Page 5 of Six Days in Bombay

I went to the stockroom to drop off the soiled sheets from Mira’s bed and get fresh ones for the very pregnant Mrs. Roy. Indira was sitting on the bench in the middle of the room, crying. When she saw me, she turned away. I dumped the sheets in the rolling canvas hamper and went to her. Her hands were cold and her teeth were chattering.

“Balbir said you’d stopped by,” she said. “He thought I’d asked you to come. You can’t come to the house again, Sona. Ever.” Her tears were wetting her uniform. “My girls, they saw everything. They saw their father beat their mother. He told them it was because I was bad. I had done something wrong. I saw the look on their faces. They didn’t want to believe him, but with no one to speak up for me, they are bound to. If everyone around you is telling you the sky is red, you’re going to start believing it.”

I rubbed her hands to warm them. “Oh, Indira! I’m so sorry. I only went because no one at the hospital knew where you were. I thought you’d been in an accident.”

“I wish I had been. Then the girls wouldn’t have had to watch…”

“Let me see where it hurts.”

“No, Sona. You’ve done enough. You don’t seem to understand that your life is always going to be different from mine. You’re not really Indian. I am. I promised to be with Balbir for seven lifetimes. Perhaps in the next he’ll be kinder to me.” She sniffled. “Perhaps he will be one of my daughters instead of my husband. Or he may be my mother. We don’t know what fate has in store. You need to stop trying to reverse fate, Sona.”

I stared at her. Here I thought I’d been helping Indira when it looked as if I had only hurt her—or encouraged Balbir to do so.

“Promise you won’t get involved,” she pleaded. “Balbir is an angry man. I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to walk home together anymore, Sona.”

I felt as if she’d punched me in the stomach. I let go of her hands and sat back on my haunches. She was my closest friend, my only true friend in Bombay. Tears pricked my eyes, but I wouldn’t let them fall.

Indira let out a moan as she pulled her uniform over her shoulders and buttoned the front, wincing when she had to move her left arm. I could almost feel the welt on her shoulder and the bruises down the back. They were sharp, raw.

The door opened. I’d forgotten to lock it. Rebecca walked in and stopped short, her eyes scanning the room, scanning us. I stood up. Indira rose from the bench, wiping her eyes.

Rebecca pursed her lips, turned her gaze to me. “We have to tell Matron. It’s time.”

As calmly as I could, I said, “No, we don’t. Indira will lose her job.”

“This is not your problem,” Indira said, looking at me and then at Rebecca. “I am fine.”

With an effort, she slowly raised her arms and straightened her nurse’s cap. Then, with a nod to us, she left the room.

I started to follow her when Rebecca yanked on my arm. “What you don’t understand, Sona, is that we are not supposed to get personal with the sick.”

“Indira is one of us. She’s not one of the sick.”

“Look at her, Sona. She is.”

Why was it so hard for Rebecca to just be a friend? But, instead of saying anything, I pulled my apron tighter around my waist. I started to walk out the door.

Rebecca said. “You realize, don’t you, that it’s easier for us—you and me—to do what you’re suggesting than it is for Indira? We are protected. We can do things an Indian woman can’t.”

I took a deep breath. “I know. But if we don’t try to help, what good is our privilege?”

***

Later that evening, I saw Dr. Mishra and Dr. Holbrook deep in conversation in the hallway. Dr. Mishra was saying, “It’s not normal for her to be experiencing this much pain three days after a miscarriage. She would feel sore, yes, but her pain is far greater than normal.”

The older doctor frowned and shook his head. “You’re still stuck in Indian mumbo jumbo, chap. Those damn hakims and yogis. Medicine is the way to heal this type of issue. I keep telling Matron that too. She’s soft on Indian ways. Just look at what she allows that pharmacist chap to do. He distributes herbs for God’s sake as well as Western drugs! Listen to me, Mishra. The morphine will make her right as rain in a few days.”

“Dr. Holbrook, with all due respect, I need for you to understand that I am practiced in modern medicine. If you’ll remember, the hospital board hired me from England after I’d completed my training as an internist. I still feel—”

“Angry with the Burra Sahib , are you?” Before Dr. Mishra, who had clenched his jaw, could answer, Holbrook said, “Look here. I’ve been through this process a thousand times. The mother will take a week to recover and Bob’s your uncle.”

