Maneuvering through the door frame, then trying not to b.u.mp her feet on the banister, his sobs changing to grunts of effort, he carried her out from her quarters, and then down the path to the operating theater. She felt heavier to Stone than she had a right to be.
There was a question the chief examiner had posed to him when he appeared for the Royal College of Surgeons viva voce after pa.s.sing his written examinations in Edinburgh: "What first-aid treatment in shock is administered by ear?" His answer "Words of comfort!" had won the day. But now, in place of rea.s.suring and soothing words that would have been humane and therapeutic, Stone yelled for help at the top of his voice.
His shouts, taken up by the keeper of the virgins, brought everyone including Gebrew the watchman, who came running from the front gate, along with Koochooloo and two other unnamed dogs at her heels.
The sight of the blubbering, helpless Stone shocked Matron just as much as the sight of Sister Mary Joseph Praise"s terrible state.
Lord, he"s done it again, was Matron"s first thought.
It was a well-kept secret that Stone had on three or four occasions since his arrival at Missing gone on a drunken binge. For a man who rarely drank, who loved his work, who found sleep a distraction, who had to be reminded to go to bed, these episodes were mystifying. They came with the suddenness of influenza and the terror of possession. The first patient on the morning list would be on the table, ready to be put under, but there"d be no sign of Stone. When they went looking for him the first time they found a babbling, disheveled white man, pacing in his quarters. During these episodes he did not sleep or eat, slipping out in the dead of night to replenish his supplies of rum. On the last occasion this creature had climbed the tree outside its window and perched there for hours, muttering like a cross hen. A fall from that height would have cracked its skull. Matron, when she had seen those bloodshot, mongoose eyes staring down at her, fled, leaving Sister Mary Joseph Praise and Ghosh to keep vigil and to try to talk him down, get him to eat, to stop drinking.
As abruptly as it started, in two days, no more than three, the spell would be over, and after a very long sleep Stone would be back at work as if nothing had happened, never making any reference to how he"d inconvenienced the hospital, the memory of it erased. No one ever brought it up to him because the other Stone, the one who rarely drank, would have been hurt and insulted by such inquiry or accusation. The other Stone was as productive as three full-time surgeons, and so these episodes were a small price to pay Matron came closer. Stone"s eyes were not bloodshot and he didn"t reek of spirits. No, he was unhinged by Sister Mary Joseph Praise"s condition, and rightly so. As Matron turned her attention from Stone to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, she nevertheless felt a ghost of satisfaction: at last the man had bared his soul, displayed his feelings for his a.s.sistant.
Matron ignored Stone"s ramblings about volvulus or ileus or pancreat.i.tis or tuberculous peritonitis. "Let"s go to the theater," she said, and when they were there, she said, "Lay her on the operating table."
He set her down and Matron saw a sight she had seen seven years before: blood soaked Sister Mary Joseph Praise"s dress in the region of her pubis. Matron"s mind raced back to Sister Mary Joseph Praise"s first arrival from Aden, and how blood on her habit then had caused similar concern. Matron had never asked the nineteen-year-old, point-blank, what caused the bleeding. The irregularity of the stain on that occasion had invited the observer to read meaning in its shape. Matron"s imagination had constructed so many scenarios to explain that mystery. In the ensuing years, memory had changed the event from mysterious to mystical.
Which was why Matron now glanced at Sister Mary Joseph Praise"s palms and breast as Stone laid her down, as if she half expected to see bleeding stigmata, as if that first mystery had grown into this second mystery. But no, the only blood was at the v.u.l.v.a. Lots of blood. With dark clots. And bright red rivulets that ran down the thighs. Matron had no doubt, as blood dripped to the floor: this time it was secular bleeding.
Matron seated herself between Sister Mary Joseph Praise"s legs, willfully ignoring the stomach swelling that loomed in front of her. The l.a.b.i.a were engorged and blue, and when Matron slid her gloved finger in, she found the cervix fully dilated.
