As the good abbess watched the two waving figures on the ship's rail recede to white dots, she felt a twinge of apprehension. What if by their blind obedience to her grand scheme they were being condemned to a horrible fate? “The English missionaries have the almighty Empire behind them … but what of my girls?” She wrote that the seagulls’ shrill quarreling and the splatter of bird excreta had marred the grand send-off she had envisioned. She was distracted by the overpowering scent of rotten fish, and rotted wood, and by the bare-chested stevedores whose betel-nut-stained mouths drooled bloody lechery at the sight of her brood of virgins.
“Father, we consign our sisters to You for safekeeping,” Saintly Amma said, putting it on His shoulders. She stopped waving, and her hands found shelter in her sleeves. “We beseech You for mercy and for Your protection in this outreach of the Discalced Carmelites …”
It was 1947, and the British were finally leaving India; the Quit India Movement had made the impossible come about. Saintly Amma slowly let the air out of her lungs. It was a new world, and bold action was called for, or so she believed.
THE BLACK-AND-RED FLOATING PACKET of misery that called itself a ship steamed across the Indian Ocean toward its destination, Aden. In its hold the Calangute carried crate upon crate of spun cotton, rice, silk, Godrej lockers, Tata filing cabinets, as well as thirty-one Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycles, the engines wrapped in oilcloth. The ship wasn't meant to carry passengers, but the Greek captain did just that by housing “paying guests.” There were many who would travel on a cargo ship to save on passage, and he was there to oblige by skimping on crew. So on this trip he carried two Madras nuns, three Cochin Jews, a Gujarati family, three suspicious-looking Malays, and a few Europeans, including two French sailors rejoining their ship in Aden.
The Calangute had a vast expanse of deck—more land than one ever expected at sea. At one end, like a gnat on an elephant's backside, sat the three-story superstructure which housed the crew and passengers, the top floor of which was the bridge.
My mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, was a Malayali from Cochin, in the state of Kerala. Malayali Christians traced their faith back to St. Thomas's arrival in India from Damascus in A.D. 52. “Doubting” Thomas built his first churches in Kerala well before St. Peter got to Rome. My mother was God-fearing and churchgoing; in high school she came under the influence of a charismatic Carmelite nun who worked with the poor. My mother's hometown is a city of five islands set like jewels on a ring, facing the Arabian Sea. Spice traders have sailed to Cochin for centuries for cardamom and cloves, including a certain Vasco de Gama in 1498. The Portuguese clawed out a colonial seat in Goa, torturing the Hindu population into Catholic converts. Catholic priests and nuns eventually reached Kerala, as if they didn't know that St. Thomas had brought Christ's uncorrupted vision to Kerala a thousand years before them. To her parents’ chagrin, my mother became a Carmelite nun, abandoning the ancient Syrian Christian tradition of St. Thomas to embrace (in her parents’ view) this Johnny-come-lately pope-worshipping sect. They couldn't have been more disappointed had she become a Muslim or a Hindu. It was a good thing her parents didn't know that she was also a nurse, which to them would mean that she soiled her hands like an untouchable.
My mother grew up at the ocean's edge, in sight of the ancient Chinese fishing nets cantilevered from long bamboo poles and dangling over the water like giant cobwebs. The sea was the proverbial “breadbasket” of her people, provider of prawns and fish. But now on the deck of the Calangute, without the Cochin shore to frame her view, she did not recognize the breadbasket. She wondered if at its center the ocean had always been this way: smoking, malevolent, and restless. It tormented the Calangute, making it pitch and yaw and creak, wanting nothing more than to swallow it whole.
She and Sister Anjali secluded themselves in their cabin, bolting the door against men and sea. Anjali's ejaculatory prayers startled my mother. The ritualized reading of the Gospel of Luke was Sister Anjali's idea; she said it would give wings to the soul and discipline to the body. The two nuns subjected each letter, each word, line, and phrase to dilata-tio, elevatio, and excessus—contemplation, elevation, and ecstasy. Richard of St. Victor's ancient monastic practice proved useful for an interminable ocean crossing. By the second night, after ten hours of such close and meditative reading, Sister Mary Joseph Praise suddenly felt print and page dissolve; the boundaries between God and self disintegrated. Reading had brought this: a joyous surrender of her body to the sacred, the eternal, and the infinite.