“Doctor, she’s miscarried a child at four months. There was an excessive amount of tissue. What if we didn’t get it all?”

Dr. Holbrook checked his watch. “I’m delivering a baby within the hour. Let me explain it to you simply. With miscarriage, the fetus would automatically have disengaged from the uterine lining. What Miss Novak is experiencing is nothing more than constipation. Bound to happen after all that morphine.”

He noticed me in the hallway and grinned. “Ah, one of our model nurses. Model being the operative word.” He waggled his bushy white eyebrows at me just as Dr. Mishra craned his neck to see who he was talking about. When he saw it was me, he cast his eyes on the terrazzo floor. He seemed embarrassed on the surgeon’s behalf.

“Oh, if only I were younger!” Dr. Holbrook was walking backward in the hallway. “Pay more attention to that, Mishra. Leave the surgical medicine to me.” He tapped a finger on the side of his bulbous nose and spun around toward the surgery section.

Dr. Mishra hung his head and leaned back against the wall. I knew he had been talking about Mira, trying to save her life. I could also see that she wasn’t getting better. The stats I recorded on her chart proved it. Her pain was constant as was her uneven temperature, which was unusual; it should have gone back to normal after surgery.

Men like Holbrook groped and pawed young women like me and laughed about it. They frequently lobbed thinly veiled—and unveiled—insults at Indian doctors and nurses. It must have been so tiring for Dr. Mishra to hear their salty remarks day after day. We had that in common. Different insults with the same power to sting.

I coughed to let him know I was still there if he needed me. The young doctor—what was he? Just three years older than me?—lifted his head and looked in my direction. For a second, his gray eyes seemed to pierce the gloom of the hallway. He pushed himself off the wall. He took a few steps toward me and opened his mouth, as if there was something he wanted to say. Abruptly, he stopped, his restless eyes scanning ground. Then, without a backward glance, he turned and headed the other way.

If he’d taken one more step, I would have met him halfway. It surprised me, that feeling.

***

I threw the dice and scanned the board. Dr. Stoddard squirmed. “Damned itch. Right where I can’t get to it.” He was irritable today. He wouldn’t be discharged for another several days, and he was getting restless. On the other side of the room, Mr. Hassan lay snoring. He’d been given a sleeping draught after his heart attack episode.

I’d made my rounds changing sheets, distributing bedpans, bathing patients, handing out medicine. I had a quarter of an hour before I needed to check on my charges again. So when Dr. Stoddard asked, I agreed to play one round of backgammon with him, keeping an eye peeled for Rebecca.

While he considered his next move, I thought about how to frame my question.

“Doctor, I’m sure you’ve seen your share of injuries.”

“Umm.” He was still preoccupied with the board. Ever since I had shown improvement, he took longer to make his moves.

“Some of those were women I’m sure.”

“Of course.”

“Were there any injuries inflicted by the men in their lives?”

Dr. Stoddard looked up from the board and pushed his black spectacles up over his nose, resting them on his head. “Now why would you ask that?”

I felt like a traitor talking about Indira like this. She had a right to her privacy like anyone else. “I have a friend. She often has bruises. Her husband beats her because he wants a son. So far, she’s only given birth to daughters.”

“But, my dear, that’s beyond her control.”

“Yes, yes. I know that. She knows that. But how can she explain it to her husband so he can understand?”

“Sona!”

I looked at the door. Indira was standing there with an enamel bowl in her hands. Her face was pinched. “How dare you?” She stomped away, as angry as I’d ever seen her.

Dr. Stoddard and I sat for several moments, staring at the doorway, as if she were still standing there.

His tone dry, the doctor said, “I take it that was the battered woman?”

As usual, he was spot on.

***

My heart was heavy when I entered our flat after my shift. My mother had made malai kofta and masala bhindi along with chapattis. She told me once that she couldn’t abide English food because it was so bland and colorless. She made no mention of what she served my father when he lived with us. He obviously favored bland and colorless or he wouldn’t have returned to England.

Mum could see that I wasn’t in a mood to talk and she went about quietly fixing me a plate. She’d also made chaach , the buttermilk drink with cumin and salt that I loved. She sat across from me, sewing hooks and eyes on a woman’s blouse while I ate.

