Authors: N. S. Köenings
Sarie hurried forth. Enormous in her orange flip-flops, not unsteadied by her speed, she cleared a heap of rotted mango peels,
eight pointed lady-fingers fallen from the gray-haired woman’s basket, and also the rough slingshot, which Agatha would later
learn indeed belonged to that felled boy who whimpered in the road. As Sarie came upon them, those around him parted like
a sea. The driver’s tout (a thick boy from whose lips protruded a thin twig), an able litter-woman (palm-frond basket heavy
on her head), the coffee salesman, a watchman in a military cap, the woman in the sari, and the newsboy (papers now aswirl
in a ragged play of wind) all stepped back to make way for the madam. Some among them, skeptical, prepared to be amused. They
wondered what, exactly, the racing woman thought she might achieve. And—this Sarie did not hear—some of them imagined that
she would have sound knowledge to apply that they themselves did not.
In this last, granting foreigners all kinds of super-expertise, people are frequently mistaken. For example, Sarie did most
definitely not possess a bright Mercedes-Benz with which she could convey the patient to a luxurious private clinic; nor was
she a doctor; and she was not related as far as she’d been told to any European football
stars, actresses, or presidents. She was not even, as most who had not heard her speak assumed, English. But she had, as humans
do, lived through a great deal, and she could be effective: as it happens, orphaned by a War, shuttled to the Colonies at
a very early age, Sarie Turner (née Genoux) had been after all brought up by dexterous Nursing Sisters, and she’d taken some
things in. It was thus neither fame nor power, but a vague and rusted habit coupled with a
feeling
, that pushed her towards the boy.
The members of the huddle watched. Sarie was: long, big-boned and ample, topped with desert-colored hair as unkempt as her
housedress (dingy, yellowed, with faded flowery marks)—a personage, indeed. She landed from a leap over a pot-hole near the
little crowd, and, hands on hips, hiked up that yellow shift—revealing as she did so two bright pomelo-sized knees—and squatted,
wild-haired, in the center of the road beside the wincing boy.
She lost a flip-flop on the way. The litter-woman, moving with a grace that kept the basket on her head absolutely still,
slid the bright thong over with a push of her big toe (her own flip-flops were blue). The night-watchman offered up the cardboard
sheet on which, at lazy times, he napped. Sarie took it, sat, stretched her own legs out, and, oddly dainty, crossed them.
She leaned over slowly.
As her big head cast a shadow on the boy, she began to whisper. Sarie did not say, “Your absent leg will cast a spell on my
green daughter.” Nor did she utter anything exceptionally prophetic, like, “Your father,
nom de Dieu
, will knock my apple cart.” In fact, Sarie, who was Belgian in some way, though she had left that place too long ago to recall
with any freshness its damp and gloomy clime, found English rather tricky and would not have spoken daringly like that, for
fun. Sarie made mistakes. She twisted sentences around. She didn’t always know the meaning or the import of the
words she put together. She sometimes did not think as clearly as she could. But she had seen sick and wounded people in her
life, and she had seen them tended. So she offered him distractions, small and tender things that in her long-gone youth she
had been apprenticed to dispense. “My Agatha likes very much the candy, will you like some in a while?” And, “You want to
stay alive to grow so tall and be resembling your papa.” And, “Nevermind, now. Nevermind.” And, “Please.”
She wished the others were not watching her so closely. She did not like so many eyes on her—did not like even her own husband
to look too long at her legs or her elbows or her face—and the heat from all the bodies and the sun felt a bit like melted
wax.
Vous me dérangez
, she thought but did not say, aware that someone else’s comfort, at this moment, mattered more than hers. She closed her
eyes and shook herself and made herself forget them.
I am needed, après tout
. Indeed, she felt that she was acting well, that she was at that moment exactly where she should be.
The boy’s eyes shut and opened, too. As Sarie touched his poor, slick brow, it did occur to her that he was not much older
than her child. She gave the boy a smile. Glad that wounds had never fazed her, she felt strong. To one or two mean hoots
and overall approval, which Sarie did not hear, she tore a length of cotton from her dress and fashioned him a tourniquet.
