To prepare for the opening, Maya had mounted a fierce raid on the rats in the roof, now mostly dead; the Home’s new purple, red, and yellow sign was hung and clearly visible from the road. And most importantly, Mr. Namboothiri, our local hero and tireless donator of paint, had driven off in the middle of the night in the smoking, paint-splattered bus we called Cyclops—one headlamp missing—to collect our first ten midwives, who arrived five hours later looking dusty and petrified. Most had never been in a bus before or left the network of small villages where they practiced. One tiny, pockmarked woman wrestled an enormous bedroll; several carried tiffin boxes, worried they might not get enough to eat here.
Some local musicians had been drafted to give the ceremony some oomph, and after drums and twiddly flutes, incense was lit, petals strewn. During Mr. Thambi’s long and droning speech, the midwives sat at his feet, barefoot and on the new coir mats, staring at him in frank amazement.
Dr. A. jumped up next, her nose quivering importantly, and in her usual rat-tat delivery gave a stirring speech, which Maya translated for me.
“You women are the future of India. Some of you have more knowledge in your little fingers than the male doctors at the hospital.” Shy giggles at this; a tremendous frown from the Minister for Health. “But we have new things to teach you here: hygienic methods, greater understanding of physiology. Crisis alleviation.”
When they’d finished the course, they would gain this certificate—she brandished a crackling sheet of cardboard—plus their very own sterile midwife kit. Maya opened a small tin box to show a tantalizing glimpse of its contents: small scissors, swabs, a small bottle of iodine, soap, and a clean towel.
Sister Patricia watched this with her head on one side and a fond smile on her face. “Look at their little faces,” she whispered to me. “Trilled to bits, poor dears.”
Shortly after this, Mr. Thambi, who’d been furtively checking his watch since the ceremony began, roared off in his government car. The midwives were given a small breakfast of steamed bananas with uppuma, a semolina-type dish, and the teaching part of the day began.
Each pupil was asked to give her name and age, the length of time she’d practiced, the number of babies delivered, and her marital status.
A few looked mulishly suspicious at this and refused. Then a small, stooped woman with dust on her elaborately tattooed bare feet, stood up and said in good English (what a relief) that her name was Subadra and that she came from Nilamperur, where she was a senior midwife. She had learned her English at a mission school there.
So far, she said, she had resisted the government’s attempts to retrain her, because, she added, with considerable pride and a hint of challenge, she had “delivered hundreds and thousands of healthy babies.”
“Hundreds and thousands?” Maya peered at her over her big specs. “For our study, how many exactly?”
“No idea,” said the woman, “maybe four thousand.” She sat down heavily and muttered something under her breath to the woman next to her, who immediately tried to hide her face.
“You?” Dr. A. pointed to her. “Stand up. No need for shyness.”
The woman cast a fearful look towards the door and whispered something to Subadra, who translated for her.
“Her name is Bhaskari,” Subadra said. “She is from a Dalit family. Her only job is to cut the cords and to dispose of afterbaby.”
A low grumble broke out at this among one or two of the women. In some communities, I already knew, these women were regarded as the lowest of the low.
“You also have an important job, Bhaskari,” Dr. A. said, bestowing one of her rare smiles. “We will teach you here how to do it sweetly and cleanly. We must all learn to work together.” The one woman still muttering was given Dr. A.’s famous basilisk glare and visibly shrank.
“Sit down, Bhaskari,” Dr. A. continued smoothly. “We’re very glad to have you with us.” One by one we took their histories, from the fat, the thin, young, old, bright, and stupid-looking. They were, as Sister Patricia whispered to me, “a bit of a job lot.”
Each midwife was then given a piece of paper and a pencil.
“Your first task,” Dr. A. announced, “is to draw what you think is inside a woman’s body. Take your time. This is not a test, it’s for knowledge sharing.”
