Amma put her hand to her mouth. “I’ll talk to him,” she mumbled at last.
“Not like this. It won’t work.”
“No?” Amma looked up, her eyes full of pain and distress.
Saraswati put on her glasses and sighed. “Spout your prejudices and things will get worse.”
“What, then?” Amma was barely audible.
“Come.”
Taking Kunjamma’s arm, she helped her over a small pile of charred rubble. To the right of them were the beginnings of a bonfire with a couple of doors and a wooden doll on top.
“Look.” Saraswati pointed. Beyond the bonfire, a large rectangle of earth had been neatly raked and pegged out with lines of string. “One day this will be our new clinic. We’ve already painted the sign to cheer us on. Some local women come every day to pray. They planted those.” She nodded towards a row of marigolds planted near a fierce plaster goddess brandishing her sword.
“Mrs. Thekkeden?” Saraswati saw her stumble and took her arm. “Are you tired?”
“Facts I need.” Light-headed from lack of food, Amma heard her own voice slur.
“So facts are these. We treat our village midwives like the lowest of the low. If men did it, it would be seen as the supreme act of courage.”
“Don’t point at me,” said Kunjamma, “I never treated my midwife like that. She is properly trained, she is clean.”
“You’re rich, you have influence. A different story for poor women.” Saraswati’s voice rose. “Their lives are often destroyed by childbirth.”
Kunjamma’s eyes floated up in her head. “I am tired,” she said. “I need to think, but one thing I would say is, Don’t mistake me for a stupid or a cruel woman.”
“I don’t,” Saraswati said softly. “Kit has told me of your kindness to her family, but seriously, would you have the guts to be a midwife? No! Nor would I. Thank God someone does.”
* * *
Before she left, Kunjamma said she wanted to read the newspaper reports. She opened the Vantage first, a local broadsheet. She smoothed it out and read it with her face going from white to red and back to white again.
“They haven’t given her our name,” she said after a long silence. “That’s something, although the gossips will have spread the word by now.” She read on. “These are disgusting,” she said at last. “Poor Anto.”
“Poor Anto!” Saraswati barked incredulously. “What about Kit? Now read these.” Saraswati pushed the red file towards her. “This is what the local women said about her. Make up your own mind.”
- CHAPTER 62 -
Two days after Anto’s visit, Chinna, the midwife, examined me and told me what I already knew: I was pregnant. I was almost sure I remembered the night it had happened, a night of high moon and high heat and desperate last-minute clinging that felt now like a lifetime ago. After Chinna left the cubicle, I lay for a while wondering what this would mean now. Pregnancy in this place was not a get-out-of-jail card: babies were born here and raised here quite routinely. My greatest worry was I’d become indispensable to the crazily overworked Dr. Zaheer, even more so now that my Malayalam had improved. When I warned him that afternoon that I only had six weeks more of my sentence to serve, he’d snapped, “That’s not correct. You must talk to the governor.”
Panicked, I wrote a letter to the governor asking for confirmation of my release date, but knowing the cumbersome bureaucracy of that prison, did not expect a speedy reply.
A few days later, I was still suffering from morning sickness, and when I felt too ill to work, I asked for an hour off. Dr. Zaheer barked, “Request refused.” He still wore the same relentless smile that meant nothing except overwork, but that night I was moved from the women’s dormitory into a small cell of my own. A big relief. I longed for sleep with the intensity of a drug fiend, and when it didn’t come, or I woke in the small hours, I felt I was in hell and sometimes wept without sound, a clown’s crying. It was one thing to lead myself down the path of destruction, quite another to be pregnant here. No one had said a word yet about my release.
The tireder I got, the more frightened I felt, my nerve a frayed cloth that grew thinner every day. Rumors flew around here: about gangs of men and women who’d stockpiled weapons and were ready to riot, about guards who gagged and raped. One night in mid-July, I was escorted back to my cell after work, my feet aching from ten hours on the ward, my head blurry with tiredness. When I walked in, I saw the silhouette of a veiled woman sitting, very still, in the corner of the room. I thought at first it was Govinda, the sweet-faced nurse who sometimes helped me on the wards.
