When the van stopped, I was led down a long corridor into a tiny windowless room lit by one naked bulb. The cell had a charpoy, a thin pillow like a bolster, a gray regulation blanket with Property of Viyyur Prison on it. A bucket in the corner of the room.
An older man wearing stained overalls appeared with a bowl of water and a cloth. He told me to take my clothes off. He turned off the overhead light and locked the door. When I told him a woman should do this, he shook his head as if he didn’t understand me. He didn’t look at me as he ran his hands over my thighs, my stomach, my breasts, and finally between my legs. It was very mechanical, thank God; in fact, he treated me with some distaste, a contaminating white woman. He took away my dress and my shoes, and gave me a coarse white sari and a white loose blouse to wear. When I asked if I could keep my diary and a pencil, he rustled officiously through its pages, sniffed, and to my surprise, handed it back to me.
He looked at the wall while I was changing, then told me, in a high staccato voice, that I would stay in this cell for one or two nights and then I would be moved. He told me the cell was the regulation size, “with sufficient breathing air.” The very idea of there being officially recommended air to breathe made the blood fizz in my veins.
* * *
On the next day, a new guard, young and with smallpox scars on his face, came into my cell, handcuffed me, and led me down the corridor and across a square to the women’s prison on F block. I stood at the door, blinking and very frightened, as another man drew aside a series of bolts and led me into a large communal cell, about twenty by twenty feet, coir matting on the floor, high, stained walls. A gravy-colored light came from four or five smeared windows set in the roof.
When my eyes adjusted, I saw fifty or so women, some sitting on the floor, one or two vacantly staring, some asleep on thin mattresses on the floor. Most, I found out later, were there for long-term offenses: illegal alcohol making, vagrancy, prostitution, murder. There were three small babies in the room and five girls under ten.
The guard said something about me that I didn’t understand but which made some of the women mutter and look suspicious and made me even more nervous about the night ahead.
When he left, a woman with a lopsided gait and her hair cut as short as a GI’s, sat down on a mattress opposite me and sneered. I discovered later that this ex-schoolteacher had been one of a group of women rounded up during the riots, taken to the officers’ mess, and raped repeatedly. The shame of being raped, and subsequently disowned by her family, had driven her mad. She should never have been there.
As soon as the guard left, the air was full of noise, a parakeet shrieking that shredded the nerves. None of the women spoke English, or if they did, not to me.
It was hot in the room and thick with smells. The madwoman sat staring at me until an older woman with an air of authority touched my arm and led me to a bed on the other side of the room. She held up her finger: Wait! and a few moments later came back with a cup of water for me to drink. She didn’t smile when I tried to thank her, but I was grateful nonetheless.
I was hungry, having had almost nothing to eat the day before, but when the gothambu unda, the prison breakfast, a large round dumpling made of wheat—a gritty kind of wheat that smelled old—arrived, I couldn’t eat it. I’d imagined, hoped, that after breakfast we’d be given a job to do—factory work, basket weaving—but we all sat for the next two hours, the air soupy and hot. It was impossible to sleep to pass the time, but I lay down on my bed anyway, worried that in this thick fug of perspiring, leaking, coughing bodies, I would catch something and die and never see Anto or Raffie again.
* * *
On my third day there, after breakfast of kanji, a kind of rice gruel made from chaakkari, the lowest-quality rice available, we were lined up and made to march across a concrete yard, where we were taken to a room stacked with baskets. A thin woman with a hard, weary face and few teeth gave me a bundle of prickly reeds and machine-gunned instructions to me in Malayalam. I felt as gormless as some of the Moonstone midwives must have felt listening to me. I did my best, but three hours of sitting cross-legged on the floor made my back and hopelessly slow fingers tremble with tiredness. When the toothless one saw my horribly made basket, she held it up and jeered at it and made the other women cackle.
