CHAPTER SIX
The Lying In
I WAS CONSCIOUS for most of the drive, but dazed, like I was wearing my grandmother’s thick glasses and everything had receded into wobbly figures in the distance. At the company infirmary, 1 was lifted off my red-saried grandmother’s lap in the back seat of the car by nurses and our driver and the doctor. The infirmary was adjacent to the tea factory, and I could smell freshly ground tea dust in the air.
The doctor asking my grandmother what happened. The nurses ushering patients out of their beds, in their housecoats and rumpled hair, and escorting them to the two other wards, so that the factory manager’s niece could have her own private ward. Me in a room of fourteen empty beds, green scratchy blankets and gray-white starched sheets.
The doctor saying it looked like a bad fall. He would take care of what he could and the rest would have to wait. A nurse holding a white cloth on my head, until the white was dyed red, and then applying a new cloth. Clumps of my black hair descending onto the floor and across my lap. Half-dry hair, wavy on one end, cut crisply on the other end. A steel tray with sharp things, with black wiry thread spooled around a card.
The doctor asking if I felt any pain. I felt nothing, but I tasted blood in my mouth. Asking if I knew where I was, who had brought me, what month it was. The infirmary, my grandmother, July. Repeat after me: monkey, rowboat, hat. Monkey, rowboat… hat.
He looked into my eyes, flashed a light on, off, on. He asked me to follow his finger. He asked me to stick out my tongue.
He asked if I had had a tetanus shot, did I remember. He was burning a needle in a flame that the nurse was holding out to him over a steel tray. What I remembered was the stapled folded set of medical records that my mother had sent with me sitting in the suitcase under the bed. Right next to the hypodermic needles and syringes my mother had also sent with me, that my pediatrician wouldn’t give her, and that she got instead from my father’s Gujarati podiatrist. I said to my grandmother, “Go to the house, look under the bed, someone must go and look under the bed.” The doctor said to my grandmother, “She is in shock; she is speaking nonsense. Sometimes it is like this for some time,” and he walked toward me with the shiny needle burned black on the tip. The black tip was submerged in the plump soft skin of my upper arm farther in and farther in, and then out. It was happening to someone else’s arm, 1 felt numb, and far away. My hair was in my face, but my arms were too numb to reach up and push the hair out of the way. 1 pursed my lips and blew air out of my mouth upward to try to move my hair off my nose and eyes where it was itching me.
Then the card with thread stretched tightly around it, unwound by the nurse, who flipped the card over for each length of thread, threading it onto a hooked instrument. The buzz of an electric razor, small fuzzy pieces of my hair flying around us. I felt the weight of hair bunched over on my left side, enveloping my shoulder, and the lightness of no hair on my right. There was a shooting icy pain, like a popsicle in my mouth bumping into a tooth that was sensitive to cold. I shuddered. “That’s the betadyne, it’ll feel cold. We’re just cleaning up the area.”
The nurse gathered all my hair to the left side and pinned it. She put a plastic drape on top of my head with an opening the shape of a diamond that she moved around until it was over the wound. The doctor came at me with a long thin needle, and he said, “Have you ever been stung by a bee? This won’t be worse than that.” I had been stung by a bee—it had hurt a lot. I braced myself for the needle plunging into my arm, I made a fist, clenched my jaw. Then I realized he was aiming the needle at my head. That taste of blood in my mouth, of blood and metal, and the burned sugar smell of hair oil, rose up, and choked me, and I started to gag. My grandmother reached out to stroke my back and the nurse readjusted the drape on my head. The doctor said, hiding the needle behind himself, “Please be calm, child, we’ll be done soon.”
I closed my eyes. There was a rain of bee stings, not one, but two, three, four. I counted in my head the number of lockers down one long hall in my high school, fifteen between each classroom, six classrooms on that hall, twelve more lockers before you reached the stairwell, ten more by the exit sign. I heard the sound of them rattling open, slamming shut in those six minutes between classes.
