“You say he's not handsome? Does he have good color?”
“Ma, he's fair … fairer than me, and he has brown eyes. Bengali, Parsi, and God knows what other influences in those eyes.”
“What is he?”
“He calls himself high-caste Madras mongrel,” she said, giggling. Her mother's frown threatened to swallow her nose, and so Hema had changed the subject.
Besides, it was impossible to construct a Ghosh for someone who'd never met him. She could say that his hair was combed flat and parted in the middle, looking sleek and smart for about ten minutes in the morning, but after that, the hairs broke loose like rioting children. She could say how at any time of the day, even after he had just shaved, black stubble showed under his jaw. She could say that his neck was nonexistent, squashed down by a head shaped like a jackfruit. She could say he just looked short because of a slight belly whose size was exaggerated in the way he leaned back and swayed from side to side as he walked, which drew the eye away from the vertical. Then there was his voice, unmodulated and startling, as if the volume knob had frozen on its highest setting. How could she convey to her mother that the sum total of all this made him not ugly, but strangely beautiful.
Despite the rash on the backs of his hands—a burn, really—his fingers were sensual. The ancient X-ray machine, a Kelley-Koett, had caused the rash. Just thinking of the “Koot” made Hema's blood boil. In 1909, Emperor Menelik had imported an electric chair, having heard the invention would efficiently get rid of his enemies. When he discovered it needed electricity, he simply used it as a throne. Similarly, the big Kelley-Koett had come in the 1930s with an eager American mission group that soon realized that, even though electricity had arrived in Addis Ababa, it was intermittent and the voltage insufficient for such a temperamental beast. When the mission folded, the precious unpacked machine had been simply left behind. Missing lacked an X-ray machine, and so Ghosh reassembled the unit and matched it to a transformer.
No one but Ghosh dared touch the Koot. Cables ran from its giant rectifier to the Coolidge tube, which sat on a rail and could be moved this way and that. He worked the dials and voltage levers until a spark leaped across the two brass conductors, producing a thunderclap. The fiery display had caused one paralyzed patient to leap off the stretcher and run for his life; Ghosh called that the Sturm und Drang cure. He was the Koot's keeper, repairing it, babying it so that three decades after the company went under, the Koot was still operational. Using the fluo-roscopy screen, he studied the dancing heart, or else he defined exactly where a cavity in the lung resided. By pushing on the belly he could establish whether a tumor was fixed to the bowel or abutted on the spleen. In the early years he hadn't bothered with the lead-lined gloves, or a lead apron for that matter. The skin of his probing, intelligent hands paid a visible price.
HEMA TRIED TO IMAGINE Ghosh telling his family about her. She's twenty-nine. Yes, we were classmates at Madras Medical School, but she's a few years younger. I don't know why she never married. I didn't get to know her well till we were interns in the septic ward. She's an obstetrician. A Brahmin. Yes, from Madras. An expatriate, living and working in Ethiopia these eight years. Those were the labels that defined Hema, and yet they revealed little, explained nothing. The past recedes from a traveler, she thought.
Sitting in the plane, Hema closed her eyes and pictured her schoolgirl self with the twin ponytails, the long white skirt, and white blouse under the purple half sari. All Mrs. Hood Secondary School girls in Mylapore had to wear that half sari, really nothing more than a rectangle of cloth to coil around the skirt once and pin on the shoulder. Shed hated it, because one was neither child nor adult but half woman. Her teachers wore full saris while the venerable headmistress, Mrs. Hood, wore a skirt. Hema's protests triggered a lecture by her father: Do you not know how fortunate you are to be in a school with a British headmistress? Do you not know how many hundreds have tried to get in there, offered ten times the money, but were turned down by Miz-Iz-Ood. She goes by merit only. Would you prefer the Madras corporation school? And so, each day she put on the hated uniform, feeling half dressed, and feeling as if she were selling a piece of her soul.
Velu, the neighbor's son whod once been her best friend, but who had turned insufferable at ten, liked to perch on the dividing wall and tease her:
The girls who come from Miz-Iz-Ood, parlez-vous?
