by Bapsi Sidhwa
“Daddy has gone to fetch Colonel Bharucha,” soothes Mother. She carries me round and round the room stroking my back. Finally, pushing past the curtain and the door, she takes me into the sitting room.
My father raises his head from the couch.
The bitter truth sinks in. He never phoned the doctor. He never went to fetch him. And my mother collaborated in the betrayal. I realize there is nothing they can do and I don’t blame them.
The night must have passed—as did the memory of further pain.
As news of my operation spreads, the small and entire Parsee community of Lahore, in clucking clusters, descends on the Sethi household. I don’t wish to see them. I cry for Godmother. I feel only she can appreciate my pain and comfort me. She sends her obese emissary, Mini Aunty, who with her dogged devotion to my mother—and multiplicity of platitudes—only aggravates. “My, my, my! So here we are! Flat on our backs like old ladies!” She clicks her tongue. “We’ve no consideration for poor Mummy, have we?” As if I’ve deliberately committed surgery on my foot and sneaked my leg into a cast!
But, preceded by the slave, Godmother comes.
She sits by my bed stroking me, smiling, her eyes twinkling concern, in her gray going-out sari, its pretty border of butterflies pinned to iron strands of scant combed-back hair. The intensity of her tenderness and the concentration of her attention are narcotic. I require no one else.
All evening long Mother and Father sit in the drawing room, long-faced and talking in whispers, answering questions, accepting advice, exhibiting my plastered leg.
When Colonel Bharucha makes his house call at dusk he is ushered through the sitting room—hushed by his passage into the nursery by the officiating and anxious energy of Electric-aunt. Father, cradling me like a baby, carries me in.
The visiting ladies form a quiet ring round my cot as with a little mallet the doctor checks my wrist, knees, elbows and left ankle for reflexes, and injects a painkiller into my behind. Cousin, watching the spectacle, determines seriously to become a doctor or a male nurse. Any profession that permits one to jab pins into people merits his consideration.
Taking advantage of Colonel Bharucha’s brief presence Mother reads out her list of questions. Should she sit me out in the sun? Massage like this... or that? Use almond or mustard oil? Can she give me Mr. Phailbus’s homeopathic powders? Cod-liver oil?
“I’m to blame,” she says, “I left her to the ayahs ... ”
A month later, free of pain, I sit in my stroller, my right leg stuck straight out in front on account of my cast, as Ayah propels me to the zoo. I observe the curious glances coming my way and soak in the commiserate clucking of tongues, wearing a polite and nonchalant countenance. The less attention I appear to demand the more attention I get. And, despite the provocative agitation of Ayah’s bouncy walk, despite the gravitational pull of her moon-like face, I am the star attraction of the street.
When we stop by the chattering monkeys in the zoo, even they through their cages ogle me. I stare at the white plaster forcing my unique foot into the banal mold of a billion other feet and I ponder my uncertain future.
What will happen once the cast comes off? What if my foot emerges immaculate, fault-free? Will I have to behave like other children, slogging for my share of love and other handouts? Aren’t I too old to learn to throw tantrums—or hold my breath and have a fit? While other children have to clamor and jump around to earn their candy, I merely sit or stand, wearing my patient, butter-wouldn’ t-melt ... and displaying my calipers—and I am showered with candy.
What if I have to labor at learning spellings and reciting poems and strive with forty other driven children to stand first, second or third in class? So far I’ve been spared the idiocy—I am by nature uncompetitive—but the sudden emergence from its cocoon of a beautifully balanced and shapely foot could put my sanguine personality and situation on the line.
I flirt, briefly, with hope. Perhaps, in his zeal, Colonel Bharucha has over-corrected the defect—and I see myself limping gamely on the stub of my heel while the ball of my foot and my toes waggle suspended.
I am jolted out of my troublesome reverie when I realize that Ayah is talking to Sher Singh, the slender Sikh zoo attendant, and I have been rolled before the lion’s cage. There he lies, the ferocious beast of my nightmares, looking toothless and innocent... lying in wait to spring, fully dentured, into my dreams.
