Monsoon Summer (41 page)

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CHAPTER 61
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W
hen Anto left, Amma went upstairs, locked the bedroom door, and in a moment of pure rage kicked Appan's brown leather suitcase, a present from Hugo Bateman, as hard as she could. Appan had left for a three-day conference, pajamas and papers packed in a small holdall. He'd left this case behind for her to tidy. It will give her something to do, she could almost hear him thinking. She closed the shutter and, hugging herself tightly, paced about the room, crying and shouting.

This was the worst public disgrace the family had ever faced, and what hurt most was that everyone had known but her, as if she were too feebleminded, too conventional, too utterly and completely retarded to be told a thing.

Another source of humiliation was that, freed from family responsibilities and Mangalath, this unexpected holiday with Mathu had, after many years of drought, led to something surprising: they'd started to make love again.

I'm too old, she'd wanted to tell him, on that first night at the Willoughby in Bombay, and it's too late. Nothing but embarrassment at first, but then, her legs softening, her breath quickening, she'd felt something like an ice flow melting inside her. “Don't cry, silly woman,” Mathu had said fondly, when she was lying in his arms.

“I'm sorry,” she'd said. “I'm happy.”

Now she felt duped and stupid and sordid, and during the two
sleepless nights that followed, her mind lunged back and forth between disgust at the girl, love for her son, loyalty to Appan, and ice-cold fury at him for making her so stupid, such a nothing in the general scheme of things.

On the third day she sat down on the bed and forced herself to be calm. The time for weeping and wailing had passed. She had made up her mind: she had a plan.

She pulled Appan's suitcase onto the bed and, after forcing the lock with her manicure scissors, tore the clothes from it, flung them on the bed, and fumbled in the pocket of the silk lining for the envelope where she knew he kept his money. Her mood was so savagely vindictive that she was half hoping, as she went methodically through every scrap of paper, to find further evidence of wickedness—a failed business deal, a mistress she didn't know about.

She took a bundle of rupees from the envelope and put in her own pocket. Downstairs, she asked the swanky-looking desk clerk for train times to Cochin that day, wrote the times down carefully, and left a note for Appan on the bed.

“I've taken money from your briefcase. I'm going home to take care of the children. I know about Kit.”

Her rage frightened her, and she wondered, as she folded the note carefully, if she would ever be able to forgive him. All the kootchy-coo second-honeymoon stuff was a lie, and she, credulous fool, had lain there as panting and grateful as a starving dog.

She packed the brand-new suitcase she'd been so proud of and then, by force of long habit, folded his clothes and smoothed down the bedspread before closing the door. She was leaving. She was gone.

* * *

Calm yourself, woman, Kunjamma Thekkeden warned herself as she walked down the railway platform at nine fifty that morning. Her first trip alone on a train would take all her courage and all
her strength. She fell asleep in the women's carriage, with her face pressed against the window, and woke raging at Kit.

“You are a contaminant.” She was silently moving her lips as the streets of an unknown town sped by. Everyone knew that nurses had weak morals. Anto, thousands of miles from home, must have been a sitting duck. So fine, sleep with him, be immoral, but don't come home with him, bringing nothing but trouble and distress.

She closed her eyes tightly. What torture to think of all their friends reading their newspapers, gossiping, and giggling about how the mighty Thekkedens had fallen, and in the most sordid and public way possible.

“Are you all right, madam?” the young woman next to her asked when she groaned out loud.

“Perfectly fine, thank you.” Amma peered through the window at a rubbish-strewn culvert. “Thank you,” she said again just to be clear.

“Perfectly fine.” Her words left an acid taste in her mouth. Was this what life was really like, lie upon lie, upon lie? She recalled how she'd walked towards Kit that first day, hand outstretched, smiling, exclaiming; and later, welcoming the unstable Glory into the fold; and sitting in the summerhouse, while the ancient lover soggied up his handkerchief. This suavity, this politeness—look where it had landed her now that the big cat had pounced.

By the time the train had come to its screeching halt, she felt a tremendous weariness creep over her. What Anto was asking of her was not as simple as a change of mind, but a change of beliefs she'd led her life by.

“Why must I do this?” she muttered to herself as, half-dead with tiredness, she pulled down her suitcase. Her plan now was to hail a taxi and go straight to Saraswati Nair's office at the Mother Moonstone Home at Fort Cochin. “If your friends ever need legal advice,” Mrs. Nair had said months ago, handing her a business card, “you know where to find me.”
Pushy
, Amma had thought at
the time, and disrespectful, when she had a first-class legal brain living under her own roof.

* * *

It was a surprise to see a stony-faced Anto standing on the platform waiting for her.

“Why are you here?” she said.

“Appan sent me,” he said. “The hotel manager told him what train you were on. He phoned my hospital. He's horrified.”

