Monsoon Summer Read online

  “How could I what, Glory?” I used her name to remind her I was a grown-up.

  “Take that man up to his room and stay with him so long. Everybody was waiting for you to come down.”

  Everyone of course meant Tudor.

  “You were in the kitchen. Daisy was busy, I did it to help.”

  “To help. By being with a man alone.”

  I would have laughed had I not been so angry myself.

  “Glory,” I said, as patiently as I could. “I was a nurse during the war.” I could have told her then about wiping the lips of wounded men, holding their legs in my hands, emptying their chamber pots, feeding them, changing their pajamas, and yes, seeing, sometimes, their most secret parts—what my mother would have called their nooks and crannies—but even in the heat of battle, I needed to protect her.

  “And look where nursing got you.” Her eyes glittered with spite. “Right back here again.” She looked around at the barn’s cobwebby bridles and molding hayricks, and shuddered theatrically as her eyes settled on a two-foot-high technical drawing, “The Anatomy of the Genital Tract.”

  “Look at that revolting thing. Have you any explanation for your behavior?” she said when she had recovered.

  “That foul old bag was attacking him,” I said. “You know how nasty she gets.”

  “Oh, so a world savior now, like Daisy,” my mother said sarcastically. “And look where it got her.”

  I disliked it when my mother sneered at Daisy, showing a deep mistrust of intellectual “bluestockings” that came from her own insecurities.

  “Get this into your head, Kit.” She held up a finger. “Number one: you are not a skivvy here, your job is in the office. You’re a volunteer, you’re Daisy’s friend.”

  “Can’t you see any good in this?” I asked her. I’d tried, at least once, to tell her about the charity but she’d turned a deaf ear.

  She looked down for a second. “Oh, blast it!” Our walk across the yard had rimmed her suede shoes with mud. She set about scrubbing them frantically with a sheet of discarded writing paper from the wastepaper basket.

  “Second.” With a dainty gesture she dropped the dirty paper back in the bin. “Never, ever go unattended into the bedroom of an Indian man. You don’t know them. I do. They are absolute predators, and they see all European women as sluts. Don’t look so shocked. I’m only telling you what is true.”

  I rubbed my arm where she had pinched it hard, and pulled away from her. She’d once thrown a lamp at my head in a fury when I wouldn’t wear the dress she’d laid out, and now she had the same wild look in her eyes. She’d bathed the cut later and given me a doll as “a sorry present” and had said she loved her little girl more than anything else in the world, but it was just so hard sometimes being all on our own together. And I’d hugged her back, flooded with sweet relief at our being friends again, and kept the doll, seeing loneliness forever after in its glass-button eyes.

  “I’m a grown-up now,” I said.

  “That’s exactly the point,” she said. “I want you to find someone nice, to settle down, have babies, a proper home.”

  I had a sinking feeling as she said this that the doll with the glass eyes was back in my arms.

  “And the thing is,” I replied, “quite soon I want, I have to go back to London and finish the midwifery.” (I had to say the word every now and then as if to inoculate her.) “It won’t take long, I—”

  “Oh, that.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Please, for God’s sake, don’t talk about that now.”

  A sudden wind rattled the barn doors and swayed the flame in the oil lamp. My mother, who was terrified of ghosts, clutched me in genuine terror.

  “It’s all right.” I put my arms around her. “There’s nothing here.” And then, oh, how quickly her moods could change: she gave me a real hug and I smelled her perfume (Shalimar) and a whiff of cardamom from the curry cooking.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a muffled voice. “There are too many people here, and it’s driving me a little doolally. And I can’t stand that old bat either. She never has a nice word to say about anyone.”

  She gave a little croaking laugh, which I could not return, and then looked around the barn with big black-and-white eyes.

  “It’s stopped raining. Let’s go back. I hate it out here.”

  “Give me a moment to lock up,” I said, her nails digging into my arm.

