by Philip Roy
He went to the door, pushed it open and pointed out. “Go.”
Funny the things we notice at times like this. I saw the very same advertisement for Radji’s skin cream on the wall of the doctor’s office. On the counter was an open box of tubes. The doctor was selling it here. “Go,” he said. “Across the street there is another clinic. Maybe they will see you there.”
He left the room. I rushed outside, went through the gate and looked down the road. There was a group of buildings at the corner. It looked like the edge of a small town. I grabbed hold of Radji’s legs tightly and hurried down the road.
I burst into the clinic, saw several people waiting in chairs and a doctor talking to a nurse. They stopped talking and stared at us. I was almost fainting with fatigue now. “He . . . he . . . got a snake bite!”
The doctor put down her chart. “Quickly!” she said. “Come with me.”
I followed her to an examining room where she helped take Radji off my back and lay him onto an examining bed. “How long ago?” she asked.
“Umm . . . about forty-five minutes, I think. We were in the woods.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Down the road.” I pointed.
“No. I mean, where is the bite?”
“Oh. Here. Above the ankle. His leg is swollen now.”
She felt his forehead, lifted his wrist and started counting his pulse.
“Will he be okay?”
She looked at me very sympathetically while she counted his pulse. “We will certainly hope so.”
“The doctor across the street wouldn’t see us.”
“He would see you. He wouldn’t see him.”
She took a magnifying glass and looked at the snake bite very carefully. “Describe the snake to me.”
“It happened so fast. It was green and had black and yellow on it, I think. I wanted to try to kill it and bring it here but never had a chance.”
“Were they blocks of colour or stripes?”
“Umm . . . I’m not sure. I think maybe they were stripes.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“I’m sorry. No.”
She felt the swelling on his leg, then compared it to his other leg. “Did he fall? Did he hurt his leg in any other way?”
“Yes. He did. He twisted his ankle this morning. I saw him limping a little bit.”
She nodded her head. “And was he maybe very tired?”
“Umm . . . yes, I think so. Our sleep had changed. We had been up all night and sleeping in the day, then we changed back.”
“Yes. Well, I think I might have good news for you. I think this is not a venomous bite. We don’t need to see the snake to diagnose a snake bite anyway. We can tell by the bite. Not all snakes here are dangerous, although many are. I think your friend was bitten by a harmless snake. Painful, yes, but not deadly.”
“But what about the swelling?”
She smiled. She was so kind. “Your friend has been walking around on a sprained ankle. That’s why it is swollen. Didn’t he complain?”
“No, he never complained.”
She touched his forehead affectionately. “He’s a tough little guy.”
“He is.” I swallowed hard. “Can you help me? I have to find my dog. Is there any way I can leave my friend here while I go searching for him? Please?”
She touched my arm gently and looked into my eyes. “He can stay here. Go find your dog. We’ll keep him safe and let him rest, and when he wakes we’ll find something for him to eat.”
“Thank you so much.” I could barely get the words out of my mouth without bursting into tears. I felt so grateful. Her kindness took me by surprise. The doctor across the street would have let Radji die. But I couldn’t think about that now. Hollie was lost in a dangerous place and I had to find him.
Chapter Twelve
HOLLIE WAS AS CAUTIOUS as a wise old man, he really was. He was curious, of course, but didn’t take the kinds of risks that many dogs do. He had been the runt of the litter and was thrown from a wharf with a rope around his neck, tied to a stone. So, his start in life was pretty bleak. And yet he carried a lucky star, too, because he had landed in a dory, not the sea, and somehow that dory untethered and drifted free and I found it. Since then, he has travelled around the world in relative comfort. Still, he doesn’t ask for much.
I couldn’t figure out what had happened to him. Now that I knew that the snake was not poisonous it must have been something else. Had he been spooked by something? But what? I hadn’t seen anything. He was with us one minute, gone the next. I had been so preoccupied with Radji I didn’t even notice. I ran back to where we had come out of the woods. I checked the ditch all the way. The thought that he might have been struck by a car came to me but I tried not to think that. Images of finding him lying on his side jumped into my head and I had to push them out. When I reached the woods, I started calling his name. I tried to follow exactly the same path but I wasn’t sure it was right. I couldn’t remember well enough because we had come through in a panic. I thought I would recognize the bush where the snake had bitten Radji but suddenly there were so many of them. I yelled Hollie’s name all the way through the woods but there was no sign of him. I felt discouraged. I was worried sick. I just wanted him back. You could keep all the money in the world, I just wanted my dog back.
Maybe I was going the wrong way. I wasn’t sure. I just kept going. Eventually I reached the river. Then I discovered I had travelled too far upstream. I ran down to where the sub was and entered the woods again. Now it looked familiar. I found the woods where the snake had been. Then I recognized the bush. Then, I saw the tool bag, and there, curled up inside the bag, was Hollie.
But there was something wrong with him. He didn’t bark. He wagged his tail but he didn’t get up. “Hollie? Are you okay?” His face was a little swollen. I examined him very closely. I think maybe he had been bitten by the snake too, and it caused his face to swell. The poor thing. I scooped him up in my arms, threw the bag over my shoulder and headed back towards the clinic. I was worried about him but I was so happy I found him.