I made baskets for six days, and when, on the seventh, a guard suddenly appeared saying, “Husband is here,” I didn’t know whether to cheer or weep. I hadn’t slept and had a permanent crick in my back. I felt dirty too. When I asked the guard if I could wash myself first, he snapped, “Full female ablutions are on Friday.” But then he relented and brought me a basin of water and a small pot of sticky black soap.
Anto was sitting in the visitors’ room when I walked in, very pale and still. Raffie was there too—a huge mistake. He leapt at me and covered my face in kisses, then lay on the floor and sobbed so hysterically that the guard warned us he would have to leave if he couldn’t stop. Anto knelt down beside him.
“The man says we’ll have to go if you cry,” he warned. He cradled him in his arms, but the sight of Raffie’s brave little face struggling for control broke my heart.
“Mummy smells funny,” Raffie said, when he could speak. When he took his thumb from his mouth and touched the ends of my hair, I could feel his heart jumping in his chest.
Anto, watching us, said, “How on earth did we get here?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. What I wanted to say to Anto was I love you, I miss you, I’ll be home soon, but I felt so degraded and ashamed, the words wouldn’t come out right. Instead I told him it had been a mistake to bring Raffie, and he hissed in a low voice, “You’re not living with him.”
Raffie wriggled off my lap and sat on the floor in the gloomy light.
“You’re a very good boy, darling,” I said. “I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
When he started to cry again, Anto said I looked pale and had lost weight. He was worried about me. I told him about the basket making, trying to make him smile, then I asked him to bring a Malayalam dictionary the next time he came.
“It won’t be for much longer, you do know that?” He cupped my face in his hands.
I looked at him properly for the first time since his arrival. “I’m sorry I told you off about Raffie,” I whispered. “Is he sleeping?”
“Not much . . . don’t worry . . . not really,” he said after a pause. “He misses you.”
“Can’t Amma have him for a day or two?”
“No. She’s . . . Appan’s taken her on a holiday.”
“Really?” This sounded so unlikely. Amma was as much a fixture at Mangalath as the rocks or the trees, but there was no time to explain, and not much else to say that didn’t feel either trivial or freighted with unsaid things. The rhythms of our lives together had changed already: no more laughs, no shared conversations, no tasks to do together, no teasing, just this shared humiliation.
“Saraswati and I are sure we can get you out soon,” he said before he left. “I’ll tell you more next time.” He stared at me intently. “You’re not alone,” he said. “You’re not alone,” he repeated. “Do you believe that?”
I nodded numbly. When he hugged me, I wanted to imprint every part of him on me: his chest, his arms, the lemony woody smell of him, but later that night, sleepless and boiling hot in my cot, I felt a desert growing inside me. We had very little money left now after the bad lawyer, and little support, I suspected, inside the prison, so what realistically could he do?
CHAPTER 58
At the end of my second week, I woke to find the ex-schoolteacher with the gray crew cut rhythmically pummeling my face, her yellow teeth bared. It was early morning; I was half-asleep. Two guards, hearing my yells, rushed in and dragged her away, but not before she’d kicked me hard in the head. When I woke next, I was lying in the prison hospital, a large Nissen hut on the edge of the exercise yard
. There was a nauseating pain in my temple, and my mouth and right cheek felt bruised.
Coming round was like swimming to the surface of a scummy lake, full of the dirty rubbish in my head. When I looked up, Saraswati Nair staring down became, for a few weird moments, part of my dream, like déjà vu in reverse. Her face was still and unsmiling.
“Is Raffie all right?” I said. My spit tasted of copper.
“Don’t worry.” She knelt down beside me. “Kamalam and Anto are taking good care of him. Now listen carefully”—Saraswati’s glasses were painfully bright—“because I have only ten minutes to talk to you; this is important.”
She brought her face close to mine and spoke slowly and distinctly. “There will be a retrial. I have more than one hundred and eighty-three signatures on a petition from Moonstone patients. I am visiting government offices, twisting arms. I am insisting they call me as a witness next time; the trial was a grave miscarriage of justice. Are you listening to me?”