At vespers on the sixth night (for they were determined to carry the routine of the convent with them no matter what) they finished a hymn, two psalms, and their antiphons, then the doxology, and were singing the Magnificat when a piercing, splintering sound brought them to earth. They grabbed life jackets and rushed out. They were met by the sight of a segment of the deck that had buckled and pushed up into a pyramid, almost, it seemed to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, as if the Calangute were made of corrugated cardboard. The captain kept his pipe lit and his smirk suggested his passengers had overreacted.
On the ninth night, four of the sixteen passengers and one of the crew came down with a fever whose flesh signs were rose spots that appeared on the second febrile day and that arranged themselves like a Chinese puzzle on the chest and abdomen. Sister Anjali suffered grievously, her skin burning to the touch. By the second day of illness she was raging in feverish delirium.
Among the Calangutes passengers was a young surgeon—a hawk -eyed Englishman who was leaving the Indian Medical Service for better pastures. He was tall and strong, and his rugged features made him look hungry, yet he avoided the dining room. Sister Mary Joseph Praise had run into him, literally, on the second day of the voyage when she lost her footing on the wet metal stairs leading up from their quarters to the common room. The Englishman coming up behind her seized her where he could, in the region of her coccyx and her left rib cage. He righted her as if she were a little child. When she stuttered her thanks, he turned beet red; he was more flustered than she by this unexpected intimacy. She felt a bruising coming on where his hands had clutched her, but there was a quality to this discomfort that she did not mind. For days thereafter, she didn't see the Englishman.
Now, seeking medical help, Sister Mary Joseph Praise gathered her courage to knock on his cabin. A faint voice bid her to enter. A bilious, acetone odor greeted her. “It is me,” she called out. “It is Sister Mary Joseph Praise.” The doctor lay on his side in his bunk, his skin the same shade as his khaki shorts, his eyes screwed shut. “Doctor,” she said, hesitating, “are you also with fever?”
When he tried to look at her, his eyeballs rolled like marbles on a tilting plate. He turned and retched over a fire-bucket, missed it, which didn't matter, as the bucket was full to the brim. Sister Mary Joseph Praise rushed forward and felt his brow. It was cold and clammy, not at all feverish. His cheeks were hollowed, and his body looked as if it had shrunk to fit the tiny cabin. None of the passengers had been spared seasickness, but the Englishman's affliction was severe.
“Doctor, I am wanting to report a fever that has affected five patients. It comes with rash, chills, and sweats, a slow pulse and loss of appetite. All are stable except for Sister Anjali. Doctor, I am most worried about Anjali …”
She felt better once it was off her chest, even though other than letting out a moan the Englishman made no response. Her eyes fell on a catgut ligature that was looped around a bed rail near his hands and that displayed knot thrown on top of knot, ten-score of them. The knots were so plentiful that the thread stood up like a gnarled flagpole. This was how he had logged the hours, or kept track of his bouts of emesis.
She rinsed out the bucket and put it back within his reach. She mopped the mess on the floor with a towel, then she rinsed the towel out and hung it up to dry. She brought water to his side. She withdrew, wondering how many days it had been since he'd eaten anything.
By evening he was worse. Sister Mary J
oseph Praise brought sheets, towels, and broth. Kneeling, she tried to feed him, but the smell of food triggered dry heaves. His eyeballs had sunk into their orbits. His shriveled tongue looked like that of a parrot. She recognized the room's fruity odor as the scent of starvation. When she pinched up a skin fold at the back of his arm and let go, it stayed up like a tent, like the buckled deck. The bucket was half full of clear fluid. He babbled about green fields and was unaware of her presence. Could seasickness be fatal, she wondered. Or could he have a forme fruste of the fever that afflicted Sister Anjali? There was so much she did not know about medicine. In the middle of that ocean surrounded by the sick, she felt the weight of her ignorance.
