Nor were there any prospects for Leena to earn a living. Farming was the way of life in their village, and it was largely men’s work. When the harvest was good, her parents worked in tandem: her father moving up and down rows to gather the vegetables, her mother carrying them in vessels back to the large terrace that wrapped around their small house, where she sorted and cleaned them. Leena’s mother would rub the eggplants until their purple skin gleamed; she wrapped the long beans in tidy, even bundles. When Leena’s father returned from the market, he often reported selling his stock immediately and at the highest possible price. Her mother smiled as she rubbed warm coconut oil on her husband’s tired feet. Her father praised his wife for her talents of presentation at the market. Her father’s land was productive but modest: it was enough to sustain them, but her parents could not go on supporting her forever. Perhaps, if she could have a marriage like theirs, it would be worth it to leave her parents. As content as Leena was being their daughter, she wondered if something even better might await her.
They all thought it best to find a boy from a family who lived nearby. There were not many eligible men in Panchanagar. Her parents spent several months looking, but all the boys they found were too young to get married, so old that everyone knew something was wrong, or otherwise unsuitable. Her father, though hardworking, was not a rich man and could not afford the dowry the best families were asking.
So they began to inquire about boys in villages farther away, relying on the introductions and suggestions of people who were merely acquaintances or barely known in their circle. Soon, families came with their sons to visit, and each time, Leena and her mother spent all day preparing. They ensured every corner of their small home was cleaned and filled with the aroma of chai brewing. Leena’s mother, known for her delicious homemade sweets, always had a tray of freshly prepared boondi laddoo or pistachio bhurfi.
“Come, you must know something about him,” Piya said. “One thing, besides his name.”
Leena cast her eyes up toward the ceiling and rocked her head back and forth as she thought. “He likes his tea sweet, too sweet,” she giggled.
The day Girish had come to visit, he wore a crisp white kurta-pajama with tan embroidery around the neckline. Right away, Leena noticed how neat his hair was. It looked as though it had been freshly oiled, and the pale line of his part was straight as a ruler. That a man would take such care in his personal grooming was surely an indication of how he would care for his wife.
Rather than addressing Leena directly, out of respect for her as an unmarried woman, Girish asked her mother for three full spoons of sugar in his tea. What could it mean, Leena wondered, that he possessed such strong tastes?
His parents sat on either side of him on the divan. His father was a tall man with a straight nose and dark sagging skin under his eyes that made him look as if he were perpetually tired. When Leena leaned forward to offer the tray of chai, he peered directly into her eyes for several breaths before taking his cup, and Leena had the strange sensation that he was trying to see inside her. He spoke only to her father, posing all sorts of questions. How often did Leena fall ill? Which of the foods she prepared were his favorites? Did she know how to mend clothing? Had she ever raised her voice to her parents? His questions came quickly—one after another, like the popping of mustard seeds in hot oil—and then, just as suddenly, they stopped and he sat back on the divan, blowing across the surface of his chai while he looked over at his wife.
Girish’s mother was a plump woman with an equally round face who wore her hair in a large bun. Her ample belly spoke of a household where food was abundant and hardship scarce. Once she began, she spoke without pause about how smart her son was, how hardworking, how respectful: a good boy with excellent prospects, a bright future and his choice of brides. He was the middle of three sons and his mother was very proud; this seemed to Leena a good thing, even if the woman came across as somewhat boastful. Perhaps if Leena had a son one day, she would feel the same way.
When Girish’s mother finally stopped speaking, she ate an entire laddoo in one bite and drank down most of her chai in a single, long gulp. Leena noticed her parents exchange a smile; their guests’ cups were empty and they had each consumed several sweets. Leena’s father took the opportunity to ask his questions, inquiring about the quality of the farmland in their village, what type of accommodations Leena would have in the family house, and the nature of the eldest brother’s wife. He had managed only a few questions before Girish’s family had to leave, to return to their village before nightfall.
Piya clapped her hands together. “How exciting! He sounds handsome, yes?”
Leena wobbled her head, her smile unrestrained now.
“What will you wear for the ceremony? And what kind of jewelry?”
