Page 10 of Six Days in Bombay

I handed the note to Mohan. His eyebrows rose higher as he read. “Do you think… It seems as if she meant these for you?” He gave the note back to me and surveyed the paintings. “Who are those people she mentioned?”

It took me a moment. “Old friends.” Once more, I regarded the canvases. All these paintings? But they were so valuable! I thought back to her last words to me. The paintings. Downstairs. Why would she want me to have them? Why not her husband? I read the note again. As will Jo and Petra and Po. Were the paintings meant for them? But which ones were for whom? Did she mean for me to send them the paintings? Or deliver them in person? Perhaps there was a message in each frame? I turned the paintings around and ran my fingers on the inside of the frames, feeling for another note. But there was nothing. Except…there were painted letters on the back of Man in Abundance. “Po.” The canvas with the group of monks listening to their master, The Pledges , was inscribed with a J. The Waiting was labeled P. The last, The Acceptance , was marked S.

I stepped back from the worktable, as if the paintings had scalded me. Each had been designated for a different friend. Josephine, Paolo and Petra. But she’d never mentioned a friend whose name started with an S . For Sona? Did she mean me? It was one thing to gain Mira’s friendship—it had been my privilege—but quite another to receive such largesse. I glanced at Mohan, who was watching me. In exchange for the gift, was I to send the paintings to their intended recipients? How? Aside from the cities where Mira told me they lived, I had no addresses. How would I find them without talking to Filip? I remembered the argument he and Mira had been having under the back terrace of the Singh mansion. She’d told Filip she didn’t want to sell these four paintings. She must have known then she wanted to give them to her friends.

I had only met Mira Novak six days ago. Why would she entrust me with such a large, such a personal task?

Mohan asked, “Sona, how will you get them home?” It was as if he had already come to the same conclusion I had without a word exchanged between us.

“Oh.” I hadn’t thought about that. Each painting was two by three feet. Too large to take on my bicycle.

“I have an idea.” Mohan began removing the wooden frames from each canvas. Flattened, the canvases looked vulnerable. He stacked them one upon the other, carefully laying brown paper between them. With the utmost care, he rolled the stack until it resembled a long tube. He tied a rope at each end of the column to keep the canvases from unfurling.

“I’ll fasten it to the rack of your bicycle. If men can carry ladders and a family of five on a bicycle, I think you should be able to get these paintings safely home.”

I smiled at Mohan. I hoped the woman he did end up marrying would value his small kindnesses. “Thank you, bhai .”

He wagged his head. As I turned to leave the room, he said simply, “ Bhagwan will take care of her, Sona.”

Once again, I was on the verge of crying for Mira and all I had lost, all her friends had lost, what India had lost. Walking back to the ward, I thought about all those beautiful paintings, the entire body of Mira’s work. Her death had put an end to what had been a brilliant career. Mira’s talent had been a source of pride for Indians. One of our own made it despite those who held us back, who belittled every one of our attempts to create, build or improve India for Indians . I caught myself in my hypocrisy. Here I was aligning myself with the Indian side of me while holding the English side of me accountable. Being an in-between , how convenient was it for me to switch allegiance as my mood suited me. I was so deep in thought I almost ran straight into Matron coming the other way.

“Apologies, ma’am.”

She regarded me a moment, then consulted her watch fob. “Nurse Falstaff, I don’t believe you’re at your best right now. Miss Novak’s death has probably made it difficult for you to perform your duties effectively. Go home. I will ask the other nurses to take over the rest of your shift. Come see me tomorrow when you arrive for work.”

It sounded like a reprimand, less like a sympathetic suggestion. Perhaps her scolding was justified. “Yes, Matron,” I said.

I’d been eager to talk to Amit about Mira’s death and about how much I’d miss her. But private ambulances had brought two patients involved in an accident. A young Englishman whose scooter had collided with an Indian woman coming out of an alley with her shopping bag. Both were unconscious. Dr. Holbrook and Amit had called in emergency reinforcements from JJ Hospital to help triage the injuries and stave the bleeding on the man’s thigh and the woman’s stomach. The surgeries would take hours.