I had apologized to Indira several times for confiding in Dr. Stoddard. She’d softened when I explained that I was trying to find a way for her to talk to her husband without inciting his anger. Still, as we left the hospital, Indira asked me not to walk with her to her street, and I assumed she was still upset with me.

“I’m worried for you now, Sona. I think Balbir will be on the lookout for you.” She bit her lip.

I should have been afraid, but I only felt bereft. My only friend at work was rejecting me.

Indira said, “It will be safer for both of us not to be seen together.”

Now, I sat in front of my thali thinking about my conversation with Indira. My mother’s kofta was always delicious, but I was finding it hard to swallow.

My mother bit off the thread as she finished fastening a hook. “Fatima is pregnant.”

My mood lifted. Our neighbor across the way would make a wonderful mother. She was a happy, healthy young woman with an even temper. I don’t think I’d ever heard the couple argue. “How did you find out?”

“I went across the way to give her some of the kofta. I added an extra chili because she loves it that hot, but today, as soon as I lifted the lid off the bowl, she threw up over the landing. That’s when I told her she was pregnant.”

I laughed, as my mother had known I would. She knew how to lighten my mood.

“So,” she said, pulling another fastener out of her button box. “What happened today?”

First, I told her about Mira. “She’s not getting better, Mum. Dr. Mishra thinks so too.” At the mention of his name, my mother cast a sharp glance at me. “I saw him arguing with Dr. Holbrook about it. Holbrook thinks it’s nothing. He seems to think complications of any kind are the result of indigestion or constipation. The sooner he retires, the better. You should see the way he talks to Dr. Mishra.”

“Should I?” she said, her tone shrewd. I ignored it.

I told her about Indira’s bruises and how she told me not to walk home with her anymore.

“Leave that girl alone, Sona. It will only bring you trouble.”

I got up to put my plate and glass in the sink. “How can you say that, Mum? If it were me who was being beaten by my husband, wouldn’t you help me?”

Done with the blouse, she held it up in front of her, looking for imperfections in her work. “Her husband sounds dangerous, beti , and I don’t want him anywhere near you.” After a beat, she said, “Mohan would never do that to you.”

I fumed. The voice in my head—the one my mother always told me to listen to—cautioned, Don’t, Sona. Stop! But today had been a trying day. Men like Dr. Holbrook looking at me as if he could see through my uniform and treating Dr. Mishra as if his Indianness was several levels below Holbrook’s Britishness. Indira’s husband beating her like a street dog he could kick to the gutter when he felt like it. Rebecca, thinking that her half-English blood was a foolproof shield, protecting her from harm. Matron believing I deserved punishment for something I hadn’t done.

I turned and leaned with my back against the counter to face my mother. “Mum, people do things—hurtful things—that never cease to surprise me. And disgust me. They can be charming one minute and betray you in the next. Who’s to say Mohan isn’t like that? He’s kind now. But what if I failed to give him sons instead of daughters? What if he comes to believe that the British behaving badly is down to my English blood?” There they were. The words I’d locked inside me for as long as I could remember. I’d turned the key. Now they tumbled out at breakneck speed. “And what about my father? Charming his way into your life and leaving you with two children and no way to support them? Isn’t he the reason we never see your family? Isn’t he the reason we live in this cramped room with no air to breathe? The reason we have to watch every rupee we spend. And even then, we don’t have enough to buy you new chappals. What kind of man does that? I hate him, Mum. I’ve hated him since I was three. I hated him even more—which I didn’t think was possible—after Rajat died. I still miss Rajat, Mum. He was just a baby. He didn’t deserve to die.” I shook my head at her, breathing hard. “You were fooled into thinking my father was a good man. He wasn’t. If he had been, he would be with us here, now, and not in this appalling place with the trains waking us up every hour, the stench of their smoke in our mouths.” My heart pounded in my chest so loudly I thought I might pass out. My stomach hurt. I doubled over, my hands on my knees. I wished the last five minutes hadn’t happened. I regretted the words as soon as they came out of my mouth. I had no right to hurt my mother like that. Speaking out against my father was like blaming her for being with him in the first place. How was I any better than the people I’d been talking about—people who smiled at you and then stabbed you in the soft spaces? Wasn’t that what I’d just done to her?