Of blood there was much too much. She swabbed and dabbed and pulled down on the posterior v.a.g.i.n.al wall for a better view. When a piteous sigh emerged from her patient"s lungs, Matron almost dropped the speculum. Matron"s chest was pounding, her hands shaking. She leaned forward, tilted her head again to peer in. There, like a rock at the bottom of a mud pit, a stone of the heart, was a baby"s head.
"Lord, she"s," Matron said, when she could finally speak, gasping at the sacrilegious word that threatened to choke her and which her mouth could no longer contain, "pregnant."
Every observer I later talked to remembers this moment in Theater 3, when the air stood still, when the loud clock across from the table froze and a long, silent pause followed.
"Impossible!" said Stone, for the second time that day, and even though it was incorrect and hardly the thing to say, it allowed them all to breathe again.
But Matron knew she was right.
She would have to deliver this baby. Dr. K. Hemlatha-Hema to all of them-was out of station.
Matron had delivered hundreds of babies. She reminded herself of this now to try and keep herself from panic.
But how was she to push away not just her qualms but her confusion? One of her own, a bride of Christ-pregnant! It was unthinkable. Her mind refused to digest this. And yet the evidence-an infant"s skull- was there, right before her eyes.
The same thought distracted the scrub nurse, the barefoot orderly, and Sister Asqual, who was the nurse anesthetist. It caused them to trip over one another and knock down an intravenous drip as they scurried around the table, readying the patient. Only the probationer, who was mortified that she had failed that morning to recognize this crisis when she visited Sister Mary Joseph Praise, didn"t stop to wonder how Sister Mary Joseph Praise got pregnant.
Matron"s heart felt as if it might gallop right out of her chest. "Lord, what worse circ.u.mstance can you construct for a delivery? A pregnancy that"s a mortal sin. A mother-to-be who is like my own daughter. Ma.s.sive bleeding, ghostly pallor ..." And all this when Hema, Missing"s only gynecologist, not only the best in the country, but the best Matron had ever seen, was away.
Bach.e.l.li up in the Piazza was marginally competent in obstetrics but unreliable after two in the afternoon, and his Eritrean mistress was deeply suspicious of him leaving on "house calls." Jean Tran, the half-French, half-Vietnamese fellow in Casa Popolare, did a bit of everything and smiled a lot. But a.s.suming they could be reached, it would still be a while before either man would come.
No, Matron had to do this herself. She had to forget the implications of the pregnancy. She had to breathe, concentrate. She had to conduct a normal delivery.
But that afternoon and evening, normal would elude them.
STONE STOOD BY, his mouth open, looking to Matron for direction, while Matron sat facing the v.u.l.v.a, waiting for the baby to descend. Stone alternately crossed his hands in front of him and then dropped them by his sides. He could see Sister Mary Joseph Praise"s pallor increasing. And when Nurse Asqual in a panicked voice called out the blood pressure- "systolic of eighty palpable"-Stone wobbled as if he might faint.
Despite uterine contractions which Matron could feel through the belly and see in Sister Mary Joseph Praise"s contorted face, and despite the fact that the cervix was wide open, nothing happened. A baby"s head high up in the birth ca.n.a.l with the cervix flattened like a gasket around it always reminded Matron of the shaved scalp of a bishop. But this bishop was staying put. And meanwhile, such bleeding! A dark and messy pool had formed on the table and tidal eddies of blood came out of the v.a.g.i.n.a. Blood was to delivery rooms and operating theaters what feces were to tripe factories, but even so it seemed to Matron that this was a lot of blood coming out.
"Dr. Stone," Matron said, her lips quivering. A bewildered Stone wondered why she was calling on him.
"Dr. Stone," she said again. For Matron, Sound Nursing Sense meant a nurse knowing her limits. For G.o.d"s sake, she needs a Cesarean section. But she didn"t say those words because with Stone it could have the opposite effect. Instead, her voice low, her head drooping, Matron pushed down on her thighs to bring herself to her feet and to vacate her spot between Sister Mary Joseph Praise"s legs.
