A large canoe passed carrying a load of giggling schoolgirls, hair plaited and tied with white ribbons, long blue skirts, shirts white, smart enough to go to a posh girls’ boarding school.
“I know them all.” Maya returned their waves. “I delivered two of them. One took two days and nearly killed me.”
On the opposite side of the river, a pathetic scrap of a girl—no more than six or seven—stopped washing clothes when she saw us pass. When she waved a skinny arm at us, her collarbone popped out like organ stops. Maya told me the poor people were poorer than ever around here, what with the war and the rice crop being bad last year. That girl was an orphan, but I was not to worry about her: “In India, the children belong to everyone, grandmas, aunties, friends.”
So why had my mother fallen through this particular net, I wondered, and ended up in an orphanage? I felt the jagged pain, familiar as an old injury, of wondering if she missed me. On the ship coming over, I’d written two letters to her, half hoping to hear she still loved me, that she forgave me. I’d followed up with another letter and two postcards from Mangalath, but the silence from her end was deafening, and I was starting to believe her “dead to me” ultimatum.
To stop my gloomy thoughts, I asked Maya about her training and if she would mind my taking notes. She told me that after delivering babies for many years with no formal training, she’d been persuaded by Dr. A. to do three years of general nursing in Madras, followed by one year of midwifery.
“My family allowed me to do this because my husband is ill, he has a heart problem, but now he hates what I do,” which was pretty obvious from the green and purple shiner. “Most nurses here,” she added with a shrug, “are life dust: widows, orphans, or deserted wives. Until recently there was no formal training of midwives at all. We caused a very big stir.” She added with a wide smile, “But now there is a very big government push towards it.”
I marveled at her calm, cheerful presence; it made my blood boil too. Every bloody religion in the world pretends to care about mothers, children, the sick, and the lame—but they can’t mean it, not really.
We were talking when Dr. A. rose like a large whale from the prow of the boat. She pointed towards a cluster of mud shacks on the riverbank, the spire of a white church.
“Champakulam,” she said to me, adjusting her sari and picking up her large doctor bag. “Two local midwives will see us there.”
Only two! Daisy had led me to believe there’d be a classroom crammed with them, but I followed the doctor meekly off the boat and down a dirt road—filthy drains, lots of stinky rubbish, an old woman with milky eyes selling fish—to a small whitewashed convent on the edge of the village, where an old French nun was waiting for us.
The nun led us to a windowless room at the back of the church where two women were waiting. The first midwife, Amba Kannan, was a small, wiry, aggrieved-looking woman, about thirty-five years old, arms covered in cheap gold bangles. The other covered her face when she saw us and said in a reluctant mumble that her name was Latika.
Amba greeted Dr. A. politely with a namaste but then let go a torrent of words. Dr. A. listened silently, sympathetically wagging her head, and then turned to me. “Her biggest problem is this: some of the people in this village have stopped paying the local midwives for their work because they hear that you are paying them now. She says—” She listened to another blast of invective. “They are being treated like criminals.”
“Please tell them we only pay for training,” I said to Dr. A.
“This I have explained to them, but they are angry and do not trust British peoples anymore.” Dr. A. snorted noncommitally. “She would like some money now to make up for what she has lost.”
“May I ask how much they charge for each delivery?” I asked.
“It’s very meager; twelve to sixteen rupees is standard.” In English money, between one and two pounds.
I made a note of it in my new notebook, as if I knew what I was doing. “How many deliveries does Amba do, on average, each month?” Another torrent of words.
“Last month five. In total, three thousand.”
“Three thousand. Good God!”
“Yes, three thousand,” came the firm reply. “Maybe more.” Amba’s s eyes darted towards me, a proud curve to her lip.
Now Maya translated for my benefit. “Dr. Annakutty is proud to announce that now Independence has come, Travancore will be the best country in the world to have a baby in, and that we have only come to show them simple things.” Dr. A.’s head was waggling fit to fly off her shoulders.
