by Liam Pieper
Sasha broods. She is worried for the dozens of workers working through illness, but she knows that they’re part of a much larger problem, that there are thousands more villagers out there who can’t afford medical care. She asks her maid, the driver, the guy who delivers her meals in the evening, to put the word out that everyone is welcome to see her if they need a doctor.
There’s a chance, she thinks, that Velli’s family is out there, in one of the surrounding villages, freaking out and unable to reach her. If she can make herself known, maybe Velli’s parents will come out of the woodwork. Worst case scenario, she’ll make life a little better for the villagers.
Soon she is inundated. It seems nearly every one of the dozens of servants has been stoically nursing some acutely unpleasant condition – and knows three more people in need of treatment who can’t make it to the ashram.
One morning she gathers her kit and heads to the nearest village, reached by a dirt track off the highway to Chennai. She parks her motorbike at the end of the road, overlooking a beach lined with colourfully painted wooden skiffs and strewn with plastic bags, soda bottles, the ghosts of old fishing nets. Naked except for their lungis, men rest in the shade of the boats and stare at her with what she reads as hostility. Starving dogs, all skin and ribcage, raise their heads and wag their tails as she passes, but don’t stir beyond that.
She walks into the village, through squat concrete buildings in pastels and temples with gaudily painted statues of gods perched above steel guttering. She doesn’t know what she was expecting from the India beyond the ashram – thatch huts and handicrafts, placid animals, a cartoon farm. Not this. Under the shade of an edifice of Shiva, an old man hitches up his lungi, squats, and relieves himself on the street. He stares at Sasha as she hurries by, and one of the mutts raises itself and trots over to him, tail wagging.
Around a few corners she finally locates a young woman, maybe in her early twenties, with a brace of children around her. She sits in front of a tarpaulin on which small fish in neat rows are drying in the sun.
‘Hi!’ Sasha says brightly. The woman narrows her eyes.
‘Doctor.’ Sasha points to her chest. ‘I’m a doctor. Do you need help?’
A child runs behind her mother and the woman herself turns away, stares angrily into the middle distance, ignores all of Sasha’s overtures until she gives up and leaves.
Sasha can’t say she blames her. She feels like an asshole as she limps back to the ashram on her bike.
When Sasha tells her what happened, the guru only laughs, a tinkling carefree sound. She tells Sasha that of course they were suspicious. Sasha will have to work to earn the trust of the people in the surrounding countryside, as the guru has over the years.
The next time Sasha heads to the village, the guru and her entourage accompany her. This time, the guru marches into the main street, straightens her back, and then makes a long speech in clipped, rapid-fire Tamil. When she finishes, there is a pause, and then all around them front doors open and women start to file out, their children in tow.
After only a few weeks, Sasha realises that she is good at this. She is really good at this. There are days when she feels that her whole existence has led her to this; her mother’s illness, her stupid, bedraggled life in which she has had all the agency of a feather in a stream, all just so she could find herself in this strange place by the sea, half desert and half jungle, doing her best to make life better for people who have so little. Her half-rusted medical education is enough here; she can check vitals, feel out infected lymph nodes with her fingertips, administer antibiotics and vaccinations to squalling children.
Even her years of waitressing are helpful – she jumps off the bike in a new village with a huge all-American diner waitress openness on her face, her body language smooth and unthreatening. There isn’t that much difference between coaxing a tip out of a recalcitrant diner in Brooklyn and convincing a young mother with the barest of broken English to let Sasha examine her and her children.
She starts to feel that this is what she was born for. She feels incredibly lucky. How many people ever get to realise their destiny? How many people figure out their purpose, much less live it?
When Sasha realises just how much help is needed in the area, she takes stock of the medical supplies in the ashram and finds them deeply wanting. She goes through with a clipboard, makes a thorough inventory with a deepening scowl while the guru watches from the doorway, amused.
