The Silver Lotus

by Thomas Steinbeck

  Dr. Neruda and his family were stunned by the captain’s hospitality and the profound kindness that allowed for a family’s dignity to be held in such high regard, as evidenced by the new clothes the captain and Lady Yee had given them. The silks that Lady Yee had supplied from her own collection particularly impressed Mrs. Neruda and her daughter, and they hoped that the captain would convey their sincere appreciation to his bountiful and generous wife. Captain Hammond left the houseboy to look after the family’s needs, and said he would return to visit them the following afternoon once they’d enjoyed hot baths, clean clothes, a few good meals, and a full night’s rest. They could talk about more important matters on another day. He assured them that he would do all in his power to see that their goods and baggage were retrieved from the stranded ship as soon as possible. In the meantime, the captain assured Dr. Neruda and his family that they were welcome to stay as his guests for as long as necessary. When he left them, it was in a cloud of blessings and praise for his generosity and compassion. Captain Hammond humbly stated that in fact his brilliant wife had instigated everything at hand, and they could thank her personally when they met again.

  When Captain Hammond returned to Lady Yee, she was in the midst of sorting through business documents that pertained to her proposed infirmary. She needed to compile an ironclad proposal that would pass muster with the city fathers regardless of public objections. Her focus rested upon the money the city would save in public services and the costs related to treating the poor at public expense. Not poor white applicants, mind you, for they seemed quite acceptable as recipients of the public largess, but rather poor Chinese, who were not. As the captain appeared, she began to question him about Dr. Neruda and his family. She assumed her husband saw them as a possible answer to her medical staffing problem, even though the question had never been broached to Dr. Neruda. She was curious to hear her husband’s opinions and reasoning.

  Captain Hammond grinned to himself. He could sense the maw of Chinese convolution open before him like a tiger pit, and he had no intention of even testing the trigger. He flatly stated that whether or not Lady Yee and Dr. Neruda ever came to terms was really none of his business. The scheme was totally hers from start to finish. It was her money that had given it blood, and her drive that had supplied the bone and muscle. This was all hers to command. He had simply taken the opportunity to repay an old debt to a man that had been cruelly unfortunate in his choice of ships and was cast upon the mortal shore of a strange land. As far as he was concerned, the matter ended there. If Lady Yee chose further association with Dr. Neruda, that was strictly her own affair. He had conducted himself according to his own codes, and he stood on their merits and motives.

  Then, just to stir up the waters for his own amusement, the captain continued as though casting the observation off as an aside. Besides, he quipped, he seriously doubted whether tradition-bound peasant fishermen, Chinese, Portuguese, or even Filipino, would allow themselves to be examined, or prescribed to, by an Indian Hindu using ayurvedic medical guidelines and Western surgical practices. Indeed, he doubted if even the tong masters and village elders could be brought around to the idea, so the whole matter, to his way of thinking, was only marginally possible and speculative at best. The captain then called for his dinner and left Lady Yee to ponder his words. He knew full well that the surest way to charge Lady Yee’s cannon was to tell her something was either impossible or improbable, and then sit back and watch the fireworks. The captain never tired of her intricate machinations, enigmatic though they sometimes were. It was like watching a fine magician pulling a long parade of colored silk handkerchiefs from a silver coin perched between forefinger and thumb.

  EARLY THE NEXT DAY, Lady Yee took Ah Chu aside for a long conference in the kitchen, and then announced to her husband that she was preparing a small feast for their Indian guests that night, and the captain was instructed to carry her handwritten invitation when he stopped by to see Dr. Neruda after breakfast. The captain nodded in a distracted manner, and continued carefully spreading strawberry jam on a small piece of buttered toast. This morsel he then presented to an expectant Macy, who seemed thoroughly delighted with the whole performance.