A spurt of anger invigorated her. “He has no right to be horrified. He travels all the time.”

“He thought you'd left him. He's in an awful state.”

“Anto,” she said, “I don't care. I have no time to waste. What I want to do now is to go to the place where Kit works. I want to see everything.”

When they arrived at the Moonstone, she told him to pick her up in an hour. She needed to talk to Saraswati Nair on her own. A few moments later, she faced the lawyer in her office—a converted Nissen hut under the stump of a charred tree.

“I know about Kit,” she said, “I know about the prison, I know about my son. I'm saying this to save your breath, because I have my own questions now.”

“Take a seat please, Mrs. Thekkeden,” Saraswati said, when Amma's fury had spent itself. “I have a client coming soon, but I am able to talk for”—she consulted her watch—“twenty minutes. Why are you here?”

“I'm here because my family have told me many lies.” It grieved her deeply to say this, but it was true now. “I don't trust them anymore.”

“But you still care for them?” Saraswati gave her a level look.

“I don't know.” Amma took a sharp breath. “They have driven me to the point of madness.”

“I understand,” Saraswati said with a deep sigh. “But as a profes
sional person and as a friend, I am in a dilemma: I've been told not to tell you anything.”

“No line has been crossed,” Kunjamma said. “I came to you knowing the truth.”

Saraswati snapped the elastic bands on a couple of folders and stared at Kunjamma.

“All right,” she said eventually. “But we're going to do this my way because you seem to be on a warpath, and that won't work.”

“Are you surprised? This girl has brought nothing but disgrace to our family.”

Saraswati snapped the folder shut. “So, I must stop you there. My time is precious, I won't have it wasted. There's too much to do.”

Amma pressed her lips together. “Start again.” She folded her hands in her lap, trained her eyes on Saraswati. “Sorry . . . please . . .”

“And to go any further,” Saraswati continued in the same colorless lawyer voice, “you need to understand some things. Put these on.” She handed Kunjamma a pair of galoshes. “Come outside.”

They stepped from the hut. “This way.”

Outside, a dazzling sun shone mercilessly on the charred beams, the smashed bricks, the soggy mattresses, and the broken fish tank that had once held the premature babies.

“The Moonstone is not at its best at the moment,” Saraswati conceded, as they skirted the stump of the neem tree, “but you must imagine it before they burned it down: a beautiful place full of hope.

“Maternity ward was there.” She pointed towards burned wire and a sodden sofa. “Reception there. There was the mango tree, but most of all—”she stopped and faced Kunjamma—“it was the people who made it. They were good people. Not just Kit, but the other midwife Maya, the nurses. They were gentle, kind. I'm saying
kind
,” Saraswati repeated, angrily. “It's so underrated, particularly by very traditional people.”

“When I came here,” she continued, as they crunched over some
broken floor tiles, “I was full of fear. I had fallen out with my family, who disliked my practicing law. My labor was hard, fourteen hours, but nothing but kindness from Kit. Everything very sweet and clean here. I had a boy, and when she stitched me up afterwards, she was so gentle, I didn't feel a thing.”

“She stitched you up!” Kunjamma's hand flew to her mouth.

“If you make that face again, I'll stop. She's a midwife, that's what they do when people bleed: you either take responsibility or you fail to, it's very simple.” Saraswati glared.

“I'm sorry. Carry on . . . You're right, that's what they do.” Kunjamma made a visible effort to control herself. Her mind tripped back to the awful medical drawings she had seen in Kit's wardrobe: bare women with their bottoms in the air; varicose veins of the vulva.

“So.” Saraswati took a shuddering breath. “My baby was born, over there actually.” She gestured towards a pile of broken glass and burned timber struts. “And then, a few weeks after that,”—her voice steadied and rose—“he died. It was a cot death. Had nothing to do with the hospital. No infection was there, no injury at all. But this was the single thing that started the witch hunt. They said I would be called as a witness, but I was never called, and this is why I will stay and fight for this place and your daughter-in-law with my last breath, and why your son and I are working around the clock to set her free.”

“I'm not a lawyer,” Amma said in a low voice. “My husband is.”

“Your boy has a good brain, he could probably pass his bar exams now, but he's on his knees with exhaustion. We've been canvassing local women for their support. We have two hundred and sixty-five signatures already on our petition.”

Amma sat on a bench and put her head in her hands. “I'm sorry about your son,” she said quietly at last. “I had a miscarriage once; it would have been another boy.”

She looked down at the ground. That memory had been bur
ied so successfully—the pain, the total desert of the days that followed—that she had never spoken about it to anyone ever again.

“Well, you're lucky,” Saraswati said at last. “You have a live son, but you will lose him if you cannot accept his wife. He adores her, and he is in hell right now.”

Amma put her hand to her mouth. “I'll talk to him,” she mumbled at last.

“Not like this. It won't work.”