***

I left the hospital at eight o’clock that night. I cycled slowly, trying to delay going home, when I’d have to tell my mother what had happened. My route from Wadia Hospital took me past the High Court of Bombay, where a rally was in progress to protest working conditions of textile workers. A man shouted into a megaphone, “We work fourteen hours a day and still can’t feed our families. Men have lost arms, hands, fingers in old machinery that the bloody British won’t fix. We are suffocating! We work in rooms without windows, without air…” His voice was drowned out by the rallying cry of the crowd. “Respect our rights!”

I cycled on, passing a Parsi in a suit, a briefcase under his arm. Three Muslim men were chatting in front of a mosque. I stopped to watch a man on the side of the street teaching a crow to remove a beedi from his pocket and put it in his mouth. No doubt the trick would earn both man and crow a meal or two. An ice-cream vendor plied his trade from a cart (the night may have cooled somewhat but a day of hard work still warranted a kulfi ). Next to him, a man sat on a small carpet carving a group of elephants out of ivory.

After a while, even the protesters and street peddlers failed to distract me. I veered away on my bicycle and found myself heading in the opposite direction from home, toward Marine Drive, where Mira had lived. The promenade curved around Back Bay and the beach. I stopped at her building and looked up at the apartment where I’d helped her pick out a dress for the Singh party only last night. It seemed like such a long time ago. I thought I saw a light in her apartment. Perhaps Filip Bartos was there, grieving. He’d looked at me so strangely when Amit led him away from Mira’s room earlier this evening.

I spun my bicycle around and headed west toward Victoria Terminus, an intimidating gothic behemoth designed by the British. So depressed was I that I found myself mourning for the tens of thousands of Indians who broke their backs building it with nothing to take home at the end of the day but a handful of coins that barely fed their families.

Three hours later, sweating and out of breath, having cycled through feelings of shame, despair and injustice and trying to outrun them all, I reached the flat my mother and I shared. The shift that should have ended at four in the morning found me home by eleven o’clock. I dreaded mounting the stairs to our landing and telling my mother about Mira’s passing. And that I seemed to be the one whom everyone was looking to for answers.

One look at my face and my mother turned, went to the Primus and served me a plate of dal and makki ki roti, one of my favorite dishes. She led me to the table, as if I were an invalid, and sat me down. She pulled her chair from the other side of the table and sat next to me. “Tell me.”

It was the same when the girls at school bullied me for having a father who didn’t love me enough to stay. Or when the Matron of my Calcutta hospital called me a troublemaker. My mother knew when something was bothering me without my having uttered a word.

My throat felt so tight it hurt. I told her about Mira’s sudden death. What Matron said. Perhaps I’d been careless with the dosage? Why did I leave the room unguarded when there was a vial of morphine lying about? How could I have left it there?

My mother listened with furrowed brows, the crevices getting deeper the longer I went on. She put a hand on mine. “I am truly sorry about your friend.”

“Oh, Mum!” I reached for her, wrapped my arms around her. She knew how much I would miss Mira. For the past six days, I’d shared so much about her. Just the fact that Mum said the word friend unleashed something inside I’d been trying to contain. Mira had been a friend. She’d let me see a side of her I imagined she shared with very few. Before she came to the hospital, she’d been busy with her painting and exhibiting and wandering in her own thoughts. Being bedridden had forced her to slow down, to reflect on her life and share confidences, regrets and memories about those closest to her. And I’d been there to listen, happily. The six days with her had felt elastic. As if we’d known each other for years.

My mother rocked me, the way she’d done when I was a little girl with a scraped knee, a loose tooth or a doll with a broken arm. I let myself be comforted until my body was empty of misery—for the time being at least. I knew grief came in waves, as it did for the families of patients we’d lost. Perhaps Mira’s husband would feel it that way too.

Finally, Mum released me. She rummaged among her fabric scraps on the table and found one to wipe my face. Then she broke off a bite of the cornmeal roti, dipped it in dal and held it to my mouth. “Eat.”

I forced down the food. I was an obedient daughter. I’d always obeyed. Somehow, after my father left us, I’d known she needed me to do as she wanted without raising a fuss. She couldn’t afford to enroll me in a convent school like the one her middle-class Indian parents had sent her to. Instead, I’d gone to a free government school. At home, she tested me on English, having me read aloud from her sewing books to make my speech sound less Indian and more British. I could pronounce words like welt pockets, palazzo trousers and backstitch before I understood what they meant. Ultimately, my mother’s tutoring had won me a scholarship at the private convent school. When she’d wanted me to enroll in a nursing course, I did.