Chapter 2
Father stirs in the bed next to ours. “Jana?” Mother says softly, propping herself up on an elbow.
I lie still pretending sleep. She calls him Jan: life. In the faint glow of the night-light I see him entirely buried beneath his quilt like in a grave. Mother hates it when he covers his face, as if he is distancing himself from her even in his sleep. She knows he is awake. “Jana?” she says again, groping for his head. “Don’t cover your face like that... You’ll suffocate.”
“So?” says Father drowsily, hanging on to the heavy cotton quilt and unveiling only his eyes. “You’ll be a merry widow. You’ll blow every pice I’ve saved.”
I can almost feel a languorous happiness settle in my mother’s flesh. He sounds teasing, affectionate, as she says he did in the first year of their six-year-old marriage.
“Don’t say that, Jana. Even as a joke,” Mother says, her voice plaintive, grateful, husky. She rolls over and molding herself to his back makes small burrowing, yearning movements. Father turns and lifting the quilt buries his head in the breasts she has inherited from a succession of bountifully endowed Parsee grandmothers.
Having polio in infancy is like being born under a lucky star. It has many advantages—it permits me access to my mother’s bed in the middle of the night.
“Baijee? Wake up.” Ayah taps Mother’s hand urgently. “Baijee?”
My lids fly open. Mother looks startled and her eyes, still glazed with dreams, stare fixedly at Ayah.
“Something’s happened to Papoo ... I’ve put her in the nursery,” whispers Ayah. “You’d better come.”
In one starting movement Mother pushes away the quilt and swings her feet to the icy floor. Her calves gleam creamily in the pale light seeping in through the narrow windows. Shanta, my eighteen-year-old ayah, pushes the red felt slippers towards her mistress’s feet and holds out Mother’s pashmina shawl.
I sit up, whimpering, and Ayah swings me up and places me on her hip. I know I am heavy with my cast.
It is warmer in my nursery. A thin woolen dhurrie covers the brick floor and the sweeper’s daughter is lying on it in front of the glowing rods of an electric heater. She is three years older than me, a bit taller, but she weighs less I’m sure.
Ayah places me in my cot and squats beside my kneeling mother. I feel a sickening lurch of fear—and fury. From the way she lies, ashen, immobile—the right side of her dark cheek and small mouth slightly askew, a thread of saliva stretched to a wet spot on the dhurrie—I think that there is something terribly wrong with Papoo. “Has Muccho beaten her again?” I ask fiercely.
Ayah looks up at me, shivering in the sleeveless cardigan worn over her cotton sari. Her hair is disheveled and her large eyes are dilated with anger too. “Shush,” she says. “She’ll be all right.” The shawl she has flung aside earlier lies in a heap on the floor.
“Papoo,” Mother says, smoothing back her straight, sun-bleached hair, “open your eyes, child. You’re safe. Come?”
But the girl, normally so responsive, lies absolutely still. She looks unbearably ill: shrunken, her small features barely defined, showing milky crescents beneath her lids.
“We’d better get her to the hospital,” Mother says, standing up. “I’ll tell Sahib to mind Lenny.”
Papoo remains in the hospital two whole weeks. She has a concussion. Her mother says she fell off her bed, but we know she’s lying. Muccho maltreats her daughter.
When Papoo returns from the children’s ward of the Ganga Ram Hospital she is sprightly, defiant, devilish and as delightful as ever.
>
My parents sit on wood-bottomed chairs in Colonel Bharucha’s consulting room. Mother holds me. I’ve been inflated to twice my size by knitted underwear, pullovers, a five-foot Kashmir shawl and a quilt.
Colonel Bharucha is applying a stethoscope to the emaciated chest of an infant. A woman in a shabby black burka holds the child. The infant coughs so severely that his mother has to hold him upright.
Colonel Bharucha removes the stethoscope from his ears and lets it hang from his neck like a talisman. “How long has he had this cough?” he asks.
The father, standing deferentially to one side, bends towards his wife. She turns her veiled face to him and whispers.
“For a week, doctor sahib,” the man says. His head and neck are wrapped in a muffler and his gaunt face is careworn.