“More hygienic methods.” Maya rubbed her hands like Lady Macbeth. “Example: not moving from baby to baby without washing our hands, or leaving the—” She didn’t finish the sentence. Dr. A. was shaking her head forbiddingly and looking at me.
“They are talking about the afterbirth,” she mumbled at last. “I will explain this later.”
“So.” After another majestic snort, Dr. A. clapped her hands loudly. “Time to begin.”
The two midwives sat cross-legged on the floor and Dr. A. rattled on at a tremendous pitch. She produced a plastic pelvis from her bag and a stained wooden doll and demonstrated various angles of delivery.
It was beastly hot, but it felt good to feel my brain engaged again. After a half-hour talk, Maya, like some obstetric Father Christmas, unpacked brown-paper parcels full of sterilized maternal pads, babies’ milk bottles, a jar of lubricant, and three pairs of rubber gloves.
While these offerings from the wonderful world of modern medicine were laid out on the stone floor, I reminded myself to tell Daisy that Dr. A. had the rest of the supplies at her house. Maya was demonstrating how much lubricant she used on a rubber glove, when the door flew open and the old French nun appeared. She said there might be a baby on the way.
Dr. A. turned to me. “You must go with Maya; she knows this girl and will know what to do.”
As we headed in searing heat down the dusty street, I was sweating with alarm. The memory of the redheaded girl was always there, lying behind some sopping black curtain in my mind, and I honestly didn’t know if I could cope.
“Miz Kit,” Maya said, “no rush.” She steered me around an old man sitting on the pavement with his sewing machine and told me the girl we were going to see was sixteen years old. Her name was Prasanna and she was having her second baby. Five weeks before delivery, she’d moved into her mother-in-law’s house.
“Her relatives sell fish like these people.” She pointed to an ancient couple sitting on the other side of the lane. Beside them a bamboo mat was covered in shiny-looking fish and some bunches of chilies.
“When we get there”—Maya reached into the canvas bag she was carrying, handed me a stethoscope—“put this round your neck and I’ll tell them you’re an English doctor. They will think you bring good luck.” When I shook my head, she put the stethoscope back into her bag, patted me reassuringly. “For later then,” she said. “You may stay and watch.”
* * *
We found the girl inside a dirt-floor hut, lying on what looked like a pile of packed sand with a few dirty rags scattered around. The sand, Maya told me, was a good way to soak up blood. Two women were cooking over a smoky wood-fire stove—one chopping onions, the other stirring a pot of rice gruel. There was no sense of panic here.
The girl was half-asleep when we arrived, beads of sweat gleaming on her forehead. She smiled when she opened her eyes and saw Maya. The pains she told her were coming, “Vegan and adupichu.” Thick and fast, Maya translated.
“I thought you said the village midwife would do this delivery,” I said.
“Maybe.” Maya shrugged. “We’ll have to see.”
The mother-in-law padded silently into the room, barefoot and holding a saucepan of unappetizing-looking lentils in her hand. Her hair was grizzled and gray; she looked tired. When I took out my recorde
r’s notebook, I saw my hands were shaking.
When I asked her to confirm Prasanna’s age, she looked blankly at me and scratched her head.
“She’s not sure,” Maya said, adding that wasn’t particularly unusual around here. I carried on down my list: How many other babies did Prasanna have? One. Length of labor? Ten hours.
When half an hour later the girl’s tummy started to tense and strain, Maya pulled the thin sheet back and told me to stand in a spot in the corner.
“This we call thinking with our fingers.” She brushed her fingers over the pulsating dome of Prasana’s belly, prodding here, listening intently, feeling the sides of her belly with questing hands. “The baby is in a good position,” she said. “No need for fuss.” A cockerel crowed through the open window; a bell tinged as a bicycle rattled through the lanes.
We both smiled when a small foot suddenly popped under the skin, as if the baby were saying, “Hear, hear!”