The cornmeal roti was delicious, even though I didn’t have an appetite. My mother’s cooking was a reflection of how she was feeling. When she was happy, her curries were exquisite. When she was angry or bitter or had been upset by a client, her dishes would be overcooked or too spicy or too sour. Tomorrow’s dish would be unbearably spicy.

She prepared another bite for me and held it to my lips. “What about the allegation that you’re overworked? Are you?” she asked. The timbre of her voice held the slightest hint of fear.

I waved her hand away. “You’re against me too? You think I’m guilty?”

“Not at all.” She cupped my chin with her free hand. “I’m on your side, always. I’m asking how you will prepare for the fallout. A decade ago, I would have thought you’d be safe. You’re half English. But now…there is such an outcry for the British to leave. Many are afraid; they’re going back home.” She rubbed the scarred table with her palm. “Now, it’s not so easy for Britishers to treat Indians badly or turn their nose up at people they’ve been ruling for two hundred years. Eurasians are a reminder of past times, not happy ones for Indians who have lived under British control for so long. I sometimes wish that I hadn’t insisted on making you so British. Insisting you wear dresses instead of saris. Speaking fluent English instead of fluent Hindi. I just thought that the advantages would outweigh any drawbacks. While that may have been true when I was born, it certainly isn’t true now.”

She raised her eyes to see if I’d understood the danger. I had. Here in Bombay, we saw the civil disobedience rallies, but in other parts of India I’d heard about riots erupting against oppression, quashed quickly by the colonists. At work, I’d noticed the delay in receiving supplies I’d requested. I’d felt the hostile stare of Indian nurses who were paid less than me; I earned more because of my British blood and because I didn’t have reservations about touching patients who were strangers to me the way Indian women were forbidden to. Nearby, Grant College was trying to recruit more Indian women for nursing, but progress had been slow. Patients at Wadia had started to make oblique references to my imminent departure from their country. Walking home, I’d heard whispers aimed at me. Half-half . It was my country too, I wanted to say. I didn’t choose my parentage. India was my home. I was born here. And I wanted to stay.

Was Matron’s implication that I had miscalculated the dosage a convenient excuse to get rid of me because my mixed blood made the staff uncomfortable? She was an Englishwoman who would retire to Cornwall where she was from. Amit was Indian. He would stay here, where independence would return the country to Indians like him. I was part Indian, part British, a half-caste. I belonged nowhere.

“I don’t know any way to clear the doubt hanging over my head, Mum. All the signs point to an overdose, which only I could have administered. I’ve gone over every minute, every second of my shift. I don’t see how I could have miscalculated the morphine I was supposed to give her.” I told her about seeing Rebecca leave the room and the conversation I overheard between Matron and Dr. Holbrook. Might the morphine have been tainted? Throughout, my mother listened attentively.

She tapped my plate. “Eat.” She pointed her chin at the roll of paintings I’d brought with me. “What is that?”

I’d been so lost in my grief that I’d merely laid the tube on the edge of the table. I looked at it wearily. “Would you please unroll it, Mum? I need to show you something.”

She cleared the table of everything but my plate. Using her shears, she removed the rope fastenings and unfurled the paintings. The Acceptance lay on top.

I fished Mira’s note from my rucksack and showed it to her.

She read the note, a puzzled look on her face. Then she picked up the first painting and held it in her outstretched arms. One by one, she studied the others. I watched her face closely.

“Mira left you these?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And the people in the note? Jo. Petra. Po. Aren’t they the ones you said Mira talked to you about?”

I nodded. “Petra is her girlhood friend from Prague, someone she went to school with until she left for Italy. Po—Paolo—was her painting tutor in Florence. They were together before and after she married Filip. Jo is Josephine. From Paris. Her art dealer. Whom she had a falling-out with.”

My mother arched an eyebrow, glancing my way, but said nothing. To her credit, she had passed no judgment on Mira’s life. She turned the paintings over. “These letters on the back…”

“I think they signify who each painting is for.”

My mother pointed to the lot. “So the one marked S is yours?”

“Mira’s note was tucked in that frame, and it was addressed to me, so yes, I think so.”

Mum picked up The Acceptance and studied it. “Do you think you’re meant to be the bride getting her henna done?”