There was the quiet sound of snipping. I saw the glint of scissors that the nurse handed to the doctor and that he handed back to her, and then the whole thing again. Each time, small pieces of thread fell onto the steel tray the nurse was holding out in front of me, like an airline stewardess proffering peanuts before dinner. The doctor cursed under his breath when the nurse said the surgical tape he wanted was out of stock. “These Tiger supporters, they are swiping even my most basic supplies,” he said bitterly. The doctor opened a roll of wide tape, the sound of the adhesive back unsticking from itself. Scissors flashing, he cut the tape into smaller rectangle strips. Then gauze taken from the tray, then a bandage. Then a long white strip of cotton wrapped around my head like a Martina Navratilova headband to hold the bandage in place.
The doctor said, “The most serious injuries are not always the ones that hurt the most.” He set my throbbing right arm with long wooden splints and then covered it with tight viselike bandages up and down the length of my forearm.
The nurses disappeared with their trays, and the doctor told me to lie down. He and my grandmother talked. I heard some words and not others: scan equipment, receptive language hearing neurochecks, mental status changes, nerve fibers.
“You can go home now, you will be more comfortable there than in this infirmary. I’ll come check on you, and I’ve explained to your grandmother what the next few days will be like,” the doctor said.
I looked at my grandmother standing there, her sari bright, moist red only in parts now and mostly a dark, dried, brown, her hair straggly and meager. She was wearing ratty pink bedroom slippers my mother had brought two trips ago. I looked at the hospital, at the nurses in their stiff uniforms and the beds made with square corners, and the green blankets each folded down at the same precise angle.
“I’d rather stay at the hospital,” I said. I looked at the doctor and did not look at my grandmother.
“This isn’t a hospital, child, it’s an infirmary, there’s not much here for you. We called a hospital in Coimbatore to see about sending some imaging equipment up here for you, maybe tomorrow as we see your case develop. For now, go home with your grandmother, I will look in on you.”
“Do you have trunk lines to make telephone calls?”
“Ours aren’t working, but the tea factory has lines that are working.”
“I want to call my parents in New York,” I said.
My grandmother looked at me, her eyes frightened, her hand over her mouth. The doctor looked at her, then said, “You know what, let’s not call your parents right now. They’re on the other side of the world, they’re sleeping, no?”
“I want to call my aunt and uncle then, they’re supposed to be in Bombay for another two weeks.”
The doctor said, “We’ll know more in a couple days, so let’s wait, shall we?” He said this like it was a question that had only one answer. “We’ll worry everyone by calling. It was a bad fall, but it has already happened, now you need bed rest. A lot of bed rest. Be a good girl; go with your grandmother. Everything will be taken care of.”
Taken care of by who? My grandmother and a country doctor? I wanted to call someone, anyone who lived anywhere else, just so 1 wasn’t swallowed up by this mountain place, forgotten here. But I was tired, and nauseated, I longed for cool clean sheets or, even better, a cool clean floor.
“Nausea is natural after an insult to the brain. Yes, and dizziness too, and fatigue. Look, if 1 tell you a list of symptoms you’ll start being anxious, and you’ll make yourself have them all. We can talk more after you’ve had rest,” the doctor said. To my grandmother he said, “Nothing to worry, auntie. Do as I’ve told. Nothing to worry. “
We headed home. My grandmother put her arm arou
nd me in the car, but I squirmed away. I couldn’t look at her, at that sari, and the fear in her eyes. I sat primly apart, near the window. But as the car gained speed, I was scared of being jostled. I leaned into her shoulder, let her absorb the friction of the car for me, from me.
I was crying without thinking about it. My grandmother said, urgently, “What is it, are you in pain? Should we go back?”
“No, no.”
“Then, what?” she said, her arm around me, holding me securely.
“I feel alone.” Her being here did not make me feel not alone. But she was all that I had right now, I knew this.
“Maya, you must believe me. I will do everything possible. I will do everything Dr. Murugan says.”
“What if he’s not a good doctor? Mother always gets a second opinion and a third opinion.”
