Sketching became more than an instructional or archival endeavor. It became a pastime. A meditation. An escape.
Silence was never mandatory as Dorothy lost herself in her sketching. Always within earshot, monkeys called to one another—a surprisingly normal sound. An expected sound. After all, this was rural Assam. A morning without monkeys, in fact, might even signal alarm to dwellers on the fringes of the reclaimed jungle that covered the hills beyond the near edges of the Satribari compound. So let them screech on. The sound came from a great distance. Muted. Welcome. A morning melody of its own.
Time and space seemed altered, nearly parallel, in hours like these when Dorothy could sit alone sketching the day’s cases into her journal that consumed five volumes now. She could never fully explain the sensation of seeming to be led, as if her mind detached and merely watched her hand curve across the page, sketching veins and swollen tissue and lacerated muscle and taut, distended bellies—the ghastly and beautiful things that have made up her day in the hospital, or in the traveling dispensary.
She picked up the horsehair brush and dipped it into the puddle of tea she had spilled into her saucer. With utmost care she dabbed at the areas of her drawing that her memory told her were most inflamed. Minuscule spiders of tea formed their own spontaneous designs on the fringes, soaking the margins.
Dorothy smiled at the irony of it. Tea. How perfect that it should be tea, so abundant in Assam, this land of tea gardens, that brought her illustrations to life. How ironic to be painting these angry, infected sores with tea, the very reason so many of her patients come to her in such dire straits. Their work in the tea gardens kept them in perpetual, abject poverty, and in constant danger of contracting Kala Azar.
Less than a hundred years earlier this part of India had been practically unpopulated. Then the Indian tea managers came looking for areas where their precious tea bushes would take kindly to the soil. Most of these people would not be here today had the tea managers not made just such a discovery in the soil of Assam.
But they had. And they had rejoiced over the untouched land that stretched for miles and miles on both sides of the beautiful Brahmaputra River. No wonder Gauhati and much of Assam caught the eye of the British colonial tea industry. It didn’t take them long to make their mark upon it, as well.
By the 1860s, massive immigration of tea plantation workers—low caste from Bengal and central India—brought many of Dorothy’s patients’ great-grandparents to the area seeking work in the tea gardens—a charming and colloquial name for an industry riddled with dark sides.
She knew just enough about these people’s history that unholy images of the meager life they must have found here floated in her consciousness as Dorothy darkened the tea stain around the festering sores she sketched. The boy who bore these sores suffered terribly from Kala Azar, as did many of her patients from the jungle regions. These jungles were infested with monkeys carrying the parasitic disease, the very reason not even tribal hunters could be coerced to go into the jungles and clear them for the tea plantation owners. They had known that entering that disease-ridden den was a near-certain death sentence.
What the tea plantation foremen needed were workers who had no fear of the jungle, and no such human existed in the sparse outlying villages. So the tea plantation owners would say they had little choice but to begin importing labor.
A few workers came of their own accord, drawn to work with the cultured British who had begun populating their land. But when the British needed more and more laborers, more than the native agents could recruit, the agents turned to unscrupulous methods of securing workers. Soon thousands were being kidnapped by “certified” agents and transplanted in Assam.
And some girls, as Lahaori’s family told it, became depot brides. Lahoari never failed to cry every time she told the story of her grandmother’s thirteen-year-old sister, who had been stolen from their beautiful home and whisked away to the train station before anyone even knew she was gone. Someone had spoken a few hurried words and suddenly she was married to a man—also stolen—whom she had never seen in her life, and between sobs her train left the depot and carried the new bride into a dark and soul-scarring life in the tea garden.
Eleven years later, the story went, Lahaori’s great aunt stumbled back to her home in Gauhati, emaciated, gray-haired, carrying three small children—the only surviving three of the seven she had borne in the eleven years married to a man she’d never truly come to know. She was only twenty-four.
. . . .
So it seemed that the very tea that had been a blessing in Dorothy’s daily life, an ever-present tool for journaling, had also been the curse behind the poverty and disease that plagued so many of her patients.
Now in the very modern 1930s it was that poverty—the legacy of the tea gardens—that made this valley such fertile ground for strike-organizing activists. Activists like a man named Ghandi who was a quiet firebrand for change.
Dorothy dabbed the page with a scrap of blotting paper and closed her journal. She rose to put the book on its shelf behind her desk just as one of the new student nurses stepped into the doorway and called her respectful greeting.
“Ah, thank you, Achala.” Dorothy turned to accept the medical file the girl offered. She glanced at the recent notes and nodded her appreciation of their thoroughness. The girl beamed with pleasure and turned to leave.
“Achala, one moment please.”
The girl turned, and the delight on her face turned to apprehension.
“Yes, Doctor Kinney?”
“I see you’re not wearing your uniform today.”
A half-smile crept onto the girl’s face. “No, missahib, I do not wear it today.”
Dorothy sighed. “Did something happen to it?”
“Oh no, missahib!”
“Ah. Did it not get laundered?”
“Oh no, missahib! I mean, yes, missahib.”
“Well then, would you please explain why you are on duty today but your uniform is not?”