‘This is no good,’ Sasha announces unhappily. ‘Half of this stuff is a write-off.’ The supplies are stored in no discernible order and with no particular care – pill packets and rolls of bandages have already surrendered to mildew in the damp climate. Whole ampules of antibiotics have evaporated through their seals, while all the opiates have been surreptitiously pillaged. For Sasha – for whom letting milk go sour in the fridge is an unconscionable violation of the laws of thrift – this is intolerable, and the guru, wry look still on her face, agrees.
They take a taxi into Chennai, to a pharmacy where the guru leans over the counter and delivers quick, staccato orders to the pharmacist, who fetches a pen and pad to write down their order. The guru turns around and spreads her arms expansively, offering Sasha the world.
On the way home, as they pass a little fishing village, she orders the driver to pull over in front of a wine store.
‘Well?’ says the guru. ‘Shall we?’
In a cramped, airless store lined with bottles of Royal Stag whisky and black Old Monk rum in their squat novelty bottles, they find a bottle of port wine from Goa that, when decanted into teacups back at the ashram, tastes only a little like feet.
The guru wrinkles her nose delicately as she sips. ‘God I miss France sometimes. In this country, Sasha, anything is possible – except for winemaking.’
They enjoy the wine in the guru’s chambers, behind the beaded curtain from her office, in her private quarters. They, like the guru’s office area, are spartan. A four-poster bed against a wall, covered with a mosquito net that hangs limp in the airless night. Against the opposite wall, a mirrored vanity scattered with lotions and a low wooden table – all carved out of the same dark hardwood.
The table is an antique; when Sasha runs her palm across its surface her fingers snag on nicks and scars. An elaborately carved relief runs the border – a procession of elephants, chariots, figures kneeling before deities.
‘This god,’ asks Sasha, tapping on one with many arms and the head of an elephant, ‘who are they?’
The guru shrugs, tells Sasha to take her pick – the scene is meaningless, produced by French craftsmen who carved oriental kitsch, charging by the metre. The table is a relic from the last days of French India, when there was vogue for Indian furniture in Europe that saw the jungle logged.
The table was left behind when the French abandoned their colonies in the fifties, shortly before the ashram was founded. Bankrupted and ravaged by the French invasion, the new union of India sold the land cheap to the guru’s parents, and they travelled from Paris to found the ashram.
‘But not before the colonists had cut down every tree for miles around. We had to regrow the jungle from scratch. You see the same all over India. They were terrified that there were monsters out there – tigers, rhinos, natives. It never occurred to them to look in the mirror.’
Time passes, the air grows cosy. The guru takes the pins out of her hair and the tight grey bun explodes in all directions. She retrieves a hardwood hairbrush, starts to run it through her hair. The sound is soothing, and, a little tipsy with no food in her stomach, Sasha begins to tune out. Her eyes close. When she opens them, the guru has moved a little closer, her eyes wide and urgent.
‘Are you happy here?’
‘Huh?’
‘Happy. Does this place make you happy? Does the work you do here make you happy?’
‘I’m . . . happier, I guess.’
‘Ah.’ The guru’s eyes soften. ‘I am glad.’
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��I do wish . . . I wish there was something more we could do for . . . there’s just so many people with nothing in this country. It’s hard to see.’
‘That is noble.’ The guru pauses for a long moment. ‘But I want to clarify something. Do not feel badly that there are humans in this life who suffer more than you. Suffering is divine. It brings a soul closer to purity.’
The guru takes Sasha’s hand, enlaces her fingers with hers. ‘Which means that you should not feel badly that you have suffered. Everything you’ve been through has been for a reason. Your path has brought you here. You must trust the divine consciousness.’
Sasha moves to change the subject, retrieve her hand, but the guru only squeezes it more firmly.
‘Your mother would be proud. Even if she never told you herself, you must remember this every day. I am proud of you.’
She hands Sasha the hairbrush. ‘Help me, please? My arms are tired.’