When I raised my head to look at her, my mother was staring at me, her mouth slack, her forehead creased. I saw her, now, as others saw her. Defeated. Hunched over. Her elbows knobby, her knees bony. Her scalp showing through her thinning hair, the strands now more gray than black. Her fingers, so elegant once, now swollen with arthritis. Soon, she wouldn’t be able to thread a needle or sew a hem. He had done that to her. She had paid a hard price for loving the father of her children.

“You were only three. I didn’t think you remembered him.” She began rubbing the spot above her heart. “At least I wanted to believe that. I didn’t know all this time…” She looked down at her lap, at the abandoned garment, the silver threads winking under the glare of the single ceiling bulb. She made beautiful clothes for other people, clothes she couldn’t afford for either of us. When she looked up at me, her eyes were wet.

“But, Sona… I thought you were happy with our lives. True, we’re not as flush as we’d like, but it won’t always be like that. That’s why I wanted you to become a nurse. You’re doing well, and we’re saving money.” She paused, spit forming at the edges of her lips. “I didn’t know you hated being here so much. I didn’t know you hated him so much.”

The only time I’d seen her cry was when Rajat died. Now a tear rolled down the soft pillows under her eyes and into the hollow of her cheek. I rushed to her, kneeled in front of her chair, placing my hands on her knees. “Oh, Mum. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things. I didn’t mean them. Truly I didn’t. I’m so sorry.” I wiped her tears with my palms. “Please forgive me.”

There was a catch in her voice as she continued, “You’re not wrong. He did betray us. When he left, you were both so young. How could I tell you? Then you got older and, well, it never seemed like the right time. I just thought if you never asked, we could pretend it didn’t happen. I didn’t want to hurt you, beti . I only wanted to protect you.” She was crying openly now, the tears wetting my hands. “He promised, Sona. He promised he would stay with us forever. He loved us. He said that over and over. I didn’t know he had another family. He never told me. It never occurred to me that he didn’t want to marry me because he was already married. In England. He’d been married for five or six years when I met him. If he’d been honest, I never would have taken up with him.”

My parents had never married? My father had another family? In England? My chest constricted. Rajat and I were illegitimate? Legally, I didn’t exist? A headache drummed against my temples. What else didn’t I know about the man who had lent me his mouth, the color of his skin?

Mum was crumpling the blouse she’d been working on into a ball. “I was so young, Sona. And so naive. He waited to tell me the day he left. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe he was leaving. I couldn’t believe he had another family. I couldn’t believe he would do that to us. I wanted to gouge his eyes out. I slapped his cheeks, his temples. I beat him with my fists. I kicked his shins, his knees. I threw things at him. Whatever was at hand. A pot. Scissors. Rajat’s toys. He let me. I pushed him so hard, his head hit the wall. When he stepped away, there was blood. He looked miserable. But he said nothing. He just left. He left anyway.” She hiccupped, trying to catch her breath.

“Mum.” I pried the garment from her hands and covered her palms with mine.

She regarded our hands and rubbed my thumb. “For all that, Sona, I loved him. It wasn’t all bad. Maybe you can’t understand that. Not now anyway. But someday, you will. While he was with us, he was good. He loved you and Rajat. I wouldn’t have had the two of you to love if it hadn’t been for him. He used to make paper flowers for you, which you would scatter around your bed. He would put Rajat on his shoulders and take both of you to the zoo. You loved the peacocks. When they fanned their trains, Rajat would laugh.” She smiled at the memory.

I felt something harden inside, something small and round, like a marble. She was defending him. After all he’d done to her. To us. I released her hands. “Yes, and Rajat would still be alive if he’d been a responsible father.”

Worry lines crossed my mother’s forehead. “No, Sona. Rajat might have died anyway. His heart was weak when he was born. The doctors said there was nothing they could do about it.” She paused, her eyes darting around the table: the wrinkled blouse in her lap, the pinking shears, the pincushion in the shape of a tomato. She wiped her face with the end of her sari and regarded me for a moment. As if she’d made up her mind about something, she nodded. “It’s time I showed you, Sona.”

“Showed me what?”

