Cracking India (2 page)

Flying forward I fling myself at Godmother and she lifts me onto her lap and gathers me to her bosom. I kiss her, insatiably, excessively, and she hugs me. She is childless. The bond that ties her strength to my weakness, my fierce demands to her nurturing, my trust to her capacity to contain that trust—and my loneliness to her compassion—is stronger than the bond of motherhood. More satisfying than the ties between men and women.

I cannot be in her room long without in some way touching her. Some nights, clinging to her broad white back like a bug, I sleep with her. She wears only white khaddar saris and white khaddar blouses beneath which is her coarse bandage-tight bodice. In all the years I never saw the natural shape of her breasts.

Somewhere in the uncharted wastes of space beyond, is Mayo Hospital. We are on a quiet wide veranda running the length of the first floor. The cement floor is shining clean.

Colonel Bharucha, awesome, bald, as pink-skinned as an Englishman, approaches swiftly along the corridor. My mother springs up from the bench on which we've been waiting.

He kneels before me. Gently he lifts the plaster cast on my dangling right leg and suddenly looks into my eyes. His eyes are a complex hazel. They are direct as an animal's. He can read my mind.

Colonel Bharucha is cloaked in thunder. The terrifying aura of his renown and competence are with him even when he is without his posse of house surgeons and head nurses. His thunder is reflected in my mother's on-your-mark attentiveness. If he bends, she bends swifter. When he reaches for the saw on the bench she reaches it first and hands it to him with touching alacrity. It is a frightening arm's-length saw. It belongs in a woodshed. He withdraws from his pockets a mallet, a hammer and a chisel.

The surgeon's pink head, bent in concentration, hides the white cast. I look at my mother. I turn away to look at a cloudless sky. I peer inquisitively at the closed windows screening the large general ward in front of me. The knocks of the hammer and chisel and the sawing have ceased to alarm. I am confident of the doctor's competence. I am bored. The crunch of the saw biting into plaster continues as the saw is worked to and fro by the surgeon. I look at his bowed head and am arrested by the splotch of blood just visible on my shin through the crack in the plaster.

My boredom vanishes. The blood demands a reaction. “Um...,” I moan dutifully. There is no response. “Um ... Um...,” I moan, determined to draw attention.

The sawing stops. Colonel Bharucha straightens. He looks up at me and his direct eyes bore into my thoughts. He cocks his head, impishly defying me to shed crocodile tears. Caught out I put a brave face on my embarrassment and my nonexistent pain and look away.

It is all so pleasant and painless. The cast is off. My mother's guilt-driven attention is where it belongs—on the steeply fallen arch of my right foot. The doctor buckles my sandal and helps me from the bench saying, “It didn't hurt now, did it?” He and my
mother talk over my head in cryptic monosyllables, nods and signals. I am too relieved to see my newly released foot and its valuable deformity intact to be interested in their grown-up exclusivity. My mother takes my hand and I limp away happily.

 

It is a happy interlude. I am sent to school. I play “I sent a letter to my Friend ... ” with other children. My cousin, slow, intense, observant, sits watching.

“Which of you's sick and is not supposed to run?” asks the teacher: and bound by our telepathic conspiracy, both Cousin and I point to Cousin. He squats, distributing his indolent weight on his sturdy feet and I shout, play, laugh and run on the tips of my toes. I have an overabundance of energy. It can never be wholly released.

The interlude was happy.

I lie on a white wooden table in a small room. I know it is the same hospital. I have been lured unsuspecting to the table but I get a whiff of something frightening. I hate the smell with all my heart, and my heart pounding I try to get off the table. Hands hold me. Colonel Bharucha, in a strange white cap and mask, looks at me coolly and says something to a young and nervous lady doctor. The obnoxious smell grows stronger as a frightening muzzle is brought closer to my mouth and nose. I scream and kick out. The muzzle moves away. Again it attacks and again I twist and wrench, turning my face from side to side. My hands are pinned down. I can't move my legs. I realize they are strapped. Hands hold my head. “No! No! Help me. Mummy! Mummy, help me!” I shout, panicked. She too is aligned with them. “I'm suffocating,” I scream. “I can't breathe.” There is an unbearable weight on my chest. I moan and cry.

I am held captive by the brutal smell. It has vaporized into a milky cloud. I float round and round and up and down and fall horrendous distances without landing anywhere, fighting for my
life's breath. I am abandoned in that suffocating cloud. I moan and my ghoulish voice turns me into something despicable and eerie and deserving of the terrible punishment. But where am I? How long will the horror last? Days and years with no end in sight ...

It must have ended.

I switch awake to maddening pain, sitting up in my mother's bed crying. I must have been crying a long time. I become aware of the new plaster cast on my leg. The shape of the cast is altered from the last time. The toes point up. The pain from my leg radiates all over my small body. “Do something. I'm hurting!”

My mother tells me the story of the little mouse with seven tails.

“The mouse comes home crying.” My mother rubs her knuckles to her eyes and, energetically imitating the mouse, sobs, ‘“Mummy, Mummy, do something. The children at school tease me. They sing: ”Freaky mousey with seven tails! Lousy mousey with seven tails!” ' So, the little mouse's mother chops off one tail. The next day the mouse again comes home crying: ‘Mummy, Mummy, the children tease me. ”Lousy mousey with six tails! Freaky mousey with six tails! ” ' ”

And so on, until one by one the little mouse's tails are all chopped off and the story winds to its inevitable and dismal end with the baby mouse crying: “Mummy, Mummy, the children tease me. They sing, ‘Freaky mousey with no tail! Lousy mousey with no tail!' ” And there is no way a tail can be tacked back on.

