Nectar in a Sieve (17 page)

It was for us a prolonged ordeal. One day, after an especially long line of callers had come and gone, Nathan said bluntly that he was having no more of it.

"We will have a naming ceremony," he said. "Ask those we know and get it over. After that no one will have an excuse to call."

It is the custom to have a ceremony on the tenth day from birth: this is the custom, and I had followed it for all my children. But what was proper for this child, fatherless and marked from birth? However, Nathan made the decision and once it was made I felt better for it. Despite my wavering, I had not been altogether unaware that this was the right thing to do.

So they came: friends, neighbours, bringing sugar cane and frosted sugar and sticks of striped candy for the new baby. Ira accepted them in his name, smiling, graceful as ever, unperturbed. I think her bearing astounded and even awed them. Old Granny, bent low on her stick, came bringing a rupee which she gave me to keep for the child. I did not want to take it but she insisted: if I had known it was her last I would have resisted her blandishments. But I took it and thanked her.

"You are a good friend to us."

"In my intentions," she said, "little else. It was a poor marriage I arranged for your daughter. I have brought this on her."

She still refused to forget. I made some sort of soothing reply, but with the licence of age she did not listen, hobbling away mumbling that it was her fault. Not hers, not Nathan's, not mine or Ira's. "Not the man's," Kenny said. "A freak birth." Whose the blame then? I thought wearily. Blame the wind and the rain and the sun and the earth: they cannot refute it, they are the culprits.

Nathan's voice reached me from a distance:

"What is the matter with you? Are you not feeling well?"

"I am all right. I was thinking."

"Give it a rest," he said. "Give it a rest."

I was relieved that Kali, most garrulous of women, had not come, but it was a short-lived relief. She had been suffering from one of her periodic attacks of ague, and as soon as she had got rid of it she came, waddling, for she had put on a lot of fat when prosperity had returned to the land.

"I would have come before," she puffed, "but for the ague. The shivering was bad this year and the fever! I tell you, I hardly know how I survived." She lowered her voice confidentially. "You know how it is -- not too easy at my age."

"I hope you are better," I said.

"Ah well, one must not expect too much. I am well enough. But I did not come to talk about myself."

I looked at her without favour: it was plain enough why she had come. She lowered her voice again.

"Is it true about the baby? People say he is milkwhite!"

"He is fair," agreed Ira equably. "See for yourself," and she held out the sleeping child in her arms. Kali bent forward eagerly, quivering in her excitement, and at that moment as ill luck would have it the child woke, opened his weak, pinkish eyes, yawned and began to yell piercingly. Kali stepped back as if she had been deliberately affronted: and such pity as she might have had in her perished.

"He looks peculiar," she said frankly. "Not a bit normal. Who ever heard of pink eyes in a human child?"

I did not know what to say. Nathan was looking at her sourly: he had never liked her. Ira's face was strained and taut and queerly defensive, as if she had been hurt and was wondering where the next blow would fall. So she does know, I thought with something akin to relief, yet of course not wholly so. She hides her knowledge well. . . . The silence went on, everybody afraid to speak, thoughts crisscrossing in the over-full air, eyes averted, shifting, lowered at last to the ground. Then I heard Selvam clearing his throat to speak, and at once heads turned, surprised, lightened of suspense, very much alert.

"Just a matter of colouring," he said, "or lack of it. It is only a question of getting used to. Who is to say this colour is right and that is not?"

The words of a boy -- Selvam was not sixteen -- shaming us all.

"But pink --" Kali began.

"A pink-eyed child is no worse than a brown-eyed one," he said, looking at her with cold, rebuking eyes. "I should have thought your instincts as a woman if nothing else would have told you that."

He turned away from her contemptuously and began clicking his fingers to the child. Sacrabani, who had been screaming vigorously, began to quieten down: he gave one or two more tentative wails, then his mouth split in something like a smile and his fingers curled round Selvam's.

Selvam turned and smiled at us, raising eloquent eyebrows: Was not the child exactly the same as other babies? Had he not said so?

Triumphantly he turned to look for Kali but she -- unnoticed -- had gone.

CHAPTER XXI

FROM the day construction began on the hospital, Selvam ceased to belong to us. During the preparations, while the site was bought and cleared, and a contractor engaged to find men and material, he spent his time with Kenny, and what they discussed I do not know, but sometimes he came home elated and sometimes he was morose and dejected; and it was clear enough that the many delays they encountered irked his spirit beyond the telling. Then when construction actually started, the bricks stacked high, the cement in heaps, whatever time he could spare he spent at the site watching while brick was laid on brick and mortar flowed between: and occasionally when the labourers let him (which was not often, for they were a jealous crew), he would take a hand in the building himself, for nothing gave him more pleasure than that. What he did not know was that seven more tedious years were to pass before the building was complete: both he and Kenny, possessed by their fierce enthusiasm, had, I think, reckoned on a much shorter time. Maybe it was as well they did not know: seven years is a long time to be patient.

If things had gone as they had hoped, the hospital would have been completed within a year, and Old Granny would not have had to die in the street as she did. There was nowhere else she could go: she had lived in the street and she died there. Day by day she sat beside her torn gunny sack selling handfuls of nuts and berries, growing progressively older, more ragged, less healthy. She had no relatives left -- no person on whom she had any claim -- certainly there was no one to enquire whether she made a living or how much longer she could continue to do so. Better to avoid such questions, better to pass quickly by with a cheerful word, than to stop and ask, for who would lightly take on the burden of feeding another mouth? And so one day she quietly disappeared. They found her body on the path that led to the well, an empty mud pot beside her and the gunny sacking tied around her waist. She had died of starvation.