  When the captain arrived at the guesthouse carrying a basket of fruit from Lady Yee, he found Dr. Neruda on the front porch reading a small volume of French poetry. On seeing the doctor refreshed to his normal state of presentation, Captain Hammond had to admit that he was a rather dashing-looking fellow. He was of medium height, with a clipped black beard cut close and combed in military fashion. His black hair shined like polished silk without a hint of grey at the temples. He looked to be a man of late middle age, but he showed no signs of aging. He appeared strong, centered, and sure on his feet, and all his gestures, no matter how incidental, were graceful. His English was excellent, though his discourse was sparse and to the point, and lacked the flights of hyperbole that English-speaking Indians were so fond of.

  The doctor smiled when the captain appeared and welcomed his host with warm sentiments of gratitude. He invited the captain to sit in the shade and called for his wife to please serve tea to their host. The men spoke in a slow, friendly, almost familiar manner common to those who have shared a traumatic experience. They talked of incidental matters for a few minutes, and then Captain Hammond asked permission to pose a few questions on behalf of his wife, Lady Yee. He confessed she was a woman stoutly rigged for curiosity, albeit benevolent in nature and creative in response. Dr. Neruda laughed and promised to keep that in mind. It was another point on which husbands held common ground most of the time.

  Captain Hammond asked where the Neruda family was bound when their journey was so rudely interrupted by bad seamanship. “The jagged rocks of Point Lobos were, even as an expression of heaven’s will, an unfortunate terminus at best.”

  Dr. Neruda thought for a moment, then stared off toward the bay, now calm and serene with low rolling swells being the fading signature of the departed storms. When he spoke the doctor seemed slightly at a loss, as though viewing the past like a dream. Then he shook himself free and said they had been on their way to Vancouver. He had been told that the harbor city was home to a small but affluent Indian enclave comprised mostly of aging ex-military officers who had remained loyal to the British Raj during the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857. Later, when their loyalty proved a liability to their personal safety, their futures came into question. Their defeated sepoy enemies, now driven underground, assassinated some loyalists and dangerously harassed others. As a result, a grateful British Raj allowed many retiring Indian officers and their families to immigrate to other parts of the British Commonwealth. Some went to South Africa, some to England to educate their sons, and some traveled to Vancouver. They applied their pensions and bonuses to starting businesses and sent their children to Western schools. Many children had been born in Canada and were now comfortable with Western medical practices, but tradition still held the floor as far as the older generation was concerned, and they controlled the purse strings.

  When Surgeon Major Neruda retired, he and his family at first traveled to Peru at the behest of the British Foreign Office. The British legation in Lima, like other embassies, was often the focus of local political frustrations, and required a substantial guard to protect its premises and residences from mob violence. For reasons all its own, the Foreign Office had assigned a hard-line, blood-in-the-eye contingent of Indian Sikh soldiers and Nepalese Gurkhas to protect their interests, and not even the most fervent Peruvian revolutionary wished to cross steel with these men. They prayed to ancient bloodthirsty gods and were ignorant of all mercy. It was even rumored they delighted in killing Christians. Of course this latter invention was absurd on the face of it, but the Peruvian rabble believed it, and that was all that mattered. Dr. Neruda had accepted the assignment of working as a regimental surgeon with civilian rank because it paid well and he could get his family out of India, which was suffering greatly from Muslim-Hindu sectarian violence. I
t proved an unfortunate choice, as things weren’t that much better in Peru. After two important secretaries were murdered in a street ambush, the British decided to close its legation and sever all trade agreements until restitution was paid and security could be guaranteed. This eventuality was hardly going to bloom anytime soon, so Dr. Neruda resigned his post, gathered up his family once more, and decided to travel on to Vancouver at the suggestion of a fellow Indian officer who had relatives residing there.

  The doctor said he had hoped to establish a small medical facility to serve the Indian community of British Columbia, but the unseasonable storms, and the teeth of Point Lobos, had interrupted their journey. And if, for any reason, they could not recover their property from the ship, the disaster would have cost them everything they owned. Their ready cash and personal wealth had been secreted away in a hidden compartment of their steamer trunk, which as far as he knew was still secured in their cabin. He feared their belongings would not remain unmolested, especially when a salvage crew climbed on board.

