Slice Girls

by Joan Arakkal

  SLICE GIRLS

  JOAN ARAKKAL

  First published in 2018 by Impact Press

  an imprint of Ventura Press

  PO Box 780, Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

  www.impactpress.com.au

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Joan Arakkal 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  ISBN: 9781925384598 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925384604 (ebook)

  Cover and internal design by Alissa Dinallo

  DISCLAIMER

  I have tried to recreate events, locales and conversations from my memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity, in some instances I have changed the names of individuals and places and I may have changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence.

  Joan Arakkal is an orthopaedic surgeon who grew up and trained in India before moving to the UK where she was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. She later migrated to Australia where she currently works. She is the recipient of several academic and research awards in India and in Australia. She lives in Perth with her husband and two children.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Who goes there?

  The house of bells

  Days of innocence

  When I grow up

  Emergency

  The grammar of medicine

  Healing touch

  The sticky floor

  Happy feet

  Sugar in milk

  Marriage and England

  Who is an Australian?

  Garden of life

  Slice girls

  Uninsured bones

  Walyalup

  Paddling upstream

  The scent of jasmine

  Wealth and privilege

  Figs

  Mining for gold

  Ganga Hospital

  Hand in hand

  Spudshed

  Pickles

  A new stage

  Bus ride

  The dance of life

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  FOREWORD

  Slice Girls is the type of autobiography where the reader is uninterruptedly fascinated by the description of events that Doctor Arakkal presents with veracity and honesty. Her professional concerns are skillfully mixed with colorful comments of a non-medical nature.

  Although the main theme of the book relates primarily to women in orthopaedics, the book’s message is readily applicable to other branches of the medical profession. The discrimination to which women are in various degrees subjected illustrates the seriousness of the situation.

  As a foreign-born woman with a non-western ancestry and a member of the female minority within the practice of medicine, the obstacles Doctor Arakkal encountered while trying to earn a deserved place in the field were painful, to say the least. However, the manner in which she confronted them belonged within the highest moral and courageous categories.

  To a great degree, she finally succeeds in officially entering the male-dominated field, but many of the difficulties existing within the profession remained. She learns that the situation in which she functions encourages many to abuse the system by carrying out unnecessary nonsurgical and surgical treatments motivated by an insatiable hunger for profit.

  Doctor Arakkal expresses concern over the fact that the obsession with profit in orthopaedics and the resulting shortage of members interested in basic research, has transferred, to a high degree, this important field to other disciplines. The ultimate consequences of such erosion is likely to weaken in a permanent manner the prestigious, traditional orthopaedic discipline.

  Suddenly, Doctor Arakkal is diagnosed with cancer. The bad news does not deter her from continuing to function in an exemplary manner. To make matters worse, after a few years of relative optimism, she is diagnosed with metastatic disease.

  In a stoic, resigned manner, she perseveres and continues to live a most professional life. That is the life she lives today.

  As a highly sophisticated physician, Doctor Arakkal knows there are subtle as well as obvious differences in the condition of orthopaedics and that of its practitioners around the world. This reality does not preclude the possibility that unanticipated governmental, social or economic evolution could lead to radical changes, similar to those experienced in some nations. The lessons she articulates should help address the discrimination against female orthopaedists around the world.

  The masterpiece of Slice Girls should be brought to the attention of not only women planning to enter the field of orthopedics, but also to others seeking a professional career in other branches of medicine, as well as to the overall population, in order to prevent as much as possible the further unfolding of this undesirable scenario.

  AUGUSTO SARMIENTO MD,

  EMERITUS PROFESSOR AND CHAIRMAN OF ORTHOPAEDICS

  UNIVERSITIES OF MIAMI AND SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  PAST PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ORTHOPAEDIC

  SURGEONS AND THE HIP SOCIETY

  PROLOGUE

  A hush settled over the audience as the stage curtains parted. To the faint strains of the vina, the silhouette of the dancer slowly came to life. Gradually, the music and the dance gathered pace and the lights shone brighter. I watched as my daughter gracefully performed the Tandava, the dance of Shiva. Shiva the creator, the preserver and the destroyer came to life as she carried us into the cosmic reality of our existence – both small and infinitely vast at the same time.

  The lights caught the necklace adorning her long neck. The bells on her anklets chimed to the rhythms of the tabla. As the rich hues of her silk sari fanned out, the synthesis of the masculine and feminine energies of the universe played out in the concept of Ardhanarishvara – half man, half woman, each one incomplete without the other. My husband squeezed my hand gently. Our daughter would graduate in Bharatanatyam, the oldest classical dance tradition of India. Bharatanatyam encompasses bhavam, ragam and thalam – expression, music and rhythm.