  “I know you’re a big help to Daisy,” she continued. She glanced again at the midwife training poster. “It’s just such a strange job to choose: I don’t know how you can do it.” She shuddered and clutched me more tightly.

  “I know,” I said, feeling fraudulent. I was so scared of it myself.

  - CHAPTER 6 -

  He woke up very early and stood at the window, looking out at misty gray fields, some ghostly cows, a church spire on the horizon. He remade the view into bright blue skies above the silent green backwaters of the Periyar. He would be there soon and needed to compass his mind there and not get lost.

  It was cold in the room. With an overcoat over his pajamas, he sat at a desk in the window, working on the last fifty pages of his PhD thesis on sleeping sickness—“The Care and Treatment of Encephalitis Lethargica”—that had quietly obsessed him for two years. He was paying particular attention to a major outbreak between 1896 and 1906 in Uganda and Congo, where close to a quarter of a million people died and foreign aid had been patchy and poorly coordinated and had led to unedifying squabbling among the richer nations.

  It was a sobering subject to live with day in and day out, and he, desperate to finish now, secretly hoped the work with Miss Barker would not take up too much time, even though it would pay for his rent and food.

  Deep in his studies, he skipped breakfast, until the knock on the door reminded him they were to meet at ten thirty.

  “I must apologize in advance”—Daisy bounced beside him as they walked towards the barn—“for making you, temporarily, the lone male in what Shakespeare called a monstrous regiment of women. We didn’t plan it that way at all. In fact, we absolutely welcome the masculine point of view, but you know Indian doctors who speak Malayalam aren’t thick on the ground around here, and we’re up to our eyebrows at the moment with fund-raising and speeches and so forth and, well, this is it.”

  She unlocked the huge door and together they stared into the cavernous space.

  “HQ Moonstone. We’ve cleared a desk for you near the fire; make yourself at home there. There’s rugs in the corner for when we’re really freezing,” she’d added. He liked her already, her big friendly teeth, her air of purpose.

  “Miss Barker.” He sat down, keeping his coat on. “I hope I’m not here under false pretenses: my circumstances mean that my Malayalam might be rusty.”

  She stopped moving papers and gazed at him sympathetically. “What a rotten thing, being caught out by the war like that.”

  “I was one of the luckier ones.” He had fought against the role of poor Indian boy for years, particularly at school where chinks in your armor were ruthlessly exposed. “But my main goal now is to finish my thesis before I go home.”

  “May I ask what it’s on?”

  “The human African trypanosomiasis. Sleeping sickness,” he added helpfully. “Have you heard of the particularly bad epidemic in the ’twenties?”

  “I have, and it was appalling. How very worthwhile.” She peered at him in frank admiration. “I vaguely remember a number of foreign powers tried to combine aid, and it led to the usual complications.”

  “I’d be happy to show it to you.” He felt a tug of eagerness; it was rare now for people to even know about the disease.

  “And when you finish it, you’ll be a double doctor. What an achievement! Tell me, are you very swotty or just naturally clever?”

  “Is there a good answer to that?” he asked with
a quizzical smile.

  “That doesn’t make you sound like a fascinating big head?” They smiled at each other. “You’re probably both, but anyway, onwards. Here’s the plan: weeks. If you can spare an hour or two for translation in the afternoon, you’re free to do your own work in the morning. Does that suit?”

  “Perfectly,” he said. “My passage is booked for November, so good practice for me to speak my own language again.”

  He spoke lightly of the thing most dreaded: forgetting his mother tongue. A few months ago he’d woken in a sweat after a vivid nightmare in which he stood, dazzled, excited, on the quay at Fort Cochin. His mother had run towards him: soft white clothes, soft brown skin, the thick gold hoops in her ears glinting, but when he tried to speak to her, he found his mouth stitched up in crude cross stitches and woke sweating and afraid.