“Thank you, Saraswati,” I said feebly, sure she was making it up.
“What kind of talk is thank you?” she said fiercely.
“I shouldn’t have done it . . .” I wanted her to stop my head from banging, to take her bright glasses away.
“Listen,” she hissed, moving her face an inch or so closer. “You have your husband on the warpath, also the many lion-hearted women in our community, and I am roaring with them. Don’t forget this either: you never lied to Dr. Annakutty about your qualifications. She passed you as competent, but don’t waste your breath on that, what we need now is money.”
“We don’t have it,” I told her. “Anto spent all our savings on the lawyer, much good he did us. I wish I could have had you, Saraswati.”
“I would have blown the case to smithereens,” she admitted modestly. “But back to the money: your family is wealthy, let them pay.”
“They won’t pay.”
“Won’t pay?” She could hardly contain her frustration.
“Won’t bribe—not all Indians are corruptible, you know.” Ignoring this sad joke attempt, she jerked back her cuff and looked at the man’s wristwatch she wore.
“I have five minutes left, and it’s important you understand this is not a good time to be an Englishwoman in prison: that madwoman may strike again.” She broke off suddenly. “What’s this?” She grabbed my right hand and stared at it in horror. It was crisscrossed with dried blood and small cuts.
“It’s the reeds.” I felt ashamed, like a child beggar parading her leg irons. “We do basket weaving, for the magnificent sum of one rupee a week.”
“Those stupids. What a waste!” Saraswati smacked the side of her head, looked around her. “I’m going to talk to the doctor in charge.” She flounced out of the room and came back with a middle-aged man with a set smile, baggy exhausted eyes, and a stethoscope around his neck.
“Dr. Zaheer,” she said, “is the chief physician here.” They talked over my head for a while, Saraswati translating. “He says the prison and the hospital are overflowing. He’s never known it so busy. They have a tent in the garden to deal with the extra patients; medical supplies are running out.” She broke off for another fusillade of words.
“Show him your hands. I’m asking him if that is a way to treat a state-registered nurse. Where did you train? Saint Thomas’, where Florence Nightingale worked, am I mistaken? No. One of the finest hospitals in England. Correct?”
“It’s certainly . . .”
“Now I’m telling him that you have safely delivered many children.” I was shaking my head before she finished.
“Saraswati, stop! Stop! Stop! Please! Tell him exactly why I’m here.” My lip still felt enormous, as if I were talking through an inner tube. “No false pretenses.”
As she jabbered away for a while more, I saw a faint light dawn in the doctor’s tired eyes. He ran his hands over a bristling chin and talked without drawing breath for several minutes.
“So here’s the thing,” Saraswati said. “He wants you to understand this facility here once had a very high reputation; he wants it to be like that again. I told him that was exactly how we felt about the Moonstone, that we were very proud of it, that we were doing everything we could to make it work. Sometimes we cut corners, not because we were stupid or cruel, but because we’ve had to, and this time we paid the price. You in particular.”
“That’s nice,” I said wearily, not feeling anything but pain in my head, my mouth. When I woke up again, she was gone.
* * *
It turned out that Dr. Zaheer spoke excellent English.
“Miss Smallwood,” he asked me four days later, with the same slightly unnerving set smile. “Do you have a certificate of nursing qualifications. Yes or no?”
“Yes, from Saint Thomas’, it was just the midwifery I hadn’t quite—”
“That’s all I need to know.” He got out a pad and started to write busily. “I’m signing you off for three days’ convalescence; after that I want you to report here every morning at six thirty. We are badly in need of more help with the women’s clinic, general gynecological problems, plus several deliveries a month. I will clear it with the governor. Your basket-making days are over.” This time the smile made it to his eyes, and I tried to smile, but it hurt too much, and anyway, I saw that if I proved too useful, I could just possibly get stuck in another kind of trap.