  Two years earlier, I had attended my daughter’s law school graduation ceremony. I’d been filled with pride – this passionate young woman had innumerable plans and aspirations about how to make social changes and how to rally youth involvement with the older members of the society. Her grandparents had nurtured her through her growing years and she was eager to encourage the sharing of wisdom across the generations. I knew she would accomplish some of her dreams – sometimes exceeding her imagination, sometimes having her dreams dashed, sometimes finding her rhythm and sometimes missing the beat.

  Today my heart swelled with a different kind of pride. She was graduating in an art form that originated thousands of years ago. Dancers carved into the rock surfaces of temples had stood in their various poses – beautiful and sensuous, frozen in eternal time, inspiring future artists to step out onto the world stage. Indian families who left their homeland have carried with them a fierce need to preserve their cultural ties. Although the more modern dancing of Bollywood has caught the fascination of the Western world with lively music, energetic movements and sugar-candy themes, the pursuit of classical dance remains more challenging.

  As my daughter placed her hands elegantly in namaste and bowed deeply to the audience, a collage of my life flashed through my mind. The lights dimmed once again and applause filled the auditorium as the curtains came down. A powerful thought pressed itself
upon me. Had I, too, come to my last song? There was no sadness in this thought. In Hindu thinking, life as we know it is an illusion – one of pain and triumph, colour and music, earth and fire – emanating from the cosmic Tandava of Shiva. Throughout my own personal, illusory, cosmic existence, I had danced fearlessly and joyously, untouched by the fire that sometimes raged nearby.

  If the curtains came down on my life at that moment there would be little regret. Bestowed with the gift of life, I had danced through its various stages – a childhood replete with innocence, fun and adventure, nestled in the warmth and love of a family who cherished me through my various teenage moods and blues. The love of a brother whose staunch faith in me kept me from falling when I tripped, and the love of a man carefully chosen for me by my family. The blessings of being a mother to a daughter and a son. The destiny that saw me birthed on the ancient soils of India, the travels that took me across the world and the good fortune to call Australia my adopted home. The privilege of a vocation that filled me with awe and gratitude.

  My life has been punctuated by challenges, disappointments and obstacles. I give thanks for the hardships that helped me appreciate love and success, and also for the ugliness that threw light on beauty. Everything has a larger meaning. My path was indeed taking me somewhere.

  WHO GOES THERE?

  In an India yet to be divided, a young cadet held his Enfield rifle tightly, standing to attention as the darkness engulfed him. It was his first night on guard at the gates of the air force barracks. As the hours passed, he gradually eased into his standing position. His mind wandered to his home thousands of miles away in the little-known village of Marika in the state of Kerala. His mother would have laid down her head after a hard day’s work. The bullocks that tilled the paddy fields would be resting in their paddocks, chewing their cud. His father’s stentorian snore would be reverberating through the house, carrying the fumes of toddy, the fermented sap tapped from the palm trees of his farm. The mild intoxication would help him forget the sixty per cent tax levied on his land through the Ryotwari system of the British Raj. The tax was based on the land holding, not the income from the farm. During a bad harvest, the farmers had to borrow money from lenders to pay their taxes to avoid forfeiting their property. The system left his father little money to care for his wife and six children. The cadet thought fondly of his brothers and sister, who would have gone to bed thinking of him and missing his presence.

  His life had changed dramatically when he noticed a recruitment poster that promised honour and glory if he joined the air force. The Germans had to be defeated. The poster pictured a Westland Wapiti biplane with helmeted airmen sitting in its open cockpit – for a seventeen-year-old boy it was too good an adventure to pass up. The rates of pay at the bottom of the poster – from 1/6 to a princely 12 rupees per month – clinched the deal. He imagined his brothers and sister getting an education that would free them from the hard struggle of a farming life. He saw his mother’s worries eased and the chance of prosperity for his family in tough colonial times.

  The British officers were not stringent in the application of their selection criteria. The undernourished youth navigated his way through a selection process that had an official entry age of eighteen, meeting the weight requirement by hastily consuming water and bananas before the weigh-in.

  Standing in the darkness outside the barracks with his well-polished Enfield, memories of home flooded his senses. He recalled the bittersweetness of the moment when he waved goodbye from the bullock cart that transported him and his small steel trunk to the town ten miles away. When he boarded the half-nosed British-made steam bus some hours later, tears trickled down his cheeks. The soot from the noisy engine turned his tears black. He did not dwell on the fact that his hard-earned ticket money would find its way to British households and help sustain lifestyles vastly different to his. This is how he joined the Royal Indian Air Force in 1943.

  As he stood guard, on the moonless night, his keen ears caught a movement in the nearby bush. His heart beat faster and he resisted his flight response.

  ‘Halt,’ he said, trying not to let his voice tremble. ‘Who goes there?’

  The movement continued. He lifted his rifle and repeated the command, this time a little louder. Again, his words were unheeded. His heart beat faster. Aiming his rifle at the movement, he closed his eyes and tried to steady his trembling fingers, then pulled the trigger. Thick twigs snapped and there was a heavy thud as something hit the ground. Then silence.