  Captain Hammond said that as a sailing man he could certainly sympathize, and he was going to see Mr. Campion, the harbormaster, that very afternoon. Mr. Campion had a great deal of influence in these matters. But with the seas now calm, the captain was sure that something might be done to retrieve their goods from the ship. He promised to do the best he could to resolve matters in their favor as soon as possible.

  To change the subject, the captain asked after the doctor’s family, and their roles in his plans for Vancouver. Dr. Neruda smiled and said they were indispensable to his work, and they all labored as a team. The doctor’s wife, Nandiri, was a university-trained compounding pharmacologist who specialized in ayurvedic as well as Western pharmacopeia. His daughter, Indri, was a hospital-trained surgical nurse who also specialized in convalescent nutrition, and his son-in-law, Chandra Din, took his two medical degrees in Paris and focused his studies upon bronchial diseases and skin disorders, both sadly commonplace in India.

  The doctor said that poor Chandra was the one person who really got dragooned into this dangerous adventure. His son-in-law was deeply in love with Indri, and had been since they were children. He would not be parted from her for any reason whatsoever. Indri, on the other hand, though she worshiped Chandra, very pragmatically viewed her parents as superior scholastic mentors and medical professionals with volumes still to teach her, and she would not be parted from them either. Dr. Neruda laughed gently and said that dear Chandra, who was an extremely talented and dedicated physician in his own right, and certainly a creature of keen practicality, had courageously bowed to the inevitable, as husbands sometimes must, packed his instruments and books, and come along. Dr. Neruda said he was always so pleased to see how wonderfully Chandra and Indri worked together professionally. They always engendered the greatest confidence in all their patients, and sometimes that, he said, was as critical as proper medication when effecting recovery.

  Dr. Neruda took a moment to choose the right words and finally declared that it was in the disposition of most native Indians to place the greatest confidence in the old established family concerns, and medicine in particular required reputable credentials to find acceptance in traditional Indian enclaves abroad. In short, the doctor and his family would always find much greater success together than apart, and so custom dictated they stay and work as a group regardless of circumstances. The doctor chuckled and said that medicine in India was very much a family-to-family affair. According to Dr. Neruda, by virtue of Hindu philosophy, the relationship between doctor and patient verges on the sacred. But sadly, he said, this fact had a tendency sometimes to run afoul of pure science, good medicine, and even simple common sense.

  Captain Hammond admitted he would be hard-pressed not to agree. He had experienced many cultures and found parallels almost everywhere. Cross-cultural bias, mutual suspicion, and fear usually created barriers to the adoption or adaptation of positive innovations that might have come to light from those far foreign parts where barbarians dwelled under the rule of demons. And knowing the Chinese the way he did, he would never draw against the idea that suffering and death were altogether preferable to altering the tenants of long-established custom when it came to something as intimate as submitting to medical examination and treatment, especially for Chinese women and their children, and with this recollection Captain Hammond suddenly realized that there was definitely a fly in the ointment as far as Lady Yee’s ambitions were concerned.

  Mrs. Neruda came out on the porch with a fresh pot of tea. Captain Hammond appeared distracted for a moment, but then he rose, thanked the doctor and his wife for their kindness, and said that he was obliged to conduct other business that morning. Before leaving, he presented the doctor and his wife with Lady Yee’s handwritten invitation for dinner that very night, which Dr. and Mrs. Neruda accepted with humble pleasure.

  11

  WHEN HE RETURNED HOME, Captain Hammond went in search of his wife. He found her harvesting flowers in her garden. These fresh and vibrant blooms, according to her, were destined to dance anew in her Ch’ien-lung vases and decorate the dinner table that evening. When he at last managed to focus her complete attention, the captain said he believed the whole experiment might come to nothing as far as the Neruda family was concerned. He shared his sudden foreboding that the Chinese fishing families, and the other Chinese laborers, would not willingly submit to Indian doctors of either sex. The cultural differences were too vast, he said, and the forms of medicine practiced too foreign. He was reminded that peasants of any land usually proved to be the most hidebound of traditionalists, and the most difficult to persuade when it came to any form of novelty.