"Dr. Stone. Your patient," she said to the man who everyone believed to be my father, putting in his hands not only the life of a woman that he chose to love, but our two lives-mine and my brother"s-which he chose to hate.
CHAPTER 3.
The Gate of Tears
WHEN SISTER MARY JOSEPH PRAISE felt the herald cramps of labor, Dr. Kalpana Hemlatha, the woman I would come to call my mother, was five hundred miles away and ten thousand feet in the air. Off the starboard wing of the plane Hema had a beautiful view of Bab al-Mandab-the Gate of Tears-so named because of the innumerable ships that had wrecked in that narrow strait that separated Yemen and the rest of Arabia from Africa. At this lat.i.tude, Africa was just the Horn: Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia. Hema traced the Gate of Tears as it widened from a hairline crack to become the Red Sea, spooling north to the horizon.
As a schoolgirl studying geography in Madras, India, Hema had to mark where coal and wool were produced on a map of the British Isles. Africa figured in the curriculum as a playground for Portugal, Britain, and France, and a place for Livingstone to find the spectacular falls he named after Queen Victoria, and for Stanley to find Livingstone. In future years, as my brother, Shiva, and I made the journey with Hema, she would teach us the practical geography she had taught herself. She"d point down to the Red Sea and say, "Imagine that ribbon of water running up like a slit in a skirt, separating Saudi Arabia from Sudan, then farther up keeping Jordan away from Egypt. I think G.o.d meant to snap the Arabian Peninsula free of Africa. And why not? What do the people on this side have in common with the people on the other side?"
At the very top of the slit a narrow isthmus, the Sinai, thwarted G.o.d"s intention and kept Egypt and Israel connected. The man-made Suez Ca.n.a.l finished the cut and allowed the Red Sea to connect with the Mediterranean, saving ships the long journey around the Cape. Hema would always tell us that it was over the Gate of Tears that she had the awakening that would change her life. "I heard a call when I was in that plane. When I think back, I know it was you." That rattling, airborne tin can always seemed an improbable place for her epiphany.
HEMA SAT ON THE WOODEN BENCH SEATS that ran lengthwise on both sides of the ribbed fuselage of the DC-3. She was unaware of how badly her services were needed just then at Missing, the hospital where she had worked for the last eight years. The drone of the twin engines was so loud and unrelenting that half an hour into the flight she felt as if the sound inhabited her body. The hard bench and choppy ride were raising blisters on her behind. Whenever she closed her eyes, she felt as if she were being hauled across a rutted landscape in the back of a bullock cart.
Her fellow travelers on this flight from Aden to Addis Ababa were Gujaratis, Malayalis, French, Armenians, Greeks, Yemenis, and a few others whose dress and speech did not as clearly reveal their origins. As for her, she wore a white cotton sari, a sleeveless off-white blouse, and a diamond in her left nostril. Her hair was parted in the middle and gathered with a clip at the back, and loosely braided below.
She sat sideways looking out. She saw a gray dart below-the shadow cast by the plane on the ocean. A giant fish she imagined was swimming just below the surface of the sea, keeping pace with her. The water looked cool and inviting, unlike the interior of the DC-3, which had grown less steamy but was still thick with the mingled scents of the human freight. The Arabs had the dry, musty smell of a grain cellar; the Asians contributed the ginger and garlic; and from the whites came the odor of a milk-soaked bib.
Through the half-open curtain to the c.o.c.kpit she could see the pilot"s profile. Whenever he turned to glance at his cargo, his bottle-green sungla.s.ses seemed to swallow his face, only his nose poking through. The gla.s.ses had been perched up on his forehead when she boarded, and Hema had noted then that his eyes were red like a rodent"s. The odor of juniper berry on his breath advertised his fondness for gin. She"d developed an aversion to him even before he opened his mouth to herd his pa.s.sengers onto the plane, snapping at them-"Allez!"-as if they were subhuman. She bit her tongue then, because this was the man about to take them aloft.