Once a human being is dead there are people enough to provide the last decencies; perhaps it is so because only then can there be no question of further or recurring assistance being sought. Death after all is final. I could not avoid the thought, which came from my own uneasy conscience, harsh and bitter, as I watched them lift her up, light as dust, on to the bier; as mourners came with flowers, as oil and camphor were laid unstinted on the pyre, as rosewater and sandalwood paste were sprinkled on her corpse. So it had been with my sons, so it was now with Old Granny, one day it might be the same for me, for all of us. A man might drift to his death before his time unnoticed, but when he was dead and beyond any care then at last he was sure of attention. . . .

* * *

Old Granny's death bore especially hard on me: for apart from the fact that we had been friends since my marriage I could not forgive myself for having accepted the rupee which might have fed her for several days. I wanted to throw it away -- give it to the next old crone I saw -- anything to gain my relief; but the money belonged to Sacrabani, not to me.

"You are being very childish," Nathan said. "How long would a rupee have kept her?"

"A few days at least," I said.

"And what when those few days ran out?"

"I don't know . . . something may have turned up. It is a pity the hospital was not ready. She could have gone there."

"A hospital is not a soup kitchen," he said.

I did not know what he meant by a soup kitchen and I stared at him. He repeated the words, pleased that he knew and I did not.

"Where the poor are fed free of charge," he explained. "In other countries. Selvam tells me this is a fact."

"And how should he know? He has not been out of this town since his birth?"

"From books he has read perhaps -- or Kenny may have told him. I do not know how he knows."

"Well, anyway," I said, going back to what we had been discussing, "soup kitchen or not, they would not have refused an old ailing woman."

"Why go on about it?" he said exasperated. "You are only distressing yourself and it might never have been. I tell you a hospital is only for the sick. There is nowhere for the old."

The hospital was no more than a few months old and a few feet high when people began attempting to stake their claims. They went to Kenny and they came to Selvam and they even approached me, his mother, and from the numbers who came I soon knew that not one-tenth could enter. And what I of little perception knew Kenny and Selvam knew twofold: but we none of us said anything, for we had woven about us a net of silence in whose meshes were precariously held our fears and our misgivings.

Meanwhile, work on the hospital did not progress smoothly; twice the contractor was changed, and each man in turn appointed new foremen, and these brought their own labourers. One year there were not enough men; the next, not enough material. During one very hot summer the workmen's huts caught fire and before it could be put out it had spread to the timber stacked nearby. The loss had to be made good, as had also the theft, despite the presence of a chowkidar, of a cartload of bricks and the cart itself. Several times work stopped altogether, for what reasons I do not know, while Kenny and Selvam strode about the deserted site in exasperation, dark as thunder, unapproachable. Kenny made frequent trips away from the town from which he came back tired and often dispirited; but always work was resumed on his return.

"Every pie has to be fought for," Selvam said. "It cannot be easy."

"He told me he had enough," I said. "He was away a long time collecting the money."

"There can never be enough," Selvam said, turning away.

I could not help wonder ing what bottomless pit they were trying to fill, or from what bottomless purse. It is not as simple as Kenny said, I remember thinking to myself. It is not enough to cry out, not sufficient to lay bare your woes and catalogue your needs; people have only to close their eyes and their ears, you cannot force them to see and to hear -- or to answer your cries if they cannot and will not. Once I dared to say as much to Kenny and he looked at me a little sadly and said there were other ways which he could not explain to me. There was much talk between him and Selvam of various funds and grants and so on, but I do not know whether anything came of these. At any rate building went forward, slowly, painfully slowly, but at least it did go on.

Before long Selvam began his training. The small whitewashed cottage was once again in use, with my son now assisting Kenny. By the second year of his training he began treating minor cases by himself, and from then onwards Kenny paid him a small wage, not regularly but as and when funds came his way. Once in a moment of thoughtlessness I asked how he would contrive to pay all his staff when the hospital was finally established, for it was certain many people would be needed to run it. His face darkened: he would, he said, find ways and means. It had become his most frequent saying.

CHAPTER XXII

SELVAM and Ira had always been close, the years of separation when my daughter went to her husband having affected their relationship not at all; she treated him more as if he were her son than her brother, and he in turn accepted her love and returned it in his own deep, quiet way. He understood her well, better than I did who was her mother; in fact, I wonder whether parents ever know their children as they know one another. At any rate in our family my sons and daughter had always been at one in their thinking: such schism as there was opened between them and us, never between themselves. Kali said this was so because they were better read, more learned, than we were: but ever since the troubles at the tannery in which her sons had become involved, and for other reasons, she had been prejudiced against any kind of learning. In her view most of the troubles in the country sprang from the pages of books.

Selvam's easy attitude towards her son brought Ira even closer to him. From the beginning Selvam had accepted the child's albinism: accepted it and thought no more of it. From infancy he treated Sacrabani exactly as if he were a normal child. The pity of it was that it was a forlorn battle. No amount of such action on his part or ours could bring others to the same persuasion. Sacrabani was isolated from the start, a white crow in a flock of black, a grain of wheat among the rice. By the time he was four, Sacrabani was used to being a hanger-on -- forever on the fringes of others' activities. Because of his difference, the other children never included him as a matter of course in their games: if they were short of a player, or for some other good reason, they sometimes invited him to join them, but on no account was he to do so of his own accord. In the hope of being thus asked he had to tag along, patient and submissive. His physical disabilities alone would have ensured his dependent rôle; for his skin was unable to stand the sun, and the light affected his eyes. The sight of him crouched in the shade with reddened face and streaming eyes evoked from his companions not pity but ribaldry. Poor child, he had even to suffer the behaviour of his elders, who stared -- those who had not seen him before -- and nudged each other and whispered and rustled, while those who had vied with each other to be the first to enlighten them. Then one day, sprung from who knows what taunts flung at him, his questionings, first of many, began.