  Too scared to check on his victim, the cadet waited for dawn and his senior officers to arrive. Maybe he would be nominated for a bravery award. At the end of the longest night of his life, he and a fellow soldier made their way to the bushes where they found the body of his victim: a large, black, very dead buffalo. The tale of the slain beast spread quickly through the ranks.

  King George VI, Emperor of India, ruled on. The cadet – whose name, Yonnan, had morphed and anglicised into John – grew lankier and smarter. On his first day in the air force he was surprised to find that the British officers seemed to know his name. They all called him Johnny. It took him a while to realise that even the Radhakrishnans and Chatopadyays were referred to as Johnny. When he was nineteen he made a speech at the Palam Air Force mess. His diction had improved to the point that a British officer ribbed him gently afterwards. ‘So, Johnny, did you go to Oxford or Cambridge?’

  Independence would soon come to India. In 1947, John Perumpanani was posted in Raisalpur in northern India. With the sudden enforced rupture of a previously united country into two, he suddenly found himself in a new and foreign country – Pakistan – and had to find his own way home. He boarded the train back to India to witness the gruesome birth of two nations along the newly drawn border.

  The young airmen were foot soldiers to the stalwarts of those early years of independence; silent witnesses to the strengths and foibles of the statesmen. They watched keenly for telltale signs of Nehru’s rumoured dalliance with Lady Mountbatten, though it was her daughter, the young Pamela Mountbatten, who caught the soldiers’ eyes.

  By then, John had embraced his life in the Indian Air Force, which was now no longer ‘Royal’. He learnt to play tennis, sip whisky on the rocks, and even attempted the occasional foxtrot and waltz with young Anglo-Indian women. However, when it came to marriage, it was in Kerala that this gabardine-suited, Brylcreem-coiffed man looked for a bride.

  On his annual visits home, he was introduced to many young women. None of them caught his fancy until he heard about the daughter of the Deputy Director of Education, who lived many miles away from his home town. A meeting was arranged.

  The eighteen-year-old Catholic girl was smitten by this handsome man who was thirteen years her senior. She was enchanted by the stories of his travels. She had been educated by Catholic nuns, but the stories she heard from him about faraway places were far more fascinating than anything she had been taught. Any lingering thoughts of being a bride of Christ were quickly forgotten and their courtship – unusual for the times – continued, despite scandalised, wagging tongues.

  Not long after, the Deputy Director of Education’s daughter married the farmer’s son in the village church. She was quickly transformed from a shy bride to an accomplished wife, and her husband guided her through the awkward traditions and rituals of life as an airman’s spouse. He taught her the nuances of the English language – a language she grew to love and eventually teach. At the air force mess, he gave her an appreciation for fine whisky and introduced her to the rich textures of brandy. She was encouraged to dress more stylishly and, when her skills at tennis were wanting, he taught her to ride a bicycle. Long walks and longer bicycle rides came to be permanent parts of their lives.

  A year after the wedding, she gifted him with a bundle she named Joan. My mother’s admiration for Jeanne d’ Arc allowed her to overlook details of ethnicity and skin tones that may have made me unsuitable to be a namesake of the Maid of Orleans.

/>   Decades later, my father regaled my children with tales of his days in the air force. He recounted his encounters with the revered leaders who had brought freedom to India, and whom he had the privilege to meet. Their names rolled off his tongue: Gandhi, the father of the nation; Sarojini Naidu, the president of the Indian National Congress who was also called the ‘nightingale of India’ for her poetry; Vallabhbhai Patel, the statesman who was deemed the father of the modern ‘All India Service’; and more. These visionaries did not hold the same fascination for my children as they did for me. My daughter asked him if he had fought for India’s independence.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, entirely truthfully. The evidence was in his War of Independence medal, which hung alongside medals for all the wars in which India was involved from World War II to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971.

  ‘But I did more,’ he added.

  My father’s squadron trained people to jump from aircraft in the event of an emergency. On training flights, he and his fellow airmen were positioned next to the door with their parachutes readied. A member of the squadron would hang off a pair of stirrups and use their feet to push the behinds of anyone who hesitated to jump out of the aircraft. On one occasion, early in his career, my father claimed he and his friends provided this propulsion to Lord Mountbatten’s daughter, Pamela. ‘I personally kicked a Mountbatten backside – which may have had something to do with them eventually being kicked out of India.’

  What fascinated my son, however, was the thought of his grandfather carrying a real gun.

  ‘Did you kill anybody, Achacha?’ he asked in awe.

  My children laughed as the story of the slain bull kept them entertained. My father told his grandchildren, just as he had told me, ‘Pick your battles wisely.’

  THE HOUSE OF BELLS

  Watching my father loving and cherishing my children reminded me of my maternal grandfather, Zachariah. His eight children – and later, his sixteen grandchildren – called him Chachan.