While there is little charm in losing a good leg, there was that day in the thronging bubble of Kikanga—well apart from the
appearance on the scene of a sometime European nurse—a sort of luck at work. A timely-spacely wrinkle. First, in the jam-packed
busy streets between this corner (India meets Mahaba), the Theosophical Society’s hunkered yellow palace, the clock tower
with the four
round faces that look every way at once (each with its own mind), and the eggplant-radish-onion stands of old Kikanga market,
there were several charitable clinics founded, as it happened, by the Aga Khan himself. On that day, two were sorely understaffed—one
by a long-awaited wedding, the other by a funeral. A third was sadly understocked—thanks to the ill will of an official who
would not let in the medicines from Delhi for the fee to which he had long ago agreed, and who was causing in a smoky room
beside the harbor a bitter little scene. A fourth, however, was full of stuff and staff This one—square, clean, pink Kikanga
Clinic—was just two blocks away. The boy was, from the moment of the crash, therefore, not too far from help.
Another lucky object by that sticky place? On the second floor of egg-blue Mansour House, which overlooked the sharp joint
of India and Mahaba, and was occupied by Bibi Kulthum, her fine son Issa and his clever wife Nisreen, there lived a brand-new
telephone that was eager to be used. Black, still smooth, not yet gummy from the air’s thick oil and grime, the thing sat
brashly on a table near the balcony; it was cushioned in high style by a yellow doily Bibi’s son had asked his wife to purchase,
to make certain Bibi understood the phone was there to stay. A forward-looking man, Issa had gone to great lengths to acquire
it, and had in doing so, he said, brought the future home. Nisreen, admiring of her very busy husband, and a worrier, felt
it might be useful. But while Issa had struggled to convince his mother that amenities like this one were milestones to success,
Bibi was suspicious: entreated and cajoled, she had not used it yet, and had said she never would.
As she often was, Bibi had been seated on the woven mat that softened the hard floor of her Kikanga-facing balcony, thread
and needle ticking in her lap. Because her ears were not what they had
been, she neither heard the boom nor caught the rush of birds escaping like applause from the drama in the road. She didn’t
hear the shouts. No, wrapped up in her work—a square embroidered hanging she intended for Nisreen—she hadn’t heard a thing.
But, because Bibi had another, special sense, a skill she’d had since childhood, she did look up from her embroidery at the
very moment that the brakeless Tata bus veered around the corner and next knocked the slingshot-aiming boy right on his little
back and tore one leg clean off
The skill? As a child, like many other children, Bibi had been open to the world, sensitive and curious. She wondered about
words she overheard, dampness on a face, paper bits that didn’t burn, twigs in patterns on the ground. Such wondering’s not
special. So? What was Bibi’s talent? One: when it suited her, she knew how to be still. Two: she had, since a crucial period
in her youth, almost without fail focused her bright eyes and set her mind to work at
exactly the right time
, looking up from chores and meals and stitching just as a new development that would busy tongues for weeks, a truth that
had only been suspected, or an event that none could have imagined spilled onto a scene. So she’d learned that Mrs. Dillip’s
husband had abandoned her at last, that the creditors were coming, and that a certain cousin whom she loved had exposed her
secret parts while climbing up a clove tree. Bibi, people later came to say, was more perceptive than a house crow, knew things
before they happened—even if the happening was soundless, sneakier than snakes.
She was less prone now to hiding under shelves to see what she could see than she had been as a girl. She couldn’t hear as
well. But the sharpness had stayed with her. Urged on by the feeling that she should, she looked up and out into the street
just before the bus collided with the widower’s little boy. That was as expected,
looking up at the right time. Not new. But on this special day, there was, it seemed, something else at work. Something that
had snuck up inside Bibi without her knowing that it had. It was as if Bibi, who had never in the past required an assistant,
who one could trust to know the goings-on well before they went, had on this day been accorded an extra sort of push. Insurance.
What would really stay with Bibi? Above the Tata’s foremost window, in curly painted letters, turquoise blue and white in
shades that matched the thread in her own hands, were the very words she had been stitching.
Al-Fadhil
, the Utmost, Kindest One.
Al-Fadhil!