“How often does he throw up?” asks the doctor.
Again the man stoops and, relaying his wife’s words, says: “Quite often, sir.”
“Once a day? Twice a day? Ten times a day?” the doctor booms impatiently. I feel Mother’s arm twitch.
This time the woman addresses the doctor directly, looking at him through the netting covering her eyes. “He vomits every time he has milk... five, six times a day.” Her voice is incredibly young. She couldn’t be more than twelve, I think, surprised.
“Why didn’t you bring him earlier?” the doctor roars.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the man says. “She didn’t tell me.”
“She didn’t tell you? Are you a father or a barber? And you all want Pakistan! How will you govern a country when you don’t know what goes on in your own house?”
The man, shivering slightly in a short, scruffy jacket and cotton trousers, hangs his head and smiles sheepishly.
His patients understand Colonel Bharucha. The more he roars and scolds the more likely he is to effect a cure. They have as much faith in his touch as in his mixtures.
“Take this to the dispenser,” Colonel Bharucha says, handing him a prescription. “He won’t charge you for the medicine.”
“Your fees, sir?” The man fishes out a handful of grubby one-rupee notes from his coat pocket. “No need,” Colonel Bharucha says with a dismissive gesture, and turning to us, asks, “Well?”
The man salaams and shepherds his wife out of the tiny room.
“It’s Lenny,” says Mother. “You said you’d remove her plaster today? She has a cold ... I don’t know if you should... ” Her voice trails off on a quavering note.
I quake. The news comes as a complete shock. I thought I was seeing the doctor for my cold. Misinterpreting my devotion to the cast which conceals my repaired foot, Mother thinks I’m merely scared of being hurt and has kept the true purpose of the appointment from me.
“No!” I scream, unable to bear the thought of an able-bodied future. The suspense—although it has given my forehead premature wrinkles of worry—is preferable to the certainty of an altered, laborious and loveless life.
I open my mouth wide and bawl as loudly as I am able and cleave to my mother.
“It won’t hurt, mai,” soothes Father gently.
“Don’t you remember? It didn’t hurt at all last time,” carols Mother brightly. “Dr. Bharucha would never let you hurt.”
Father waves a crisp ten-rupee note before my nose as I turn my face from side to side to abjure temptation and establish disdain. It is a touching gesture of extravagance on Father’s part. I would appreciate it in any other circumstance.
But trade my future for ten rupees?
Colonel Bharucha moves his spindly chair closer and looks eloquently at me, implying: Now what’s all this fuss about? I won’t tolerate nonsense.
But my terror is genuine and the doctor compromises. “I only want to have a look at the plaster,” he says, and displays hands innocent of saw, chisel or hammer. “See? I have nothing.”
He shifts his eyes to Mother. “How do you expect me to examine her through all this quilting?” And standing up from his desk, tall and stooping, directs: “Bring her to the table.”
Mother briskly removes the quilt and hands it to Father. She unwinds the shawl, removes my coat and trousers and lays me on the hard and treacherously narrow table that is covered only by an iodine-stained white sheet.
“Take her clothes off, woman!” the doctor hollers.
“She has such an awful cold and fever ... ,” says Mother hesitantly.
“Then take her home and broil her! If you know what’s good for her, why bring her to me?”
Mother and Father hastily strip me of my pullovers and knitted underwear, sparing only my cotton knickers.
The doctor applies his cold stethoscope. I’m still trembling from the thunder of his angry roars—and now I shiver also from the cold. “She hasn’t got a fever,” the doctor declares severely. He signals to Mother and she covers my naked and trembling torso with the shawl. At the direction of a swift and secret signal I miss, Father and Mother move to either side of me and firmly stroke my arms and shoulders: and, at my instant alarm, make soothing noises.
“Lie still!” the doctor orders, and petrified by his tone, I lie still.
Colonel Bharucha saws, hammers and chisels at my cast, and using both hands, tears it apart.
“See? No pain,” he says, moving his eyes close to mine. “Have a look,” he offers, helping me sit up. Mother hastily winds the shawl round my shoulders and I examine the doctor’s handiwork.
