The Selector of Souls (44 page)

“Yes, but I can’t work for free, like you—na, ji, na! I won’t do that.”

“The clinic is free for you all,” says Sister Anu, “but Dr. Gupta and I do get paid.”

Not much. But more than a community worker like Damini, now changing bed linen in the women’s ward next door. Anu thinks of her savings for Chetna’s wedding. Not much at all. She rubs her hands together, then places her palms very gently on Goldina’s stomach. Her touch calms and reassures; and she does feel slight movements.

“If a baby is coming,” says Goldina, “it’s all because of Dr. Gupta and you. I asked, but he wouldn’t give me a single pill, though I have five children already.”

“Everyone’s life is important, even the unborn.”

“Ha, what do the unborn feel?”

“We’re Catholic,” Sister Anu murmurs. And Catholic nuns must believe life begins at conception, even if her nursing school textbooks say the fetus emits brain waves at eight weeks. She still feels guilty for mentioning to Goldina that most chemist shops carry Ovral pills. But even if Goldina bought them, she would need someone to read and translate the instructions from English.

“Dr. Gupta isn’t,” says Goldina. “He’s Hindu—brahmin—vegetarian. Doesn’t eat onions or garlic. I told him, ‘I’m on my way to a cricket eleven if you don’t stop me having children,’ but …” she wags her head ruefully and pats her stomach.

Sister Anu inserts the eartips of her stethoscope in her ears. Like Dr. Gupta, she can advocate abstinence when advising men, but not to a woman like Goldina who seems to have little say in her sex life. And having used contraception herself, Anu prefers silence. “There’s always the rhythm method,” Father Pashan has said. But Vatican roulette requires a husband’s cooperation; she can’t recommend it.

Sister Anu doesn’t stock condoms or Pills in the dispensary but answers “No” whenever women ask if they will become too weak to work if they take the Pill, relying on her own experience. And when women ask if they must believe in the power of the Pill for it to work, she tells them no, as well. But there she stops so as to keep the clinic Catholic.

She listens, palpating Goldina’s stomach gently. Without an ultrasound machine, her hands must “see” into Goldina’s womb and divine the baby’s position. She guesses Goldina is about four months along. “Good news,” she says, and is unprepared for the liquid shimmer that wells in Goldina’s eyes, the tremble in her lips. Goldina raises herself on her elbows, wipes her cheeks.

Sister Anu waits. “What’s the matter?” she says gently.

“Nothing, nothing. I’m happy.”

“Goldina—such a pretty name,” she says.

Goldina relaxes a little. She lies down again, wipes her eyes with the corner of her sari.

More composed after a while, she says, “I named myself. When I was a little girl, I met a Christian woman, Goldina. She gave me leftovers to take home for my family. I promised myself, if ever I have leftovers, I want to be generous like her. I call myself Goldina so it will always remind me.”

The weight scale shows Goldina is too thin. Malnourished, probably anemic. She says her eyes hurt.

“Is there a window in your cookroom?” says Sister Anu. “Or a chimney?”

“No window, no chimney. The government is offering free chimneys for low-caste people, but now they tell us, oh, you’ve become Christian and Christians don’t have high and low castes, so you can’t have a free chimney. I said I’m also Hindu, but the government says you can’t be both.”

So Goldina’s eyes are smoke-damaged.

“Close one eye and tell me which way the bars point on this chart.”

“My eyes are different,” says Goldina. “I see patterns, movements, the outlines of things.”

Seeing patterns and outlines doesn’t help Goldina discern any directional bars past the third line. Sister Anu writes the results in her ledger and asks, “So you believe in the gods
and
in Christ?” She hasn’t met many who believe as she does.

“Goddesses,” says Goldina. “Mary Devi, mother of god, is an avatar of Anamika. She only named Yeshu; Anamika named all the other gods. Amanjit-saab, the SDM—all of us give Anamika respect. She protects our village.”

“And Lord Golunath?” asks Sister Anu.