The girl blushed and cleared her throat. Her hands self-consciously brushed at the fabric of her obviously homespun sari. “I do as the Ghandi instructs.”
“As the Ghandi instructs?”
“Yes, missahib! We are not to purchase the cloth that is not made in our land.”
Dorothy smiled. He was at it again. Or rather, still. His never-ending battle to press for independence from Britain.
“So you made your own?”
The girl nodded. “On the Ghandi’s loom.” She spoke with such pride that Dorothy was loath to squash her enthusiasm. But really. Women all across the country were weaving their own cloth on the rickety little portable looms the man himself had invented. And not doing it very well, from the looks of Achala’s sagging garment. It was sure to make an entire country look like beggars.
“A very noble endeavor,” Dorothy smiled, determined not to say what she actually thought about the man’s meddling. “But may I ask if we have changed the procedure here? If you were required to purchase the cloth for your nurse’s uniform?”
“Oh no, missahib! The most generous hospital has provided our uniforms. I—” Achala’s face fell further as her quick mind followed Dorothy’s reasoning.
“Very well, then. I see that you understand. Since you did not have to purchase the uniform that was made in Britain, you will not be going against your Ghandi’s ultimatum if you simply wear it. Correct?”
“Yes, missahib! Yes, I see!”
At her dismissal the girl fled, though she seemed to show great relief at the prospect of no longer having to wear her homespun garment alongside her classmates in their crisp uniforms.
Dorothy sighed. This girl was a progressive, so typical of young Indian women these days. If it was a new idea, she jumped on it. A new expression? She was the first to employ it in her everyday speech. She was bright. Independent. Aware. Not anything like Lahoari’s great-grandmother, Dorothy guessed.
May 1932
Ghandi is not a Christian and does not lay claim to being one—he is frank to admit that he is a Hindu but has simply borrowed some of Christ’s teachings that he considered good. He is spoken of as being Christ-like which to my notion is nothing short of blasphemy. He is too inconsistent, and not only that he is working entirely for an earthly kingdom and not a spiritual one. Your letters have all been full of eulogies about Ghandi from this one and that one. Well, honestly, I did think that my own family wasn’t quite so gullible. It is nothing short of propaganda and lack of brains on the part of some folks at home that Ghandi is being talked of as he is. Don’t believe anything and everything in the papers. If I did that, I surely wouldn’t have a very good opinion of the USA from the things that find their way into our papers out here.
The day fled into night and at last her lamp began to flicker as it did after long use. Though it seemed that the day filled with patients and reports had barely begun, it was over, and Dorothy wandered the path home slowly. The letter she would write while waiting for Monglu to put the supper on was already composing itself in her head.
June 1932
The hospital is still full. There are twenty-one just at present—fourteen of them children, and ten of them under four. Isn’t that grand. I get so thrilled over the opportunities out here, and then so heart sick over the tragedies. The little boy who came in for hernia is getting ready for the operation very well. Think we can do it this week.
Anywhere else a child might come for surgery one day and be on the operating table the next. But here, in many cases, a restorative regimen was necessary for a time before a malnourished, worm-ridden, vitamin deficient anemic child could be expected to survive the scalpel.
That complication was seen around the hospital as a great blessing. It took a significant toll on the hospital’s financial resources, but the longer it took to build up the child, the more time they had to introduce eager little ears to the Christian God. Happy, healthy children would return to their parents and neighbors with the seeds of something beautiful in their hearts.
Often, however, a healthy, restored child was returned to its parents only to be introduced to something horrid and dark.
December 1932
Karmoti continues to gain and get fat but the other day we found that her father (her mother died two or three months ago) has bunderbusted (that is good Assamese for making a bargain or arrangement) for her in the prostitute lines and has sold her to the women there. It seems as tho we couldn’t let that little bit of sunshine go to such a place, and we are hoping and praying that some way will open so that we may be able to either keep her in the orphanage or put her in a good home.
She is so winsome now and is beginning to talk. When you ask her if she has had her rice she will look as arch and say in a soft little voice “Nai, nai” (no), and when you ask her where Bitee is (Assamese for big sister) her little finger will go toward a certain one of the nurses of whom she is very fond. She sings and plays with her toys and is so happy and lovable.
Dorothy stood a moment on the bungla’s bottom step and looked down the road toward the orphanage. Thinking of Karmoti and the orphanage and saving her from her dreadful fate brought a boatload of emotions tumbling into the space in her heart where another baby lived.
Baby Junaki. Not so much a baby now. All of six years old, and the most precious bundle of sunshine. Junaki only had eyes for Dorothy, as well she should. She would forever and always be Dorothy’s first delivery nearly seven years ago now, the young American doctor delivering her first baby to a mother whose family had waited too long to bring her to the hospital. Junaki lost her mother in childbirth and her father that same day—she was a baby girl, after all, and of little use to a widowed man.
Dorothy’s heart had opened completely, fully, engulfing the child with every bit of a mother’s love. She kept the child at the hospital much longer than anyone thought reasonable. Longer than she knew she should. For two years Baby Junaki toddled around the hospital, reaping hugs and stories and sweets and smiles from Dorothy who was over the moon in love with the child, until the day came at last when Dorothy realized she must part with Junaki, for the child’s own good.
