Brinda’s brother, the one who had spoken before, began to protest. Anil held up a hand. “Two o’clock, see you all then.” His voice carried through the large room as people shuffled out the doors. Ma stood in the back corner, nodding to people on their way out.
Sanjay and his parents stood to leave, but Anil held up his hand to keep them in place. Once the room had cleared, he sat back down. “Brinda and Sanjay, I’d like you to be my guests for lunch,” he said. “And your families, of course.” He turned to Ma. “We will take our lunch here, please.” She nodded and disappeared into the kitchen, where she could be heard barking instructions to the servants.
Anil leaned forward and spoke softly, obliging the others to lean in as well. “Brinda, it was your idea to come here today?” When the young woman nodded once, Anil said, “Very well, I’d like to hear from you first.” He held up his palm to her brothers and father. “Don’t worry, you will all have your say.”
Brinda explained that she and her husband had been married for over a year and had not yet bound their marriage. In describing this, she used the Gujarati word meaning to tie something together, like a bundle of sticks, and Anil wasn’t sure what she meant. Brinda read the ignorance in his eyes and tried another word, an English word. Consummated. The marriage had never been consummated. He and Brinda were the only two people in the room who knew the unambiguous meaning of that word. She had used the Gujarati euphemism to spare her husband embarrassment, and this told Anil a great deal.
“It is not a real marriage,” Brinda said. “We discussed having children, a family, when the marriage was arranged. It is . . . important to the marriage . . . to me.” Brinda’s father and one of her brothers watched Anil carefully, ready to break in with their own grievances. The second brother stared across the table at Sanjay. Despite the linguistic differences, the air was thick with tension.
Ma burst into the room, two servants trailing behind her; they placed large thalis covered with colorful mounds of food in front of each guest. Anil noticed she had used the good silver thalis, the ones engraved with their family name and which she brought out for special guests and occasions. Anil smiled at her as she bustled about, breaking up the tension in the room.
Once the others began to eat, Anil leaned toward Sanjay and said quietly, “Bhai, come with me.”
He climbed the stairs to the second story of the house and down the long corridor, Sanjay lagging a few steps behind. Anil stopped outside his bedroom and stood against one wall. He held out his hand for Sanjay to stand against the opposite wall. It was not much of a meeting room, but it would have to do. At least they were out of sight and earshot of the others.
“I need to ask you some questions, okay?” Anil said. “Personal questions.”
Sanjay nodded, his eyes focused downward.
“Bhai, whatever you tell me will stay between us. No one else will know.”
Sanjay nodded again. His eyes drifted upward and in them Anil saw a combination of shame and fear. Anil took a deep breath and began asking questions, the type of questions that no longer made him uncomfortable, about Sanjay’s means of arousal and sexual history. He asked as a clinician, with empathy but without judgment.
Sanjay’s shoulders relaxed and his hands unclenched as he explained how many times he’d tried and failed since his wedding night. When he’d heard enough to make a diagnosis, Anil reached out and placed a hand on Sanjay’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault, bhai.”
But, like a water pipe that had finally burst and was gushing uncontrollably, Sanjay could not stop. The man had been torturing himself with speculative theories about his manhood, and punishing himself for the normal pleasuring activities he’d enjoyed as an adolescent boy. He had worked himself into a state of anxiety that would have impaired any man’s ability to perform sexually. Finally, when Sanjay’s well of penance was depleted, Anil repeated himself: “It’s not your fault.” He shook his head several times for emphasis. “Come with me.”
Anil walked into his bedroom and slid his large suitcase out from under the bed. Crouching down on the floor, he rummaged through the plastic bag of medicine samples and first-aid supplies he’d brought with him, some as preventative measures for himself, others to leave behind for his family. He shuffled through the asthma inhalers, quinine for malaria, antidiarrheals, the sleeping pills for his flight home. In his preflight rush, he had thrown into his suitcase more drugs than he and his family could possibly use. Finally, he found the small blue pills he’d brought for one of his uncles, because of their lesser-known use in treating pulmonary hypertension. He counted out three sample packets and gave them to Sanjay, along with clear instructions. “Don’t take more than one pill at a time. Come back tomorrow, tell me what happened, okay?”