I saw Bhaskari take her pencil, take her paper, and strike off immediately in a series of confident slashing circles. One tucked her pencil inside the folds of her sari and gave me a truculent why-should-I-tell-you? look.
After twenty minutes or so of pencil scratching, and sighing, and worried looks in our direction, Maya collected the sheets, adding names to the papers of the six women in the class who were illiterate.
Rosamma, who said she delivered up to thirty babies a month, piped up indignantly, “No one really knows what is inside the human body. You can only imagine it.”
Sister Patricia whispered to me, “Well, I wouldn’t want that one to intuit me baby out of me.”
I left the Home exhausted and conscious of a mountain to climb.
* * *
Day 2.
The women returned to the classroom this morning looking far more relaxed. Rosamma, a fat lady with an exuberant smile, made everyone laugh when she said she would like to keep dancing all day because she was so happy to get away from her husband for a few days. Her good English and self-confidence had made her the group’s leader and translator.
Today we asked the midwives to describe the work they did in their own village. It’s possible that no one has ever asked them to do this before, because they listened to each other with open-mouthed fascination, and I thought, If we achieve nothing else here, they’ve been given the chance to talk to each other, because their lives, frankly, sound terrifying.
At first they were as furtive as criminals, but then Rosamma, settling in a comfortable cross-legged position and adjusting her large bosom, began.
There were two kinds of midwives in her village, she said, the visible midwives—the vayattattis—and the invisibles, who washed the mother after delivery and buried the afterbirth. Her voice dropped confidentially at this, and when one or two of the other midwives frowned, she said, with a note of defiance, “We are here to talk about these things.”
It was the vayattattis, she went on, who were blamed for everything.
“Many things stop a woman from having a baby,” she said, her voice warm with indignation. “Lack of good food for the mother to eat, and this year our rice crops failed,” she said directly to Sister Patricia. “No proper place to have the baby. In my village some are sent out to cow sheds.”
The gold bracelets jangled on Rosamma’s right arm when she lifted it to cover her eyes. “Can you remember a time when you felt blamed or you were blamed?” Maya asked her softly.
I saw the expression on the women’s faces change while they waited for her reply, and I wondered if Maya had made a mistake by asking for these intimacies too early.
“Last month,” said Rosamma after a long silence, “a woman died in my arms. She was in labor for nearly eighteen hours; the baby got stuck. There was no bullock cart to take her to the hospital: it belongs to the head man in our village, he needed it that day. The family blame me now. They refused to pay me and avoid me in the street. This is not fair, and this is why I am here, to get more government protection.”
The women murmured sympathetically. Rosamma said, “In my village, there is also much suspicion of me because I have the freedom to travel.”
Another said, “Some will never forgive me if baby comes and it is a girl, or if it is crippled or dies; they think maybe I’m bad luck and they should have gone to another vayattatti.”
“I am a poor woman,” she added, breathing heavily. “I don’t do this for money, I do it because God wants me to.”
- CHAPTER 27 -
Anto wrote this morning to say
his old tutor at Exeter College has recommended him for a yearlong research project at the Holy Family Hospital in Kacheripady. “It sounds,” he wrote, “almost too good to be true, so only dare to be cautiously optimistic. But how wonderful it would be if it happened.”
I burst into tears when I got the letter. At last, what sounded like the perfect job for him, and I was missing him badly: my days were crammed with activity, but nights at Rose Street got long and lonesome. I wrote straight back, happier than I’d felt in weeks, and with an edited version of events in our midwife classes.
We’d had such a funny morning when Maya announced, “Today, we’re going to have our first Mother Moonstone baby. Who will be mother?”
Rosamma levered her considerable bulk on the floor, lay on her back, rolled her eyes, and groaned like an injured calf.
Maya chose Kartyani, a frowning, dark-skinned girl, to be midwife. So far she’d refused to join in with any group, and yesterday when I tried to persuade her, she’d said angrily, “My head is bursting with new information. It is not helping me.” Maya thought she was simply homesick. Sister Patricia said she was dim.
