But she wasn’t in love with me, she’d said, and she didn’t want me to love her. Didier, trying to warn me, trying to help me or save me, perhaps, had said once that nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be. And he was right, of course, up to a point. But I couldn’t let it go, that hope of loving her, and I couldn’t ignore the instinct that enjoined me to wait, and wait.
Then there was that other love, a father’s love, and the son’s love that I felt for Khaderbhai. Lord Abdel Khader Khan. His friend, Abdul Ghani, had called him a mooring post, with the lives of thousands tied to his life for safety. My own life seemed to be one of those harnessed to his. Yet I couldn’t clearly see the means by which fate had bound me to him, nor was I completely free to leave. When Abdul had spoken of his search for wisdom, and the answers to his three big questions, he’d unwittingly described my own private search for something or someone to believe. I’d walked that same dusty, broken road toward a faith. But every time I’d heard the story of a belief, every time I’d seen some new guru, the result was the same: the story was unconvincing in some way, and the guru was flawed. Every faith required me to accept some compromise. Every teacher required me to close my eyes to some fault. And then there was Abdel Khader Khan, smiling at my suspicions with his honey-coloured eyes. Is he the real thing, I began to ask myself. Is he the one?
‘It is very beautiful, isn’t it?’ Johnny Cigar asked, sitting beside me and staring out at the dark, impatient restlessness of the waves.
‘Yeah,’ I answered, passing him a cigarette.
‘Our life, it probably began inside of the ocean,’ Johnny said quietly. ‘About four thousand million years before now. Probably near hot places, like volcanoes, under the sea.’
I turned to look at him.
‘And for almost all of that long time, all the living things were water things, living inside the sea. Then, a few hundred million years ago, maybe a little more—just a little while, really in the big history of the Earth—the living things began to be living on the land, as well.’
I was frowning and smiling at the same time, surprised and bewildered. I held my breath, afraid that any sound might interrupt his musing.
‘But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.’
He fell silent, and at last I spoke my amazement.
‘Where the hell did you learn that?’ I snapped, perhaps a little harshly.
‘I read it in a book,’ he replied, turning to me with shy concern in his brave, brown eyes. ‘Why? Is it wrong? Have I said it wrongly? I have the book, in my house. Shall I get it for you?’
‘No, no, it’s right. It’s … perfectly right.’
It was my turn to lapse into silence. I was furious with myself. Despite my intimate knowledge of the slum-dwellers, and the debt I owed them—they’d taken me in, and given me all the support and friendship their hearts could hold—I still fell into the bigot’s trap. Johnny shocked me with his knowledge because, somewhere in my deepest appraisal of the slum-dwellers, there was a prejudice that they had no right to such knowledge. In my secret heart I’d judged them as ignorant, even though I knew better, simply because they were poor.
‘Lin! Lin!’ my neighbour Jeetendra called out in a frightened shriek, and we turned to see him clambering over the rocks toward us. ‘Lin! My wife! My Radha! She is very sick!’
‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
‘She has bad loose motions. She is very hot with fever. And she is vomiting,’ Jeetendra puffed. ‘She’s looking bad. She’s looking very bad.’
‘Let’s go,’ I grunted, jumping up and leaping from stone to stone until I reached the broken path leading back to the slum.
We found Radha lying on a thin blanket in her hut. Her body was twisted into a knot of pain. Her hair was wet, saturated with sweat, as was the pink sari she wore. The smell in the hut was terrible. Chandrika, Jeetendra’s mother, was trying to keep her clean, but Radha’s fever rendered her incoherent and incontinent. She vomited again violently as we watched, and that provoked a new dribble of diarrhoea.
‘When did it start?’
‘Two days ago,’ Jeetendra answered, desperation drawing down the corners of his mouth in a grimace.
‘Two days ago?’
‘You were out some place, with tourists, very late. Then you were at Qasim Ali, his house, until late last night. Then you were also gone today from very early. You were not here. At the first I thought it was just a loose motions. But she is very sick, Linbaba. I tried three times to get her in the hospital, but they will not take her.’
‘She has to go back to hospital,’ I said flatly. ‘She’s in trouble, Jeetu.’
‘What to do? What to do, Linbaba?’ he whined, tears filling his eyes and spilling on his cheeks. ‘They will not take her. There are too many people at the hospital. Too many people. I waited for six hours today altogether—six hours! In the open, with all other sick peoples. In the end, she was begging me to come back to here, to her house. So ashamed, she was. So, I came back, just now. That’s why I went searching for you, and called you only. I’m very worried, Linbaba.’
I told him to throw out the water in his matka, wash it out thoroughly, and get fresh water. I instructed Chandrika to boil fresh water until it bubbled for ten minutes and then to use that water, when it cooled, as drinking water for Radha. Jeetendra and Johnny came with me to my hut, where I collected glucose tablets and a paracetamol-codeine mixture. I hoped to reduce her pain and fever with them. Jeetendra was just leaving with the medicine when Prabaker rushed in. There was anguish in his eyes and in the hands that grasped me.
‘Lin! Lin! Parvati is sick! Very sick! Please come too fast!’