The girls who come from Miz-Iz-Ood, parlez-vous?
The girls who come from Miz-Iz-Ood,
Haven't grown their womanhood,
Inky Pinky parlez-vous!
She ignored him. Velu, who was as dark-skinned as she was light, said, “So proud you are of being fair. Monkeys will nibble your sweet flesh thinking it is jackfruit on a jackfruit tree, mind you me!” There she was, eleven years old, setting off for school, dwarfed by her Raleigh bicycle, trading barbs with Velu. Her books were in a tasseled sanji slung over her shoulder, the strap running between her breasts. Already in her posture and in her steady pedal strokes there were signs of a certain immutability.
The bicycle, once so tall and perilous, soon shrunk beneath her. Her breasts thrust out on either side of that sanji strap, and hair sprouted between her legs. (If that was what Velu had meant about not growing her womanhood, she had proved him wrong.) She was a good student, a captain in net ball, a senior prefect, and showing promise in Bharat-natyam, finding in herself a talent for recapitulating a most intricate dance sequence after being shown it just once.
She felt neither an obligation to join the herd nor any urge to try to stand out from it. When a close friend told her she always looked cross, she was surprised and a little thrilled that she could pull off such mis direction. In medical school (in full sari and now riding the bus) this quality grew stronger—not crossness, but independence and misdirection. Some classmates considered her arrogant. She drew others to her like aco lytes only for them to discover she wasn't recruiting. The men needed pliancy in their women friends, and she couldn't bring herself to act coy or silly for their sakes. The couples who huddled in the library behind oversize anatomy atlases and whispered themselves into the notions of love amused her.
I had no time for such silliness. But she did have time for trashy novels set in castles and country houses with heroines named Bernadette. She fantasized about the dashing men of Chillingforest and Lockingwood and Knottypine. That was her trouble then—she dreamed of a greater kind of love than the kind displayed in the library But she was also filled with a nameless ambition that had nothing to do with love. What exactly did she want? It was an ambition that wouldn't let her compete for or seek the same things others sought.
When, as a student at Madras Medical College, Hema had found herself admiring her professor of therapeutics (the lone Indian in a school where, even as independence approached, most of the full professors were British), when she found herself moved by his humanity his mastery of his subject (Face it, Hema; it was a crush), when she found herself wishing to be his understudy and found him encouraging, she deliberately chose another path. She was loath to give anyone that kind of power. She chose obstetrics and gynecology instead of his field, internal medicine. If the professor's field was limitless, requiring a breadth of knowledge that extended from heart failure to poliomyelitis and myriad conditions in between, she chose a field that had some boundaries and a mechanical component—operations. Of these there was a limited repertoire: C-sections, hysterectomies, prolapse repair.
She'd discovered in herself a talent for manipulative obstetrics, becoming expert at divining just how the baby was hung up in the pelvis. What other obstetricians perhaps dreaded, she relished. Blindfolded, she could distinguish the left from the right forceps and apply each in her sleep. She could see in her mind's eye the geometry of each patient's pelvic curve and match that to the curvature of the baby's skull as she slid the forceps in, articulating the two handles and confidently extracting the baby.
She went overseas on a whim. But it broke her he
art to leave Madras. She still cried some evenings, picturing her parents taking their chairs outdoors to wait for the sea breeze which, even on the hottest and stillest of days, blew in at dusk. She left because gynecology, at least in Madras, remained a man's domain, and, even on the eve of independence, a British domain, and she had no chance at all for a civil service appointment to the government teaching hospital. It was strange and yet it pleased her to think that she, Ghosh, Stone, and Sister Mary Joseph Praise had all at one time or another trained or worked at the Government General Hospital in Madras. A thousand five hundred beds and twice that number under the beds, between the beds—it was a city by itself. In it Sister Mary Joseph Praise had been a budding novitiate and probationer; perhaps theyd even walked past each other. And incredibly, Thomas Stone, too, had a brief tenure at Government General Hospital, though since the maternity section was quite separate, thered been no reason for his path to cross with Hema's.
