by Anirban Bose
‘No, no… I’m serious, Adi.’
‘I think your brain has fried in the heat, man.’
‘No, Adi… I mean it. I know I’ll fail and I have nowhere to stay when we go back. So this is it…no more exams. I’m tired of this nonsense. I’ll do something else. Farm…sell chickens…milk cows…Fuck it, man…no more medicine.’
Adi hadn’t realized he was serious. ‘Don’t give up, Pheru. Look, even if you flunk this time you can stay with me. You’ve begun to study hard and I’m sure you’ll pass eventually…like you said…you want to be the last one standing, remember?’
Pheru shook his head and sighed. ‘No, Adi. I don’t think medicine is for me… I took it up for all the wrong reasons and maybe that it is why I’m not destined to become a doctor. Abbu was right… I am cursed. I… I’ll never beat it. Never. Maybe that’s what I need to understand.’
‘That is crazy, Pheru. Don’t quit. You can stay with me and make more attempts, man. I think even Toshi would have liked to see you pass.’
‘Yeah, but Toshi is dead, Adi…after he let me stay with him. Something will happen to you too if I move in with you… I should just stay out of everyone’s lives!’
‘Pheru, that is nonsense…and Toshi was really grateful for your company. Do you remember how sick he was during the time you spent with him?’
‘Yeah, but he’s not coming back…and it’s better to be sick than dead, Adi,’ said Pheru. ‘So, I’ve been thinking about it for some time now. I can’t spend my life just trying to prove a point, man. See…all my problems go away if I just quit medicine.’
Suddenly, Sam came running towards them. ‘Did you hear what happened?’ he said. ‘During the search, they found that one of the passenger’s bags had some bullets and this guy doesn’t have his license to carry a gun. Major Nair won’t let him go without verification, and the other Nagas won’t leave without him. They are having a heated argument in the tent!’
The three of them walked over to the tent. Inside, Major Nair sat behind a big wooden table on which lay a few unspent bullets and an open suitcase, its contents scattered all over. A couple of jawans stood behind him while he faced off with one of the Naga men.
‘This is nothing but harassment!’ shouted the Naga man.
Major Nair said quietly, ‘You know that you have to carry your permit.’
‘But I’m not carrying a gun! Why do I need to carry a gun permit if I’m not carrying a gun?’
‘Look, you’d better sit down and wait. I have requested verification.’
The man stared at Major Nair in disgust, then stormed out of the tent. Outside, Adi could see him talking angrily to his fellow Nagas. Intermittently, they stared angrily towards the tent and Major Nair. A few of them re-entered the tent to talk to him.
‘This is just harassment… There is a pregnant lady in the bus who needs to get to the hospital fast!’
‘I know, but I can’t do anything. My hands are tied!’
An angry silence ensued. Then someone from the crowd of Nagas said contemptuously, ‘This is why Nagas get upset with the Indian government! You wonder why so many Nagas want a different country? We just don’t want this harassment, that’s all!’
Major Nair looked at him sternly. ‘I’m warning you to stop your nonsense, otherwise I’ll be forced to confine you.’
‘So now you’re threatening to arrest me?’ challenged the man, raising his voice for everyone to hear. ‘Go ahead…arrest me so that people will at least realize the problems that we face. Otherwise let us go!’
Major Nair stood up, trying to impose his size on the argument. ‘I cannot let him go…the rest of you can take the bus and leave, but until I get verification of his gun permit, he cannot leave. Those are my orders… I am bound by the rules.’
The passenger stared angrily at Major Nair and then spat on the ground. He joined the group outside the tent, where everybody launched into an angry, animated discussion in a language Adi couldn’t understand. The tone, however, conveyed their feelings adequately. Some of the men glared at the jawans around them. The armed jawans stood nervously still, holding on to their guns tightly, their fingers only inches away from the triggers.
Suddenly, loud incoherent shouting from the bus attracted everybody’s attention. Within a few minutes, some of the Naga men came out of the bus, carrying the pregnant lady. Her face looked ashen and she was crying.
