Woman's Day

It is woman’s day. And she is just next to me on the bed, moaning, panting, squealing, and every two minutes or so writhing wildly in the explosion and the aftershocks of the tempest raging in her loins. Her spine arches, her eyelids coil tightly shut and she bites her lip to bleeding to keep from physically shouting. As she twitches about, her hands primally grasp at anything within reach, hoping to traffic out some of this surfeit of sensation her frail body is finding impossible to contain. Sometimes it is the metal railing of the bed. Sometimes it is the cheap cotton sheet on the mattress. Sometimes it is my hand as I touch her abdomen or take her pulse.

For over four years, Sunita has been trying unsuccessfully to conceive a child. Being punched below the navel by her drunk husband some 30 minutes ago is the price she pays for her failure.

“Pehle kabhi maara hai tujhe?” (“Has he ever hit you before?”)

The first time, she doesn’t answer, she only looks away instead. I ask again.

This time round, she nods. Though definitely a more grevious one, today is clearly one of many tipping points on the couple’s mad dash for parenthood. So too say old burn scars on her forearm and a denting of her left cheekbone.

Things today don’t look too good.

For one there’s these spasms, and her abdomen is beginning to bloat. Most ominously, a stethoscope put next to her navel doesn’t send back any of the normal gurgling sounds her gut should be making.

There is only a hollow silence.

That one drunken punch may well have punctured her intestine.

As we loaded her onto the ambulance to get an Xray of her abdomen done, her story heresays itself in my head, and in doing so answers the question as to why she’s still in this marriage.
A Nepali girl who’s parents were dead by age 13, illiterate, relatively pretty and so prone to predation, is the most completely alone creature conceivable. So even an Assamese boy who gets drunk and hits her every fifth day is family enough.

It is perhaps why she is so desperate to have a child – to believe in being enough of a person for someone to need her, instead of her having to always need this excuse for a someone. She is rendered so afraid by the thought of this reversal of need never coming about.

Her XRay arrives and I know what I’m hoping isn’t on it – a sliver of black right below the line of her diaphragm signifying the air that has gushed into the abdomen through a hole in her gut, and which will force us to slit her open from her sternum to her pubis and seal it up.

It isn’t. But she still quivers and cries. Being hit by the man she looked to for everything as punishment for not bearing him a child had to hurt infinitely more than a perforated gut.
It probably would be frowned upon but I hold her hand as she weeps.

Once

‘What were you thinking?’ she asked, very low.
‘I was thinking, all you want, you get.’
‘In what way?’
‘In love.’
‘And what do I want?’
‘Sensation.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes.’
She sat with her head drooped down.
…
…
‘Why do you say I only want sensation?’ she asked quietly.
‘Because it’s all you’ll take from a man. – You won’t have a cigarette?’
‘No thanks – and what else could I take - ?’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Nothing, I suppose,’ I replied.
Still she picked pensively at her chemise string.
‘Up to now, you’ve missed nothing – you haven’t felt the lack of anything – in love,’ I said.
She waited a while.
‘Oh yes, I have,’ she said gravely.
Hearing her say it, my heart stood still.

- Once, DH Lawrence

Ends aren’t born in violent hurricaneranas of hate. They need much quieter, more coldly tranquil places to spawn. Endings lay their eggs when people aren’t looking in lulls where people aren’t talking. They grow and gain strength in the open spaces of emptinesses left behind when someone pretends to but really isn’t there anymore.

Endings are of the hyena ilk – ravenous eaters, but crippled failed hunters. In their lameness, they have to feed on bruised and hurt egos, old teethless bitterness and juvenile, childish refusals to make things better.

But when an ending corners you, there is no escape. Your demise is telling, total and brutal. There will first be blood. Then an aching so acute your bones will near break. But last to transpire, and leaving you worst off, will be the slaughtering in future tense. A butchering of belief.. Belief in everything, in hope, in tomorrow, in anything, in anyone.

That said, for all their frightening ugliness, endings are frail, fearful things. Taken that though limp, they cannot be run from. But though armed, they can be beaten. Fire, less for its flames and more for its warmth scares them. They scamper away yelping if the courage to try and build a fire is conjured. Early on, an ending keeps marauding about, hoping for a window of surrender to reopen through which to weasel back in. But if none is found, eventually it gives up. And you are at last safe.

There is no spectacle near as rejuvenating as the depressed flight of a defeated end.

spirit bandaging

Sunday - In the morning you decide to rodent around GMCH’s cardiology department, hoping to scavenge on some scrap of hope. You shamelessly pounce on an affable cardiac surgeon taking a round. The gent is nice enough to give you some of his time. The gist of things as they stand are this – there is no OPD on Monday or Tuesday as all the doctors are on leave. The nearest is Wednesday. You will have to come back on Wednesday, meet a cardiologist, then a cardiac surgeon, and then the hospital’s superintendent. Then at least you will know how much cash you have to arrange for. But that is Wednesday. This is Sunday morning. You are going to have to leave for now. But you know you’ll be back soon, for something’s being left undone is a calling card like no other.

On the ride back, you can’t stop peering back into the back of the truck to look at Maya and her husband. She talks with amazing, theatrical hand movements, as if always describing something big and wondrous. Her husband listens in rapt attention, as if proud of his wife’s cuteness. At times he sits down at her knee. Other times he sits on the bench and she rests her head on his lap. When we pick up yet another patient who’s had a rod removed from a fractured femur, they sit close together, their heads so very near as if sharing some secret joke. You could watch the two of them for hours on end. It’s one of the most ethereal sights possible – two people collectively disentangling and then demolishing the confusion most of us accuse life of, and just being .