Blinking herself awake, Sasha takes the brush, perches behind the guru on the cushions and runs her fingers through the guru’s mane, looking for the place to start. Across the room, the mirror over the nightstand reflects the scene – the guru watches for a little while, then her eyelids shut, and she leans further back so her head rests in Sasha’s lap.
Sasha gets comfortable at the ashram. She grows more confident on her Enfield, learns a few words of Tamil. She feels she is getting the hang of India.
She heads into town by herself every few weeks to resupply the ashram’s medicine cabinet. When her own malaria medicine runs out she doesn’t bother buying more – it’s too expensive and there is little risk in this area. Without it, she sleeps more deeply, feels less jittery when she wakes in the morning. She hadn’t realised the tax it had been on her well-being. When her Lexapro runs out, she lets that lapse too.
She’s been at the ashram for months now, eating little but lentils, steamed rice and bananas, and after some time on this diet she equalises, finds there are new reserves of energy on the other side of hunger. The pounds fall off her and soon she is all sharp angles; she’s never been so conscious of her cheekbones. The points of her hips stick up beneath her pyjamas when she lies prone after yoga.
At the same time, the world around her seems to be softening; the light seems gentler, the extremes of humidity and searing heat are more comfortable. The nights grow cool. A pleasant fog rolls in from the sea around midnight and something of its sleepy tranquillity stays with her through the day.
She continues exploring the jungle – long rambling walks down paths that might either be long-abandoned roads or tracks cut by floodwaters – and is often lost. No sweat, Sasha is certain no harm will come to her in this jungle. She’s been warned that wild things haunt the trees, but each time she walks away from her cottage the house dogs peel off from the sleepy pack and follow her, tails wagging as they weave through the tree line.
Some things don’t change. Sometimes she rides to town to resupply and, away from the austerity of the ashram, she indulges in everything she’s not meant to crave anymore; eats a steak, drinks a Coke, checks her email, hoping for something from her husband. She never knows if she is relieved or destroyed when it never comes, but then one day it does, and it knocks the wind out of her, guts her like a fish in the middle of a Chennai teahouse.
The email from Stephan is clinical. The relevant documents have been sent to India care of Stephan’s law firm, but to Delhi, on the other side of the country, where they have an office. An envelope is waiting with the divorce papers and a non-disclosure agreement sealing up the particulars of their failed marriage. The terms are all quite standard, she is assured. Provisions have been made for a decent settlement for Sasha, and for Mama’s care in perpetuity.
She pictures Stephan in his office in New York, rubbing sanitiser into his hands while proofing the email. It isn’t malicious, exactly, but the cordiality of it ruins her. She sits stricken before the teahouse computer – a creaking antique from a simpler age – and dashes off a wounded response that she regrets the second she hits send. Written in blinding anger and sorrow, the email will read as crazy and unhinged if it were to ever end up in court. She has disappointed herself in sending it, and probably done exactly as Stephan expected.
She controls her breathing, finds some sort of calm. When she gets back to the ashram she finds herself making her way to the guru’s rooms. Her aides usher Sasha through. The guru is sitting up, reading, a pot of tea steaming. When she sees the state Sasha is in she is on her feet in one movement, intercepts her with a rustle of silk and silver bangles. She perches on the edge of the bed and holds Sasha’s head until the guru’s sari is soaked with tears. She makes soft cooing noises, which grow into soothing words and, finally, advice.
‘You must stop fighting yourself. Go to Delhi. Free yourself of this man. Your home is here now. Give yourself permission to be free.’
That night, Sasha cannot bring herself to make it to the dining hall, but at dinner time she hears a motorbike approaching her hut. The servant who first delivered her Enfield is at the door, with her dinner still steaming in a steel tiffin carrier – daal, rice, chana in a thick tomato sauce – and a teapot, ice-cold to the touch. Sasha recognises the smell as she pours it out – whisky, officially forbidden but very welcome – and her heart leaps.