After Sanjay, Brinda, and their respective families left the Big House, Anil sat alone at the head of the long wooden table while Ma reheated his lunch in the kitchen. He ran his palm over the lumpy knots in the wood and the indentations that marred its surface. Each one told the story of meals consumed, books studied, chess matches won and lost, and problems solved. For the first time, Anil understood why Papa had wanted him to play this role. Who else could have helped Sanjay like that today? Not even his father, who probably would have sent him to the astrologer or the ayurvedic doctor, with predictably bad results. Not even Papa.
22
AFTER LUNCH, WHILE THE OTHERS IN THE BIG HOUSE NAPPED, Anil walked down the lane toward Leena’s house. He found her on the terrace, sitting with her legs wrapped around the base of the large urn she’d shown him yesterday, sanding down the top edge with the rough side of a piece of palm bark. Her hand moved in quick, sharp movements in a single direction, sending off a fine white ceramic dust that coated her face and arms. She was unaware of his presence until she stopped sanding to cough from the dust.
“I wanted to thank you,” Anil said, “for your help with my arbitrations this morning.”
“Me?” She smiled, tilting her head to the side. “I didn’t do anything.”
But without her, Anil never would have thought to clear the room of spectators, to separate Sanjay from those in front of whom he couldn’t speak openly. “Can I ask a favor? Can I borrow some of your bowls and cups?” Anil asked. “Not your good ones.” He waved his hands at the rows of pieces in various states of completion on the terrace. “The ones from inside are fine.”
Leena’s face opened slowly to her gap-toothed smile, and her hand moved reflexively to cover her mouth. Anil wondered how she could be self-conscious about her appearance. He preferred the full smile that revealed her imperfectly spaced teeth; it was as if she were sharing all of herself when she smiled like that. She steadied the urn carefully on the balcony and stood up into a powdery cloud. With her hair dusted white, Anil had a glimpse of how she might look as an old woman. Still beautiful.
She retrieved a large serving thali from inside the house and filled it with ceramic pieces from the shelf, some of them noticeably damaged, others with their invisible flaws. “What is it all for?”
Anil smiled. “Come by the Big House in the morning.”
THE NEXT day, Anil awoke early on his own to the calls of the rooster and gradual warming of his bed sheets from the sun. After four days, his body had finally settled into the once-familiar routine of Panchanagar.
Downstairs at the breakfast table, his brothers were surprised to see him so early. Kiran and Chandu took a second cup of tea to sit with Anil while he ate breakfast, but Nikhil pushed his chair back from the table and announced he was heading out to the fields.
“Listen,” Anil said to Nikhil, “if you have any field hands with injuries, send them up here on their break. I’ll take care of them.”
Nikhil raised one eyebrow, the rest of his facial expression remaining unchanged, then left.
ANIL RETRIEVED the suitcase from under his bed and asked Piya to help him outside on the porch. Together, they cleared away all but two of the chairs and set out, in Leena’s vari
ous clay dishes, the medical supplies: syringes, bandages, gauze, antibiotics, medicines, and disinfectants. Anil asked Ma for a few steel urns of boiled water and a stack of towels.
“Leena!” Piya called out, waving. Anil turned to see her walking toward the house.
“What’s all this?” Leena stood at the bottom of the steps, surveying the transformation of the Big House porch into a makeshift medical clinic. She held a hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun.
“We could use some help,” Anil said, “if you want to stay.” Before Leena could answer, someone began shouting his name. He turned around and saw a man running toward the Big House.