The light in the cell came from a weak bulb high in the ceiling, so it was hard to see, but when I moved closer and saw it wasn’t her, I remembered my attacker and froze.
“Nee endha cheyyanae? What are you doing?” I said. “Who are you?” The dark shape stood up, laid aside her shawl, and faced me. It was Amma.
She looked so pale, I didn’t recognize her at first. Her eyes were staring dark hollows between the folds of her veil. When I looked around the room, I saw that place through her own fastidious eyes—the high, scummy window, the potty, the iron bed, the gray blanket with Viyyur Prison Service on it—and it made me want to die of shame.
“Why are you here?” I said, when the guard had locked the door behind us. Both of us had started to tremble like two small dogs squaring up for a fight, until something more terrifying occurred to me.
“Has there been an accident at home?”
“No, no, no, no.” Her expression softened a little. “Nothing’s happened,” she said. “I’m here because I wanted to see you. You’ve lost a lot of weight.”
“There’s been a tummy bug.” I backed away from her. “I don’t want you to catch it.”
“I’m glad to be here.”
I didn’t believe her of course: I’d seen her immaculately ordered house, the polished floors, the tidy medicine cabinet with labels lined up, even the bloody orchid hospital, for God’s sake.
It was only when the light in the cell surged that I saw how much weight she’d lost too. Her skin, once so plump and shiny like a ripe conker, looked as papery as autumn leaves.
“Amma,” I said, not even sure I could call her mother now. “I’m so sorry . . . I’ve made such a mess of things.”
She turned away, her lips working violently.
“A big shock . . .” she said eventually. “Everyone knew but me.” I heard her gasp. “And when you don’t have the facts, your mind goes mad.”
“I know.”
“You shouldn’t have left me in the dark.” She wiped her eyes on the corner of her shawl. “You of all people should have let me know. You saw what lies did in your own family? Nothing but pain. But you didn’t trust me either.”
I thought of Glory then. How I’d clung to her on the night before she died and the lifeboat broke up into little pieces.
“I wasn’t sure I could,” I said. “I wasn’t exactly your dream of a daughter-in-law.”
A look of wry amusement passed between us. There it was out, like the head of a boil.
She closed her eyes. “Well . . .”
“And this makes it so much worse.”
“That we cannot change, but listen please, we don’t have much time.” Her face was set and unsmiling. “Anto and Saraswati want me to change overnight. I can’t—that would be another lie—but Saraswati showed me the Moonstone. She says if they can raise the money, it will be built again. A long way to go.” She sounded resigned and far from happy, and so was I: for me, the whole place felt freighted with failure now.
“Did Appan ask you to come here?” I asked in the silence that followed.
“No.” She stared into her lap. “He’s not talking to me. I stole money from him to pay the bribe.”
“The bribe?”
“How else am I sitting here?”
I was astounded. “Who did you pay?”
“I’m not going to say,” she said, pressing her lips together.
“Oh God.” The damage was spreading and I was responsible. “Amma, I’m so sorry,” I said. She looked so crushed, so old. “I never wanted you to fall out with Appan.”
“A shakeup was needed,” she said. “He’ll be back.”
“Have you spoken to Anto?”
“A few nights ago,” Amma said tonelessly. “We stayed up late unknotting things between us. He asked me a question: ‘Do you remember the parable of the Good Samaritan?’ I said of course I did, everyone did.”
“ ‘Is it true or is it a lie?’ he said.
“ ‘Don’t come to me with your clever Downside talk,’ I said to him. ‘I’m a Christian, I know what it means.’
“ ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let me put it another way. Tonight, when you leave me, you see a child bleeding to death beside the road. Do you cross the road, to avoid the mess of it? Do you say to yourself, I’m not qualified, I won’t look, or do you see the supreme value of a human life, and do what you can?’