His face and jug ears resembled a figure a child might draw with crayon on butcher paper. But the details were beyond a child: the fine arbor of blood vessels on his cheeks; muttonchop sideburns dyed bootpolish black; the white ring of arcus senilis around his pupils; gray eyebrows that betrayed his pretense at youthfulness. She wondered how a man could look in the mirror and not see the absurdity of his own appearance.
She studied her own reflection in the porthole. Hers was a round face, too, the eyes widely s.p.a.ced with a doll"s pert nose. The red pottu in the center of her forehead stood out. Her cheeks had a Martian tint cast on them by the cobalt-blue water below, and the hint of green in her eyes-unusual for an Indian-was accentuated. "Your gaze encompa.s.ses all men, makes your most ordinary glance seem intimate, carnal," Dr. Ghosh had told her, "as though you are ravishing me with your eyes!" Ghosh was a tease and forgot what he said as soon as the words rolled off his tongue. But this statement of his lingered with her. She thought of Ghosh"s fur-covered limbs and shuddered. Body hair was one of her pet dislikes, or so she"d believed. She knew it was a fatal prejudice for an Indian woman. His was like a gorilla coat, the chest tendrils poking out through his vest and peeking up above his shirt collar. "Ravishing? You wish, you lecher," she said now, smiling as if Ghosh were sitting across from her.
She had to give him this much: if she stared fractionally too long at a man, she attracted more attention than she intended. It was partly why she used spectacles with large wire frames, because she thought they made her eyes seem closer together. She liked the exaggerated Cupid"s bow of her upper lip, but not her cheeks, which she felt were too chubby. What to do? She was a big woman. Not fat, but big ... Well, maybe a bit fat, and she"d certainly put on a kilo or two or three in India, but how could she help that in the face of a mother"s astonishing cooking? Because of my height, I get away with it, she told herself. Wearing a sari helps, of course.
She grunted, remembering how Dr. Ghosh had invented a special term for her: magnified. Years later, when Hindi movies with their song and dance became all the rage in Africa, the ward boys in Addis Ababa would call her Mother India, not in mockery, but in reverence for the tearjerker of the same name starring Nargis. Mother India had run for three straight months at the Empire Theater and then moved to the Cinema Adowa; that, too, without the benefit of subt.i.tles. The ward boys could be heard singing "Duniya Mein Hum Aaye Hain"-"We"ve Arrived in This World"-though they didn"t understand a word of Hindustani.
"And if I"m magnified, what term shall we apply to you?" she said, carrying on the imaginary conversation, surveying her old friend from head to foot. He was not a conventionally good-looking man. "How about "alien"? I mean it as a compliment. I say "alien," Ghosh, because you are so unaware of yourself, of your looks. There"s a seduction in that for others. Alien becomes beauty. I"m saying this to you because you"re not here. To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive."
Mysteriously, during her holidays, Ghosh"s name kept popping up in her conversations with her mother. Despite Hema"s lack of interest in marriage, her mother was terrified that her daughter would end up with a non-Brahmin, someone like Ghosh. And yet as Hema neared thirty her mother had begun to feel that any husband was better than no husband at all.
"You say he"s not handsome? Does he have good color?"
"Ma, he"s fair ... fairer than me, and he has brown eyes. Bengali, Parsi, and G.o.d knows what other influences in those eyes."
"What is he?"
"He calls himself high-caste Madras mongrel," she said, giggling. Her mother"s frown threatened to swallow her nose, and so Hema had changed the subject.