  Inside the barn, three battered desks were arranged in a semicircle around the fire. A poster of a gruesomely naked woman was propped against the wall. Not the kind of naked woman sniggered at after lights out at school or the kind of anatomical drawings seen at Barts, but the inside of a woman, with all her pipework, her veins, her arteries, her secret caves shockingly exposed.

  “Those are a work in progress. Do you find them a bit lurid? Do be honest.”

  “From whose point of view? Don’t forget I’m a doctor.”

  “Well . . .” He sensed her struggling not to patronize him. “Yes, of course, I don’t mean you, but this is part of our dilemma. Some of the Indian midwives we’ll be instructing may be very experienced, very technically skilled, but will have absolutely no idea of what a woman looks like inside.”

  “Miss Barker,” he said after a desperate pause, “I am at sea here. I left India when I was sixteen.” Deliver me from evil, from temptation, from embarrassment ran in a silly conga line through his head.

  “So any instruction about childbirth at all?”

  “Remarkably little,” he said. The truth was the war had disrupted and reduced quite a bit of their training: at one point Barts had become a casualty receiving center. Later they’d been moved to Cambridge, where accompanied by much raucous laughter, they’d raced through reproduction and birth in a week.

  “Before I start,” she said, “would you be kind enough to call me Daisy? ‘Miss Barker’ makes me feel like a maiden aunt. Kit, who occupies that desk,”—she pointed to the one beside him—“has a delightful but rather highly strung mother. She doesn’t approve of her daughter doing this kind of work, so we try not to talk about it in the house. Does that sound very silly to you?”

  “Not at all.” He was amazed she would ever imagine he would discuss such things in mixed company. “I shan’t say a word.”

  “So,” she began again delicately, “I’m to start from the assumption you know nothing about midwifery in India.”

  “Not a thing,” he replied promptly. “Absolutely nothing. The only thing I know is that the midwives are, in some parts of India, called dais.”

  “Correct.”

  “And that when a baby was being born in our house, the men kept out of the way.”

  “In some respects it’s a great shame,” she said, her clever eyes on him. “Sad to say, India has a truly lamentable rate of infant mortality—one of the worst in the world. The British should have done far more to tackle it while they were there. They didn’t, and that’s a permanent blot on our record.”

  She briefed him concisely about the hospital in Cochin and their aims to combine the best of West and East in its practices.

  “Some of your village midwives have more knowledge in their little fingers than our Western-trained midwives will acquire in a lifetime. They come from centuries and centuries of midwives, who have done thousands and thousands of deliveries. Alienate them and we lose a vast sea of knowledge we can use.

  “But some of these women,”—Daisy pulled a mournful face—“are shockers: they cut umbilical cords with rusty knives, jump on bellies to speed births, drag placentas out. We have to teach them that small things like basic hygiene and medical kits will make a vast difference. Our aim is to become an extended family in which we all learn. What do you think?” She gazed at him hopefully.

  “It sounds very impressive,” he said politely, when all kinds of alarm bells were clanging in his mind. He’d read the papers about the tidal wave of fury unleashed after the British had left.

  Daisy’s glasses flashed at him as she showed him an account book. “To date we’ve managed to raise the sum of two hundred pounds for teaching equipment and medicine, which we plan to take to India in three months’ time to help maintain the Home. Kit’s been a marvelous support with our begging letters, and with your help we can get the training manuals right. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. The barn door rattled as the girl walked in. She wore a woolen dress and gum boots and an unflattering head scarf. Her cheeks shone with rain. “God, it’s hideous out there.” She wrestled the door closed against the wind. “Sorry I’m late.” As she swept off her head scarf, her dark hair fell in a cloud around her shoulders. She sat down on a stool near the fire and performed an unintentionally erotic striptease, as one gum boot was inched off with the heel of the other, revealing slim lower legs.

  “Have I missed the sales pitch, Daisy?”

  “Nothing you haven’t heard. How’s your mother’s headache? Did she make breakfast in the end?”