Maya put on her rubber gloves, lubricated her fingers, and did an internal exam. The quiet economy of her movements, her calmness, reminded me of old Jack, a horse breaker who came to Wickam Farm, and the sly, almost unconscious way he could slip a horse’s head into its first bridle, almost before the animal knew it.
“Close now,” she murmured, patting Prasanna’s arm. “Now you will learn some new words,” she told me. “Write them down. Velum kondu vaa, bring some water. Choodu vellum, hot water. Tulle means push. Mukkeh, bear down.”
She told me to step outside the shack for a few minutes to give her more room to administer a massage. When I did, I realized I had almost stopped breathing. I knew of course that I would almost certainly have to watch deliveries again and was prepared for that, but that hut, with its fug so thick you could slice it, plus its other smells—sweat, smoke, human bodies, ancient meals—was making me sweat and almost heave a little.
When Maya joined me again, she was eating one of the dosas and smiling. The girl’s cervix was well dilated. She had given the girl a light massage with coconut oil. Prasanna was happy.When, an hour later, the baby’s head started to crown, I was ashamed to find myself almost on the point of fainting. It was as if my mind had blanked out the twenty-eight deliveries I had been part of and taken me back to being a knock-kneed novice. But when the hut had stopped wobbling, I saw from a distance that Maya was completely in command. One loud shriek, a full head of dark, damp hair suddenly visible, then Prasanna, puffing, blowing, shouting, gave one last almighty thrust and pushed a new person into the room. The mother-in-law yelled, “Ente daivame aan kunju! Oh, my God! It’s a boy!” and Maya held it up so the girl, who was crying with happiness, could see it.
I was bundled out of the room for the cutting of the cord and disposal of the afterbirth. The baby was clean when I came back and Maya was kissing him, then looked at him slowly from his wriggling toes to his damp and tufted head. She said something which made all the women laugh.
“Why are they laughing?” I still felt sick.
“I said lovely hair, lovely fat legs, and a nice packet between his thighs.” Maya wiggled her head, delighted with her own joke.
“I didn’t expect that so early,” I said, as I walked wobble-legged out of that hut and almost immediately experienced a nearly tearful rush of emotion I could not name. Today had shown me that possibly soon, if I could get over the faintness, I might at least work my way round to being a helpful pair of extra hands at the clinic. That was a start. Whether I could still be a midwife was debatable—the thought was enough to make my heart pound again—so to avoid having my mind go down the usual ratholes, I asked Maya if Prasanna would have been very disappointed had the baby been a girl. She gave me a sharp look.
“Of course,” she said. “Girls cost too much: their dowries ruin families.” After she’d had her second daughter, her mother-in-law refused to talk to her for weeks, but then, thank God, a son came.
“His name is Shiva,” she told me proudly. “He is only eighteen but he rules the roost.”
* * *
Proud grandparents stood at the door when we arrived at our next stop to see the whopper: the twelve-pound baby who had become a local celebrity. We found him sleeping serenely in a cloth cradle suspended from a rod which hung from the ceiling—a great, big, plump, smiling Buddha of a baby, coffee-colored and with deep creases around his wrists and neck.
The baby shone with coconut oil and had a faded marigold garland around his neck and what looked like a slightly infected umbilical cord.
“Did he get this in a hospital?” I asked Devika, his mother, when she lifted him up proudly. Maya had pleaded with me to put on the doctor coat for this examination, and since this was not a delivery, and seeing no great harm in it, I had put it on.
“No.” Maya explained that Devika, who’d had her first baby at fifteen, didn’t like hospitals. She went once and they were rude to her and jumped on her stomach to make the baby come.
“So her usual midwife came,” Maya continued. “She trusts her. There was much bleeding and yelling,” she translated, as the woman’s voice rose dramatically, “but Devika is all right now.”
Maya peered more closely at the baby’s umbilical cord, which was red and weeping. “This one does it with a rusty knife,” she told me in a mutter, while keeping a neutral expression on her face. “She is stubborn about that. Now put your stethoscope on, look at it, frown.”