The servant waits quietly by the door. When she is finished eating he collects the dishes, puts them outside the hut, and returns to sit on the bed. He folds his hands over his knees. His long fingers are stark as piano keys against the white of his sarong, he keeps his eyes low, staring neutrally at his sandals.
It is a question. After a minute, Sasha closes the door and moves to the bed in answer.
Mama lived in a nursing home upstate, far from the railway, enough of a drive that visiting meant sacrificing a whole day. Even if Sasha left first thing in the morning, by the time she arrived it was nearly time to leave again, so no matter how long she actually spent with her mother it never felt like the duty was done.
The first time she visited her mother after some time away, she’d been shocked by how quickly her condition had deteriorated. She’d lost so much weight it seemed like her bones had shifted, the veins pressing out at strange angles, the eyes sunken in their sockets, her skin stretched so tight Sasha could make out the skull beneath.
Half her body was still paralysed. The immobile side of her face had yellowed and drooped in folds like the wax runoff from the thick, ancient candles of her childhood church services. That eye stared levelly forward while the other rolled around seemingly at random, occasionally fixing on Sasha, or the nurses as they came in and out to change Mama’s sheets, or her diaper. Sasha wasn’t even sure if her mother knew she was there, or, if she did, that she understood who she was.
There was no recognition in her good eye, just a simmering anger that made Sasha hope there was nothing left of her mind. It made her skin itch – so, when alone with her, she moved Mama’s wheelchair to the big bay windows that looked out on the gardens and sat with her. She grew fond of the year-round splendour of carefully manicured nature: a lake, ringed by a careful, not-quite haphazard smattering of trees that were always waving gently in a summer breeze, bursting into brilliant autumnal foliage or wreathed in snow and standing to crisp attention.
Mama sat silent, still but for the roving eye, while Sasha passed the hours talking about her new life in a Manhattan townhouse. It was all so nice; so, so nice. But she had no idea if Mama understood where she was, how lucky she was to be there.
Stephan paid the fees, had arranged a spot for her in this exclusive care facility with a decade-long waiting list, had taken care of everything. This had been after a few months of horrified flailing in which Mama had churned through the public system, enough to evaporate Sasha’s meagre savings, tank her grades, lose her scholarship.
Worst had been the feeling of helplessness, knowing just how slim her chances in the public system were. The first week, when Sasha had visited Mama in hospital, stil
l comatose, just barely clinging to life, she had found her bed empty – she would always recall the sinking, plunging horror of that feeling. It had been premature, tests were being run on her elsewhere in the hospital.
Soon enough, they wheeled her mother back in. The orderly, rushed and impatient, banged the corner of her trolley into the door jamb full tilt, so the trolley crunched to a halt and the comatose Mama flopped half out of the bed, like a puppet that had slipped its strings.
‘Hey!’ Sasha yelled. The attendant shrugged, stared through her as he heaved Mama back into bed and wheeled her into the ward.
Sasha realised she didn’t know what to do. If she complained, the orderly wouldn’t listen. If she tried to kick it up the chain, the orderly might take revenge, do something frightful to her mother. Stranger things had happened in the underfunded, overstuffed and corrupt health system. Her training, her abandoned medical degree, meant nothing, only made her acutely aware of how terribly precarious her mother’s situation was. Being half a doctor was worse than not being one at all.
She cried that night, in bed with Stephan, and, a little awkwardly, he wiped away her tears and said, softly, carefully, ‘You know, it doesn’t have to be like this. I could help.’
Gently, he sketched a plan. She argued and protested, but not very convincingly, and not very much. He slipped his arm out from under her, reached for his phone. One hand held the phone to his ear while he rested against the glass of the balcony’s French doors, which looked out over the sprawl of Manhattan, the dimples in his ass cheeks twinkling merrily. The next day a private ambulance was driving Mama upstate to her new half-life.
Stephan had clout, a last name that made scenes like this possible; besides, a glorious career was unfolding in front of him.