Back at the clinic Radji was still sleeping. The doctor was so kind she even examined Hollie for me. She said, yes, he had also been bitten, and being such a small dog, a bite in the face by a large snake would cause swelling and take awhile to heal. He would be sore and lethargic for a few days but would heal just fine. She gave me some medication to put in his food that would make him feel better. I held Hollie on my lap and stroked his fur and talked to him while the doctor saw other patients. She even let us stay after the clinic closed while she did her paperwork.
We talked. I asked her about Untouchables. She said things were changing slowly for them, but it was still a very big problem. “Mahatma Gandhi, our first leader, tried to make it better for them. He was a pacifist. He went on hunger strikes for political change. He did so much for our country, but it is very hard to go against so many centuries of tradition. At least Untouchables have legal rights now that they never had before. But there is still violence and discrimination against them. India is a complicated country with many peoples. And we have not only Hindus here; we have Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, and many others too.”
Then I asked her about the save-the-girl-child poster. She made a sad face. “It’s a program to stop the euthanasia, the killing of baby girls, before and after they are born.”
“But why would anyone kill their babies? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Girls are more expensive to have in India than boys.”
“Why?”
“Because families have to provide a dowry for them when they marry, and that’s expensive. And the other thing is that parents expect to be looked after by their sons in their old age. So, if a family has only girls, they have to pay money for them when they are married, and, when they leave, there’s no one to look after the parents. So, they get it coming and going. Our traditions make it rather difficult for many families to c
elebrate the birth of girls. There are lots of illegal clinics where people go to find out what sex their baby is before it is born. If it is a girl, they abort it.
“For some who cannot afford such a clinic, they might take matters into their own hands after the child is born. It’s terrible of course, and we are trying hard to stop it. Like the attitudes you see towards your friend, this sort of thing goes very far back in India’s history. To understand any person in India today, such as the doctor across the street, you have to imagine all the people standing in front of him—his ancestors— and the centuries of tradition and thousands of years of history. It’s not simple at all.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“No. It doesn’t make it right. But it explains where it comes from. To make it right is going to take a long time.”
When the doctor was ready to go home, we woke Radji. Then she kindly offered us a drive. It was a little tricky explaining where to drop us without telling her about the sub, which I didn’t want to do if I didn’t have to. I said we were staying on a boat on the river, which was true, mostly, and I convinced her to let us out on the road and not come to the boat, and she accepted that, although I think she was curious. I was glad to get everyone inside the sub safe and sound, including Seaweed, who dropped out of the sky when he saw us come to the river. I fed everyone and we settled down to sleep.
I should have fallen right to sleep, too, because I was so tired. But I couldn’t. Something was bugging me. I kept remembering the look on the face of the other doctor when he refused to treat Radji. I thought it was a look of hatred. It was so ugly. Now, I felt that I hated him. But I didn’t like that feeling. It was so complicated! I just couldn’t get over the fact that, had the snake been poisonous, he would have let Radji die. Didn’t that go against human nature? I lay on my cot and tried to fall asleep but I couldn’t. I needed to get out and walk. And so, while everyone was sleeping, I slipped out of bed, climbed out of the portal, shut the hatch behind me and climbed up the bank.
I walked along the road that followed the river. The moon was out and I saw it reflect off the tops of the trees. I walked, lost in thought, until I realized I was standing in front of the doctor’s house. The big iron fence went all around his property except for the side open to the river. I peeked through the fence and saw his fancy car and boat, and behind that, a statue of a woman holding an urn. It looked like a Greek statue. Staring at his house and property in the middle of the night, I felt that what was most important to him was money. I thought of the other doctor, and I knew that what was most important to her was people. They were so different. She had told me to try to think of all the generations of people standing in front of this doctor, but all I could see was money.
I went through some bushes beside his property and found my way to the river. To the right I saw an old barge, tucked in underneath some overhanging trees, just the way the sub was hidden. It looked to me as though the barge hadn’t been moved in decades. It was rusted and banged up and looked a hundred years old. So much of the machinery in India was ancient. I liked that. Ziegfried would have liked that too.
I was so restless. Looking to see that no one was around, I climbed onto the old barge. There was a cable rolled around a spindle on the stern, and a crank for winding it manually. Curious, I pulled the cable out to see how far it would reach. It came out surprisingly easy considering everything was so old and rusted. I jumped down and walked backwards pulling the cable with a hook on the end of it. There must have been two hundred feet wound around that spindle. I couldn’t believe it. I wondered what they used it for. Now that I was standing at the bottom of the doctor’s property, a crazy idea jumped into my head. I thought how much I would love to teach that doctor a lesson by tying the cable to the bumper of his fancy car so that when he tried to leave in the morning, the cable would hold his car back and he’d have to get out and unhook it. He’d wonder who had done that and maybe he would remember us and think about what he had done. I knew it wasn’t right and that I shouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I just couldn’t leave without doing something. But I did not foresee what would actually happen. I suppose I should have. But I didn’t.