Besides, it was impossible to construct a Ghosh for someone who"d never met him. She could say that his hair was combed flat and parted in the middle, looking sleek and smart for about ten minutes in the morning, but after that, the hairs broke loose like rioting children. She could say how at any time of the day, even after he had just shaved, black stubble showed under his jaw. She could say that his neck was nonexistent, squashed down by a head shaped like a jackfruit. She could say he just looked short because of a slight belly whose size was exaggerated in the way he leaned back and swayed from side to side as he walked, which drew the eye away from the vertical. Then there was his voice, unmodulated and startling, as if the volume k.n.o.b had frozen on its highest setting. How could she convey to her mother that the sum total of all this made him not ugly, but strangely beautiful.
Despite the rash on the backs of his hands-a burn, really-his fingers were sensual. The ancient X-ray machine, a Kelley-Koett, had caused the rash. Just thinking of the "Koot" made Hema"s blood boil. In 1909, Emperor Menelik had imported an electric chair, having heard the invention would efficiently get rid of his enemies. When he discovered it needed electricity, he simply used it as a throne. Similarly, the big Kelley-Koett had come in the 1930s with an eager American mission group that soon realized that, even though electricity had arrived in Addis Ababa, it was intermittent and the voltage insufficient for such a temperamental beast. When the mission folded, the precious unpacked machine had been simply left behind. Missing lacked an X-ray machine, and so Ghosh rea.s.sembled the unit and matched it to a transformer.
No one but Ghosh dared touch the Koot. Cables ran from its giant rectifier to the Coolidge tube, which sat on a rail and could be moved this way and that. He worked the dials and voltage levers until a spark leaped across the two bra.s.s conductors, producing a thunderclap. The fiery display had caused one paralyzed patient to leap off the stretcher and run for his life; Ghosh called that the Sturm und Drang cure. He was the Koot"s keeper, repairing it, babying it so that three decades after the company went under, the Koot was still operational. Using the fluo-roscopy screen, he studied the dancing heart, or else he defined exactly where a cavity in the lung resided. By pushing on the belly he could establish whether a tumor was fixed to the bowel or ab.u.t.ted on the spleen. In the early years he hadn"t bothered with the lead-lined gloves, or a lead ap.r.o.n for that matter. The skin of his probing, intelligent hands paid a visible price.
HEMA TRIED TO IMAGINE Ghosh telling his family about her. She"s twenty-nine. Yes, we were cla.s.smates at Madras Medical School, but she"s a few years younger. I don"t know why she never married. I didn"t get to know her well till we were interns in the septic ward. She"s an obstetrician. A Brahmin. Yes, from Madras. An expatriate, living and working in Ethiopia these eight years. Those were the labels that defined Hema, and yet they revealed little, explained nothing. The past recedes from a traveler, she thought.
Sitting in the plane, Hema closed her eyes and pictured her schoolgirl self with the twin ponytails, the long white skirt, and white blouse under the purple half sari. All Mrs. Hood Secondary School girls in Mylapore had to wear that half sari, really nothing more than a rectangle of cloth to coil around the skirt once and pin on the shoulder. Shed hated it, because one was neither child nor adult but half woman. Her teachers wore full saris while the venerable headmistress, Mrs. Hood, wore a skirt. Hema"s protests triggered a lecture by her father: Do you not know how fortunate you are to be in a school with a British headmistress? Do you not know how many hundreds have tried to get in there, offered ten times the money, but were turned down by Miz-Iz-Ood. She goes by merit only. Would you prefer the Madras corporation school? And so, each day she put on the hated uniform, feeling half dressed, and feeling as if she were selling a piece of her soul.
Velu, the neighbor"s son whod once been her best friend, but who had turned insufferable at ten, liked to perch on the dividing wall and tease her: The girls who come from Miz-Iz-Ood, parlez-vous?
The girls who come from Miz-Iz-Ood, parlez-vous?
The girls who come from Miz-Iz-Ood,
Haven"t grown their womanhood,
Inky Pinky parlez-vous!
