The Best Day of My Life

by Deborah Ellis

  I had been looking at the inside of the windows, so I hadn’t noticed it before.

  Now I saw it.

  I was filthy. I had stayed away from the river because I was afraid I might run into Dr. Indra there. My kurta was torn and covered in grime. My hair was knotted and matted. I scratched my head a lot because ants crawled around in it at night and that made it all bunch up. Wind and living did the rest.

  They were right, I thought. Books were not for me. I probably didn’t even look like everybody else inside. Under my skin, there was probably just more dirt.

  I left the mall.

  I walked out past the guards at the gate, who yelled, ‘How did you get in here? Get out!’ I tried to sit on the steps, but they chased me away.

  I sat on the curb across the street. They couldn’t stop me from doing that.

  But it didn’t make me feel any better.

  11

  Feet

  And then I forced myself to do what I had avoided doing since I’d left the hospital.

  A I looked at my feet.

  Even caked with dirt, I could see they were a mess.

  There were large nasty-looking sores on the sides and the bottoms. There were blisters from the burns that were green and puffy. There were cuts from glass and bruises and scrapes from all the falls I’d had just that morning, hitching rides on the backs of trucks.

  And they smelled bad.

  Not just ordinary street-dirt bad. Worse. Like walking-by-a-dog-that-had-been-dead-for-three-days bad.

  I looked at the feet of the people passing by. I was close to the ground, in a good position to look at feet. I saw feet in high heels, feet in army boots, feet that were bare and feet in canvas runners. I saw the dancing feet of children who were eager to get into the mall and the tired feet of tradespeople pushing their barrows.

  What was the worst that could happen? My feet wouldn’t fall off. So what if they had sores? So what if they smelled bad? Nobody ever died from having bad-smelling feet.

  Or did they? I didn’t know.

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ I said out loud.

  Maybe I should try to make my way back to Jharia. I could pick up coal, live with the woman who was not my aunt and it wouldn’t matter that I didn’t know how the body made blood or what it took to make someone die. I knew how to find bits of coal on the ground, pick them up and put them in a bag. A lot of people lived their whole lives that way.

  ‘Get along. Keep moving.’

  I thought the guard was snarling at me. I wasn’t sure I had the strength to argue with him, even though he was a mall guard and had no power over who sat on the curb. Of course, that wouldn’t stop him from hitting me anyway if he wanted to.

  ‘Spare a rupee for my baby?’

  The voice was weak, but there was a lull in the traffic and I heard her.

  I looked up.

  A thin woman in a torn and dirty sari was slowly climbing the stairs to the gate where the guards stood. Her baby was in a pouch across her shoulder. She cradled it with one arm and held the other arm out, the palm of her hand open to the sun.

  ‘Please, one rupee.’

  She would never get anything. After months on the streets, I could generally tell who was not worth begging from. Guards didn’t get to be guards by doing anyone any favors.

  ‘Get away from here!’

  The woman kept climbing.

  Mall customers pushed by her. They ignored her open hand and hurried through the security check to get into the stores.

  Four more shopping days to Christmas, I thought.

  Four days suddenly seemed like a long time.

  I realized that I had gotten through these months by not thinking about time. I thought about food, and somewhere to sleep, and being entertained, but I never thought about time.

  What was there to think about? Each day would be the same. Some days I would eat more, some days I would eat less. Some nights I would sleep in a cemetery. Some nights I would spend on the pavement. Sometimes I washed in the river. Usually I didn’t wash at all.

  Just like on the best day of my life when I stood on the edge of the coal pit and looked into my future, I looked into my future now.

  I could see it.

  My future was the woman with the baby, who was walking with her head down across the road to my curb, her palm still open and hanging down empty at her side.

  She got closer to me. She was crying. A thin wail rose up from the pouch across her chest.

  ‘It’s a lousy day,’ I said to her.

  ‘It’s just…’ She eased herself down onto the curb. Then she said, ‘It’s just an ordinary day.’

  I reached into my pocket and took out the folded-up piece of pizza. There was some pocket fuzz on the crust. I brushed it off.

  ‘Here,’ I said.

  She took the pizza from me and stared at it for a moment, as if she wasn’t quite sure what it was. Then she took a small bite of the crust, softened it with her mouth and took it out and gave it to her baby. I saw two tiny hands come out of the pouch to grab hold of the food. The wailing stopped.

  The woman looked up at me.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  I walked away.

  I kept walking. I had a long way to go.

  The mall was in the Salt Lake area of Kolkata, far from the middle part of the city. I could have hopped rides to get back downtown. But walking seemed like the right thing to do.

  I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. I couldn’t picture it. I walked through the streets as if it were my last walk.

  I walked past the smooth green lawns and marble palaces of the neighborhoods where rich people lived. I walked along the narrow pathways between the small square lakes where fish were hatched and caught. I walked through the bamboo bustees and pavement dwellers, past shops and mosques, movie theaters and yoga parks with their pergolas and quiet gardens. I walked as the sun went down and the headlights shone on the thick dust and exhaust that turned the air to fog.