The girl was writhing in the spasm of an agony that centred on her stomach. She clutched at her belly and curled up in a ball, only to fling her arms and legs outward in a back-arching convulsion. Her temperature was very high. She was slippery with sweat. The smells of diarrhoea and vomit were so strong in the deserted chai shop that the girl’s parents and sister held cloths to their mouths and noses. Parvati’s parents, Kumar and Nandita Patak, were trying to cope with the illness, but their expressions were equally helpless and defeated. It was a measure of their despondency and their fear that dread had banished modesty, and they allowed the girl to be examined in a flimsy undergarment that revealed her shoulders and most of one breast.
Terror filled the eyes of Parvati’s sister, Sita. She hunched in a corner of the hut, her pretty face pinched and cramped by the horror she felt. It wasn’t an ordinary sickness, and she knew it.
Johnny Cigar spoke to the girl in Hindi. His tone was harsh, almost brutal. He warned her that her sister’s life was in her hands, and he admonished her for her cowardice. Moment by moment, his voice guided her out of the forest of her black fear. At last she looked up and into his eyes, as if seeing him for the first time. She shook herself, and then crawled across the floor to wipe her sister’s mouth with a piece of wet towelling. With that call to arms from Johnny Cigar, and the simple, solicitous gesture from Sita, the battle began.
Cholera. By nightfall there were ten serious cases, and a dozen more possible. By dawn the next day there were sixty advanced cases, and as many as a hundred with some symptoms. By noon, on that day, the first of the victims died. It was Radha, my next-door neighbour.
The official from the Bombay Municipal Corporation’s Department of Health was a tired, astute, condolent man in his early forties named Sandeep
Jyoti. His compassionate eyes were almost the same shade of dark tan as his glistening, sweat-oily skin. His hair was unkempt, and he pushed it back frequently with the long fingers of his right hand. Around his neck there was a mask, which he lifted to his mouth whenever he entered a hut or encountered one of the victims of the illness. He stood together with Doctor Hamid, Qasim Ali Hussein, Prabaker, and me near my hut after making his first examination of the slum.
‘We’ll take these samples and have them analysed,’ he said, nodding to an assistant who filed blood, sputum, and stool samples in a metal carry case. ‘But I’m sure you’re right, Hamid. There are twelve other cholera outbreaks, between here and Kandivli. They’re small, mostly. But there’s a bad one in Thane—more than a hundred new cases every day. All the local hospitals are overcrowded. But this is not bad, really, for the monsoon. We hope we can keep a cap on it at fifteen or twenty infection sites.’
I waited for one of the others to speak, but they simply nodded their heads gravely.
‘We’ve got to get these people to hospital,’ I said at last.
‘Look,’ he replied, glancing around him and drawing a deep breath, ‘we can take some of the critical cases. I’ll arrange it. But it’s just not possible to take everyone. I’m not going to tell you any lies. It’s the same in ten other hutments. I’ve been to them all, and the message is the same. You have to fight it out here, on your own. You have to get through it.’
‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ I snarled at him, feeling the fear prowl in my gut. ‘We already lost my neighbour Radha this morning. There’s thirty thousand people here. It’s ridiculous to say we have to fight it out ourselves. You’re the health department, for God’s sake!’
Sandeep Jyoti watched his assistant close and secure the sample cases. When he turned back to me, I saw that his bloodshot eyes were angry. He resented the indignant tone, especially coming from a foreigner, and was embarrassed that his department couldn’t do more for the slum-dwellers. If it hadn’t been so obvious to him that I lived and worked in the slum, and that the people liked me as much as they relied on me, he would’ve told me to go to hell. I watched all those thoughts shift across his tired, handsome face and then I saw the patient, resigned, almost affectionate smile that replaced them as he ran a hand through his untidy hair.
‘Look, I really don’t need a lecture from a foreigner, from a rich country, about how badly we look after our own people, or the value of a human life. I know you’re upset, and Hamid tells me you do a good job here, but I deal with this situation every day, all over the state. There are a hundred million people in Maharashtra, and we value them all. We do our best.’
‘Sure you do,’ I sighed in return, reaching out to touch his arm. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take it out on you. I’m just … I’m way out of my depth here and … I guess I’m scared.’
‘Why do you stay here, when you can leave?’
It was an abrupt question, under the circumstances, and almost rude. I couldn’t answer it.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I love … I love this city. Why do you stay?’
He studied my eyes for a moment longer, and then his frown softened again in a gentle smile.
‘What help can you give us?’ Doctor Hamid asked.
‘Not much, I’m sorry to say.’ He looked at the dread in my eyes, and heaved a sigh from the hill of exhaustion in his heart. ‘I’ll arrange for some trained volunteers to come and give you a hand. I wish I could do more. But I’m sure, you know, I’m sure that you all can handle it here—probably a lot better than you think, just at this moment. You’ve already made a good start. Where did you get the salts?’
‘I brought them,’ Hamid answered quickly, because the ORT salts had been supplied illegally by Khaderbhai’s lepers.