I colored. “Really, Mum, I don’t know what was on Mira’s mind when she wrote that note.”

“And you’re sure she didn’t want to leave these for her husband?”

“The note indicates otherwise.”

My mother raised an eyebrow. “It’s odd, isn’t it?”

I told her about the argument I’d witnessed between Mira and Filip the night of the Singh party.

“Sona, if she wrote this before she died, do you think…she knew she was dying?”

I bit my lip. The thought had occurred to me. But how could Mira have known she would end up in the hospital again, much less lose her life? Or—and I didn’t want to think about this—had Mira deliberately taken an overdose? Why? Because she was in so much pain? What other reason would she have had to take her life? She’d been melancholy about Jo and Petra and Po and how she’d treated them. Was she more downhearted than she let on?

My mother began to roll up the paintings. “Would Dr. Mishra know anything about these?”

I frowned. Did Mira tell Amit something she didn’t tell me? “I can ask him.”

Wrinkles lined her forehead. She rubbed her chest.

“You’ve taken your medicine?”

“Hahn,” she said absently.

I retied the rope around the rolled-up canvases, glancing every now at then at her worried expression. When we finished, my mother told me to sit down. Then she sat across from me and took my hands in hers. She rubbed my knuckles tenderly. “You may not want to hear this, Sona,” she started haltingly. “But the blame will rest on you. Dr. Mishra will not be blamed. Your Matron will not be blamed. Dr. Holbrook will not be blamed. But they will need to hold someone responsible for Mira’s death. I worry that as of tomorrow, you will no longer be a nurse at Wadia’s.”

My mother’s image became hazy, as if I were looking at her underwater. I had suspected I might be punished, that my wages might be reduced, but not that I might lose my post. It had taken time to find this position; it would take time to find another. What would I say to another Matron when she asked why I left Wadia’s? Would she write to the Matron here to ask what had happened? Or would we have to change cities again? Neither one of us could bear another move. Would Mira’s death be the destruction of me? The hair on my arms stood up. If someone else caused Mira’s death, were they trying to punish me or her?

My mother was still talking to me. With an effort, I made myself listen.

“You need to clear your name, beti ,” she said. “For your own sake. So this accusation isn’t hanging over your head. It’s the only way for you to move forward. Maybe one of those people—or all three of them,” she gestured to Mira’s note. “Maybe they can help you. Maybe they know something about her you don’t. Or maybe they know nothing.” She pointed her chin at the paintings. “Mira left you a note clearly asking you to deliver these paintings to her friends. She could easily have had them sent. But she didn’t. She wanted you to go. Why? There must have been a reason.” My mother exhaled slowly. “To find out, you’ll need your father’s money.”

I couldn’t believe what my mother was suggesting. “But, Mum, we’ll need the money for rent and food and medicine. Let’s use it for that until I find another job.”

She shook her head. “No, beti . What you need to do first is salvage your reputation so you can continue being a nurse. I’m asking you to do that. You have to go.”

I looked at my mother, who rarely asked me for anything but did so many things without my asking. She peeled the skin from grapes because she knew I only liked the sweet pulp inside. She massaged my legs after a long shift at the hospital, but would never let me do the same for her. She sewed, cleaned and pressed my uniforms, always tucking rose petals in the pockets to perfume them. Rarely did she buy anything new for herself. I noticed how the neckline of her blouse and sleeves were fraying. She needed new glasses but refused to spend the money on them even though she had to bend closer and closer to the fabric to see if her seams were straight.

“I can’t leave you alone here in Bombay, Mum. Who will take care of you?” I felt something akin to fear. Like the fear I felt after my father left. Who would take care of us?

She squeezed my hands. “Sona, it’s not me who needs to be taken care of. I’ve been caring for you since you were a baby. I will be fine. You need to learn how to take care of yourself. I have kept you soft.”

I was taken aback. I thought of myself as strong, capable, able to handle anything that came my way. “You’ve kept me soft ?”

“All these years, I’ve shielded you from those who wanted to hurt you. The market staller who sent you home with bruised fruit. The bus driver who wouldn’t let you on his bus. I went back and scolded the fruit seller. And the bus driver. And all the others who hurt you. I should have made you stand up to them yourself. I pushed you toward nursing school so you could support yourself whether I was here or not. I made you more British because I thought it would protect you. I made you so safe that you’re afraid to take chances. Think what your life could be if you weren’t afraid.”