But she knew how to nurse. And she knew how to pray. So, praying, she eased off his shirt which was stiff with bile and spit, and she slid down his shorts. As she gave him a bed bath, she was self-conscious, for shed never ministered to a white man, or to a doctor for that matter. His skin displayed a wave of goose bumps at the touch of her cloth. But the skin was free of the rash shed seen on the four passengers and the one cabin boy who had come down with fever. The sinewy muscles of his arms bunched together fiercely at his shoulder. Only now did she notice that his left chest was smaller than his right; the hollow above his collarbone on the left could have held a half cup of water, while that on the right only a teaspoon. And just beyond and below his left nipple, extending into the armpit, she saw a deep depression. The skin over this crater was shiny and puckered. She touched there and gasped as her fingers fell in, not meeting bony resistance. Indeed, it appeared as if two or perhaps three adjacent ribs were missing. Within that depression his heart tapped firmly against her fingers with only a thin layer of hide intervening. When she pulled her fingers away, she could see the thrust of his ventricle against his skin.
The fine, translucent coat of hair on his chest and abdomen looked as if it had drifted up from the mother lode of hair at his pubis. She dispassionately cleaned his uncircumcised member, then flopped it to one side and attended to the wrinkled and helpless-looking sac beneath. She washed his feet and cried while she did, thinking inevitably of her Sweet Lord and His last earthly night with His disciples.
In his steamer trunks she found books dealing with surgery. He had penned names and dates in the margins, and only later did it occur to her that these were patients’ names, both Indian and British, mementos to a disease hed first seen in a Peabody, or a Krishnan. A cross next to the name she took as a sign the patient had succumbed. She found eleven notebooks filled with an economical handwriting with slashing down-strokes, the text dancing just above the lines and obeying no margin save for the edge of the page. For an outwardly silent man, his writing reflected an unexpected volubility.
Eventually she found a clean undershirt and shorts. What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books? Turning him first this way and then that, she changed the sheets beneath him and then dressed him.
She knew his name was Thomas Stone because it was inscribed inside the surgical textbook hed placed at his bedside. In the book she found little about fever with rash, and nothing about seasickness.
That night Sister Mary Joseph Praise negotiated the heaving passageways, hurrying from one sickbed to the next. The mound where the deck had buckled resembled a shrouded figure and she averted her eyes. Once she saw a black mountain of a wave, several stories high, and the Calangute looked poised to fall into a hole. Sheets of water smashed over the bow, the noise more terrifying than the sight.
In the middle of the tempestuous ocean, groggy from lack of sleep, facing a terrible medical crisis, her world had become simplified. It was divided into those with fever, those with seasickness, and those without. And it was possible that none of these distinctions mattered, for very soon they might all drown.
She awoke from where she must have drifted off next to Anjali. In what seemed like the next instant she awoke again, but this time in the Englishman's cabin where she'd fallen asleep kneeling by his bed, her head lolling on his chest, his arm resting on her shoulder. In the time it took her to recognize this, she was asleep again, waking at daybreak finding herself on the bunk, but on its very edge, pressed against Thomas Stone. She hurried back to Anjali to find her worse, her respirations now sighing and rapid. There were large confluent purple patches showing on Anjali's skin.
The anxious faces of the sleepless crew and the fact that one fellow had knelt before her and said “Sister, forgive my sins!” told her that the ship was still in danger. The crew ignored her pleas for help.
Frantic and frustrated, Sister Mary Joseph Praise retrieved a hammock from the common room because of a vision she had in that fugue state between wakefulness and sleep. She strung it in his cabin between porthole and bedpost.
Dr. Stone was a dead weight and only the intercession of St. Catherine allowed her to drag him from bunk to floor, then feed him, one body part at a time, onto the hammock. Answering more to gravity than to the roll of the ship, the hammock found the true horizontal. She knelt beside him and prayed, pouring her heart out to Jesus, completing the Magnificat which had been interrupted the night the deck had buckled.
Color returned first to Stone's neck, then his cheeks. She fed him teaspoons of water. In an hour he held down broth. His eyes were open now, the light coming back into them, and the eyeballs tracking her every movement. Then, when she brought the spoon up, sturdy fingers encircled her wrist to guide the food to his mouth. She remembered the line shed sung moments before: “He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He hath sent empty away.”