God’s name on bus and cloth! Was this not much more than a lucky-look-up at collision? Was this not a super perk, to make
doubly-triply sure that Bibi Kulthum was informed? She and he—the boy, whom she could see between the concrete moldings of
the balcony, framed by a neatly crafted opening shaped precisely like a heart—were, or were they not,
stitched
together in a cosmic bus-to-balcony alert? The undeniable conjunction, the fact that between herself and the scene there
was a heart drawn in the air, and that the bus that hit the boy proclaimed God’s Almighty Kindness just as she was doing in
her lap, prompted Bibi to deploy a courage that surprised her only later.
She had not touched the thing before. Insisting that she had never needed one, and why should she start now? and, hadn’t she
grown up and borne four children without a hitch or flaw? she had frankly refused to; but Issa, stopping wisely short of saying
that three of those four kids (himself the one exception) had fallen ill and died almost right away and think what might have
been if they had rung a doctor, had subjected her, as youth these days were wont to do, to lectures. Issa had talked on and
on and on, and Bibi, because she loved him very much, had heard some of what he said. And so, well drilled despite herself
by her modern son “in case anything
should happen” (and what a thing had happened!), Bibi lifted the receiver—which was heavy, which she did not know how to hold—and
used the only number (also lucky) that she had learned by heart.
One eye on her own
Al-Fadhil
, the other on the phone, she tapped and tapped as she’d been shown and waited for the click. The operator spoke. Bibi gave
the number of nearby, cool Kikanga Clinic, where bright and promising Nisreen was none other than the woman at reception.
Click-click. Click
. And
click
. An unseen switchboard ticked, then gave over to a clatter. A voluminous quiet rose. Bibi held her breath. At long, impatient
last, there came a rolling ring. Nisreen, accustomed to emergencies, picked up at the first shiver of her very own black box
and, after expressing her surprise at hearing Bibi’s voice, listened to her mother-in-law relate the news that a holy Tata
bus had smashed into an ordinary boy just outside their building. The bus, said Bibi, had sent that boy’s four limbs aflying
(arm, arm, leg and leg) in each cardinal direction. “Do something!” she said. “
You
work in a clinic!” It was Nisreen’s job to “do something,” of course, and she would have, quite regardless. But hearing Bibi
so excited made her do it faster. As she dropped the telephone, leapt up from her seat, and raced into the ward, she did not
ask herself if her limp made her seem lame. It escaped her mind completely to wonder how she looked. Driven, brave, she found
the orderlies and doctor and told them what she knew.
Therefore, with Bibi’s timely vision and Nisreen at reception, Sarie’s actions were perhaps not as weighty as they felt. She’d
made the boy more comfortable, and may have stemmed his blood at a semicrucial juncture, but no more. After she’d secured
the yellow cloth, whispered some more things, and was about to press a testing hand to the small boy’s pounding wrist, a troop
of medical assistants descended on the scene. Their leader gave the order for the
members of his little group to take the boy away, which, without a gasp or shout, or—to their credit—so much as a blink, they
did.
Two of the assistants, scolding her for touching what they argued was now theirs, took the leg from Agatha. At the ominous
pinching in the recess of her chest, she did the only thing she could, causing the two white-coated men to falter, stamp,
and sigh: as the leg was taken up, she stood to tie the shoelace back again. It was a skill that she was eager to display
(recently acquired with her father’s single pair of dress-ups), and (bright girl) she also feared that that shoe might be
lost: she would not be rushed. Medical assistants frowning all the while, poor leg in midair, the shoe was tied up snug.
Once the dislodged limb, the boy, the clinic-folk, were gone, the compact huddle loosened. The street, with all the things
upon it, came slowly right again. The stationer’s index cards fell back in relief and waited for new dust; the pens rolled
into place. The pavement settled down. Bystanders who had screamed and then gone absolutely still now shrieked in retrospect.
Some hooted. Others, hands on heads, reminded themselves and their neighbors patiently that God-must-not-be-cursed-no-matter-what-no-matter-what,
and tried to give Him thanks for His mysterious work. The coffee-man announced to no one in particular that the bus had burst
as though from smoke into the day. The woman with the wandering eye recovered from the shock and noted with dismay that some
produce had been lost. The litter-woman saw a heap of coco husks and thought that she might pluck them. The paperboy, who
had thrilled to being on the scene when new news came about, gathered up his now outdated sheets.