“Then we can get more doctors for you, from Coimbatore, anything you want, Maya. But you have to be calm, and rest, and trust me. The doctor said if you’re agitated, it’s not good. Please. Will you?”
“I’m not agitated. I’m not,” I said. Now she was crying too, the driver was eying us in the rearview mirror, some of her tears fell on me, dripped onto me leaning on her shoulder. 1 gave in. “Don’t cry, Ammamma.”
“I will. I will do everything. I know you think of me as an old woman. But I can do this, you’ll be better, you’ll see,” she said, speaking into my hair. I nodded drowsily, falling off to sleep.
I WAS TIRED all the time. I couldn’t sleep for more than a few minutes before feeling uncomfortable. Then my grandmother and Vasani would come and help me change position in my bed. I felt nauseated, and the painkillers I took at regular intervals made me more nauseated, until I was entirely unable to eat. My grandmother fixed all kinds of concoctions, but I couldn’t eat any of them. The doctor on his next visit brought electrolyte fluid, it tasted like flat orange soda mixed with baby aspirin and salt. Every five hours, I drank a whole teacupful, usually in two large gulps. Right after, Ammamma gave me a pinch of sugar to hold on my tongue to chase away the bitter and the salty with sweet.
I was moved into Ammamma’s room, so she could watch me. The two double beds had been separated; she slept a few feet away so that she did not turn and wake me or disturb my sheets. My bed was under the mosquito net, my grandmother didn’t want me using the chemical repellent while I was taking strong medications, and while I couldn’t bathe. Every time I woke in the night, she was standing there peering at me through the white netting.
Not bathing contributed more to my discomfort than my injuries did. My hair hung limply, my face was covered with a thin film of flaking skin. With one of my grandmother’s handkerchiefs, I wiped my forehead and came away with gray smudges. My grandmother brought a bucket to the side of my bed and she helped me soap my face, my hands, then rinse, dry. On the third day, the doctor let me have a “half-bath.” I sat on a low bench in the bathroom, and Ammamma filled one bucket with soapy water and one bucket with warm clear water. She soaped a washcloth and handed it to me. I waited for her to leave—she stayed just outside the door, worried I might need her—and then took off my robe, managing everything with my left hand, my right hand limp like a scarecrow’s. Ammamma had covered the bandages with the bubblewrap Mother had cushioned Reema auntie’s perfumes in. I soaped everywhere with my one good hand. Then I poured pitchers of clear water over myself from the neck down. I put the robe back on, and called for Ammamma. She came, helped me rise from the bench, and walked me back to my bed. She left me sitting on my bed with fresh clothes laid out. It took me fifteen minutes to maneuver into a salwar kameez. Ammamma came back then to do up the snaps on the back of the kameez.
It was delicate, this matter of staking out a little territory of privacy, even though I needed help eating and cleaning and dressing myself. Ammamma tried to respect my wishes, appearing and disappearing at a moment’s request, but I still felt self-conscious, awkward. I suggested having Rupa come to help, it would be better. With her, I knew there would be the unembarrassment of sisters, the easiness of those who have swum and played together and know the other’s body instinctively because it is so much like one’s own. But Ammamma brushed my request away, not seeing what was behind it, saying, “I can manage everything you need, Maya. I want to do everything for you myself—you have only to ask.”
Each time the doctor came, two or three times every day, we played twenty questions, sometimes with my grandmother, too. I had to be able to guess what they were talking about, identify the name of my high-school teachers, of my cousins, of different countries, different kinds of fruit.
It was hard to stay in bed all the time. My legs cramped up, and my back hurt. Sometimes I would lean on Ammamma and walk around a bit, but I would get dizzy and tired and have to lie down. Each time she walked me to the bathroom, and waited just outside, she talked the whole time through the door, nervous that 1 would be dizzy or lose my balance. Walking felt strange, my weight supported by another, I felt gravityless, only touching on the earth, but not bound to it.
A Dr. Mani came from Coimbatore, he was a neurologist and a professor on faculty at the medical school there. He made me play more games, word games, puzzles, add numbers together, count backwards. I liked him better than Dr. Murugan; he talked to me, told me what he was thinking. He said I had good long-term memory and good short-term memory, and was processing information well.