The sky was turning blue. Morning was coming. I snuck up behind the car, hooked the cable around the bumper and went back into the bushes. When I reached the road and started to leave, I saw two men and a boy turn down towards the river. They didn’t see me. I would have just kept going except they seemed to be heading towards the old barge. That surprised me so I stopped and waited. The next thing I knew, I heard the motor of that old barge cough and spit as it started up. It sounded terrible. A small cloud of blue smoke drifted through the bushes. That engine needed a cleaning badly. Surely they weren’t planning to take such an old barge out on the river?
Too curious to leave yet, I snuck back into the bushes and waited to see what they would do. Sure enough, the engine coughed, wheezed, and roared into life, and they steered the barge onto the river. Oh no, I thought, they will get frustrated when the barge won’t go and they’ll discover the cable attached to the car and will realize that someone was playing a prank on them. Then I felt badly because I never meant to play a prank on those guys, and I wondered if I could reach the car and unhook the cable before it grew taut. No, it was too late. There was nothing I could do about it now.
The barge didn’t go upstream, it went down. And it very quickly picked up momentum in the current. The cable went taut and began to drag the doctor’s car across his property and into the river, and I suddenly felt sick in my stomach. As the barge went down the river, the cable went sideways across the yard, wrapped itself across the statue, knocked it over and smashed its head before the cable finally snapped. I saw the doctor come running out of his house, screaming. All he could see was his car disappearing into the river. He ran after it, yelling, but the men on the barge couldn’t hear him, and he couldn’t see anything but a normal looking barge going downstream.
I crept back onto the road and got out of there as fast as I could. I ran all the way back to the sub, where I saw the barge pass with the men on it, who still didn’t know anything had happened because the cable had snapped and they were looking downstream the whole time. I climbed inside the sub, shut the hatch and went back to bed.
My heart was racing. The butterflies in my stomach took a long time to settle, but eventually they did. I wondered if the doctor would be able to rescue his car. Maybe. I felt badly. It wasn’t what I had planned to happen. I should have minded my own business. I wondered what Ziegfried would have done in my shoes. Well, the doctor wouldn’t have refused Ziegfried; he would have been too afraid of him. And Sheba, my mystical and loving friend, who loved everyone and everything? Hmmm. I think she would have won him over with the sweetness of her heart. And if she hadn’t, and he had behaved the way he did to us, what would she have done? Would she have pulled his car into the river? No. Not a chance. She would probably have visited him again and brought him flowers and won him over in the end. And he would have felt really badly and tried hard to make it up. Sheba was a messenger of love, or something like that.
Then I wondered what Mahatma Gandhi would have done. He was the first leader of India as an independent country and he was a pacifist. I’m sure he wouldn’t have pulled the doctor’s car into the river either. Maybe he would have gone on a hunger strike until the doctor gave in and saw Radji. The nice doctor told me that Gandhi had tried to help the Untouchables of India when he was the leader. And he fasted to get his way sometimes. Well, I wasn’t Gandhi, or Sheba, or Ziegfried. And I did cause the cable to pull the car into the river and break the statue. And I knew it was wrong and I felt sorry for it. On the other hand, he was obviously rich and could probably just buy another car and another statue. It wasn’t as though he had been injured or wounded or anything. And it wasn’t as if he was going to die.
Chapter Thirteen
RADJI MOVED HIS KNIGHT and took my pawn. “When do we
go to Varanasi?”
He looked up at me with great expectation. I wondered what the centuries of people standing in front of him would have looked like. I imagined a whole bunch of men with really long beards standing in rice fields.
“What?”
“Varanasi. When do we go there?”
My mind raced. Oh, yah, I had promised him I would take him there. But that was when I thought he was dying. Surely he didn’t expect me to take him now? “Umm . . . let me think . . .” I took his knight with my bishop. I was surprised he didn’t see that coming.
“Will you keep your promise?” He took my bishop with his bishop. The little sneak, he tricked me by distracting me.
“Of course I will keep my promise.”
I studied the map. Varanasi was far inland. It was far from any coast. It sat on the Ganges River but if I wanted to sail up the Ganges, which I didn’t want to do, we’d have to sail all the way around India first, into the Bay of Bengal and enter Bangladesh. Nope, didn’t want to do that. How else could we get there? By bus? By train?
“We can walk,” said Radji, as if he had been reading my mind. I was pretty sure he was.
“No way! It’s too far. It would take forever.”
“No! No. Just six months, maybe. It would be a pilgrimage.”
“Radji. I promised to take you to Varanasi but I didn’t promise to walk there. We’ll probably take the train.”
He dropped his head. “They won’t let me on the train.”
“Yes, they will. I will make sure of it.”
I needed to think. On one hand, it seemed like a heck of a lot to do, to go all the way to Varanasi just so that Radji could step into the river. On the other hand, it could be kind of exciting. My guide book said that Varanasi was thousands of years old, one of the oldest cities in the world. It was a holy city where people went to die. The Ganges was believed to be a goddess in the Hindu religion. She was pure and would cleanse you, body and soul—even though my guide book said the river was horribly polluted.