  I grew very tired.

  But I kept on walking.

  I was afraid that if I stopped, I would think. And if I thought about it, I would talk myself out of it.

  It was quite late at night by the time I got to Dr. Indra’s hospital. The gates across the driveway were closed and locked shut.

  Across the street was a row of large cement construction pipes. I climbed into one.

  From pipes on either side of me came the sounds of snoring. Others had the same idea I did. But I didn’t sleep.

  I kept my eyes on the gates. I waited out the night and tried hard not to think.

  At dawn the guards came out to open the gates. I jumped up.

  I walked quickly across the road and into the hospital. Up the stairs, and then I was back in the room full of beds and monsters.

  Everyone was still asleep. They were just lumps under sheets. Just lumps. They did not look like monsters.

  I remembered which bed I had been in. It was the one next to the one next to the window. I walked right over to it and stood at the end.

  Someone was sleeping there.

  I assumed it was a woman because everyone else in the room was a woman. I couldn’t tell for sure because of all the bandages over the face. There were bandages on the arms and across the chest.

  I had walked a very long way and sat up all night in order to be back in the hospital, and now I didn’t know what to do. It had never occurred to me that there might not be room for me.

  I had no other plans.

  And so I did the only thing I could think of to do.

  I banged on the bedframe.

  ‘Get up,’ I said loudly. ‘You’re sleeping in my bed.’

  12

  A Decision

  Not everyone was glad to see me.

  In fact, for several hours, until Dr. Indra came, nobody was glad.

  The women in the ward were not glad. I had woken them up from a sound sleep, ages before the tea was hot and at the hour of t
he morning when mosquitoes were most hungry. It was hard to get back to sleep with the noise of their buzzing.

  The nurses were not glad. They had been awake and working all night. Their shifts were coming to an end and they were busy writing notes and shuffling papers around. None of them had been on duty when I had been in the hospital before. They didn’t know me. They didn’t know that was my bed.

  And the security guards were not happy. I hadn’t climbed the fence or broken any windows. I had waited until the gate was unlocked. But I caused a commotion, and they were tired, too.

  ‘If she can get in, anybody can get in,’ I heard.

  ‘No one is coming in,’ someone else said. ‘People run away from us. They don’t sneak into places to be with us.’

  ‘And yet here she is,’ the first voice said. ‘I knew she was trouble.’

  ‘Miss, please come with us to the waiting room.’ A guard stood beside me. I waited for him to hit me, but he must have been too tired. ‘The doctors will be in soon.’

  I knew I couldn’t leave that room. If I did, I might leave the hospital, and I needed to be there. But I was scared. I held onto the metal frame of that bed and I did not move. I kept my eyes on my hands.

  ‘Dr. Indra wants me to be here,’ I said. ‘This is my bed.’

  They left me alone.

  The guard went away and the nurses worked around me. They changed bandages, carried bedpans, fluffed pillows and gave out pills. Sometimes they said ‘Excuse me,’ but they didn’t sound angry. And nobody hit me.

  I had walked a long way and sat up all night. Once the excitement of my arrival died down, the ward got quiet again. The walk and the night started to catch up with me. My eyes wanted to shut and my body wanted to slide to the floor.

  ‘You can sit.’ A patient with a cane pushed a chair over to the end of the bed. ‘No one will think less of you if you do.’

  She left the chair beside me. I tried to ignore it, but it called to me. My knees bent. I sat down, and in moments I was sound asleep with my head on the bed.

  ‘Good morning, Valli.’

  Dr. Indra had arrived.

  ‘Would you like to stop drooling on Laxmi and tell me why you are here?’

  I shook my head clear of sleep and stood up.

  ‘My bandages fell off.’

  ‘You came here to get new bandages put on your feet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  I want to be you, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t.

  ‘Just the bandages,’ I said. I hoped she would be able to guess that I wanted more.

  Instead she shook her head and said, ‘Come with me.’

  She led me out into the hall and sat down with me on a bench.

  ‘If all you want me to do is bandage your feet, then I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

  ‘You won’t help me?’

  ‘That would not be helping you. It would be hurting you.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t.’

  ‘Yes. You would go back out into the street and continue living your life, all the while doing more damage to your feet and to the rest of your nerves. I am a doctor. I took an oath to do no harm. Simply giving you bandages and letting you leave would be doing you harm. I would be going against my oath.’

  ‘What’s an oath?’

  ‘It’s a solemn promise.’

  ‘To who?’

  ‘To myself. And it’s very important to keep the promises we make to ourselves. So, if all you want is a bandage, I can’t help you.’

  I hung my head and looked at my hands.

  ‘What should I want?’ I asked.

  ‘You should want to get well. Leprosy is curable if you take the pills. Your wounds are treatable if you allow us to treat them. You are a child. As far as we know, you have no parents or guardian. I could arrange things to make myself responsible for you and force you to take treatments. But I want you to make the decision.’

  ‘What would I have to do?’

