A nurse
starts cranking up the back of my
hospital bed.
Against the wall, Ma sits dozing.
Beyond Ma, a glint of steel—
a wheelchair.
Fear slices through my dull brain.
No. The wheelchair
cannot be mine.
I see an ugly bulge under the sheet covering my legs.
Yank off the sheet with what’s left
of my strength.
My right leg ends
in a bandage.
Foot, ankle, and nearly half of my calf,
gone.
Chopped
right off.
“No!” The nurse pulls my sheet
back over the leftover
bit of my right leg.
But I still see the
nothingness
below my right knee.
Ma jerks
awake,
leaps up from her chair,
runs toward me.
Her eyes scared as a child’s,
she clutches the metal rail
of my hospital bed.
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
“About
everything.”
I turn my face away from Ma,
away from the cold metal gleam of the wheelchair
in this puke-green hospital ward.
Outside the window, I see the gnarled trunk
of a huge banyan tree.
Its thick branches sprout roots that hang down
shaggy as Shiva’s hair.
Wish I could slide out like a cobra.
Hide amid those unkempt roots.
“You were in a van,” the nurse says. “The driver was speeding.
A truck crashed into the van and ran it off the road.
Your driver hit a tree. He died.
Remember any of that?”
A pipul tree’s pale trunk
coming closer and closer.
Screaming.
The smell of vomit and blood.
“Your surgeon, Dr. Murali,
did all he could to save your foot.
He is a great surgeon.
He tried to save it but
he had to amputate.
Your foot was
too far gone.”
My hands thrash at the sheets.
I feel the nurse’s vise-grip around my wrists.
“Calm down. No need
to panic. You’re young. You’ll recover in no time.
Dr. Murali even had a physiatrist advise him during the surgery
on making the best cut
so an artificial leg would easily fit.
You’re lucky to have Dr. Murali for a surgeon.”
Lucky?
Ma reaches for my hand, whispering my name.
I squeeze my eyelids tight. Shut out everything.
No no no no no.
I need to get away.
Can’t.
Trapped.
EMPTINESS
FILLS
Pa comes in. Holds my hand.
His fingers are wilted stalks.
Drooping.
Tell me it’s a bad dream, Pa,
please.
“Just stepped out for a cup of coffee. Didn’t mean to leave you.
Didn’t want you to find out this way—we
—they—tried—” he chokes.
He moves his lips.
No words come.
My eyes are dry sockets in a skull.
Pa and I share
emptiness.
EVERYWHERE,
in
EVERYTHING
Everywhere, in everything, I used to hear music.
On sunny days when I was little, after Ma and Pa left for work,
we’d walk to the fruit stall down the road, Paati and I.
There was music
in the drone of horseflies
alighting on mangoes ripening in the heat.
Each day of the monsoon season
the rhythm of rain filled me.
Rain on the roof, rain drizzling
into rainbows of motor oil spilled by scooters and rickshaws,
silver sparks of rain skipping
across waxy banana leaves.
Every morning I’d wake to the krr-krr-krrk of Paati
helping Ma make breakfast in the kitchen,
grating slivers of coconut for a tangy chutney.
I’d dance thakka thakka thai,
into scents of cumin, coriander, and red chili.
Wrap my arms around Paati’s plush body.
At night I’d hear music
in the buzz of hungry mosquitoes
swarming outside my mosquito net,
in the whir of the overhead fan
swaying from the ceiling.
In the gray-green hospital room
silence
stretches.
ASHES
Light fades. Night falls.
But darkness doesn’t shroud the sight
of my half leg
from my mind’s unblinking eye.
Under the sheets my hands reach
like a tongue that can’t stop playing with a loose tooth.
Over and over the rough bandages my fingers run,
trying to smooth over
reality.
In the morning I feel Paati’s hands kneading my temples.
Not even her touch soothes me.
Murmuring a prayer,
she places the bronze idol of Shiva I won at the competition
on my bedside table.
“Mukam karothi vachalam; pangum langayathe girim.”
God’s grace moves the mute to eloquence
and inspires the lame to climb mountains.