“It is important to talk openly about gains and abilities,” he said, sitting on the side of my bed. Boli barked indignantly on the other side of the door; he had been banned from my room, and he was incensed that there was a visitor who had not yet passed muster with him.
“Is everything going to be normal?"I said.
“Everything looks pretty much on track. But tell your grandmother immediately if the headaches get more frequent or more intense, or if you feel like you are forgetting things or not able to think of words for things you know.”
I told him how I kept trying to think of things I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget. I kept repeating my name over and over silently, so that it wouldn’t go away from me. I wanted to write things down, but I couldn’t because of my arm. It made me dizzy to think of everything in my head. “Is that strange?” I said.
“It’s normal to be worried about failure of memory in a situation like this. But try not to be obsessive. Hopefully, you will have everything up there"—and he tapped my head—"that you used to have.”
My grandmother came in with a glass of tea for Dr. Mani.
“I am going to suggest to your grandmother that she help you explore your memory so you’re not worried about it by yourself. If there are gaps, I can come back and meet with you and see if they are significant.”
“Like those questions Dr. Murugan is always asking?” I said.
“This is different. This is not testing abilities per se, this is about talking and exploring a whole range of memory,” he said. Picking up a picture frame from the bureau, he said to my grandmother, “Use photos of family, friends, possessions, speak of familiar names, places, interests, and activities. And, Maya, these things you’re worried about losing, tell your grandmother. She can write it down and remember it for you, so she can remind you if you need it. If there’s anything you don’t feel fully comfortable sharing with her, you can give her keywords or names, so you can use them to remind yourself. This should help you relax, I hope. Is there anything else you want to ask me?”
Yes, I thought. Will you stay? Will you take care of me? Will you be my confidant, my comrade, my partner in memory? I would tell you everything, so easily.
But instead, there was my grandmother. Over the next days, I told her things. She did not comment, she just wrote, asked me to repeat things, go slow. She filled page after page of a notebook, front and back.
I told everything—my first treehouse, my first swim team medal, my first period. The only time Mother ever slapped me, the only time I had detention at school, the only stuffed animal 1 still slept with
. The walk home from junior high school to my house, the muddy field we cut across, red maple leaves in our hair, the races to the stop sign, and then running back to pick up the books and lunch bags we’d deposited on the side of the road. The bus to high school where everyone picked on the new girl from Hungary who wore the same clothes three days in a row and had crossed eyes. How my lab partner in chemistry class was known for breaking things, pipettes, flasks, microscopes, so that everyone thought it was her fault our experiment caught fire—but it was mine. How the girls at my last slumber party wouldn’t talk to each other by the end of the night.
My best friend, Jennifer. My rival on the swim team, Samantha. The year I took horse-riding lessons until a horse threw me, and then I stopped. The summer I worked at the movie cineplex and gained seven pounds from sub-sisting on buttered popcorn and Raisinets.
My friend Steve. How I taught him the whole periodic table. And binomial equations. And trig. How he ran for student council and made a speech in front of the whole school. And lost.
And how I kissed him in the school parking lot that day to make him feel better. 1 wanted to say this, but I didn’t. In the pause, as I thought of what to say instead, my grandmother looked up from the notebook, shaking her pen to bring more ink down.
“Maya,” my grandmother said. “Pretend I’m not your grandmother if it helps. I know in your life, like in anyone’s life, there might be things you are not proud of, or things you are proud of that you think your family would not accept.”
I didn’t say anything.
She continued. “I am old, and I won’t to try to tell you what is acceptable or not. Tell me everything, so you can have everything back that was yours. These notebooks you can take, and the things I know I will take to my grave.”
“Don’t talk like that, Ammamma. You’ll be alive for a long time. Mother says half of it is positive thinking. She worries about you.”
“Does she? What your mother doesn’t understand is that I’m not afraid to die—it’s more natural than to live beyond everyone you know.”
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