“No?” Amma looked up, her eyes full of pain and distress.

Saraswati put on her glasses and sighed. “Spout your prejudices and things will get worse.”

“What, then?” Amma was barely audible.

“Come.”

Taking Kunjamma's arm, she helped her over a small pile of charred rubble. To the right of them were the beginnings of a bonfire with a couple of doors and a wooden doll on top.

“Look.” Saraswati pointed. Beyond the bonfire, a large rectangle of earth had been neatly raked and pegged out with lines of string. “One day this will be our new clinic. We've already painted the sign to cheer us on. Some local women come every day to pray. They planted those.” She nodded towards a row of marigolds planted near a fierce plaster goddess brandishing her sword.

“Mrs. Thekkeden?” Saraswati saw her stumble and took her arm. “Are you tired?”

“Facts I need.” Light-headed from lack of food, Amma heard her own voice slur.

“So facts are these. We treat our village midwives like the lowest of the low. If men did it, it would be seen as the supreme act of courage.”

“Don't point at me,” said Kunjamma, “I never treated my midwife like that. She is properly trained, she is clean.”

“You're rich, you have influence. A different story for poor women.” Saraswati's voice rose. “Their lives are often destroyed by childbirth.”

Kunjamma's eyes floated up in her head. “I am tired,” she said. “I need to think, but one thing I would say is, Don't mistake me for a stupid or a cruel woman.”

“I don't,” Saraswati said softly. “Kit has told me of your kindness to her family, but seriously, would you have the guts to be a midwife? No! Nor would I. Thank God someone does.”

* * *

Before she left, Kunjamma said she wanted to read the newspaper reports. She opened the
Vantage
first, a local broadsheet. She smoothed it out and read it with her face going from white to red and back to white again.

“They haven't given her our name,” she said after a long silence. “That's something, although the gossips will have spread the word by now.” She read on. “These are disgusting,” she said at last. “Poor Anto.”

“Poor Anto!” Saraswati barked incredulously. “What about Kit? Now read these.” Saraswati pushed the red file towards her. “This is what the local women said about her. Make up your own mind.”

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CHAPTER 62
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T
wo days after Anto's visit, Chinna, the midwife, examined me and told me what I already knew: I was pregnant. I was almost sure I remembered the night it had happened, a night of high moon and high heat and desperate last-minute clinging that felt now like a lifetime ago. After Chinna left the cubicle, I lay for a while wondering what this would mean now. Pregnancy in this place was not a get-out-of-jail card: babies were born here and raised here quite routinely. My greatest worry was I'd become indispensable to the crazily overworked Dr. Zaheer, even more so now that my Malayalam had improved. When I warned him that afternoon that I only had six weeks more of my sentence to serve, he'd snapped, “That's not correct. You must talk to the governor.”

Panicked, I wrote a letter to the governor asking for confirmation of my release date, but knowing the cumbersome bureaucracy of that prison, did not expect a speedy reply.

A few days later, I was still suffering from morning sickness, and when I felt too ill to work, I asked for an hour off. Dr. Zaheer barked, “Request refused.” He still wore the same relentless smile that meant nothing except overwork, but that night I was moved from the women's dormitory into a small cell of my own. A big relief. I longed for sleep with the intensity of a drug fiend, and when it didn't come, or I woke in the small hours, I felt I was in hell and sometimes wept without sound, a clown's crying. It was one thing to lead myself down the path of destruction, quite
another to be pregnant here. No one had said a word yet about my release.

The tireder I got, the more frightened I felt, my nerve a frayed cloth that grew thinner every day. Rumors flew around here: about gangs of men and women who'd stockpiled weapons and were ready to riot, about guards who gagged and raped. One night in mid-July, I was escorted back to my cell after work, my feet aching from ten hours on the ward, my head blurry with tiredness. When I walked in, I saw the silhouette of a veiled woman sitting, very still, in the corner of the room. I thought at first it was Govinda, the sweet-faced nurse who sometimes helped me on the wards.

The light in the cell came from a weak bulb high in the ceiling, so it was hard to see, but when I moved closer and saw it wasn't her, I remembered my attacker and froze.

“
Nee endha cheyyanae?
What are you doing?” I said. “Who are you?” The dark shape stood up, laid aside her shawl, and faced me. It was Amma.

She looked so pale, I didn't recognize her at first. Her eyes were staring dark hollows between the folds of her veil. When I looked around the room, I saw that place through her own fastidious eyes—the high, scummy window, the potty, the iron bed, the gray blanket with Viyyur Prison Service on it—and it made me want to die of shame.

“Why are you here?” I said, when the guard had locked the door behind us. Both of us had started to tremble like two small dogs squaring up for a fight, until something more terrifying occurred to me.

“Has there been an accident at home?”