  ‘You would have to stay here for a while. We will test you to see what kind of drugs you need. Some people need only one pill. Others need up to three different kinds of pills. You would have to take this medicine every day for six months to two years, depending on the test results. And you would have to let us treat your wounds properly, which might mean surgery.’

  I didn’t understand the word surgery, but I had other worries.

  ‘I would have to stay here all the time?’

  ‘Yes. For a while. Then we’ll see.’

  ‘But I could go out during the day and come back here to sleep.’

  ‘No,’ Dr. Indra said. ‘Staying here means staying here. Not running off into the street whenever you feel like it or whenever you get scared. Living here.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I told her.

  ‘Tell me why not.’

  ‘How will I eat?’

  She smiled. ‘We have food here. We fed you before. Don’t you remember?’

  Why couldn’t she understand? I leaned in close to her and whispered, ‘I don’t have any money.’

  Dr. Indra laughed. ‘I didn’t think you did! All over the world, people send us money so that you can get treated.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘And others like you. But it’s not a gift. They expect something for their money.’

  ‘What? I don’t have anything.’

  Then I remembered my talk with the old man and his pet goat. I had quite a lot, really.

  ‘They expect you to get healthy and go on to do great things with your life.’ Dr. Indra stood up. ‘I have to start my shift. Sit here as long as you need to. Let me know when you have made your decision.’

  She walked away, then turned back again.

  ‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘There will be no more talk of monsters. You will treat these people with respect. You have the same disease they do.’

  ‘Will I end up like them?’ I pushed in my nose and clawed up my hands.

  ‘No,’ the doctor said, walking away again.

  ‘How do you know?’ I called after her.

  ‘Because,’ she called back, ‘you have me!’

  I stood at the top of the stairs and watched her walk down. I went back to the bench and stayed there.

  There really was nothing to think about. Free food, a free place to sleep on a mat that was even softer than the grassy graves in the Englishmen’s cemetery. My feet would get fixed and maybe Dr. Indra would let me look through the microscope again.

  ‘Tea?’

  I looked up. A woman with part of her nose gone was pushing a cart full of cups and tea pots. She was hard to look at.

  ‘Are you a patient?’ I asked.

  ‘I used to be,’ she said. ‘Now I work here. I’m the tea lady.’

  She poured me some tea with a hand that had some of its fingers worn away. She held out the cup for me to take.

  I stared at it. She put the tea down on the bench beside me and rolled the cart away.

  I couldn’t make myself pick up the cup.

  Maybe I couldn’t do this, I thought, as I watched the steam rise up from the tea.

  The tea lady pushed her cart over to the nurses’ office. I could see through the large window that several nurses were leaning over files and charts, writing and talking. They said, ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you’ to the tea lady as she poured them their morning cups, then pushed the cart into the next ward.

  The nurses drank from the cups, talked and wrote. To them it was just another ordinary day.

  I picked up my own cup and drank the tea.

  It tasted good. It tasted like tea.

  And then I went in search of Dr. Indra. I was ready to tell her my decision.

  13

  Clean

  ‘This will be your bed.’

  I was back in the same ward, close to the same bed. My old bed was still occupied by the woman with all the bandages. They were putting me in the bed right next to her.

  ‘You’re close to th
e window,’ Dr. Indra said. ‘You can keep an eye on the world.’

  ‘Are you going to do that to me?’ I pointed to the woman in the bandages.

  ‘If you give me any trouble, I might.’ But she said it with a smile, so she was probably joking.

  I started to sit on the bed but she stopped me.

  ‘You’re filthy.’

  ‘Do you want me to go down to the river to wash?’

  She had something else in mind.

  The tea lady, whose name was Usha, did more than just pour tea.

  ‘The washing room is through here,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you clean.’

  At the end of the ward was a small lavatory with showers.

  ‘I can do this myself,’ I said.

  It was just the two of us in the washroom. Usha stood between me and the door.

  ‘Dr. Indra asked me to help you.’

  ‘I can do it,’ I said again.

  She stepped toward me to help me take off my kurta.

  I stepped back.

  ‘Valli, look at me.’

  I raised my eyes to her face, then looked down again.

  ‘Don’t look away,’ she said. ‘Look as long and as hard as you need to. Look at me until you see me.’

  She held up her hands so I could look at them, too, the fingers only half of what they should have been.

  I did as she asked.

  I looked. Hard.

  And something happened.

  I stopped seeing the caved-in nose. I stopped seeing the damaged eye with its drooping eyelid and milky-looking eyeball. And I stopped seeing the stubs of fingers.

  Instead I saw the face of the woman who had brought me a good cup of tea. I saw little lines around the corners of her eyes. I saw kindness in her smile. I saw a woman who was stubborn and hard working and did not want to hurt me.

  ‘I see you,’ I said.

  She smiled. And then she scrubbed.

  Usha didn’t have all her fingers, but what she had left were strong. She rubbed and scrubbed even harder than the women at Mrs. Mukerjee’s. I kept saying, ‘Owww!’ and all she said was, ‘Oh, does that hurt?’ and she kept scrubbing.

  She handed me a hospital gown and had me stand in front of a mirror while she combed out my hair.