“Sometimes,” says Goldina. “But when I talk to Anamika, she brings justice if Golunath-ji’s power has failed.”

Sister Anu fastens a blood pressure sleeve on Goldina’s bared upper arm. She closes the valve on the rubber bulb, feels for a pulse in front of Goldina’s elbow joint and places the diaphragm of her stethoscope over it. She squeezes the rubber bulb. With the cuff
pumped up, she releases the valve on the rubber bulb and begins listening for a beat.

Goldina is watching the needle fall. “I told Samuel, we should become Sikhs. They also make offerings to only one god and say all castes are welcome.”

“That seems much like being Christian.”

“Only inside their gurdwara,” says Goldina. “Outside, dalit Sikhs and dalit Hindus get the same treatment from the respected castes. I said, at least we could get a free chimney—but Samuel’s too proud.”

“You have excellent blood pressure,” Sister Anu reports, noting it on Goldina’s record.

Goldina glows. “It’s better to be Christian,” she says, as if reassuring Sister Anu. “We only spend on offerings to one Jesus-god, and only on Sundays.” After a moment, she says, “Don’t give me any medicine that might make me sleepy or unable to work, or Samuel might slap me.”

“Does he?”

“If I complain too much.”

How much complaining is too much? Sister Anu’s experience of violence pales by comparison with women in Gurkot. They seem accustomed to being slapped, pushed, and punched, not only by men but by older women—but who can become accustomed to humiliation? Yesterday she helped Dr. Gupta wash the stomach of a woman who “mistakenly” took insecticide. To protect her children from retaliation or loss of inheritance, she would not charge her husband or in-laws with emotional cruelty. The day before, she helped Dr. Gupta put a cast on a woman whose father-in-law smashed her patella because she served him cool tea. Men of Gurkot beat the women in their families hardest when women are most vulnerable—often when pregnant. Yet the women here don’t divorce their husbands or leave their children as Anu did; they laugh and joke and carry on working.

“If I had a daughter old enough,” says Goldina, “I could make her
deliver and cut the cord for this baby, but Samuel and I just married off our eldest two. Now we have to take loans and start again.”

“We can do it here. Did you ask Damini to come and cut the cord for you?”

“A slow child can do it.” She purses her lips. “But Damini won’t. She’s respected, she’s too much high-up.”

If I learned to overcome disgust, to clean my own toilet and deal with bodily fluids during my nursing courses, Damini can too
.

“And if she did it, we Christians would have even less work.” Goldina says, “Besides, I don’t want her to—she makes me afraid.”

“Why?” says Sister Anu, placing her stethoscope bell against Goldina’s back ribs.

Goldina tilts her chin. “Buss aise hee,” she says. Just because—which is no answer. Sister Anu folds away her stethoscope, and says. “Come to Bread of Healing as soon as you feel contractions. You mustn’t walk uphill after your water breaks.”

After a tetanus injection and some iron pills, Sister Anu ushers Goldina outside, back to Damini and a longer line of patients.

“Damini,” says Sister Anu. “I will attend Goldina when it’s her time, but you must help and learn.”

“Of course, Sister-ji,” Damini’s servile tone is a Delhi-sound in the pine-scented air of Gurkot.

After Goldina, Sister Anu has so many patients she has no time for lunch. At teatime she crosses the clearing to the school. Father Pashan is sitting cross-legged on a dhurrie spread on the veranda. His diary lies open on one knee and he’s reviewing a list of Catholic girls and boys of marriageable age. Beside each, he has written their caste name or tribal origin, to help him arrange marriages.

Bethany brings three glass tumblers of milky tea on a tray, along with some artificial sweetener for Father Pashan. “Mix them up,
Father!” she says, as she offers the tray. “Intermarriage will rid us of caste.”

“Slowly-slowly, Bethany,” says Father Pashan, taking his tea. “It will happen as people begin to follow Jesus’s example. He was the rebel of his day, you know.”

Bethany says, “Do you ever wonder if he thought he was god and then, in Gethsemane, learned he was merely a man?”