Shed left behind Madras, left behind labels of caste, gone so far away that the word “Brahmin” meant nothing. Working in Ethiopia, she tried to make a visit home every third or fourth year. She was returning after her second such visit. Seated in the noisy airplane, she found herself rethinking her choices. In the last few years shed come close to defining the nameless ambition that had pushed her this far: to avoid the sheep life at all costs.
Missing had felt familiar when she first arrived there, not unlike the Government General Hospital in India, but on a much smaller scale: people waiting in line, the families camping out under trees, waiting with the infinite patience of those who have little choice but to wait. Shed been kept busy from her first day. If the truth be known, she secretly relished the emergencies, the situations where her heart was in her mouth, where the seconds ticked off, where a mother's life hung in the balance, or a baby in the womb, deprived of oxygen, needed a heroic rescue. In those moments she did not have existential doubts. Life became sharply focused, meaningful just when she wasn't thinking of meaning. A mother, a wife, a daughter, was suddenly none of these things, boiled down to a human being in great danger. Hema herself was reduced to the instrument required to treat them.
But of late she felt the huge remove between her practice in Africa and the frontiers of scientific medicine epitomized by England and America. C. Walton Lillehei in Minneapolis had just that year begun an era of heart surgery by finding a way to pump blood while the heart was stopped. A vaccine for polio had been developed, though it had yet to make its way to Africa. At Harvard in Massachusetts, a Dr. Joseph Murray had performed the first successful human kidney transplant from one sibling to another. The picture of him in Time showed an ordinary-looking chap, unpretentious. The portrait had surprised Hema, made her imagine that such discoveries were within every doctor's reach, within her reach.
She'd always loved the story of Pasteur's discovery of microbes, or Lister's experiments with antisepsis. Every Indian schoolchild dreamed of being like Sir C. V. Raman, whose simple experiments with light led to a Nobel Prize. But now she lived in a country that few people could find on the map. (“The Horn of Africa, on the upper half, on the eastern coast—the part that looks like a rhino's head and points at India,” she'd explain.) And fewer still knew of Emperor Haile Selassie, or if they remembered him for being Time magazine's Man of the Year in 1935, they didn't remember the country whose cause he pleaded at the League of Nations.
If asked, Hema would have said, Yes, I'm doing what I intended to do; I'm satisfied. But what else could one say? When she read her Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics (each month's volume arriving by sea mail weeks after publication, bruised and stained in its brown wrapping), the innovations read like fiction. It was exciting yet deflating, because it was already old news. She told herself that her work, her yeoman contribution in Africa, was somehow connected to the advances described in SG&O. But in her heart she knew that it wasn't.
A NEW SOUND REGISTERED. It was the scrape and rattle of wood on metal. The tail of the plane was packed with two giant wooden crates and stacks of smaller square tea chests, banded with tin strips stamped LONGLEITH ESTATES, S. INDIA. Netting hooked to skeletal struts restrained the cargo from falling on the passengers, but not from sliding around. Her feet and those of her fellow passengers rested on bulging jute sacks. Fading military logos were stenciled on the floor and on the silver fuselage. American troops in North Africa once sat here and contemplated their fate. Patton himself perhaps sat on this plane. Or perhaps this was a relic from the French colonies in Somalia and Djibouti. The carrying of passengers felt like an afterthought for this new airline with its hand-me-down planes and ancient pilots. She could see the pilot arguing into the microphone, gesticulating, pausing to listen to the reply, then barking again. The passengers who were close to the cockpit frowned.
Once again Hema craned her neck to see if her crate with the Grundig was visible, but it wasn't. Every time she thought about her extravagant purchase she felt a pang of guilt. But buying the radio-cum–record player had made the night she spent in Aden almost tolerable. A city built on top of a dormant volcanic crater, hell on earth, that was Aden, but at least it was duty-free. Oh yes, and Rimbaud had once lived there—and never wrote another line of poetry.