I glance at my dancing Shiva,
His left leg raised parallel to the earth,
His right leg crushing the demon of ignorance,
His inner hands juxtaposed, palms flat,
His outer hands
holding aloft the fire of creation and destruction,
and a drum
keeping time to the music of His eternal dance.
I try to repeat Paati’s prayer. I strain my ears to hear
His music.
It feels like Shiva destroyed my universes of possibility,
like He’s dancing
on the ashes
of my snatched-away dreams.
NAMELESS
“Veda, you’ve got a roommate,” a nurse announces.
A woman with a mop of gray hair
gives me a yellow-toothed smile.
“I heard you lost your leg. How?”
I don’t want this stuffy space invaded.
Especially not by a chatty old woman.
I don’t answer.
“Talking will help you heal, you know.
They cut my toes off. Diabetes.
Now tell me about you.”
I give her more silence.
“What’s your full name, girl?
Veda what?
You can tell me that, at least, hmm?”
No.
I don’t know who I am
anymore.
PAIN UNCONTROLLED
Nurses come and go,
black strands of hair escaping bleached white caps,
flowing saris peeping from beneath starched coats.
“Pain under control?” they ask.
As a dancer, how carefully I mastered
the mechanics of my body—
learning to bear just enough pain
so I could wear it proudly, like
a badge of honor.
I want to tell the nurses no scale can measure
the pain of my dreams
dancing
beyond reach.
PINS, NEEDLES, PHANTOMS,
and
PAIN
The nurse pulls the faded privacy curtain around my bed
to keep me partially hidden
from my roommate’s curious eyes. Why bother?
The curtain isn’t soundproof.
My surgeon, Dr. Murali, lists my injuries in a tired voice,
his limp hair matching the glint of his silver-rimmed spectacles.
Below-knee crush injury, concussion, two cracked ribs,
cuts on thighs and shoulders.
“Nothing more.”
Sounds more than enough to me.
My once-golden-brown skin
mottled with more blue-black bruises than a rotting mango.
My once-strong body
bandaged in so many places
I feel like a corpse someone started to mummify
and abandoned halfway.
“Will I have scars?”
“None a sari won’t hide.”
My sigh of relief is cut short
by a stab of pain from my cracked ribs.
Dr. Murali says, “You may have phantom pain.
You might feel the part of the leg you lost
is still there.
Many patients say it feels
like when a part of your body falls asleep
and later the numb part wakes up with a prickling sensation.
Like pins and needles.
Except it hurts worse.”
Pain from the ghost of a leg that’s gone,
adding to the excruciating ache
in my existing limbs?
Just what I need.
He continues, “Most patients get over it soon.
A year or two at most.”
Maybe when you’ve got
hair as gray and glasses as thick as he does
two years feels like a short time.
When my roommate and I are alone, she says,
“Sometimes they cure ghost pain
by cutting more off.”
Butcher what’s left of my leg?
No, thanks.
ALL I
STILL HAVE
Paati says, “You have your whole life
ahead of you.
You have
me, Ma, Pa, Chandra.
And God.
God is within you, Veda. So is His strength.”
I don’t feel God is anywhere nearby,
let alone inside me.
“Your grandpa was a wonderful man,” Paati says.
“When your pa was a baby and I was widowed,
I fell from the heights of being
a joyful young wife and mother
into a dark valley of sadness.
I could have stayed there.
My in-laws wanted to look after me.
They were loving and kind.
And working widows were rare in my day.
But I didn’t dwell on what I’d lost.
I returned to college, became a teacher,
grew independent.
Because I chose to focus on all I still had:
my son, my intelligence, my supportive in-laws.”
In the past, Paati’s spoken of my grandpa.
But until now I never realized
how much she loved the man
her parents made her marry.
And how unusual and brave Paati was.
As she leaves the room Paati says, “Doesn’t mean it was easy.
I still miss your grandfather. I think of his kindness every day.
Some things you never get used to being without.”
Like a right leg.
Like moving effortlessly everywhere.
Like dance.