She ignored him. Velu, who was as dark-skinned as she was light, said, "So proud you are of being fair. Monkeys will nibble your sweet flesh thinking it is jackfruit on a jackfruit tree, mind you me!" There she was, eleven years old, setting off for school, dwarfed by her Raleigh bicycle, trading barbs with Velu. Her books were in a ta.s.seled sanji slung over her shoulder, the strap running between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Already in her posture and in her steady pedal strokes there were signs of a certain immutability.
The bicycle, once so tall and perilous, soon shrunk beneath her. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s thrust out on either side of that sanji strap, and hair sprouted between her legs. (If that was what Velu had meant about not growing her womanhood, she had proved him wrong.) She was a good student, a captain in net ball, a senior prefect, and showing promise in Bharat-natyam, finding in herself a talent for recapitulating a most intricate dance sequence after being shown it just once.
She felt neither an obligation to join the herd nor any urge to try to stand out from it. When a close friend told her she always looked cross, she was surprised and a little thrilled that she could pull off such mis direction. In medical school (in full sari and now riding the bus) this quality grew stronger-not crossness, but independence and misdirection. Some cla.s.smates considered her arrogant. She drew others to her like aco lytes only for them to discover she wasn"t recruiting. The men needed pliancy in their women friends, and she couldn"t bring herself to act coy or silly for their sakes. The couples who huddled in the library behind oversize anatomy atlases and whispered themselves into the notions of love amused her.
I had no time for such silliness. But she did have time for trashy novels set in castles and country houses with heroines named Bernadette. She fantasized about the dashing men of Chillingforest and Lockingwood and Knottypine. That was her trouble then-she dreamed of a greater kind of love than the kind displayed in the library But she was also filled with a nameless ambition that had nothing to do with love. What exactly did she want? It was an ambition that wouldn"t let her compete for or seek the same things others sought.
When, as a student at Madras Medical College, Hema had found herself admiring her professor of therapeutics (the lone Indian in a school where, even as independence approached, most of the full professors were British), when she found herself moved by his humanity his mastery of his subject (Face it, Hema; it was a crush), when she found herself wishing to be his understudy and found him encouraging, she deliberately chose another path. She was loath to give anyone that kind of power. She chose obstetrics and gynecology instead of his field, internal medicine. If the professor"s field was limitless, requiring a breadth of knowledge that extended from heart failure to poliomyelitis and myriad conditions in between, she chose a field that had some boundaries and a mechanical component-operations. Of these there was a limited repertoire: C-sections, hysterectomies, prolapse repair.
She"d discovered in herself a talent for manipulative obstetrics, becoming expert at divining just how the baby was hung up in the pelvis. What other obstetricians perhaps dreaded, she relished. Blindfolded, she could distinguish the left from the right forceps and apply each in her sleep. She could see in her mind"s eye the geometry of each patient"s pelvic curve and match that to the curvature of the baby"s skull as she slid the forceps in, articulating the two handles and confidently extracting the baby.
She went overseas on a whim. But it broke her heart to leave Madras. She still cried some evenings, picturing her parents taking their chairs outdoors to wait for the sea breeze which, even on the hottest and stillest of days, blew in at dusk. She left because gynecology, at least in Madras, remained a man"s domain, and, even on the eve of independence, a British domain, and she had no chance at all for a civil service appointment to the government teaching hospital. It was strange and yet it pleased her to think that she, Ghosh, Stone, and Sister Mary Joseph Praise had all at one time or another trained or worked at the Government General Hospital in Madras. A thousand five hundred beds and twice that number under the beds, between the beds-it was a city by itself. In it Sister Mary Joseph Praise had been a budding novitiate and probationer; perhaps theyd even walked past each other. And incredibly, Thomas Stone, too, had a brief tenure at Government General Hospital, though since the maternity section was quite separate, thered been no reason for his path to cross with Hema"s.
Shed left behind Madras, left behind labels of caste, gone so far away that the word "Brahmin" meant nothing. Working in Ethiopia, she tried to make a visit home every third or fourth year. She was returning after her second such visit. Seated in the noisy airplane, she found herself rethinking her choices. In the last few years shed come close to defining the nameless ambition that had pushed her this far: to avoid the sheep life at all costs.