“Ah, don’t be ridiculous!” Leena said, slapping her friend’s knee. “You’re getting ahead of yourself.” And yet, Leena knew her parents were downstairs in the gathering room at that moment, working out arrangements for a possible wedding ceremony with the village pandit and Piya’s father, Jayant Patel, who her father held in high regard. Now, for the first time, Leena allowed herself to feel excited, letting her mind slip into what might lie ahead.
4
ANIL AWOKE WITH A START. IT WAS ALWAYS THE SAME DREAM that haunted him: he was home, visiting from medical college, and Ma shook him in the middle of the night. “Come quickly, the midwife is calling. Papa’s waiting in the car.” When Anil stumbled into the car outside, Papa explained that one of the villagers was in labor with her third child and the midwife had sent for help.
Anil thought of explaining to his father the limitations of his relevant experience. He’d only spent two years studying medicine, and only in books and laboratories. He had no clinical experience with patients, nor any obstetrics training. He hadn’t attended a childbirth or seen a woman in labor. He had never, in fact, seen a woman unclothed for any reason in his twenty years. But he swallowed these words, knowing he was still the most qualified person for such a task and that Papa was counting on him.
It was eerily quiet when they approached the house, the warm night air still and devoid of the cries Anil would have expected from a woman in the throes of labor. Inside, he saw her, laying on the floor, panting, her hair matted with sweat and her eyes closed. An older woman he assumed to be her mother sat behind her, propping her up. The sheets upon which the young woman lay were soaked through with blood and other fluids. Her knees were parted, and the midwife was squatting between them, blood dripping onto the floor around her. “I can see the baby’s head,” the midwife said. “But it will not come out.” She shook her head. “Her first two babies came with no problem.”
Papa nudged Anil forward. The midwife turned to him, her mouth puckered tight. Next to her were two pails of water, a pile of cloths, and a few rudimentary tools, including a pair of ancient forceps. Anil washed his hands in the hottest water he could get from the cistern, and dried them on a clean cloth as he gingerly kneeled down next to the midwife. In Gross Anatomy, he’d dissected a cadaver from head to toe in concert with each chapter of his textbook, but this was entirely different.
The young woman’s legs were spread wide, her thighs trembling and her genitals swollen nearly beyond recognition. The midwife wiped away some blood and pointed to the crown of the baby’s head, an ovular patch covered in fine black hair pressing against the mother’s pubic bone. To Anil’s shock, she thrust her fingers into the birth canal and traced its circumference before indicating, with her blood-covered hands, the size of the baby’s head. Anil looked around the room: there was no equipment to use, nothing with which to sterilize, no medicine.
Suddenly, the midwife grabbed Anil’s wrist and held it tight, as if she sensed he was about to run off. “Do something, quickly, or else they will both die,” she whispered. He followed her eyes to the floor, where a small pool of blood was forming around their feet.
Each time he had the dream, the diagnosis came easi
ly—when the warm blood dripped onto his sandals, or when the veiny lump of tissue obscured the opening to the cervix. Placenta previa was not an uncommon condition and would have been easily identified with a prenatal ultrasound, if the woman had had one. Always, the same terror rose within him. She would never make it to the hospital in time. What was he to do on the outskirts of the village in the middle of the night, perform a C-section with an unsterile kitchen knife?
The young woman’s eyelids began to falter and her body shuddered. The profuse volume of blood had become visible to her mother, who began moaning for God to save the baby. Anil said a silent prayer as he reached for the decrepit forceps. How long had it been since they’d been used, or even properly cleaned? He maneuvered the forceps into the birth canal and around the baby’s head. It took a surprising amount of strength. Anil felt the tension in his shoulders, the straining of the muscles in his arms, but finally the baby’s head emerged, then the shoulders, and the midwife leaned forward and pulled out the baby. She clutched it to her bosom and cleaned out its mouth and nose while Anil watched anxiously. A small, animalistic cry came as the baby took its first gasps of air. Anil closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
It was a few moments before he discerned another kind of shrill scream mixed in with the baby’s cries. He looked up to see the older woman slapping her daughter’s face, which had gone pale. Her eyes had rolled back, and her body was limp. A gush of warm fluid spilled onto Anil’s feet; she was hemorrhaging blood.