  “Not good. I should probably leave early. So, Dr. Thekkeden,” she said, and turned towards him with a professional smile, “how was your night in the Bird Room? Good, I hope.”

  “We’re going to call him Anto,” said Daisy.

  “Anto,” she said.

  “And Kit,” he said shyly.

  “Is Anto an unusual name in India?” She unbuttoned her raincoat and set it on a pitchfork near the fire to dry, then tugged at her dress to straighten it.

  “Not for a Catholic boy,” he said. “Most of us are called by Christian names. My family calls me Anto,” he said, putting the stress on the first syllable.

  “Anto.” Her plump lips cupped the sound.

  He took a deep breath and said, to distance her, “Does that sound more Indian?”

  She gave him a straight, unembarrassed look. “I don’t know, but I shall definitely call you that.”

  “Whatever you like.” He gave her a brief smile and opened the files he had brought with him.

  “Well, Anto, don’t let me interrupt you,” she said. If she’d registered the slight, she showed no sign of it. “I have a ton of letters to write.”

  They worked in silence until the lunchtime bell came across the yard. The silence was soothing, giving him time to restore himself amongst his books. Being in the company of women was pleasant too, he reflected, after being alone now for months, in libraries or in his digs, often working between damp-smelling sheets in bed to keep warm. This was the reason for the unusual slightly electric glow he was feeling.

  Towards lunchtime, she stood up. “I’ve replied to most of the letters in the yes tin, Daisy,” she said. “There’s a very angry nurse in the other pile. I’ll sort her out after lunch, if that’s all right.” Her blue Fair Isle sweater rose as she yawned—a slim waist, a glimpse of liberty bodice. “I’m starving,” she said. She turned to him. “How about you?”

  - CHAPTER 7 -

  In early March, I got a letter from Saint Andrew’s saying my course had to be postponed until the next academic year. The roof of the nurses’ home had been deemed unsafe, and with much of London still in ruins, it was impossible to find builders to fix it before the new term began.

  When I read this to my mother, she said, “So, together again like old times.” She dabbed her eyes and gave me her loving look, and from long habit I smiled back and returned her quick hug. But my feelings were complicated, and since our row, I had become mo
re and more secretive with her.

  The truth was that as much as I loved the peace of Wickam Farm, without the Moonstone work and the challenge of helping Daisy, I would have been climbing walls by now, and there was something else far more troubling to me, which was the Indian doctor.

  For the first few weeks, he’d expressed a preference, in the politest way possible, for working on his own in the Bird Room during the mornings and skipping breakfast. I was never sure whether this was due to my mother’s chilly treatment of him or his way of avoiding Tudor and Ci Ci at breakfast, but it had definitely helped with my mother’s worries about having this potentially wild beast housed under the same roof as her daughter.

  Daisy tried to talk him out of it, saying, rather shamefacedly, they could only afford now to light two fires: one in the dining room, the other the ancient solid fuel range in the barn. But he’d insisted, until in February during one particularly bitter week, the rotten wood surrounding his window had fallen away with a chunk of Virginia creeper, and he’d been forced to move back into the barn.

  For the first few days, we sat several feet from each other at the old school desks that had been brought down from the nursery. I was making sketches and notes from Comyns Berkeley’s Pictorial Midwifery and sending out letters. His glossy head was bent over piles of academic textbooks.

  Whenever I sneaked glances at him, I was amazed by his industry and his concentration, because for years I’d heard my mother say that Indians were lazy and stupid and this was why they’d let the British lord it over them. Ci Ci often sang the same song, recalling servants straining soup through their turbans or needing a good boot up the “you know what” to get them going at all.

  I felt a spurt of jealousy too sometimes. Men were lucky that way, I thought, remembering how my mother had dragged me away from my matric books saying if I worked too hard, I would ruin my looks. Men, she warned me, were put off by bluestockings, whereas a man’s industry was applauded, fed with meals and cups of tea, and not interrupted by countless scurrying tasks.