Missing had felt familiar when she first arrived there, not unlike the Government General Hospital in India, but on a much smaller scale: people waiting in line, the families camping out under trees, waiting with the infinite patience of those who have little choice but to wait. Shed been kept busy from her first day. If the truth be known, she secretly relished the emergencies, the situations where her heart was in her mouth, where the seconds ticked off, where a mother"s life hung in the balance, or a baby in the womb, deprived of oxygen, needed a heroic rescue. In those moments she did not have existential doubts. Life became sharply focused, meaningful just when she wasn"t thinking of meaning. A mother, a wife, a daughter, was suddenly none of these things, boiled down to a human being in great danger. Hema herself was reduced to the instrument required to treat them.
But of late she felt the huge remove between her practice in Africa and the frontiers of scientific medicine epitomized by England and America. C. Walton Lillehei in Minneapolis had just that year begun an era of heart surgery by finding a way to pump blood while the heart was stopped. A vaccine for polio had been developed, though it had yet to make its way to Africa. At Harvard in Ma.s.sachusetts, a Dr. Joseph Murray had performed the first successful human kidney transplant from one sibling to another. The picture of him in Time showed an ordinary-looking chap, unpretentious. The portrait had surprised Hema, made her imagine that such discoveries were within every doctor"s reach, within her reach.
She"d always loved the story of Pasteur"s discovery of microbes, or Lister"s experiments with antisepsis. Every Indian schoolchild dreamed of being like Sir C. V. Raman, whose simple experiments with light led to a n.o.bel Prize. But now she lived in a country that few people could find on the map. ("The Horn of Africa, on the upper half, on the eastern coast-the part that looks like a rhino"s head and points at India," she"d explain.) And fewer still knew of Emperor Haile Sela.s.sie, or if they remembered him for being Time magazine"s Man of the Year in 1935, they didn"t remember the country whose cause he pleaded at the League of Nations.
If asked, Hema would have said, Yes, I"m doing what I intended to do; I"m satisfied. But what else could one say? When she read her Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics (each month"s volume arriving by sea mail weeks after publication, bruised and stained in its brown wrapping), the innovations read like fiction. It was exciting yet deflating, because it was already old news. She told herself that her work, her yeoman contribution in Africa, was somehow connected to the advances described in SG&O. But in her heart she knew that it wasn"t.
A NEW SOUND REGISTERED. It was the sc.r.a.pe and rattle of wood on metal. The tail of the plane was packed with two giant wooden crates and stacks of smaller square tea chests, banded with tin strips stamped LONGLEITH ESTATES, S. INDIA. Netting hooked to skeletal struts restrained the cargo from falling on the pa.s.sengers, but not from sliding around. Her feet and those of her fellow pa.s.sengers rested on bulging jute sacks. Fading military logos were stenciled on the floor and on the silver fuselage. American troops in North Africa once sat here and contemplated their fate. Patton himself perhaps sat on this plane. Or perhaps this was a relic from the French colonies in Somalia and Djibouti. The carrying of pa.s.sengers felt like an afterthought for this new airline with its hand-me-down planes and ancient pilots. She could see the pilot arguing into the microphone, gesticulating, pausing to listen to the reply, then barking again. The pa.s.sengers who were close to the c.o.c.kpit frowned.
Once again Hema craned her neck to see if her crate with the Grundig was visible, but it wasn"t. Every time she thought about her extravagant purchase she felt a pang of guilt. But buying the radio-c.u.mrecord player had made the night she spent in Aden almost tolerable. A city built on top of a dormant volcanic crater, h.e.l.l on earth, that was Aden, but at least it was duty-free. Oh yes, and Rimbaud had once lived there-and never wrote another line of poetry.