One of the men ran ahead towards Major Nair and said, ‘She says that she cannot feel the baby moving. She feels the baby may have died!’
Major Nair immediately made way for the men to take her inside. They laid her on a cot in one corner of the tent. Her husband began to fan her with his shirt.
Major Nair looked lost. He turned towards the six of them and said, ‘You guys are doctors, right?’
‘Third year medical students!’ came the rapid clarification.
‘But you guys have seen patients, right? You know first aid and simple stuff, right?’
Pheru, Harsha and Sam shook their heads in unison before turning to look at Adi. Adi had been dreading this. Aside from him, none of the others had ever taken care of a pregnant woman, an inexperience that served well as an obvious disqualification from the responsibility of taking charge. Adi, on the other hand, had spent extra time in obstetrics, even defying the class to do so.
Adi cringed.
Jagdeep said, ‘Adi, you’ve conducted deliveries, right? Let me go and get my stethoscope for you.’
With typical second-year-medical-student pride in the new tools of his trade, Jagdeep had remembered to pack his stethoscope. He ran to retrieve it from the bus.
Major Nair spoke to the lady’s husband. Adi noticed the word spreading quickly among the gathering that they were ‘doctors’, and Adi was the ob-gyn specialist.
Adi froze. His heart began to race and his mouth turned dry when he remembered the trouble he had identifying foetal heart sounds even when a large ‘X’ identified the location on those protuberant bellies. He gulped, wishing he could confess that his interest in obstetrics hadn’t exactly been academic. He silently cursed his hitherto cavalier approach to the intricacies of childbirth. Finally, unable to avoid the onus, and conscripted into service by the invisible spotlight of expectant stares, Adi felt obliged to involuntarily volunteer his ‘expertise’.
All eyes were upon him as Adi slowly approached the pregnant woman. She lay on the makeshift cot, her eyes wide with anxiety. Sweat glistened on her face.
Adi stood beside her for a few seconds, unsure of what to do next. Then, very tentatively, he placed the stethoscope on her belly.
He smiled almost immediately, marvelling at his acoustic windfall. Adi could clearly hear the sweetest, most beautiful sound in the universe: the sound of life. A tiny heart inside her belly went dub-a-dub-a-dub, pounding away at the pace of a fast-moving train.
Adi shouted excitedly, ‘The baby is alive… I can hear its heart! I can hear its heart!’
A collective sigh of relief arose from the crowd that quickly condensed into a murmur of admiration. Major Nair beamed happily while the prospective parents broke into relieved smiles.
Bolstered by his initial success, Adi’s confidence grew. He wondered why the baby wasn’t moving if it was alive. He looked again at the spot where he had heard the foetal heart sounds. It was low in the pelvis… Could it be that the baby had stopped moving because it had engaged deep in the pelvis? But that would mean she could be in early labour!
That was the first time Adi noticed she was in pain. She was in labour! Adi’s jaw dropped at the thought of impending birth. Sweat began to run down his forehead when he remembered how he had blacked out while witnessing his first delivery. The dryness in his mouth returned and his panic-stricken heart began to race even faster when he realized that the responsibility of holding the slippery, slimy, blood-covered infant as it came sliding out of the vagina was his. He didn’t dare imagine what would happen to them if he dropped the baby.
Taking a couple of deep breaths to control his mounting panic, Adi tried to find faith in his abilities to guide a baby out of its womb. Sure, he had seen a bunch of babies being born, and thanks to Isha’s enthusiasm he had even managed to supervise a few. But those had been with the comforting presence of Dr Choksi only a few feet away.
Trying to emulate what he had seen Dr Choksi do so many times, Adi asked for some privacy to examine her. Major Nair immediately cleared the tent. Adi was surprised to find that she was very advanced in labour. Her cervix felt soft and indistinguishable from the rest of the womb and he could even feel the frizzy hair on the baby’s head. Her water must have broken while she was in the bus; she just hadn’t realized it. She would deliver soon.