Maya ignored Kartyani’s scowl. “Our patient is having her first baby. She’s been in labor now for fourteen hours, nothing is happening.” From the floor Rosamma rolled her eyes convincingly and clutched her belly. “Owwwwwwww. Oh dear. No baby comes.” The class tittered.
“What will you do now to progress the baby?”
“I don’t know,” Kartyani said sulkily, and shook her head.
“Hurry up,” Rosamma commanded from the floor. “I am paining badly.”
In a mutinous drone, Kartyani began. “First, I would go to her house.”
“Of course.” Rosamma was irritated by this glimpse of the obvious.
“I would loosen her hair and her bangles,” Kartyani said in the same unwilling monotone. “I would open all her cupboards and doors.”
Maya peered up at me through her big specs. “This is psychologically helpful to a woman: it opens everything up.”
“Then this.” Kartyani sank to her knees and rubbed her hands expertly around the rim of Rosamma’s belly.
“What is she saying?” I asked. Rosamma was rolling her eyes lasciviously, shimmying her shoulders.
“That I can’t translate.” Maya was blushing. “Too crude.” Even Kartyani couldn’t resist a faint smile at this.
Before the lesson ended, pop! Rosamma produced a plastic baby from the folds of her sari, and everybody cheered except Kartyani, who ran out of the room.
“She is not happy here,” Maya whispered in the corridor later. “She says the teaching is too Western, and that she doesn’t want to share her own secrets with us or with low-caste village people. I think she is a spy from the government.” She laughed to show me she was joking, but it wouldn’t have surprised me.
* * *
I wrote to Daisy about what happened next but left it out of my letter to Anto.
Kartyani refused to leave her room. She reiterated that her head was bursting with all this new information, that she wanted to go home.
“Stay there then, mundi stupid idiot,” Dr. A. barked at her. “Nee orikkalum nannavilla, you will never improve.”
“Write that down,” Maya instructed me. “It’s a good insult.”
Kartyani missed that afternoon’s lively debate on menstruation and contraception. Shanta, a sprightly young woman who had delivered umpteen babies, stood up and said, in her shy, piping voice, “I will share my knowledge with you. Monthly bleeding was originally given to the man, but God found it was too hard for the man, so he gave it to a woman.”
“Do you all think this?” Maya asked the other women. They bobbed their heads in the yes-no Indian gesture.
“How you behave with your monthlies will depend on what caste you are in,” said Subadra, noticing my confusion. “A Brahman woman must stay apart from her family during this time, wash many times, and not meet with her husband. She cannot take part in celebrations.”
“A Dalit, an untouchable, will go about life as usual.”
“In our family, we are very careful not to stop the period,” Shanta piped up, unwilling to relinquish the floor. “If you do, you could become poisoned and lose your sight.”
Maya listened patiently. “So now I am going to show you what really happens,” she said. She opened the cupboard and took out a three-foot-high wall chart of the naked woman Daisy and I had christened Vera.
Vera’s fallopian tubes, womb, and major arteries were clearly marked in red; stomach, heart, liver, and kidneys in blue. Her face was concentrated and thoughtful, as if it was hard work keeping all this complicated machinery going.
“Is this an Englishwoman?” Kartyani said at last, as if this might explain Vera’s elaborate plumbing.
“No,” Maya said. “This is what we are all like inside.”
“No, we’re not,” Kartyani contradicted immediately. “I have seen other drawings done by ayurvedic doctors, and there are many, many more blood vessels.”
One or two of the midwives looked defiantly towards me as if I were the snake oil salesman here. When Maya took off her glasses and polished them, I could see that her eyes still had dark-purple bags under them. She worked far too hard. She took a deep breath and began her menstruation talk. She was five miutes into it when I looked up and saw Dr. A. standing at the door. She was beckoning me towards her.