“ ‘I’m not stupid,’ I said. I knew where this was leading. ‘There are laws, and your wife broke one. Jail was the next step.’
“He was stern with me. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve spent months now looking at the legalities of manslaughter and criminal negligence, and they’re muddled and unclear, all lawyers know this. For example, if I was a naval captain on a ship and one of my crew got ill, I could be prosecuted for not doing anything. The law calls this failure to assist. New health system, new country, new laws, we’re all at sea,’ he said.”
Amma raised her eyes and looked at me. She wasn’t enjoying this one bit. “He said that you chose to help in a difficult situation, that you might have been foolish in your innocence and optimism, but you were at least brave, and that you paid a high price for it.”
“He did?” I could hardly speak.
“He said all this.” Her voice was low.
“You don’t agree though, do you?”
“I don’t know.” She looked at me again. “I’m never going to like you doing this.”
We smiled the same wry smile. She was, at least, honest.
“Anto says that you’ll complete the medical requirement as soon as you get out.”
“I’m almost there,” I said. “That’s the irony. I needed two more supervised deliveries. I should have organized them at the Moonstone, but we were always too busy.”
“What next?” She was watching me like a hawk.
“I don’t know . . . get my certificate, go back to the Moonstone . . . probably . . . if they’ll have me . . . and if the money gets raised to build it again. I don’t look forward to it, but I can’t seem to let it go. It’s not what you want to hear.”
“No, it’s not.” She looked pretty miserable. “It’s your life.”
We had come to the end of what was possible for now, and hearing the guard’s feet again, the rattle of keys, I felt incredible weariness: the heat pressing down on me like a hot, wet blanket, the long night ahead.
“Look, Amma,” I said, “I am not in control anymore . . . I try not to make plans.”
When she brought her face so close to mine, I thought for one strange moment that she was going to kiss me. Instead, she whispered, “You’re wrong. It will happen, and it will be soon. Wait and see.”
- CHAPTER 63 -
My knight in shining Amma, I thought unkindly after she’d left and darkness had fallen. She looked too old and frail to have any kind of currency in a place like Viyyur.
But a week later, shortly after breakfast, a package appeared in my cell. Inside it was the blue dress I’d arrived in eight weeks ago, nicely washed and ironed by the prison laundry, a pair of stockings, and my shoes, lying there like messages from another life: both wonderfully familiar and awfully strange.
The guard took me across the F block square to a concrete room with a sign on the door saying Female Ablutions. He gave me a pot of black sticky soap and a strip of cotton fabric to dry myself with. I filled the copper bucket, and I washed my body from head to toe.
My heart was crashing in my chest as I dressed, combed my hair, and later, as I walked into Dr. Zaheer’s cramped office on the side of the main ward.
This is a trick, I thought, listening to the piping birds in the tree outside. It won’t happen, I told myself, gazing at the prison walls, the brilliant blue skies beyond.
But then Dr. Zaheer, in his grimy lab coat, with bruised eyes, said to me in his I’m-speaking-to-you-from-the-grave voice, “You’re leaving today. Not my choice.” No smiling now. He had the look of a man betrayed.
There were, he said, a couple of important strings attached: I was to come back to the hospital and work two days a week at the clinic for the next six months. Part of this arrangement involved helping the resident midwife.
“If I do that,” I said, “could I please be officially supervised? I’d like to get my final qualifications.”
I watched his eyes flicker thoughtfully while I waited for this penny to drop, then he said in a barking voice, “Prisoner rehabilitation is at the heart of what we do. We have a prison library here. I will order any books. You can be our first midwife graduate.”
* * *
When I saw Anto waiting for me outside the prison walls, I could not speak at first. When I got in the car, we clung to each other.
“Stop it!” Anto said, wiping his tears with his sleeve. “We’re bloody idiots! You’re free.”
And then I told him about our new baby, and we started again sobbing and laughing and clutching each other for dear life.