He turned to Pheru. ‘Pheru, I think she is in labour…in fact, she is progressing really fast! I’ll need your help!’
Pheru nodded uncertainly. ‘Me? Yeah…okay, what should I do?’
‘She is fully dilated and effaced. The presentation is vertex and LOA and I’ll try and manage her labour. But I… I have no idea about pediatrics or neonatal care. Can you take care of that…can you just hold the baby as it comes out?’
Pheru nodded uncertainly.
Outside, the hostilities had vanished. The jawans and the Nagas milled about, awaiting more news.
Adi turned around to give orders. Some of the jawans ran to boil water while Rajeev found some simple instruments in a first-aid kit. Some thread, a pair of moustache-trimming scissors and a couple of plastic meat-cutting gloves received a thorough boiling. A partition was fashioned out of a bedsheet hung across bamboo poles to provide privacy in the open tent.
Adi tried to think through the steps of childbirth. He asked her to bear down during her contractions. He felt her push the baby vigorously. A couple of Naga women stood around her, talking to her, helping her through it, while all eyes remained focused on Adi.
Adi barked instructions loudly while praying silently in his heart. The baby’s head was crowning; the face would be out soon.
Her labour proceeded at good speed. In the next half-hour, Adi had managed to draw out most of the baby’s head. As the chin turned and escaped the confines of the passage, he was completely unprepared for the sudden spurt of the rest of the squiggly body. He managed to hold on tightly to the slippery, rubbery mass of humanity, still attached to the umbilical cord.
Pheru rushed to wrap the baby in towels. They tied two knots in the cord and cut it. Pheru took the baby while Adi applied pressure on the mother’s belly to expel the placenta.
The silence that followed her painful screams was deafening. As everybody stood rooted to the spot, Adi realized something was wrong.
The baby was not crying. It looked dark, limp and lifeless.
‘Pheru?’ Adi hissed, looking at him anxiously. ‘Why isn’t it crying?’
Pheru put his fingers into the baby’s mouth to clear the passageway. Unable to find anything, he flipped the baby around in an effort to drain its mouth. The baby flip-flopped in his hand like a lifeless rag doll. Pheru started sweating profusely as he tried different manoeuvres to get the baby to breathe. Adi felt his heart sinking in the unbearable silence.
Then, more out of frustration than intent, Pheru spanked the newborn’s bottom and shouted, ‘Come on, damn it!’
The sharp slap echoed loudly in the room.
As if woken from a deep sleep, the baby suddenly cried out loudly, protesting its entry into an uncertain world, away from the comfortable confines of its mother’s belly.
Everyone broke into a loud cheer as the indignant cries of a little girl filled the room. The louder she cried, the happier their faces got. People smiled and hugged the father. Within a few seconds the baby turned pink as they showered her with more looks of admiration. Then, when the crying had stopped in the tight and cozy confines of Pheru’s arms, he handed the beautiful little girl to her mother.
Tears of joy and relief were streaming down Adi’s face. He turned and hugged Pheru. As they embraced, Adi heard Pheru whisper quietly, ‘Adi, I’m so bloody glad you didn’t join the strike!’
TWENTY-FIVE
Her birth changed everything.
Tightly wrapped into a small bundle, she gained instant eminence – the centrepiece of interaction amongst her numerous admirers. They fussed over her complacent pout, laughed at her cantankerous cries, and gushed at her content little face, finding kinship with one another in the familiarity of these simple emotions. The astounding beauty of her life trivialized all that had seemed so important only moments ago.
Pheru held the little girl for a while. She curled up cozily in his arms as he stared at her contented little face with a mixture of pride and sadness on his own. She was like the beautiful dream that deceives the slumbering mind, its lucidity inspiring belief – only to leave behind the bittersweet emptiness of its illusion when awakened. For the first time in his six years of studying medicine, Pheru felt the need to become a doctor for the same reasons that usually makes someone want to become a doctor. Yet, this true calling came with the reminder of its inherent improbability. His failure was imminent: his exam was to take place in another five days when he would be 3000 kilometres away from any chance of success.