* * *
It was the wrong end of a hot, exhausting day. I was longing for home, a bath, an early supper, and to finish my letter to Anto. But Dr. A.’s gesture was insistent, excited.
In the corridor she whispered in a quick cinnamon-scented blast, “We have a patient, Laksmi, in labor. Maya is busy; Sister Patricia’s gone home.”
I assumed I was to assist her. Laksmi, with her slender child’s body and her history of miscarriage, was anything but a straightforward case. Admitted to the Home the week before, very anxious, she had had a show of blood. Her husband was a local policeman.
“She asked for you this morning,” Dr. A. whispered as we sped down the corridor. “She said she wanted the English doctor lady to do the delivery.”
I stopped aghast. “But I’m not a doctor.”
“I am not the one saying it.” Dr. A. handed me a starched white doctor coat with a bland stare. “And neither are you. But Laksmi needs a good delivery this time. With this we can make her confident.” She put a stethoscope around my neck, patted me on the back. “Don’t look so frightened.”
I should have said no. Instead, I buttoned the coat with shaking hands and walked towards the delivery room on rubber legs. I could already hear Laksmi’s weak cries coming from behind the door.
Anto once told me he believed everything we were was the result of what we had thought, so I knew that in one sense I had led myself down this corridor and towards this test. Half of me had wanted it all along. I knew too that if this was a normal vaginal delivery, I had the skills to do it. After all, firemen and panicked husbands had managed in the past. C sections were very rare here.
“Maya will be finished with the class soon,” Dr. A. said, at the door. “She’ll come and take over.”
“So, I’ll call if there are any complications,” I said, in what I hoped was a calm voice. But she was already walking down the corridor.
“Yes,” she said when she reached the end.
* * *
The first thing I saw was Laksmi’s small feet sticking out from the sheet, clenching and unclenching in pain. When her head reared up, I remembered her better: a small, undernourished woman, a two-inch scar from a burn on her right cheek. I recalled that she suffered from anemia, which was not unusual amongst the local women. Please God, don’t let her start bleeding again.
Her mother—a wizened woman dressed in a widow’s white sari—sat beside her, fanning her with the nee
m leaves thought to keep the angry spirits at bay. Then Subadra walked in.
“Dr. A. sent for me,” she said. “I know this girl and speak her dialect.”
Subadra took a damp flannel from the table and wiped Laksmi’s forehead, which was filmed with sweat. The girl’s eyes fixed on mine, and with a desperate expression, she poured out words. “She is very afraid,” one of the nurses said. “She thanks God you have come.”
“Tell her I am glad to be here,” I said, trying for a confident voice. “I’m going to have a look now, to see how her baby is.”
* * *
When I rolled back the sheet, her taut belly was covered in gray ash.
“Don’t touch it,” Subadra said quickly. “Ash is put there for a boy.” Another gush of words from the girl made the mother nod vigorously.
“She says she will kill herself this time if she doesn’t have boy. She has conceived”—she shot an extra question at the girl, got a tearful confirmation—“six times in the past eight years, only two children survived. She says if she has another girl, her mother-in-law will take it away and harm it.”
The girl moved her eyes from Subadra to me like someone watching a tennis match. Tears poured down her face; another fusillade of words.
Subadra murmured a string of the words Maya had taught me. “Saramilla pottey ellam sheriyakum, njaan illay. It’s all right, let go, don’t worry, everything will be OK.” But the girl was crying again.
Subadra wrung out the flannel and sponged the girl’s face and arms.
“She says she should have taken a drink of hot chilies, killed the fetus and herself before coming here. She knows it will be another girl.”
The girl let out a groan like that of a tree before it loosens from the earth and crashes to the ground. The tight brown dome of her tummy strained, and I could see the clearly defined shape of a baby’s foot kicking out.
“Can you stop her crying?” I was terrified of hurting her. “Get her to breathe evenly?”
After the internal exam, I estimated she was two fingers dilated. If all went well, the baby would be born in a matter of hours.
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