You’re already fervidly scheming of how to get her new heart valves. If she dies, you almost believe you will too. She catches you watching through the glass, blushes, giggles, points it out to her husband and the three of you beam teeth at each other.

Rage

Saturday evening - The day culminates as a casserole of anger, hunger, frustration and fuck ups. It’s one of those days, as if you’re cursed with some mutant Midas touch, turning everything you lay eyes on and you experience into something worthy of contempt. Everything.

You hate your nursing assistant for being an ass and claiming to have said people have refused Maya any assistance at GMCH. You hate yourself for having taken his word. You hate the private Cardiologist you went to visit at a hospital that’s listed with the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund. He charged you Rs750 to sit your ass down on a chair for 4 hours and in the end tell you something you already knew (i.e. that the porcelain doll Nepali girl needs both valves in her heart replaced) and to hand you a certificate worth it’s weight in rabbit droppings. You hate yourself for not have seen it coming. The marble flooring and the airconditioning should’ve given it away. You hate knowing that a familiar self-loathing guilt germinating within you shall soon force you to pay Maya’s husband the money.

You both somehow hate and are relieved that you were proved wrong by an echocardiogram done on Bimla Maya. It is completely normal. She is fine and now can’t wipe a smile off her face. It’s amazing what 800mL of blood this way or that can do to the man.
But that you’ve basically served as an tool in GNRC ripping off Maya Tamang defiles this little victory completely. The meltdown is final and flawless. By the end of the walk out to the car park, you’re so livid you can’t even swallow your own spittle. Liquid lead.

There is no justification. I am down. Come and kick me.

Oh Guwahati!

And then there’s Bimla Maya. Yet another beaming, pristine, skin-porcelain-clean Nepali lass of 21 who came to you as the week’s second wheezing, sweating, nearly-not-breathing, ticker-barely-ticking heap. Swollen legs, gasping crackling lungs, the works. Her problems amplified by her having a haemoglobin count of 3, roughly a quarter of the norm. Two blood transfusions later, she is in a state fit to move. In the shorter scheme of things, moved to Guwahati. In the larger sense, you wonder towards what and where…..

Friday evening - Unlike most government hospitals, Guwahati Medical College Hospital (GMCH) does not wear it’s squalor like a badge or brandish it like a crutch to prop up a plea of pity. Considering that it is the end point of all of the NorthEast’s ill, it is acceptably clean. Another laborour we’d gotten admitted here for a prolapsed vertebral disc lies on a shared bed with his attender (just because the frugality isn’t advertised doesn’t mean it isn’t there).A case in point is that there is no anaesthesiologist. The only surgeries being done are emergencies. You’re told to take him back and bring him in March. So be it.

The other crusade commences tomorrow.

....without a clue

And so off to Guwahati – faraway city of Kamakhya and Cardiologists. Maya Tamang is a 20 year old laborer who’s heart bacteria have turned into a leaky plastic bag-esque blood pumper, which regurgitates half the load it should be forcing through her 5-foot frame.
Save the decaying valve, she’s like any of the button-pretty Nepali girls from around these parts.
Her husband’s brought around a thousand rupees for the trip. That and the BPL (below poverty line) card we’d gotten made should see us through. We hope.
The doctor I’m supposed to meet could not be contacted on phone. Network in Tenga is an utter and final bitch. An apocryphal practioner has already written Maya off. It’s something you just refuse to believe. Her love story’s something you choose to instead – married to a boy from the basti who used to walk her to school, at 17. Proud mother at 20. Wheezing, sweating, nearly-not-breathing, ticker-barely-ticking heap at 20 and 2 months.
Stubbornness is a gift. You have a lot of hope. You just have no clue. We leave at 0730……
At the back of your mind you wonder why you're so desperate to see this through. Considering you go about saying you hate the line of work.

Resuscitation

Kuch nahi samjha o buddhu
Kuch nahi socha
Reng ke (rail se) jaane kahan pahucha
- Ringa Ringa, Slumdog Millionaire

It was one of the few times there was a real sign of things being right. For sieved through gathering fog, the dying light of dusk showed her then and there for all she was – the single most beautiful girl in the world.

He was almost grateful for the hint of mud on her sneakers. It made her believable. Otherwise, the way her gloved hands tucked in her pockets, how some of her wispy hair peeked out from under the cap, that her lips, bodily curtains to the most spectacular smile ever up on show half-smiled, and her lively gear-shifting eyes were for now placidly parked in neutral, it all came together and made everything as it had always been. Perfect.

But a vague decoct of the past four months held him back from just plain grabbing her and making her disappear in his arms the way he used to. To fill the void in his core wholly and exactly with her being. It was perhaps the only perfect fit he knew of. He couldn’t do it. And there was this cacophony in his head. So many voices in so many tenses speaking together so loudly in such resonance, that they all cancelled each other out and came to nothing. He could not speak.

“Hi”. She stuck out a right hand.
It half crushed him that this was for now the fitting form of greeting.

But as he took it and held it, even through the wool, every fiber of him knew. The mime had fallen for the maiden all over again.

(Contd)