Major Nair agreed to let them board the bus without waiting for the gun license, happily flouting the laws he had insisted on upholding only a short while ago. This time when they re-boarded the bus, the animosity had vanished, replaced by welcome stares and admiring nods. The best seats in the bus awaited them along with enthusiastic offerings of whatever little food the Nagas carried.
As the bus started to drive off, the new father raised his newborn to the rear window for the jawans to say goodbye. They stood on their tiptoes and waved enthusiastically, leaning on each other’s shoulders in order to get a better look as though bidding farewell to a distant but special relative. Their guns hung by their sides, the nozzles pointing harmlessly towards the ground.
Soon they began climbing the eastern range of the Himalaya. It was late afternoon as they made their way along the sinuous roads that snaked through the mountains. The bus paced along the empty road, slowing down for the sharp turns or the shallow stream that cut across its path. The verdant hills on both sides were velvety lush. Sunlight glinted off the emerald green leaves that glowed brilliantly after the recent showers. The graceful slopes merged into one another, or flattened out into quaint valleys with clear, sparkling streams. Small villages with thatch-roof houses and smoking chimneys dotted the valleys. A few desultory clouds floated in the pale blue sky, meandering aimlessly after having dropped their wares. Far away on the eastern horizon, snow-covered peaks broke the monotony of the barren altitudes, looking like a disgruntled artist’s brush strokes on the giant canvas of the sky.
They crossed the hills just as the sun flirted with the western horizon, glowing like a giant orange fireball and transforming the snowcapped mountaintops into reddish orange smudges of incandescent beauty. Soon, someone pointed out the village of Mokukchung to them. It cradled an entire hillside and looked like a bigger version of the villages they had passed on the way. As soon as the village came into view, the Nagas in the bus spontaneously broke into song.
The sun had set by the time they reached the bus-stop. Jagdeep had managed to contact Toshi’s parents by telephone from Dimapur and they had assured him that someone would meet them at the bus-stand. A gentleman stepped forward when he saw them alight, and identified himself as Toshi’s uncle. He embraced them warmly and loaded their bags onto a waiting jeep. Making their way across town on narrow, steep roads, they headed towards Toshi’s house. As they got closer, Adi could see a small crowd waiting for them near the door. He scanned those expectant faces, feeling his heart grow heavy with sadness when he realized that they must have waited in a similar manner for Toshi’s arrival.
Toshi’s father and mother stepped forward. Although they had never met before, Adi hugged Toshi’s father tightly. Toshi’s father began to sob.
His brothers and sisters were full of questions: what was Bombay like? Did Toshi like it in Bombay? What did he eat, and where? Why hadn’t he come earlier? Had he, or any of them seen any filmstars in Bombay? They talked late into the night, recounting stories, incident and anecdotes, reliving the two years of Toshi’s life that his parents hadn’t had a chance to know. Between them, they recounted every nitty gritty detail of Toshi’s life in Bombay, to an audience whose hunger for Toshi’s memories was insatiable.
Then Toshi’s father recounted his experience of the fateful day. He had been waiting for Toshi at Dimapur airport that afternoon when he learned that the plane wouldn’t be landing. Initially, there were rumours that it had been hijacked. After six hours of bureaucratic inertia they were informed that the pilot had lost control of the plane in the inclement weather and crashed into the mountains surrounding Dimapur.
The heavy rains had delayed his efforts to survey the wreckage site on his own. Keeping a father’s hopes alive were his prayers, until he found, scattered on the hillside, the remains of what looked like the seat of a pair of corduroy trousers. He recognized it as the one he had given Toshi on his eighteenth birthday. Neatly preserved in the back pocket was a wallet that contained a photograph of his family.
That’s when, sitting in the rain amidst the plane debris scattered over the hills, he had begun to cry.