“Anil bhai! Anil bhai!” The man was waving both of his arms overhead as he ran. It was Sanjay, from yesterday’s arbitration. He bounded up the porch steps two at a time and landed, breathless, a few feet from Anil. He put his palms together in namaste and bowed deeply, fell to the ground to touch Anil’s feet, then jumped back up like a gymnast. “It worked, Anil bhai. It worked just like you said it would. I am a happy man. A very happy man.” Sanjay beamed. He lowered his voice. “Brinda too, she is very, very happy.”
Anil looked over Sanjay’s shoulder to see Brinda walking toward them, carrying a bowl overflowing with coconut, fruit, and flowers. With her eyes averted in a shy smile, Brinda handed the bowl to Anil and went off with Leena, their arms wrapped around each other’s waists.
“Anil bhai, do you have any more?” Sanjay pulled one of the empty sample packets from his pocket and waved it in front of him.
“Uh, yes,” Anil said, stunned by the wholesale transformation of the man. He set down the enormous fruit bowl. “Let me go find some.”
BEFORE THEY’D even finished setting up, the first field hand arrived, with a hand laceration that had become infected. Anil drained the pus from the wound, then showed Leena how to clean it with iodine, treat it with antibiotic ointment, and bandage it to prevent further contamination. More servants arrived from the field and neighboring homes, and within an hour there was a queue of people down the steps and into the clearing in front of the Big House. A familiar anxiety stirred up inside Anil; he felt a pressing need to move quickly through the line, but no one else seemed to feel the same way.
Anil examined the patients on one side of the porch; Leena assisted him when needed, and showed patients to the other side of the porch when they were ready to leave. Piya traveled up and down the queue, inquiring about people’s ailments and moving the urgent ones to the front. Even Ma, who had initially been skeptical about relinquishing her towels, dispatched her servants to carry trays of water cups out to those waiting to be seen.
As lunchtime approached and passed, and Anil refused to take a break, Ma brought food outside and hounded them to eat something. Anil took a few bites when his stomach growled, glancing up after each patient to mark their progress against the human chain stretching down the lane.
In some ways, it felt oddly similar to his frenzied shifts in the Parkview ER. And yet, it was nothing like that. People waited patiently in line under the hot midday sun: the men draped white handkerchiefs atop their heads, while the women used the ends of their saris. The patients introduced themselves by explaining how they were connected to the Patel family: a distant cousin of Papa’s sister’s husband, a neighbor of one of the field servants, the elderly grandmother of one of Kiran’s cricket teammates. Only after they had made the connection clear to Anil did they reveal their ailments. Often they thanked Anil, and God, before he’d done anything to treat them.
As the day wore on, Anil treated a field servant who had a broken rib from a donkey kick, two others suffering with seriously infected wounds, and six members of a neighboring family afflicted with what was probably a mild case of malaria, who took all the chloroquine Anil had brought with him. Anil and Leena worked until after his brothers came in from the fields, and once the sun went down, they kept working by the light of a single lantern. When the line had dwindled to a small handful of people, Piya joined Leena in bandaging up the minor wounds. They saw the last few patients after Ma had finished cooking the evening meal and everyone inside the Big House had begun to eat.
The sky was an inky blue, save for the glowing aura of the moon and a sprinkling of stars. Anil could barely make out Leena’s face as they cleaned their hands and instruments in vessels of hot water. But in her dusky outline, he filled in the details from glimpses he’d stolen all day: the graceful arch of her eyebrows, the tiny gold stud on the side of her nose, the full lips that parted to reveal the gap between her teeth. She had smiled several times throughout the day, despite the strenuous work and heat. Perhaps she was becoming less conscious of it.
As Anil lay in bed that night, his body ached all over with pleasant weariness. After dinner, Nikhil had pulled him aside and thanked him for treating his men. “That was one of my best men, the one with the infected cut on his hand. With everything going on, I thought he was just complaining like the others, but he was in real pain. The look of relief on his face when he came back to the fields today . . .” Nikhil trailed off. He put a hand on Anil’s shoulder. “Thank you, bhai.”
Anil smiled as he remembered it, a satisfying exhaustion permeating him. It was only a few minutes before sleep overtook him.