I blurted it out before I could stop myself. “You took a chance on my father and look where it landed you!” My heart was knocking against my ribs. I’d never spoken to my mother like that before.

She released my hands. Was that pity in her eyes? “Oh, Sona. Don’t you know that I loved the time I spent with him? I would never take that back. I hated that he lied. I hated that he left but not that he and I came together. And he didn’t leave me alone. He left me with you, precious you and Rajat. How could I not have taken that chance? This is your life. You should live it the way you want. Go where you want. See the things you cannot even imagine now. Your father’s money will make that possible.”

I stared at her. My mother thought I lived in fear? Too afraid to step over the line, even to stand up for myself? A memory of me as a thirteen-year-old girl floated into view. I’m standing next to my mother in the headmistress’s office. She is telling the older woman that I was cheated out of my number one rank because the teacher gave it to her own daughter, who did not do as well on the test as I had. My mother is speaking softly, but firmly. She is not complaining. She is explaining. The next day, the teacher gave me the rank I should have been given. I had expected my mother to prevail. Because she always had. Why had I never noticed the many ways she had been strong when I couldn’t be? She’d needed courage—and more—to overcome my father’s betrayal. Without it, how could she have raised a child without family, without money?

I thought about Matron’s reprimand when she called me to her office. I hadn’t wanted Rebecca to get into trouble over what happened when Mr. Hassan had a heart attack. I should have told Matron what my mother would have. In her own quiet way, she would have explained that without my quick thinking, a patient could have died. And the criticism about being sociable with patients? Why hadn’t I told Matron that emotional comfort was part of my remit as a nurse, which I provided by taking my patients’ minds off their unease and engaging them in activities they enjoyed. Instead, I had said nothing. Too soft.

A knock at the door startled us. We hardly ever had visitors. My mother always saw clients in their homes, taking a small sewing kit of pins, basting chalk, a tape measure. She did her best to refresh our cramped flat by sewing new curtains or crocheting a new tablecloth and quilting a rajai every year, but it certainly wouldn’t do for her clients to see our humble quarters. Among those were wealthy Indians whose loyalties lay with the British for as long as it served them. Others were Britishers who lived like royalty in India but would have had a stark middle-class existence in England. A few were European gadabouts not bright enough to help with their fathers’ estates back home or ones who had transgressed in such a way as to be sent out of sight, out of mind.

I rose to answer the door. It was my landlady, the mother of the brood downstairs. Not for the first time did I notice that she needed to let the seams out on her blouse. Flesh oozed out of her midsection from the bottom of her blouse to the top of her petticoat.

“You have a visitor. A man,” she said. She remained standing at our doorstep, eyeing me suspiciously. She pulled her pallu tighter around her plump shoulders. “You know I don’t approve of guests coming this late to the house.”

I glanced at my watch. It was almost midnight. Aside from Amit, who had arrived early in the evening yesterday to take me to the Singh party, Mum and I had never had guests.

“Well, if it’s a visitor, I had better go visit,” I said, skirting her stout frame. I ran down the steps, leaving her to plod slowly behind me.

Amit Mishra stood at the gate. My heart picked up its pace. The weak bulb cast shadows on his face that made him look ten years older. Or did he look haggard because of the long hours he’d just spent in surgery for the emergency patients? Or because Mira had died on his watch?

“Let me come out to you,” I said, opening the gate and joining him in the lane. I led him down the slender path away from the house. When we’d taken a few steps toward the main street, he asked, “How are you?”

“I… It’s just so…” I couldn’t finish my sentence. I fished my handkerchief from my pocket and blew my nose. “I can’t imagine going in tomorrow and not seeing her, you know?”

He lifted his hand toward me, perhaps to comfort me, then dropped it, stuffing both hands in the pockets of his trousers. He hung his head. Mira had been his friend too. It occurred to me that he must have had to suppress his feelings about her death at work. We walked for a while without speaking.