“No, no, no, no.” Her expression softened a little. “Nothing's happened,” she said. “I'm here because I wanted to see you. You've lost a lot of weight.”

“There's been a tummy bug.” I backed away from her. “I don't want you to catch it.”

“I'm glad to be here.”

I didn't believe her of course: I'd seen her immaculately ordered house, the polished floors, the tidy medicine cabinet with labels lined up, even the bloody orchid hospital, for God's sake.

It was only when the light in the cell surged that I saw how much weight she'd lost too. Her skin, once so plump and shiny like a ripe conker, looked as papery as autumn leaves.

“Amma,” I said, not even sure I could call her mother now. “I'm so sorry . . . I've made such a mess of things.”

She turned away, her lips working violently.

“A big shock . . .” she said eventually. “Everyone knew but me.” I heard her gasp. “And when you don't have the facts, your mind goes mad.”

“I know.”

“You shouldn't have left me in the dark.” She wiped her eyes on the corner of her shawl. “You of all people should have let me know. You saw what lies did in your own family? Nothing but pain. But you didn't trust me either.”

I thought of Glory then. How I'd clung to her on the night before she died and the lifeboat broke up into little pieces.

“I wasn't sure I could,” I said. “I wasn't exactly your dream of a daughter-in-law.”

A look of wry amusement passed between us. There it was out, like the head of a boil.

She closed her eyes. “Well . . .”

“And this makes it so much worse.”

“That we cannot change, but listen please, we don't have much time.” Her face was set and unsmiling. “Anto and Saraswati want me to change overnight. I can't—that would be another lie—but Saraswati showed me the Moonstone. She says if they can raise the money, it will be built again. A long way to go.” She sounded resigned and far from happy, and so was I: for me, the whole place felt freighted with failure now.

“Did Appan ask you to come here?” I asked in the silence that followed.

“No.” She stared into her lap. “He's not talking to me. I stole money from him to pay the bribe.”

“The bribe?”

“How else am I sitting here?”

I was astounded. “Who did you pay?”

“I'm not going to say,” she said, pressing her lips together.

“Oh God.” The damage was spreading and I was responsible. “Amma, I'm so sorry,” I said. She looked so crushed, so old. “I never wanted you to fall out with Appan.”

“A shakeup was needed,” she said. “He'll be back.”

“Have you spoken to Anto?”

“A few nights ago,” Amma said tonelessly. “We stayed up late unknotting things between us. He asked me a question: ‘Do you remember the parable of the Good Samaritan?' I said of course I did, everyone did.”

“ ‘Is it true or is it a lie?' he said.

“ ‘Don't come to me with your clever Downside talk,' I said to him. ‘I'm a Christian, I know what it means.'

“ ‘OK,' he said. ‘Let me put it another way. Tonight, when you leave me, you see a child bleeding to death beside the road. Do you cross the road, to avoid the mess of it? Do you say to yourself, I'm not qualified, I won't look, or do you see the supreme value of a human life, and do what you can?'

“ ‘I'm not stupid,' I said. I knew where this was leading. ‘There are laws, and your wife broke one. Jail was the next step.'

“He was stern with me. ‘Listen,' he said, ‘I've spent months now looking at the legalities of manslaughter and criminal negligence, and they're muddled and unclear, all lawyers know this. For example, if I was a naval captain on a ship and one of my crew got ill, I could be prosecuted for not doing anything. The law calls this failure to assist. New health system, new country, new laws, we're all at sea,' he said.”

Amma raised her eyes and looked at me. She wasn't enjoying this one bit. “He said that you chose to help in a difficult situation, that you might have been foolish in your innocence and optimism, but you were at least brave, and that you paid a high price for it.”

“He did?” I could hardly speak.

“He said all this.” Her voice was low.

“You don't agree though, do you?”

“I don't know.” She looked at me again. “I'm never going to like you doing this.”

We smiled the same wry smile. She was, at least, honest.

“Anto says that you'll complete the medical requirement as soon as you get out.”

“I'm almost there,” I said. “That's the irony. I needed two more supervised deliveries. I should have organized them at the Moonstone, but we were always too busy.”

“What next?” She was watching me like a hawk.

“I don't know . . . get my certificate, go back to the Moonstone . . . probably . . . if they'll have me . . . and if the money gets raised to build it again. I don't look forward to it, but I can't seem to let it go. It's not what you want to hear.”

“No, it's not.” She looked pretty miserable. “It's your life.”

We had come to the end of what was possible for now, and hearing the guard's feet again, the rattle of keys, I felt incredible weariness: the heat pressing down on me like a hot, wet blanket, the long night ahead.

“Look, Amma,” I said, “I am not in control anymore . . . I try not to make plans.”

When she brought her face so close to mine, I thought for one strange moment that she was going to kiss me. Instead, she whispered, “You're wrong. It will happen, and it will be soon. Wait and see.”