“Actually, I’m not quite free,” I said. As we drove away, I told him the agreement I’d made with Doctor Zaheer.
“Do you mind?” He glanced at me and grabbed my hand.
“No,” I said, and then to show off my Malayalam, “Athu nalla kachavadam tannae. It seems like a fair exchange.” Which in a queer sort of way it did.
* * *
It took a while for things to feel right again. On my first morning home, the beautifully sliced ripe Alphonso mango laid out on my breakfast plate, the cup of freshly brewed coffee looked as if they had arrived from another planet. There was a note from Anto: “Morning, wife. I hope you slept well.”
The house had rearranged itself in my absence. Raffie kept asking if he could sleep in Kamalam’s bed. We let him for a while in order to avoid the explosion of tears detonated on the first night at the thought of going back to his old room.
At the end of my first week back, I sat with him on the veranda, where he was playing listlessly, jumping in and out of a cardboard box. When I tried to join in, he stood in front of the box and folded his arms like a sentry. “I only play this with Kamalam,” he said.
“Give him time,” Anto said, when I told him later. Anto, who was wearing glasses for the first time, had lost weight and was starting to look like Appan. In my absence, our bedroom had been converted into an untidy study covered in papers and legal books. I wanted him to take those bad memories away but didn’t dare ask until I felt less of a stranger here.
I knew everything would start to get better when I slept, but I’d been running on adrenaline for so long, my motor wouldn’t stop, and one night when I woke and felt Anto’s hand on my head, I yelled so loud, I woke Raffie up. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m sorry . . .”
Then, one night when Anto came home from work, he put me to bed. When he took off his new wire glasses, I was aware again of the beauty of his eyes, how they opened up in a seam of tortoiseshell and green. He needed a new haircut; his hair was soft and silky when I touched it. He brought me fresh lemon juice in a tall glass. He asked me if I would like to go with him and spend a few days at Mangalath. Not yet, I told him, not ready to face the relatives. Their displeasure, their
polite smiles. Not yet.
* * *
I didn’t want to see anyone for a while, but Saraswati came anyway. Said she’d hired a special rickshaw to take me down to the Moonstone. It was a huge shock to see it again: the soil all churned up, the foundations dug in, but nothing, apart from that, but broken glass and charred beams. Saraswati took my arm to help me over a pile of broken bricks. She wanted to show me the new Durga statue in the one patch of vegetation that had survived. This Durga, huge and pink, had been paid for out of donations by the ever-generous Mr. Namboothiri, the paint manufacturer. She was sitting on a lion, and to me seemed a fanciful waste of what little money we had left.
“Do you know what she stands for?”
“No.” I closed my eyes and thought, Here we go.
“She has three eyes,” Saraswati said, with the gusto of someone describing a marvelous friend.
“Her left eye is for the moon, or desire; the right eye, the sun, stands for action; the central eye is knowledge. And the lion,” Saraswati ended with a flourish, “determination. Willpower.”
“I had some of that once,” I joked.
“You still do,” said Saraswati. “Shock will go and you’ll be back. The three weapons in Durga’s hands are a thunderbolt, a sword, and—your mother-in-law’s favorite—a lotus in bud but not fully bloomed. That symbolizes certainty of success but not finality.” While she was talking, I saw two huge rats move over the ground.
“I need some of your strength,” I told her.
“Give it time,” she said.
* * *
Mariamma came next, unannounced and unexpected, with a bag of fresh pastries in her hand. She stood at the door, framed in sunlight, motionless for a moment, as if taking the temperature of the room before walking in, and then came towards me and, sinking to her knees, put her arms around me.
“Welcome home, sister,” she said. “I’m so happy to see you.”
She stayed for lunch and in the afternoon washed and braided my hair: the beautiful smell of coconut oil. When I told her I was expecting a baby, her eyes filled with tears, and she hugged me. “You’re the first person to know,” I said, “and don’t tell anyone else, it’s too early.” As a midwife, I was extra superstitious about that.
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