“Even if he was only a man, his story would be inspiring,” says Father Pashan. “Now then, give me some ideas. How do we explain that illness is not caused by spirits and angry deities? I want us to discourage people in Gurkot and Jalawaaz from attending ceremonies with the ojha.”

“Oh, the ojha!” says Sister Bethany. “I don’t know what I was expecting but he doesn’t look very different from anyone else.”

“Except for his tattoos,” says Sister Anu. “All over his arms and neck.”

“He had a jacket on, so I only saw a wiry man with greying hair. He seemed like a bottle of Pepsi—full of compressed energy.”

“Why did he come to Bread of Healing?” says Pashan. “Everyone in Gurkot says he can heal every ailment.”

“He said he can’t heal those in his immediate family,” says Sister Anu. “He said that’s why he was unable to heal his wife and granddaughter. The wife wasn’t sick, just argumentative. I was more worried about his granddaughter.”

“I didn’t meet his wife or granddaughter,” says Bethany.

“Because they weren’t with him. I told him Dr. Gupta would want to examine them and talk to them, but he said they had too much work to come. He was annoyed too because he let me know he would give them ‘takat pills’ instead, by which I think he meant vitamin supplements. He said his cousin-brother sells them in Vancouver.”

“Dr. Gupta, Damini and I drove to his village the next day, but he wouldn’t let me talk to either woman. Finally, he opened his door to us because Damini offered some madhupatra for his wife, and told him the sweet leaves would make her kinder.”

“And the granddaughter?”

“Dysentery. Dr. Gupta prescribed oral rehydration solution and an antibiotic. I’ll return to check on her soon.”

“So very pagan—” says Father Pashan, “these beliefs in plants and spirits and spirit possession.”

“People do things because there is some benefit,” says Sister Bethany, taking her glass from the tray.

Father Pashan says, “You’re right, Bethany. Other people’s beliefs are real to them. We mustn’t mock or judge. Our strength comes from reliance on Jesus, theirs from reliance on spirits. But our god is theirs, there can be no doubt—and their gods are all facets of Jesus.”

Sister Anu crosses her ankles and drops into lotus on the edge of the dhurrie. “We should pray to the Holy Spirit to help us stop the villagers from believing in spirits,” she says with a smile.

“Good idea,” says Father Pashan, with ever-ready optimism. Bethany hides a grin.

“There’s another matter. We now know we have a case of AIDS.”

Father Pashan says, “In India?”

“There must be thousands of cases of AIDS in India,” says Sister Anu. “This one is a trucker.”

“AIDS doesn’t happen to married men,” says Father Pashan.

Sister Anu says, “This man is married and a father, but it’s definitely AIDS. He needs antibiotics by IV and different blood tests. We need to order antiretrovirals, and I can’t find any companies that are donating such medicines …”

“He must be a married homosexual,” Father Pashan is speculating out loud. “Families arrange marriages believing it will cure such men, but they go on sinning. We can’t treat AIDS—tell Dr. Gupta.”

The coma ward at Snowdon … a white shirt … brown blood …
Snowdon Hospital doctors didn’t ask how much of a man Bobby was before they treated him, but then, Snowdon isn’t a Catholic institution. “Dr. Gupta enrolled him in an experimental trial of zidovudine,” says Sister Anu. “Which is better than doing nothing.”

“All right, continue the trial, then. But we can’t condone homosexuality.” Father Pashan adjusts his collar.

“I don’t think Chunilal is homosexual,” says Sister Anu. “But even if he were, we can’t turn him away!”

She had not thought Pashan capable of withholding treatment from a poor man like Chunilal, no matter what Church doctrine says.

The priest runs his fingers through his hair. “If anyone in Delhi comes to know we are treating AIDS, we could lose funding.”

She can’t argue with Father Pashan, but is she an obedient daughter of the Church first, or is she a nurse? Sister Anu rises and busies herself with saucepans, tea leaves and tea glasses.