Instead of answering, she rose and went to the foot of our charpoy where she kept a metal trunk filled with fabric remnants from her commissions. She used the leftovers for our sheets and pillowcases and my dresses. Once, I asked her if Mrs. Rao, who wanted Mum to account for every inch of cloth used on her garment, wouldn’t be upset that Mum was using her fine cotton for our curtains. My mother had tapped the side of her nose. “I have a secret.” She pulled a half-finished kameez from the stack of clothes she was working on and showed me the seam inside. “Other seamstresses leave extra cloth in the seam so the Mrs. Raos of this world can gain a few kilos. The seam can be let out and no one’s the wiser. But our Mrs. Rao is so patali--dubali that she couldn’t gain an ounce even if she ate a plate of pakoras every night. I make it look like I’ve tucked the extra seam allowance in the topstitching. Instead, I save the extra fabric to sew a new rajai for our bed every year. It’s almost complete!” She grinned, revealing her overbite.

Now she returned to the table and sat in her chair. She was slightly out of breath. Her mouth drooped. Her pallor was gray. In her hand was a stack of letters about six inches high. Envelopes tied together with jute.

Immediately, I rose to help her sit down. Her heart had been giving her trouble, but she had medicine for that. “Did you take your pills today? Let me make you some rose water tea, Mum. I’ll put some hibiscus in it as well.” I took a step toward the Primus before my mother stopped me.

“I’m fine. Come sit down.” She patted the table. I didn’t believe her, but I returned to my chair.

She placed the stack on the table.

“These are yours.” Slowly, she slid the stack in front of me, her eyes downcast.

I’d never seen them before. I frowned at her.

“Every year since your father left, he has sent money on your birthday—and Rajat’s.” Her lower lip trembled. She pointed to the envelopes. “There are no written notes. No return address. If there had been, I would have told him about Rajat’s passing. There’s only British money. The early letters contained a few shillings, then a pound. On your last few birthdays, he sent three pounds a year. I’ve never touched the money. I saved it for you.” She put her hands between her knees, in the well created by her sari. “For your marriage. He owed you that much,” she said quietly.

I stared at her. My father had been sending me money for… twenty years ? “But how did he find out our address in Bombay after we moved from Calcutta?”

“I don’t know how he knew. Maybe from one of our old neighbors.” My mother looked down at her gnarled hands. “Please forgive me for keeping these from you.” Her voice cracked. “I only wanted to do what was best. And…frankly… I didn’t want you thinking better of your father for trying to provide for you. I was selfish, I know. I was so furious at him for so long. Just like you are now. But it’s time to let your anger go, Sona. As I had to. In the long run, it will do you more harm than good.” She wiped her eyes with a scrap of fabric on the sewing machine.

I looked at the stack of envelopes, a small mountain in the middle of our table. “But…shouldn’t we use this money for food? Or pay the rent in advance? We could get you new spectacles so you could do your fine hand stitching.”

She shook her head. “I’ve saved enough from your salary and my sewing to do all that. This is your money. Do what you will with it.”

I stared at the pile on the table. It was like another presence in the room, pulsing with life, expanding and contracting. I got up from my chair, nearly upending it, and began pacing the room.

So many thoughts were churning, unwinding, then spiraling again. My father remembered my birthday—and Rajat’s—every year since he left? Did my father ever write to us? And then, at the last minute, decide not to mail the letter? Did he think it would hurt us to hear from him after so much time had passed? My father had an English wife? What did she look like? Did he have children with her? Boys? Girls? What ages? Did they know about us? What did they say when they found out? Did they ever find out? Did he ever miss us? Did this money make up for all the years of neglect? Would it make me any less angry with him?

What I was looking at was guilt money. He was guilty for lying to us. For abandoning us. Not letting us know if he still loved us. Was my mother inventing memories like the paper flowers and the visits to the zoo? Were they things she wished had happened but didn’t?

I didn’t want his money—to keep or to use. I didn’t even want to touch it.

But when I looked at my mother, the heart medicine she needed, the worn chappals she insisted on wearing because she said they were more comfortable than new ones would be, the sari she had worn so often the fabric was transparent in places, I knew we needed more than the money she’d put away.

I let out a long, long breath and stood in front of my mother. She looked up.

I leaned toward her, touched my forehead to hers.

Then I pulled my chair up to the table and sat.

“Let’s count the money,” I said.