And when that day came, it was dear Monbahadur, the compound’s general mahorie (handyman) and his lovely wife who adopted Junaki. Their home was a model of joy. That and only that made it possible for Dorothy to let loose of the little Garo girl.
Karmoti and Junaki had—by the grace of God—been spared the life of prostitution for which they were destined. They were two little girls, two precious little souls, who now thrived in a life that promised infinitely more than fate had dealt them.
They had lost their mothers, and Dorothy had taken them into her heart. She could feel their small arms wrapped fiercely around her neck. She could see clearly in her mind’s eye the bright intelligence that shown from their beautiful brown eyes. She never lost the tug at her heart that happened without fail when anyone mentioned those two dear names.
Junaki. Karmoti. Their names made her smile as she wearily slipped her shoes off and clapped the dust from them before she entered her quiet bungla. Overhead the first stars of a lovely northern India evening graced the dark sky.
Aha. Her letter home would have to wait, if the enticing aromas indicated as she thought they did that Monglu had dinner ready to set out for her. She stowed her Oxfords and stepped into the kitchen to let him know she was home.
The table was nicely set as always. And in the center was grandly displayed the special dish she had requested of Monglu that very morning.
Apple rings.
In a lovely china bowl.
Still soaking.
Still in the tin.
CHAPTER FIVE
USE WHAT YOU HAVE
As they are wont to do, a hundred golden mornings passed in the blink of an eye. Some heavy with fog, some sodden for weeks after torrential downpours, some still and dry. Yet each and every morning dawned golden in Dorothy’s eyes, gilded with opportunity and laced with anticipation of yet another chance to feel God’s will at work through her own hands.
This particular golden morning quickly lived up to its promise, delivering a solution to a medical problem in the form of a brilliant idea.
Accomplishment sang in her veins as Dorothy gathered the items with which she hoped to achieve her latest inspiration. Yesterday’s cares fell away, allowing her muse to put wings to her feet.
It never failed. A plan waiting to be fulfilled invigorated her in a way no other thing could, sharpening her senses, honing her creative edge, stoking her ingenuity. Better than sugar on cinnamon toast, she always said—and to Dorothy there was very little better than sugar on cinnamon.
With barely repressed eagerness she selected and rejected items from her small storage closet, gathering unlikely objects to achieve an unlikely purpose, but one she was certain would work. She felt it in her bones.
No day here was without its challenges, but for a born problem solver a new dilemma was like Christmas all over again. Another test. Another mystery. Another conundrum.
She welcomed them.
“Edna, where is that length of mosquito netting you were showing me the other day?”
Edna Stever was busy at her bookkeeping just a few paces away. She looked up and dropped her spectacles down the bridge of her nose.
“That? It’s not much use, Dorothy. Not much more than a scrap. Dunno what they were thinking. Doesn’t even stretch across a baby’s bassinet. Bottom shelf, I think. Toward the back.”
She poked her glasses back up where they belonged and bent to her work. Dorothy smiled. That was actually quite a long, eloquent oration. For Edna, anyway.
Dorothy shook her head at some of the improbable things stored in her little closet. Silk sheets. Books on star-gazing. And for heavens’ sake, how many homemade te
a cozies could one hospital possibly use? All were things that had been sent from the States. By well-meaning church ladies bent on being helpful to ‘those poor missionaries’.
How simple it will be when people finally learn to just read my lists and fill my requests.
Too simple, she knew. Still, no matter how clearly she stated their need in her letters, the Board of Missionaries could seldom manage to send the things she actually requested, or authorize her to have the work done or items made by local craftsmen.
It frustrated. It maddened.
A care package would arrive from a well-meaning patron back home and the tingle would rush from the nape of her neck to her fingertips. What could it be?
The brown paper would be carefully removed, folded, and set aside, and the string that bound it would be neatly coiled before she opened each package. This could be the one! This could be the surgical instrument she has asked for…repeatedly. Or the sheets made to order for the new hospital bed. Or, praise God, it might even be the crinoline she needed for plaster casts, or…
But no. It would be some frilly furbelow chosen especially to thrill the sensibilities of an isolated missionary female working in the hinterlands. Or a new appliance that drew off so much of her precious electricity that she could never—almost never—use it.
June 1933
The gloves and syringe from Durbins have not come altho I think you said a week or two ago that you had sent them. How we do wish we could get someone to just give an operating table or the money for one. Have asked Miss Tufts if I could ask for it as a specific, but don’t imagine that they will be willing. Have heard nothing from the Board so far as to any chances for our septic tanks, pump, etc. If they just had to live and work without a septic tank, they would change their minds in a hurry.
The Bets Catalog came but it doesn’t help us much inasmuch as we haven’t the money for the table much as we need it. Oh, for more equipment. If we could just have about five hundred dollars we could have a decent table that would fill all our needs for years to come. We stand on our heads, we break our backs, we use bricks, and then we can’t do the things we could do if we had better equipment. How I wish somebody would just give us about five hundred for a table and give it to us quick.
Courage in a White Coat Page 3