling?”

“Horrible,” she gasped. “Worse than last time.”

“So, listen.” My heart was flipping around in my chest. “Everything is going to be all right, but your baby's bottom will come out first, unless we try to turn it.” I blew out a couple of puffs of air.

When Charu and Ammini came silently into the room, they put the palms of their hands together, bowed low, scrubbed up at the sink, and moved, without panic, towards Mrs. Nair, now rolling her eyes in agony. They poured coconut oil into the palms of their hands and I watched in awe as they performed their massage with the confidence of two pianists who had duetted together for years. It was a beautiful thing to see, but after a while, Mrs. Nair pushed their hands away.

“I must leave the bed.” Her mouth was a rictus of pain.

When we'd helped her out, she got down on her knees and began to hug herself and howl.

“Try not to do that,” I told her, peeling her arms away from her side. “Keep your tummy open.” It was an instruction I'd learned from the Moonstone midwives. She gave me a look of ferocious dislike and was sick all over the floor.

“Check we have enough sterilized implements in the autoclave,” I told Maya a few moments later.

When Mrs. Nair was half lying on the bed again, breathing in short, anguished gasps, I saw Charu give the baby one last beefy shove, and joy of joys, I could feel through her tummy the knobs of a spinal cord. The baby had turned itself like an eel in a basket.

Less than twenty minutes later, Mrs. Nair gave a guttural cry. Her legs began to tremble.

“You're doing wonderfully, Saraswati.” I rubbed her legs.

“
Ippo varum
—you good girl, almost there,” Maya assured her.

She closed her eyes; I thought she was going to give up, then came a string of words that sounded like desperate pleas to the gods she said she'd abandoned. It was the longest three or four moments of my life before she started to push again violently.

“Slow it down,” Maya told her. “Hold for a moment and then push.” A few seconds later: “
Tulleh umm! Tulleh onnum! Loodi ippo varum!
Push once more, about to come!”

After three more contractions, the baby's head appeared, then nose, shoulders, a tiny hand, a perfect baby boy with a shock of black hair.

I suctioned the baby's mouth, felt around his neck for the umbilical cord, and cut it, and then, because the baby wasn't crying, Maya held him up by both heels and slapped him briskly on the bottom and he bawled. It was a beautiful sound that made everybody laugh, and then he was anointed with gold and honey. Maya said if he'd been born in his Brahman home, a lemon would have been tossed out the window.

Mrs. Nair lay in an ecstasy of exhaustion on the bed, her baby's naked breast on hers. “My boy, my baby,” she crooned.

* * *

It was late by the time I left the Moonstone. I was charged with energy: I had delivered a perfectly formed baby in difficult circumstances, and I was having a baby myself!

But my legs felt leaden and achy when I started to walk, so I took a shortcut home, through the iron gate that led into the English Club, and out onto Saint Francis Street. The guards who sat near the gate usually let me through with a quiet, “Good night, madam,” but there was no one there tonight, and it looked deserted inside the gardens, the shadows lengthening.

In the tufty grass at the edge of the once-manicured lawn, I saw
a pile of rusted croquet hoops, an old wooden tennis racquet press, and a faded cap. Some of the veranda's rails had been chopped down, presumably for firewood. A mournful sight, like a still life for summer's end, except I wasn't feeling mournful at all. I was in a semi-ecstatic mood, thinking of the new baby, feeling a part of the abundant trees springing from the earth around me, all manner of trees—the palms, the banyan, the Indian bean tree with its fat waxy flowers—thinking how beautiful this country was and how much had changed in my life.

When I reached the clubhouse, I sat down on a bench in front of it, wanting to savor the moment. It was then that I felt the light changing behind me, the sound of an opening door.

“Madam.” The boy with the thin mustache who had called me Mrs. Queen when I'd bought sweets for Anto the other morning stood over me. I gazed up at skinny thighs in wrinkled trousers, a smiling face with cool calculating eyes.