THE NEXT morning, Piya knocked on Anil’s bedroom door before poking her head inside. “Get up, get up, brother. Look outside.”
Anil, feeling groggy, hoisted himself out of bed and walked over to the window. Five or six people were waiting in the clearing in front of the Big House. “Who are they?”
“One of the field servants—a man you helped yesterday—he came back with his wife and children. They all have fever. The baby’s lips are chapped and flaky, she must be dehydrated.”
Anil looked over at his little sister. How, when had she learned such things? He craned to look out the window. Three bicycles and a few more people were coming down the lane.
“You’d better get dressed, bhai,” Piya said.
He reached for his clothes. “What about Leena?”
Piya, already out the door, called back over her shoulder, “I’m going to get her.”
WORD HAD spread across the village; throughout the day, people in need of medical attention continued to flock to the Big House. They came alone and in groups; by foot, scooter, and bicycle. They brought straw mats on which to sit, and tiffins of food to see them through the long hours of waiting. With the assistance of Leena and Piya, Anil set the broken wrist of a young woman, removed a ball of ear wax the size of a grape from an elderly man, and treated a blacksmith with a severely burned hand. They kept going until their medical supplies were depleted, and even then, some people refused to leave, believing Anil could perform some miracle of healing without so much as a cotton ball.
After the crowd finally began to dissipate, Piya walked toward him, holding the hand of a five- or six-year-old girl. Anil watched the girl’s face as Piya explained that she had severe pain in one of her molars. Anil glared at his sister. She knew he couldn’t do anything about tooth pain. But the girl’s eyes were welling with tears. Anil knelt down and asked her to open her mouth. There was no swelling of the gum, no visible infection or decay.
“We could try a clove,” Piya offered. “I remember Ma doing that when I was little.”
Anil shrugged, having nothing else to offer. Piya went inside the house and returned with a small handful of dried cloves. She picked one out, placed it inside the girl’s mouth atop her molar, and told her to bite down. The little girl did as instructed, a tear spilling out of her eye. “Keep chewing on it, okay? Don’t eat it, spit it out. Then take another one.” Piya held the girl’s palm in hers and poured the rest of the cloves into it.
“Where are her parents?” Anil asked.
Piya pointed to a couple standing next to a coconut tree, some twenty meters away. “Untouchables,” she said. They were standing at a distance out of respect for the Patel family’s higher caste. Another difference from P
arkview, where anyone could walk into the ER to receive treatment, and quite often berate him as he provided it.
Anil touched the girl’s head as he walked past her and she looked up at him, chewing vigorously with a smile on her face. Her parents greeted him with folded hands but did not touch him. He explained that their daughter likely had a cavity in her molar and needed to see a dentist in town. In the meantime, the cloves would provide some temporary relief from the pain she was suffering. He took several hundred-rupee bills out of his pocket and pressed them into the father’s hand.
“Bring some fresh coconut water for these people,” Anil shouted to the nearest field hand. “Quickly!” he added when the boy hesitated, prompting him to scramble up the nearest tree. The girl’s father smiled and pressed his palms together in appreciation. Piya brought the child back over to her parents, then went inside to appease Ma, whose calls from within the house were growing louder.
Anil turned back toward the porch. He’d been able to treat many, but not all, of those who’d come—not those who needed surgery or more acute care, and these were the ones who stayed in his mind. There was a diabetic woman who’d developed a foot ulcer from poor blood supply. He’d treated and dressed her wound, but what she really needed was antibiotics, ongoing care, and insulin to control her diabetes. There was the little boy born without an ear, whose parents had been taking him to every temple within fifty kilometers to try to rid him of what they believed were evil spirits; Anil explained that their son suffered from microtia, a congenital deformity unrelated to spirits or demons. They looked hopeful for a moment, until Anil explained there was nothing he could do to help the little boy, whose condition required surgery.
It was the plight of being a doctor, Anil now understood. He would never stop thinking of those he couldn’t save.