Shed picked out the spot for the Grundig in her living room. Most definitely it would have to be under the framed black-and-white print of Gandhi spinning cotton. Shed have to hunt for a quieter location for the Mahatma.
She imagined Ghosh nursing his brandy, and Matron, Thomas Stone, and Sister Mary Joseph Praise drinking sherry or coffee. She pictured Ghosh leaping to his feet as the dazzling opening chords of "Take the "A" Train" poured from the Grundig. Then came the cheeky melody-the last tune in the world that youd have predicted to follow. Those opening chords, though ... how they stayed with her. And how she resisted them! She resented the chauvinism of Indians who could only admire things foreign. And yet, she heard those chords in her sleep, found herself humming them during her ablutions. She heard them now in the plane. Strange dissonant notes thrown together, wanting resolution, and somehow they captured America and Science and all that was bold and brash and daring and exciting about America (or at least the way she imagined America to be). Notes pouring out of the skull of a black man whose name was Billy Strayhorn. Stray ... horn!
Ghosh had introduced her to jazz and to "Take the "A" Train." "Wait ... watch! See?" he said, the first time she heard the melody after the chords. "You have to smile. You can"t help it!" And he was right, the tune was so catchy and upbeat-how fortunate she was that her first introduction to serious Western music should be that tune. Still, shed come to think of it as her song, her invention, and it annoyed her that hed been the one to bring her to it. She laughed at the strangeness of liking Ghosh so much, when she wanted so much to dislike him.
BUT JUST AT THE MOMENT she was thinking these thoughts, antic.i.p.ating her arrival in Addis Ababa ... she found herself suddenly invoking Lord Shiva"s name: the plane, the DC-3, the trustworthy camel of the frontier sky, was shuddering as if mortally wounded.
She looked out. The propeller on her side fluttered to a stop, and a puff of smoke came out of the beefy engine cowling.
The plane pitched to starboard and she found herself plastered against the window. All around her pa.s.sengers screamed, and a thermos flask bounced on the cabin wall, spilling tea as it clattered away. She clutched around for a handhold, but then the plane righted itself and seemed to stop in midair, before beginning a steep descent. No, not a descent, her stomach corrected her-this was a fall. Gravity reached its tentacles out and grabbed the silver cylinder with its cantilevered wings. Gravity promised a water landing. Or, since the plane had wheels, not floats, a water smashing. The pilot was shouting, not in panic, but in anger, and she had no time to think how strange this was.
When, years later, shed look back at this moment of change, look at it clinically ("Milk the history! Exactly when and exactly how did it start? Onset is everything! In the anamnesis is the diagnosis!" as her professor would say), she would see that her transformation actually took place over many months. However, it was only as she was falling out of the sky over the Bab al-Mandab that she understood that change had come.
A LITTLE INDIAN BOY fell on her bosom. He was the son of the only Malayali couple on board-teachers in Ethiopia, no doubt; she could tell that in a single glance. This knock-kneed fellow, five, maybe six, years old in oversize shorts, had clutched a wooden plane in his hand from the moment he came on board, protecting it as if it were made of gold. His foot had become wedged between two jute sacks, and when the plane righted itself, he fell onto Hema.
She held him. His puzzled look collapsed into one of fear and pain. Hema spotted the curve in his shin-like bending a green stick, the bone too young to snap clean. She took all this in even as her body registered that they were plunging, losing alt.i.tude.
A young Armenian, bless his practicality scrambled to free the leg. Incredibly, the Armenian was smiling. He tried to tell her something- a rea.s.surance of sorts. She was shocked to see someone calmer than herself when all around the cries of pa.s.sengers made the situation worse.
She lifted the little boy to her lap. Her thoughts were both clear and disconnected. The leg is already straightening but there is no doubt that it is fractured and the plane is going down. She stopped his stunned parents with an outstretched palm and clamped a hand on the mouth of the wailing mother. She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
"Let him be with me," she said, removing her hand from the woman"s face. "Trust me, I"m a doctor."