“Don't be frightened,” he said when he saw me jump. “I've been waiting for your return.” He handed me the light muslin scarf I often wore to protect my head from the heat. “You dropped it this morning.” He smiled as I took it. I wasn't too alarmed; I'd grown used to being tracked in India. Only the week before I'd been cashing a check at the bank when a voice behind me barked, “Wrong date, madam.” A funny story saved for Daisy, but not now.

“How very kind,” I said to the boy in what Anto calls my toff voice. “Thank you so much.” I put the scarf in my handbag and got up to walk away.

“Do you walk here often, missus?” His sandals clattered down the steps behind me.

“No,” I said walking a little faster. “My husband is an Indian man. He's very strict.”

“That's good.” He fell into step beside me, shot me a glance. “You are too pretty lady to walk on your own. Please don't run, I only want to talk to you.”

“My husband is waiting for me.”

“Lady, stop running!” His voice rose. “You're safe with me. There are bad men on the street who can hurt you.”

“The guard on the gate knows me.” I tried to sound calm. “He's there,” I pretended. When he jerked his head towards the club, the line of angry pimples on his neck made him look younger than I'd thought at first: seventeen, maybe eighteen at the most.

“There's no one there,” he crooned in a singsong voice.

“Look.” I fumbled in my bag for my wallet. “You've been awfully kind to find my scarf, I'd like to—”

“Put it away, madam,” he said, very offended. He smiled and looked down at the bulge in his trousers, which was growing. He grabbed my arm and pulled me towards a large banyan tree. Its thick leaves and impenetrable roots formed a small, dark room where I sat sometimes on the bench, to read a book or to get shelter from the sun.

“This is what I like from English girls.” He pushed me down on the bench, sat beside me, and with the sly smile of a dog about to steal the Sunday joint, put his arm round me. I thought my best bet was to be polite, to talk him out of it, until his free hand dived up my skirt and pulled at the edge of my knickers. In the scuffle that followed, the contents of my handbag scattered in the dust: wallet, mirror, notes for Daisy.

Maya had warned me about Eve teasing, the practice of groping women in the street. “If it happens,” she'd advised, “slap the miscreant hard, I mean
really
slap him.” She'd demonstrated with a sharp crack on her palm.

“Doesn't that makes things worse?” I'd asked.

“No.” She'd cracked her palm again with a stinging sound. “If you give in, they'll hurt you.”

When I hit him hard on the side of his face,
Biff!
went crazily through my mind
Biff! Biff! Biff!
as if I were Desperate Dan in
The Dandy
. I swore the worst words I could think, and I had plenty
to choose from after nursing in the wards. When the mark of my hand bloomed on his face, I was shocked. He looked towards the street, hesitated, his head wobbling on his neck, and then he hit me back, thud, thud, thud, on my arms and head.

“Don't!” I shouted, “Stop it! I'm having a baby.” He raised his fist, and when it came towards my stomach, I grabbed his wrist and shouted, “You bloody bastard! Don't you dare!” He shook me off and landed a punch just below my ribs.

“I know who you are,” he sneered. “You are the foreign lady who teaches our Indian girls bad things. We don't want you. Go home!” Then he saw my purse in the dust. He dropped to his knees and scrabbled crab-like towards it.

“Take it.” I kicked the purse towards him. He tore the few rupees out of it, ran through the iron gate in the direction of the town, and left me shaking.

-
CHAPTER 34
-

I
t would have been so much better if I'd confided in Anto that night, but I didn't: the habit of keeping hard and potentially shameful things to myself was too ingrained. This is no excuse, but the one or two times in my life I'd confided in my mother had not been a rousing success.