  Lady Yee could not help but laugh at her husband’s sincere but ill-informed concerns. She said that the impediments he predicted were already accounted for in her plans, and she believed that the right approach to both parties, finite as they were, might nullify centuries of pointless tradition where health was a principle, and not a custom. As for medical practices, Lady Yee took a mock pedantic stance and told her husband that a substantial portion of Chinese medicine came to China from India and the ayurvedic school of healing and health. Like much that was admirable about China, advanced Indian medical sciences followed in the wake of enlightened Buddhist teaching, or so the great scrolls record. But Lady Yee observed that the Chinese had been sailing on trading voyages to India centuries before that, and as her husband knew only too well, good health in a sailor is more precious than coins to his captain. Indeed, Lady Yee stood on her conviction that though Chinese medicine had made innumerable independent contributions to the art of healing, its roots were nurtured in the rich soil of ayurvedic tradition, so in principle, tradition and custom were being served to a higher order. If all the greatest emperors of China found it wise and expedient to pay high bounties to keep Indian doctors, surgeons, and even astrologers on their household staffs, then what was once enlightened behavior on the part of a son of heaven would always be adopted by others, if not for obviously pragmatic reasons, then vanity as a matter of court fashion. Either way, the truth, medically speaking, remained the truth, and if the empire’s people remained healthy as a result, then all prospered from the Indians’ contributions, especially the sons of heaven. In the end, Lady Yee persuaded her husband that she had already taken all possible cultural objections into her calculations and would play out the cards she was dealt. She wasn’t vain enough to believe she couldn’t fail, of course, but she always preferred to set her sights on optimistic horizons.

  Lady Yee’s dinner presentation later that evening was a surprise even for Captain Hammond, who thought he’d become used to such flights of culinary indulgence. She didn’t do it often, but when Lady Yee chose to entertain at their table, her respect for her guests was always translated into exceptionally prepared food. But the captain had no idea that his wife’s demon familiar, agent provocateur, and chef, Ah Chu, knew how to prepare such a variety of exotic Indian foods properly. Not th
at the captain was any kind of connoisseur in such matters, but he did recognize genius and artistry when it fell on him, and Lady Yee was always a marvel when mustering the forces of surprise. Dr. Neruda was not the least to be impressed either. Mrs. Neruda was beside herself with compliments and gratitude, and her daughter and son-in-law were equally vocal in their praises and sentiments of appreciation. Dr. Neruda freely admitted that they hadn’t enjoyed such complex and beautifully prepared Indian cuisine in their three-year migration.

  Over dinner, Lady Yee posed a number of polite questions concerning the doctor’s journey west. She had listened carefully to what her husband had reported to her, and so avoided the embarrassment of asking repetitive questions. She seemed more interested in their fields of study and their ambitions in Canada.

  Dr. Neruda revealed that after many turbulent years in the British Indian Army, and having witnessed all possible categories of mass violence, both sectarian and military, and having also experienced the blatant and pointless inhumanity displayed by all parties concerned, he had finally determined to take his family to a part of the world where they could fulfill their callings as medical practitioners without living under the looming threat of violence for their efforts.

  The doctor also confessed that in India, mythology, religion, and inflexible superstition in many cases ran contrary to sound medical practices, and one was forever obliged to invent mythological reasons to justify straightforward procedures, and in this regard the poor were always far more conservative than the well-to-do. Only Indian expatriates far from home seemed to honestly appreciate the skills and education the Neruda family brought into their culturally isolated communities. The doctor confessed that even his exalted rank and position in the Indian Army seemed to reassure these middle-class immigrants. He said they would allow precepts of Western medicine to be practiced, of course, but only by Indian doctors who were qualified in traditional methods as well, and it was understood that Indian doctors comprehended the spiritual ramifications of their prognosis, diagnosis, and projected cures. But he bemoaned the fact that in India, regardless of the need, or nearness of death, Muslims would never allow themselves to be treated by Hindu doctors, and no self-respecting Hindu, even on the verge of discovering “the eternal mystery,” would tolerate the ministrations of a Muslim physician, no matter how gifted and famous that man might be. In short, Dr. Neruda believed they could accomplish more good outside India, and his family shared his opinions.