The doleful story adds to my misery. But stoically bearing my pain for the duration of the tale, out of pity for my mother's wan face and my father's exaggerated attempts to become the tragic mouse, I once again succumb to the pain.

My mother tells my father: “Go next door and phone the doctor to come at once!” It is in the middle of the night. And it is cold. Father puts on his dressing gown and wrapping a scarf round his neck leaves us. My screaming loses its edge of panic. An hour later, exhausted by the pain and no longer able to pander to my mother's efforts to distract, I abandon myself to hysteria.

“Daddy has gone to fetch Colonel Bharucha,” soothes Mother.
She carries me round and round the room stroking my back. Finally, pushing past the curtain and the door, she takes me into the sitting room.

My father raises his head from the couch.

The bitter truth sinks in. He never phoned the doctor. He never went to fetch him. And my mother collaborated in the betrayal. I realize there is nothing they can do and I don't blame them.

The night must have passed—as did the memory of further pain.

 

As news of my operation spreads, the small and entire Parsee community of Lahore, in clucking clusters, descends on the Sethi household. I don't wish to see them. I cry for Godmother. I feel only she can appreciate my pain and comfort me. She sends her obese emissary, Mini Aunty, who with her dogged devotion to my mother—and multiplicity of platitudes—only aggravates. “My, my, my! So here we are! Flat on our backs like old ladies!” She clicks her tongue. “We've no consideration for poor Mummy, have we?” As if I've deliberately committed surgery on my foot and sneaked my leg into a cast!

But, preceded by the slave, Godmother comes.

She sits by my bed stroking me, smiling, her eyes twinkling concern, in her gray going-out sari, its pretty border of butterflies pinned to iron strands of scant combed-back hair. The intensity of her tenderness and the concentration of her attention are narcotic. I require no one else.

All evening long Mother and Father sit in the drawing room, long-faced and talking in whispers, answering questions, accepting advice, exhibiting my plastered leg.

When Colonel Bharucha makes his house call at dusk he is ushered through the sitting room—hushed by his passage into the nursery by the officiating and anxious energy of Electric-aunt. Father, cradling me like a baby, carries me in.

The visiting ladies form a quiet ring round my cot as with a little mallet the doctor checks my wrist, knees, elbows and left
ankle for reflexes, and injects a painkiller into my behind. Cousin, watching the spectacle, determines seriously to become a doctor or a male nurse. Any profession that permits one to jab pins into people merits his consideration.

Taking advantage of Colonel Bharucha's brief presence Mother reads out her list of questions. Should she sit me out in the sun? Massage like this... or that? Use almond or mustard oil? Can she give me Mr. Phailbus's homeopathic powders? Cod-liver oil?

“I'm to blame,” she says, “I left her to the ayahs ... ”

 

A month later, free of pain, I sit in my stroller, my right leg stuck straight out in front on account of my cast, as Ayah propels me to the zoo. I observe the curious glances coming my way and soak in the commiserate clucking of tongues, wearing a polite and nonchalant countenance. The less attention I appear to demand the more attention I get. And, despite the provocative agitation of Ayah's bouncy walk, despite the gravitational pull of her moon-like face, I am the star attraction of the street.

When we stop by the chattering monkeys in the zoo, even they through their cages ogle me. I stare at the white plaster forcing my unique foot into the banal mold of a billion other feet and I ponder my uncertain future.

What will happen once the cast comes off? What if my foot emerges immaculate, fault-free? Will I have to behave like other children, slogging for my share of love and other handouts? Aren't I too old to learn to throw tantrums—or hold my breath and have a fit? While other children have to clamor and jump around to earn their candy, I merely sit or stand, wearing my patient, butter-wouldn' t-melt ... and displaying my calipers—and I am showered with candy.

What if I have to labor at learning spellings and reciting poems and strive with forty other driven children to stand first, second or third in class? So far I've been spared the idiocy—I am by nature uncompetitive—but the sudden emergence from its cocoon of a beautifully balanced and shapely foot could put my sanguine personality and situation on the line.

I flirt, briefly, with hope. Perhaps, in his zeal, Colonel Bharucha has over-corrected the defect—and I see myself limping gamely on the stub of my heel while the ball of my foot and my toes waggle suspended.

I am jolted out of my troublesome reverie when I realize that Ayah is talking to Sher Singh, the slender Sikh zoo attendant, and I have been rolled before the lion's cage. There he lies, the ferocious beast of my nightmares, looking toothless and innocent... lying in wait to spring, fully dentured, into my dreams.

Father stirs in the bed next to ours. “Jana?” Mother says softly, propping herself up on an elbow.

I lie still pretending sleep. She calls him Jan: life. In the faint glow of the night-light I see him entirely buried beneath his quilt like in a grave. Mother hates it when he covers his face, as if he is distancing himself from her even in his sleep. She knows he is awake. “Jana?” she says again, groping for his head. “Don't cover your face like that... You'll suffocate.”