I was bullied once for weeks at a new school in Edinburgh, where my mother was working as a lady companion to a polio victim. A girl called Celia McIntyre, wild red hair and an undershot jaw, had on my second day there pulled my hair and called me a Sassenach pig. She began to ambush me after school and push me off my bike or throw my homework in the bushes. When I finally plucked up the courage to tell my mother, who'd been worrying about my grazed knees and the occasional patch of hair missing, she listened gravely at first, rushed into the bathroom, and turned the taps on hard to muffle the sound, but through the locked door I'd heard her shout, “Oh God! Why does
everything
go wrong for me?” or some such. She'd returned from the bathroom, eyes red-rimmed, voice all echoey and sad, and said, “Don't worry, Kit, ignore that pig of a girl.”

And I'd said, “It's all right, Mummy, I don't mind,” because I had a growing sense of us both being swirled down a plug hole of female powerlessness and rage, and this was the voice that frightened me most. Going, going, gone.

So the lesson learned was that a trouble shared was frequently
a trouble prolonged till bedtime and often beyond, and anyway, in later years my mother had recast the whole incident.

“Do you remember that vile girl who hated you? The one who looked like a rugby player? We gave her what for, didn't we?” No mention of “Ignore the pig” or the shouting.

So I lay in the dark that night, eyes open, thinking of that boy: the saliva on his teeth, his skinny Douglas Fairbanks mustache. I was hugging Anto hard. When he'd seen my bruised cheek earlier, I'd sat on a footstool between his legs and he'd bathed my face with warm water.

I knew I should tell him then but instead played the daffy woman.

“Silly me, I took a shortcut through the club garden and had a tumble down the steps and hit a geranium pot. Nothing serious.”

And it wasn't, except I had a new fear now that it might have hurt our baby and he might blame me if anything happened to it.

“Poor Kittykutty.” He stroked my head in the way I love; it makes me want to butt my head against his hand like a cat. “You should take a rickshaw, I don't want a falling-down wife.”

“It's only a ten-minute walk,” I protested, but I was still feeling shivery and out of sorts. “I like it.”

“Do it for me.” He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “Your scaredy-cat husband who would die of misery without you.”

We laughed and we cuddled, and then he undressed me, and I almost told him as he ran his fingers gently over my breasts and belly, but I kept my eyes wide open instead, over his shoulder checking the exits, the windows, the doors, thinking of the boy, his mocking smile, the line of pimples on his neck.

Over prawns and rice at supper, Anto talked some more about his new job at the hospital, the inspirational boss who had, he said, been pleased with the work Anto had done on their research project. Funds would be provided soon for Anto to travel to the areas of India where doctors were reinstating ayurvedic principles into their
work. Dr. Sastry had also read his thesis and thought he should publish it as a book.

“I feel I'm on a journey now,” Anto said. “One of striving and of happiness I can say . . .” He closed his eyes and thought. “I can say I feel whole for the first time.”

He looked boyish, happy. The extra skin of irony and detachment he'd had to wear in England seemed gone. When he asked me about my day, I told him about Mrs. Nair and her new baby, and all she'd told me during our time together: how she'd given up following the rules of her own caste and burned her sari when she met Gandhi and become politicized.

“Is she a terrifying harridan?”

“Anto!” I said. “Why on earth would you assume that?”

“Because Appan told me about her only recently,” he said. “He said he was in court with her and very taken with her sharp brain. She would be a handful if things went wrong,” he said, looking troubled. “Sorry for this, but why on earth did she go to the Home? She has plenty of money.”

“It's not to do with money. She's left her home, and she hates the thought of hospital. Very simple, really.”

“Sorry, Kittykutty, but Appan says she is an angry woman. I'm only thinking of you if things went wrong.”

“Well, they didn't.” I gave an enormous yawn. “They went well. I must go to bed.”

But before I did, I felt so jittery and out of sorts I made him check every single shutter and door and window, my mind flipping back to that rank-smelling hand over my mouth, my skirt being clawed. And now this extra terror, that the boy's punch had harmed our child, and that it was all my fault for taking yet another stupid shortcut.