FINDING
My
VOICE
A nurse enters, carrying a sponge and a basin.
She draws the privacy curtain around my bed and starts
undressing me
as if my body belongs to a doll she owns.
My body is not hers.
It’s mine.
I still have
most of it.
“What are you doing?” I’m surprised
I sound strong enough to make her step back.
“Sponge bath.” The nurse’s voice wavers.
“I can do it myself.
I’ve got arms.”
I’m finding my voice
though I’ve lost my leg.
EXPERIMENTAL PROJECT
Dr. Murali is followed into the room by a strange man
with flame-gold hair and bright blue eyes.
Is my pain medication making me hallucinate?
“We’re lucky,” Dr. Murali says, “to have, working with us,
Mr. James, from America,
who is collaborating with an Indian research team
to create cost-effective modern prostheses.
He’s agreed to help with your rehabilitation
and with the fitting and making of your prosthesis . . .”
He suggests I’m lucky, too, to be part of the project,
because my family doesn’t have enough insurance.
I feel the American’s eyes on me,
looking
as though I’m more than an amputee, a number, a chore.
He crosses over to me, his strides large, a broad smile on his lips.
“Veda? Did I say your name right?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Call me Jim. Please.” His left hand in his pocket,
he holds his right hand out to me.
As though we’re equals.
“Thank you, Doctor—I mean—just Jim,” I say.
He chuckles. “Haven’t done anything yet.”
He has.
No older man ever invited me to shake hands.
No other adult ever asked me to call them by name.
He even said “please” although I’m a patient.
A smile tugs at face muscles I haven’t used for a while.
My hand slips into his
as though it remembers his touch
and we’ve held hands often
in a previous life.
“Think it over,” he says. “Take as long as you need.”
I let my fingers stay in his pale palm
like brown roots sinking into chalky white soil. “I’ll do it.”
“Good,” Dr. Murali says. “He’ll have you
walking fine in no time.”
“I don’t want to walk fine.
I want to dance.”
The American—just-Jim—lets my hand go,
but his gaze holds me.
His eyes, blue and bright,
light a sparkle of hope inside me.
LESS UGLY
I used to dream of handsome men
whose touch
made my skin tingle.
In the hospital’s airless exercise room,
I hurt from deep in my ribs to the surface of my skin
when handsome Jim lifts me out of the wheelchair,
helps me hold on to parallel bars
to do the simplest of movements—
bending and straightening,
moving what’s left of my legs.
“You’re doing great, kiddo,” he says.
I don’t feel great.
My shameful croaks of pain
grate on my ears, harsh as a frog’s.
But when Jim says “great,”
rolling the r’s around like m
elting sweets
in his American mouth,
when he calls my lopped-off leg a “residual limb,”
when he says I’m “differently abled,”
not handicapped, not disabled,
when he’s nearby, using his kinder words,
he makes me feel
a little less ugly.
VISITORS
Chandra visits wearing a wobbly smile,
with her wet-cheeked ma
and her pa, who clutches her ma’s shoulder
for support.
I watch Chandra walk across the green tile floor,
her strong, muscular cricket-captain legs gliding toward my bed.
She takes no notice of where slopes and cracks
hinder a wheelchair ride.
Chandra says,
“Can’t wait for you to get on the cricket field.”
I don’t care about cricket.
All I want is to dance again.
She should know.
She tries, “The whole team’s waiting for you to get back.”
—A polite lie I never expected
to hear from my best friend.
I hardly ever spoke to anyone on the team except Chandra.
She says, “I miss you in class, too.”
I say thanks.
Our conversation totters
close to the cliff of silence.
Keels over.
Chandra says, “See you
later.”
Not see you
soon.
I try to lift my eyes to meet hers.
But my gaze stays low
and follows her quick, sure steps
across the uneven floor.
After she leaves, though I shut my eyes,
I can’t stop picturing
the ease
of her walk.
STAYING AWAY
Uday anna
doesn’t visit.
He’s fine, Pa says, when I ask.
No one else was badly hurt.
A Time to Dance Page 3