I let go my breath in a massive sigh of relief. My right leg looks dead: pathetically thin, wrinkled and splotched with discolored and pale patches. The shape of my ankle has definitely changed. It joins my foot at a much more reasonable angle. On the whole I’m surprisingly pleased. My leg looks functional but it remains gratifyingly abnormal—and far from banal!
I am dressed and stood on my bare feet. My heel still clears the floor. Colonel Bharucha tries briefly to press my heel down.
“Much better!” he announces, looking up. “See the difference?”
My parents’ twinge of initial disappointment is at once replaced by readjusted expectations. They nod their heads with admiring smiles of satisfaction.
“Mind you, she must wear her calipers for some time,” says the doctor, and turning to me he adds, “We’ll get you new ones.” I could hug him. “She still needs care ... Massage, ultraviolet rays, physical therapy.” He raises my right arm and bends my torso to the left. “Her right side is affected: she will have to exercise and stretch her waist like this!”
Mother’s eyes are brimming with tears, her beautiful mouth working.
Colonel Bharucha places his arm around her. “What’s here to worry now?” he says gruffly, surprised at Mother’s agitation. “By the time she grows up she’ll be quite normal.”
Mother blows her nose in a daintily embroidered cambric handkerchief and taking the doctor’s hand presses it to her eyes. Father sniffs and clears his throat.
“What about her schooling?” he asks, masking his emotion. I can’t tell if he is inordinately pleased by the condition of my leg—or inordinately disappointed.
“She’s doing fine without school, isn’t she?” says the doctor. “Don’t pressure her... her nerves could be affected. She doesn’t need to become a professor.” He turns to me. “Do you want to become a professor?”
I shake my head in a firm negative. “She’ll marry—have children—lead a carefree, happy life. No need to strain her with studies and exams,” he advises, thereby sealing my fate.
Mother’s mouth is again working—her eyes again brimming. And driven by unfathomable demons, again her guilt surfaces. “I don’t know where I went wrong,” she says. “It’s my fault... I neglected her—left her to the care of ayahs. None of the other children who went to the same park contracted polio.”
“It’s no one’s fault really,” says Colonel Bharucha, reassuring her as usual. “Lenny is weak. Some child with only the symptoms of a severe cold could have passed the virus.” And then he roars a shocking postscript: “If anyone’s
to blame, blame the British! There was no polio in India till they brought it here!”
As far as I’m concerned this is insurgence—an open declaration of war by the two hundred Parsees of Lahore of the British Empire! I am shocked because Colonel Bharucha is the president of our community in Lahore. And, except for a few designated renegades, the Parsees have been careful to adopt a discreet and politically naive profile. At the last community dinner, held on the roof of the YMCA building on the Mall, Colonel Bharucha had cautioned (between the blood-chilling whines of the microphone): “We must tread carefully ... We have served the English faithfully, and earned their trust ... So, we have prospered! But we are the smallest minority in India ... Only one hundred and twenty thousand in the whole world. We have to be extra wary, or we’ll be neither here nor there... ” And then, surmounting his uncharacteristic hesitancy, and in thunderous voice, he declaimed: “We must hunt with the hounds and run with the hare!”
Everybody clapped and gravely said: “Hear! Hear!” as they always do, reflexively, every time anyone airs a British proverb in suitably ringing tones.
“The goddamn English!” I think, infected by Colonel Bharucha’s startling ferocity at this “dastardly” (one of Father’s favorite words, just as “plucky” is Mother’s) instance of British treachery. “They gave us polio!” And notwithstanding the compatible and sanguine nature of my relationship with my disease, I feel it is my first personal involvement with Indian politics: the Quit-India sentiment that has fired the imagination of a subject people and will soon sweep away the Raj!
Chapter 3
Ayah and I, arrested by a discordant bugle blast, come to a dead stop outside Godmother’s gate. There is a brief roll of drums. The tall tin-sheet gates of the Salvation Army compound open and the band and marchers emerge from the leafy gloam of neem trees fermenting behind the walls.