- CHAPTER 59 -
Clinic hours at the prison hospital were from eight to twelve in the morning. Nobody stuck to them. Our stream of patients came with every imaginable complaint from boils to stomach upsets to secondary syphilis to broken bones. On my first week there, I treated one woman for vaginal tears that had been the result of a violent rape. Dr. Zaheer told me pointedly that she had been assaulted twice: this time by a prison guard, who had been severely punished, the time before that by a British soldier, on the week before Independence. Whether this was true or not, I had no idea.
Dr. Zaheer, whose mirthless smile looked more like a death’s-head grimace every day, said the facility was close to collapse. Our main ward held twenty people comfortably, but we often had twice that number, making it hard to move between the beds.
But I respected this conscientious man, doing his best in difficult conditions. He was nice enough to me—even complimenting me on my stitching of the vaginal tear, an hour-long job—but he made it crystal clear I had no choice about being here, particularly as two local nurses were off sick. He also insisted I speak to the patients in Malayalam. “That’s our state language, is it not?” he asked me sarcastically.
After a month I could speak whole sentences without having to think about them, not necessarily phrases you might use in polite society—“Have you tried to strangle yourself before?” “How many men have you lain with?”—but it pleased me to be able to speak more fluently.
The ward nurse, a good-looking, hard-faced woman called Kali, was, I was pretty sure of it, sleeping with Dr. Zaheer, a kind of droit de signeur arrangement that was not uncommon in Indian hospitals—another reason, I imagined, why the Thekkedens found my profession so distasteful.
When I stumbled on them once in the dispensary, they sprang apart, and afterwards, when I didn’t understand her instructions, she widened her eyes in fury, like the wicked witch in a panto.
In my third week there, when one of the new prisoners came in almost fully dilated, I was ordered to help a local midwife, Chinna, who came to the hospital whenever she was needed. With no time for formal introductions, we rushed the shrieking woman into a side ward and performed what Sister Tutor would have called a textbook vaginal delivery together. Thanks to the Moonstone, I understood all the words, and we were a good team, and when the baby shot out, Chinna gave me a sort of thumbs-up look which meant “good, competent.” That poor baby would spend most of its life in captivity, as the mother was in for the murder of a bullying mother-in-la
w and was lucky, Dr. Zaheer told me, to avoid being lynched in her village.
By the time I got back to F block, I’d been gone for almost ten hours and I was dizzy with exhaustion. When the guard appeared and told me I had a visitor in the reception area, I felt nothing but frustration.
* * *
Anto couldn’t hide his shock when he saw me.
“Are you eating?” He grabbed my hand. “You’ve lost so much weight. What are they giving you to eat?”
I told him that the nursing food was miles better than the ordinary prisoner’s diet. That there were dosas in the morning, and fresh fruit, but I was never very hungry in the morning.
“Kit.” When Anto ran his thumb gently along my hand, a guard leapt forward; they’re always on red alert for “immoral acts” during visiting hours. “Please eat breakfast.”
I didn’t answer. I was trying to work out whether I should tell him then and there my suspicions about other possible reasons for my paleness. On the days leading up to my sentencing, we’d made love several times with the kind of desperate intensity that reminded me of our early days at Wickam Farm, and now I’d been sick for two mornings in a row and my breasts were tender. I’d put my three-week-late period down to anxiety, hoping this was so. I couldn’t think of a worse time or place to celebrate a possible new life. I didn’t want to raise his hopes either, so instead, I asked for news of Raffie.
“Sad,” said Anto at last. I could see him processing this thought, trying to find a way of answering this without lying to me, which is one thing I’d always loved about him: how he tried to tell me the truth, however hard.
“He misses you.”
“Still not sleeping?”
“Not brilliantly.” Anto gave a long shuddering sigh.
“Any help from Amma?”
Monsoon Summer Page 39