Shed picked out the spot for the Grundig in her living room. Most definitely it would have to be under the framed black-and-white print of Gandhi spinning cotton. Shed have to hunt for a quieter location for the Mahatma.
She imagined Ghosh nursing his brandy, and Matron, Thomas Stone, and Sister Mary Joseph Praise drinking sherry or coffee. She pictured Ghosh leaping to his feet as the dazzling opening chords of “Take the ‘A’ Train” poured from the Grundig. Then came the cheeky melody—the last tune in the world that youd have predicted to follow. Those opening chords, though … how they stayed with her. And how she resisted them! She resented the chauvinism of Indians who could only admire things foreign. And yet, she heard those chords in her sleep, found herself humming them during her ablutions. She heard them now in the plane. Strange dissonant notes thrown together, wanting resolution, and somehow they captured America and Science and all that was bold and brash and daring and exciting about America (or at least the way she imagined America to be). Notes pouring out of the skull of a black man whose name was Billy Strayhorn. Stray … horn!
Ghosh had introduced her to jazz and to “Take the ‘A’ Train.” “Wait … watch! See?” he said, the first time she heard the melody after the chords. “You have to smile. You can't help it!” And he was right, the tune was so catchy and upbeat—how fortunate she was that her first introduction to serious Western music should be that tune. Still, shed come to think of it as her song, her invention, and it annoyed her that hed been the one to bring her to it. She laughed at the strangeness of liking Ghosh so much, when she wanted so much to dislike him.
BUT JUST AT THE MOMENT she was thinking these thoughts, anticipating her arrival in Addis Ababa … she found herself suddenly invoking Lord Shiva's name: the plane, the DC-3, the trustworthy camel of the frontier sky, was shuddering as if mortally wounded.
She looked out. The propeller on her side fluttered to a stop, and a puff of smoke came out of the beefy engine cowling.
The plane pitched to starboard and she found herself plastered against the window. All around her passengers screamed, and a thermos flask bounced on the cabin wall, spilling tea as it clattered away. She clutched around for a handhold, but then the plane righted itself and seemed to stop in midair, before beginning a steep descent. No, not a descent, her stomach corrected her—this was a fall. Gravity reached its tentacles out and grabbed the silver cylinder with its cantilevered wings. Gravity promised a water landing. Or, since the plane had wheels, not floats, a water smashing. The pilot was shouting, not in panic, but in anger, and she had no time to think how strange this was.
When, years later, shed look back at this moment of change, look at it clinically (“Milk the history! Exactly when and exactly how did it start? Onset is everything!
In the anamnesis is the diagnosis!” as her professor would say), she would see that her transformation actually took place over many months. However, it was only as she was falling out of the sky over the Bab al-Mandab that she understood that change had come.
A LITTLE INDIAN BOY fell on her bosom. He was the son of the only Malayali couple on board—teachers in Ethiopia, no doubt; she could tell that in a single glance. This knock-kneed fellow, five, maybe six, years old in oversize shorts, had clutched a wooden plane in his hand from the moment he came on board, protecting it as if it were made of gold. His foot had become wedged between two jute sacks, and when the plane righted itself, he fell onto Hema.
She held him. His puzzled look collapsed into one of fear and pain. Hema spotted the curve in his shin—like bending a green stick, the bone too young to snap clean. She took all this in even as her body registered that they were plunging, losing altitude.
A young Armenian, bless his practicality scrambled to free the leg. Incredibly, the Armenian was smiling. He tried to tell her something— a reassurance of sorts. She was shocked to see someone calmer than herself when all around the cries of passengers made the situation worse.
She lifted the little boy to her lap. Her thoughts were both clear and disconnected. The leg is already straightening but there is no doubt that it is fractured and the plane is going down. She stopped his stunned parents with an outstretched palm and clamped a hand on the mouth of the wailing mother. She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
“Let him be with me,” she said, removing her hand from the woman's face. “Trust me, I'm a doctor.”
“Yes, we know,” the father said.