God had heard her prayers.
A pale and unsteady Thomas Stone came with Sister Mary Joseph Praise to where Sister Anjali lay. He gasped at the sight of the wide-eyed and delirious nun, her face pinched and anxious, her nose sharp as a pen, the nostrils flaring with each breath, seemingly awake and yet completely oblivious to her visitors.
He knelt over her, but Anjali's glassy gaze passed right through him. Sister Mary Joseph Praise watched the practiced way he pulled down Anjali's lids to examine her conjunctivae, and the way he swung the flashlight in front of her pupils. His movements were smooth and flowing as he bent Anjali's head toward her chest to check for neck stiffness, as he felt for lymph nodes, moved her limbs, and as he tapped her patel-lar tendon using his cocked finger in lieu of a reflex hammer. The awkwardness Sister Mary Joseph Praise had sensed in him when she had seen him as a passenger and then as a patient was gone.
He stripped off Anjali's clothes, unaware of Sister Mary Joseph Praise's assistance as he dispassionately studied the patient's back, thighs, and buttocks. The long sculpted fingers that probed Anjali's belly for the spleen and liver seemed to have been created for this purpose— she couldn't imagine them doing anything else. Not having his stethoscope, he applied his ear to Sister Anjali's heart, then her belly. Then he turned her to one side and pressed his ear against her ribs to listen to the lungs. He took stock, then muttered, “Breath sounds are diminished on the right … parotids enlarged … she has neck glands—why? … Pulse is feeble and rapid—”
“It was a slow pulse when the fever started,” Sister Mary Joseph Praise offered.
“So you mentioned,” he said sharply. “How slow?” He didn't look up.
“Forty-five to fifty, Doctor.”
She felt he had forgotten his illness, forgotten even that he was on a ship. He had become one with Sister Anjali's body, it was his text, and he sounded it for the enemy within. She felt such confidence in his being that her fear for Anjali vanished. Kneeling by his side, she was euphoric, as if she had only at that moment come of age as a nurse because this was the first time she had encountered a physician like him. She bit her tongue because she wanted so much to say all this and more to him.
“Coma vigil,” he said, and Sister Mary Joseph Praise assumed he was instructing her. “See how her eyes keep roving as if she's waiting for something? A grave sign. And look at the way she picks at the bedclothes—that's called car
phology and those little muscle twitches are subsultus tendinum. This is the ‘typhoid state.’ You'll see it in the late stages of many kinds of blood poisoning, not just typhoid … But mind you”—and he looked up at her with a little smile that belied what he said next—”I am a surgeon, not a medical man. What do I know of medical matters? Except to know that this is not a surgical illness.”
His presence had done more than reassure Sister Mary Joseph Praise; it calmed the seas. The sun, which had been hiding, was suddenly at their back. The crew's drunken celebration indicated how grave the situation had been just hours before.
But though Sister Mary Joseph Praise did not want to believe this, there was little Stone could do for Sister Anjali, and in any case, nothing to do it with. The first-aid box in the galley held a desiccated cockroach— its contents had been pawned by one of the crew at the last port. The medicine chest which the captain used as a seat in his cabin seemed to have been left over from the Dark Ages. A pair of scissors, a bone knife, and crude forceps were the only things of use within that ornate box. What was a surgeon like Stone to do with poultices, or tiny containers of wormwood, thyme, and sage? Stone laughed at the label of something called oleum philosophorum (and this was the first time Sister Mary Joseph Praise heard that happy sound even if in its dying echo there was something hard-edged). “Listen to this,” he said, reading: “ ‘containing old tilestones and brickebats for chronic costiveness’!” That done, he heaved the box overboard. He'd removed only the dull instruments and an amber bottle of laudanum opiatum paracelsi. A spoonful of that ancient remedy seemed to ease Sister Anjali's terrible air hunger, to “disconnect her lungs from her brain,” as Thomas Stone explained to Sister Mary Joseph Praise.
The captain came by, sleepless, apoplectic, spraying saliva and brandy as he spoke: “How dare you dispose of shipboard property?”