“I know how heartbroken you must be about Mira,” he said. “I don’t know if this helps, but what happened to Mira can happen to any patient. We see suffering in the course of our day, every day. She told me how you made her suffering bearable. You did so much for her, more than she could have expected. And—I believe—she loved you. One day, we were talking about…oh, I don’t know…operas we’d seen in London, how the river Wein in Vienna glows at sunset, how brilliant a cappella sounds in a Prague cathedral—and she said she’d love to take you to all those places. She saw in you someone who was bursting to explore the world but was holding herself back.”

Oh, Mira. What made you think more of me than I was capable of? I told you over and over that your world and mine weren’t alike.

He pulled his hands from his pockets and stopped walking. I turned to face him. “I’m… I have spoken to Dr. Holbrook and Matron at length. Also, to the hospital board. We discussed the various causes of Mira’s sudden death. Holbrook still maintains that she suffered nothing more than gastritis…and that the party at the Singh home more than likely tired her.” He hesitated. “But the issue of the syringe left in the room, the missing morphine in the vial…is still a cause of concern. I spoke of your dedication to your work, your patients and your impeccable work record. I said the explanation had to lie outside of your involvement. There are a number of possibilities the hospital will investigate.”

A train sped past the chain-link fence. Chug-chug-chu-chug . Amit stopped talking. We resumed our stroll.

“Sona, if it makes you feel any better, I’ve been wondering if I made a mistake in her care. Perhaps she didn’t tell us about a condition—her heart, a childhood disease, something—that could have caused such a sudden—relapse. If only I could have convinced Dr. Holbrook to do the surgery. I keep thinking why—how—” With a start, I realized he was torturing himself the same way I was. Could he have prevented the tragedy?

This would have been the perfect time to tell him what I’d overheard between Matron and Dr. Holbrook. That the older doctor had ignored Mira’s pain because he felt she’d not been worthy of his attention. Not British enough. Not chaste enough. Not the kind of painter he approved of. I could have told Amit that Dr. Holbrook suspected Horace in the pharmacy of skimping on quality drugs. How to prove any of that? And what good would it do to tell Amit? He’d only feel worse for not fighting harder for the painter. Besides, nothing would bring Mira back.

Amit stopped mid-stride and turned to me, his brow creased with worry. He touched my arm. I looked at the spot where his fingers lay. “Unfortunately, I won’t be at the hospital tomorrow, Sona. My aunt has taken ill in Shimla. I’m about to take a train to Delhi tonight and will go to Shimla from there.”

I almost gasped. Don’t leave me with this , I wanted to say. I crossed my arms over my chest, as if to protect myself. Had my mother been right? With no one to support me when I showed up for work tomorrow, I would be the one held responsible for Mira’s death. My eyes pleaded with him. “I’ve gone over it in my mind so many times. I can’t see where I might have gone wrong. I didn’t administer that fatal dose, but I can’t imagine who did.”

He came closer and put his hands on my arms. “I believe you.”

I searched his face, desperate for his assurance. His opinion mattered to me, both because he’d been Mira’s friend and because I felt he was mine.

He dropped his hands. “If something were to happen… If the hospital… What I mean to say is…” He brushed a hand through his hair. “I spoke to Ralph Stoddard. He may have mentioned to you that he’s going to Istanbul. He will need a nurse to accompany him. The post entails full passage and expenses as well as a stipend.” He offered a brief smile. “And the company of a lovely old codger. Is that something you might consider if…?”

I felt faint. How could I possibly leave Mum in a city we were both just coming to know? Istanbul was so far away from home. It was the kind of opportunity Mira would have jumped at without knowing where it could lead. The thrill of a new experience would have been enough.

“Think about it,” Amit was saying.

I nodded absently and looked at the packed dirt beneath us. We stood without speaking, listening to another train whistle past.

“When will you be back?”

“I don’t know. I need see if my aunt will pull through. Of course, I’m hoping for the best. It could be five days. Or three weeks. If you decide not to take Dr. Stoddard’s offer, I will help you find another position in Bombay, which would be…preferable for me.”

When I met his eyes, I saw the sadness. Mira’s death could have been a moment for us to find comfort in one another, but propriety wouldn’t allow it. All I could do was nod. I retraced my steps back to my flat, knowing he was watching me until I was safely inside the gate.

As I climbed the steps to our flat, I knew I didn’t want to tell my mother that I’d be losing my position even though she was expecting it. I would lie and tell her Dr. Mishra came to tell me my post was safe. Let her have one more night of peace before my inevitable fall.