‘When I told him I thought we had cholera here, he brought the ORTs, and told me how to use them,’ I added. ‘But it’s not easy. Some of these people are too sick to hold them down.’
ORT, or Oral Rehydration Therapy, had been devised by Jon Rohde, a scientist who worked with local and UNICEF doctors in Bangladesh during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The oral rehydration solution that he developed contained distilled water, sugar, common salt, and other minerals in carefully mixed proportions. Rohde knew that what kills people who are contaminated with the cholera bacterium is dehydration. The ugly fact is that they shit and vomit themselves to death. He discovered that a solution of water, salt, and sugar kept people alive long enough for the bacterium to pass through their systems. Ranjit’s lepers, at Doctor Hamid’s request, had given me boxes of the solution. I had no idea how much more of the stuff we could expect to receive, or how much we would need.
‘We can get you a delivery of salts,’ Sandeep Jyoti said. ‘We’ll get them to you as soon as possible. The city is stretched to its limits, but I’ll make sure you get a team of volunteers here as soon as we can send them. I’ll put a priority on it. Good luck.’
We watched in grim silence as he followed his assistant out of the slum. We were all afraid.
Qasim Ali Hussein took control. He declared his home to be a command centre. We called a meeting there, and some twenty men and women gathered to devise a plan. Cholera is largely a water-borne disease. The vibrio cholerae bacterium spreads from contaminated water and lodges itself in the small intestine, producing the fever, diarrhoea, and vomiting that cause dehydration and death. We determined to purify the slum’s water, beginning with the holding tanks and then moving on to the pots and buckets in each of the seven thousand huts. Qasim Ali produced a bundle of rupee notes as thick as a man’s knee, and gave it to Johnny Cigar, deputing him to buy the water-purification tablets and other medicines we would need.
Because so much rainwater had accumulated in puddles and rivulets throughout the slum, those too had provided breeding grounds for the bacteria. It was decided that a chain of shallow trenches would be established at strategic points in the lanes of the slum. They would be filled with disinfectant, and each person walking the lane would be required to pass through the ankle-deep antiseptic drench. Plastic bins for safe disposal of waste materials were to be placed at designated points, and antiseptic soap would be given to every household. Soup kitchens would be established in the chai shops and restaurants to provide safe, boiled food and sterilised cups and bowls. A team was also assigned to the task of removing the bodies of the dead and taking them on a trundle-cart to the hospital. My task was to supervise the use of the oral rehydration solution and to prepare batches of a homemade mixture as required.
They were all huge undertakings and onerous responsibilities, but no man or woman at the gathering hesitated in accepting them. It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity. But there was another reason, far from virtue, for my own eagerness to accept the tasks—a reason found in shame. My neighbour Radha had been desperately ill for two days before she died, and I’d known nothing of it at the time. I was gripped by a feeling that my pride, my hubris, was responsible for the sickness in some way: that my clinic was founded in an arrogance—my arrogance—that had allowed the disease to breed in the smear of its conceits. I knew that nothing I’d done or neglected to do had caused the epidemic. And I knew that the disease would’ve attacked the slum, sooner or later, with or without my presence. But I couldn’t shake off the feeling that, somehow, my complacency had made me complicit.
Just a week before, I’d celebrated with dancing and drinking because, when I’d opened my little clinic, no-one had come. Not one man, woman, or child in all the thousands had needed my help. The treatment queue that had begun with hundreds, nine months before, had finally dwindled to none. And I’d danced and drunk with Prabaker that day, as if I’d cured the whole slum of its ailments and illnesses. That celebration seemed vain and stupid as I hurried through the sodden lanes to the scores w
ho were sick. And there was guilt in that shame as well. For the two days while my neighbour Radha lay dying, I’d been ingratiating myself with tourist customers in their five-star hotel. While she’d writhed and thrashed on a damp earth floor, I’d been calling down to room service to order more ice-cream and crepes.
I rushed back to the clinic. It was empty. Prabaker was looking after Parvati. Johnny Cigar had taken on the job of locating and removing the dead. Jeetendra, sitting on the ground outside our huts with his face in his hands, was sinking in the quicksand of his grief. I gave him the job of making several large purchases for me and checking on all the chemists in the area for ORTs. I was watching him shamble away down the lane toward the street, worrying about him, worrying about his young son, Satish, who was also ill, when I saw a woman in the distance walking toward me. Before I could actually know who it was, my heart was sure it was Karla.
She wore a salwar kameez—the most flattering garment in the world, after the sari—in two shades of sea green. The long tunic was a deeper green, and the pants beneath, tight at the ankle, were paler. There was also a long yellow scarf, worn backwards, Indian style, with the plumes of colour trailing out behind her. Her black hair was pulled back tightly and fastened at the nape of her neck. The hairstyle threw attention at her large green eyes—the green of lagoons, where shallow water laps at golden sand—and at her black eyebrows and perfect mouth. Her lips were like the soft ridges of dunes in the desert at sunset; like the crests of waves meeting in the frothy rush to shore; like the folded wings of courting birds. The movements of her body, as she walked toward me on the broken lane, were like storm-wind stirring in a stand of young willow trees.