I peered at the cord, wondering why the baby wasn’t screaming blue murder, it looked so sore. When Maya cleaned the wound, the baby kicked two legs the size of hams and just looked at me with its huge brown eyes. No squealing.
When I handed the mother a small bottle of potassium permanganate, she thanked me with a fervor that made me feel ashamed.
“What did you say about me?” I asked on our way back to the convent.
“That you were a fine English doctor.”
“Oh God, you mustn’t say that. I feel like the most awful fraud.”
“It will help her, and her baby,” Maya said simply. “The power of the mind is very strong.”
I put it out of my mind. We were late for lunch and both hungry.
“That child was a baby elephant. Poor woman!” As we ran down the towpath together, I was laughing.
* * *
Fish curry for lunch, and after it Maya showed me my bedroom—a small whitewashed room above the church with an iron bed and a crucifix on the wall. The air smelled faintly of incense. When I crawled under the mosquito net, my head was reeling at all I’d seen. I heard birds singing as I drifted off to sleep, the lap of water from the river. I was too tired to worry much about whether Amma would mind my being here. As for Anto: what a wicked wife, I’d hardly given him a thought all day.
- CHAPTER 21 -
Before she took her breakfast, Amma went into the prayer room inside the house, determined to find some rest from the furious thoughts that kept her awake at night. Anto’s new wife had been staying with them for close to two months now, and Amma had started to hate her. She blamed her for Anto’s new reserve, when he was once so open and jolly with her; she blamed her for his frequent absences to find work. She was sure that by now he would have been deluged with job offers had he not come home with the impediment of an English wife.
Kneeling at the cedar altar made from the deck of an ancestor’s spice ship, she breathed in the mingled smells of beeswax furniture polish and incense and wrestled her mind into a state of weary numbness. This is your favorite time of the day, she reminded herself: no relatives to talk to and placate, nothing to disturb you, only the discreet twitterings of birds, and from the kitchen the silky sounds of Pathrose pouring water through muslin and into the earthenware pots, the flash of spices hitting hot fat.
Soon the swish of Satya cleaning the steps with cow dung. Later, three other women in the yard would pick stones out of the rice stored in the granary on the left of the courtyard
. They would fold at the waist like ballet dancers, murmuring as they worked; she might hear them giggle. If she heard the low drone of complaints, she’d go out to see what was wrong. That was her job: keeping the house running like a well-oiled machine. Mathu, at his most unreasonable, behaved as if any fool could do this. Let him try.
“Heavenly Father, make me an instrument of thy works. Don’t let me be proud, or hard, or unkind. God, help me. Please!—”
Often nowadays, her formal prayers seemed to break down into a desperate pleading because, when he was home, Anto had almost stopped speaking to her and it was grinding her down. Ashamed of her weakness, she wiped her eyes, got up stiffly, and went into the kitchen, where Pathrose, standing in a pool of sunlight, was measuring out six cups of rice, then dhal and fenugreek seeds for breakfast dosas.
For dinner that night, she planned a beef ularthiyathu, a stir-fry, a spinach thoran, and a dish of the fiery red fish curry that the girl had praised extravagantly on the night they arrived, before she had a coughing fit. Anto had loved it, licking his fingers in sheer bliss. This much she could at least do for him.
“Don’t make it too spicy for the English girl,” she told Pathrose. They shared a brief look of malice and exasperation before she moderated hers into one of studied calm. Pathrose knew her too well, how she faked sunniness sometimes to keep this house on an even keel, just as she knew how he and Satya rolled their eyes behind the scenes and mimicked her sayings: Aana karyam parayumbol aano chena karyam, “Must you talk about the yam when I’m dealing with the elephant?” or complained about her tongue-lashings. They shared her shame too, when on entering the young master’s bedroom, they saw the blatant display of stockings, the silk slip on the rattan chair. They were simple people; to them, she was like an exotic harlot.
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