Anil grabbed the remaining cloths from the floor and packed them in, applying as much pressure as he could, but the blood seeped through. He looked around frantically, then tore off his shirt and used it against the tide of blood. The older woman was crying loudly, pleading with Anil to do something. His hands were lodged against her daughter’s body. He had no blood to transfuse her, no drugs to clot her blood. Even if he could stop the hemorrhaging, she’d lost too much blood already. If she didn’t go into shock, she would almost certainly develop an infection. But he stayed in that position, pressing with all his strength—with his hands, his arms, his shoulders—against the young woman’s body as he watched the life drain out of her and onto the floor.
When she died, Anil felt it in his hands. There was nothing left to strain against. He stood up and backed away from her lifeless form, his body covered with her blood. The older woman cradled her daughter’s head in her arms and rocked back and forth, moaning. Anil turned toward the door and saw his father, holding a pile of clean towels and wearing an expression of disappointment Anil had not seen before.
Anil washed himself at the pump outside the house, trying to scrub away the sticky blood from between his toes, scrape it from underneath his fingernails. At this point, the dream often departed from the reality of what happened that night. Sometimes, the older woman followed him outside and beat her fists against her chest, wailing that he had killed her daughter. This time, the young woman’s husband was waiting outside with a string of jasmine buds. Anil was forced to look into the man’s bloodshot eyes and tell him his wife was gone. “What good are you?” the distraught man cried, then his hands were around Anil’s throat, squeezing tighter until Anil woke up gasping for air.
In actuality, what passed that night in Panchanagar was both milder and more haunting than what Anil imagined in his nightmares. The young woman’s mother appeared outside as Anil was trying to clean his hands. He readied his apology, braced himself for her wrath. She walked toward him, put her palms together, bowed her head, and fell to the ground to touch his feet. “Thank you, Doctor Sahib, for saving my grandchild.”
A wave of shame swept over Anil, not only for his own failure but also for his home in this uncivilized corner of the world where the practice of medicine was nothing but an illusion. It was then, Anil knew for certain, that he could not stay in Panchanagar. He would strive to practice the highest level of medicine he could—far, far away.
5
IT SEEMED TO LEENA THAT EVERYTHING HAPPENED VERY quickly after that day at the Big House. Within a week, the wedding preparations had begun. There were meetings with the astrologer and the pandit. Leena and her mother selected wedding saris, jewelry, and henna designs for her hands and feet. Despite her parents having told her to choose whatever she wanted, she picked out smaller earrings and a less ornate necklace after seeing her mother wince at the more elaborate pieces.
There was such a flurry of activity and excitement, Leena barely had time to consider how much her life would change in the days ahead. Lying in bed at night, she closed her eyes and pictured her groom’s face from their single encounter. She repeated his name, softly, to herself. She tried to recreate his voice from the few words he’d spoken. What would his laugh sound like, how would his arms feel around her? Although she knew little about this man, Leena trusted her parents, who approved of the boy and his family, as did the pandit who had compared their horoscopes.
On her wedding day, Leena followed the pandit’s solemn instructions during the ceremony, even as she tried to catch glimpses of her groom’s long fingers, his prominent shoulder, the faint shadow of his freshly shaved face. She greeted people as they pressed coins and coconuts and rose petals into her hands, wishing her well in her new married life. Within the swirl of activity and emotion, Leena hardly knew how to feel, until she saw the unadulterated joy on her parents’ faces. But after the festivities were over, when it was time to say good-bye to the only home she’d known, she could not help but weep and cling to her mother.
THE RIDE to her husband’s village was long, nearly two hours. Leena sat next to her mother-in-law in the car, staring at the back of Girish’s head, studying his hand gestures and facial expressions for clues about this man with whom she would spend her life. Her body brewed with equal parts anticipation and nervousness.
It was dusk when they finally arrived. Through the fading daylight, Leena could see that the cotton crop in the fields was overgrown and withered, while the family house was quite large and looked as if it had once been grand. Girish opened the car door for her and carried her single large trunk into the house. She followed him, stepping carefully across the porch, avoiding the wooden planks that seemed to be disintegrating.
As Girish entered the house ahead of her, two children came running to greet him. A small boy clutched at his leg while an older girl wrapped her arms around his waist. Girish stopped to ruffle the boy’s hair and kiss the girl’s head, then called out, “Rekha! Come take these rascals. I’m tired.” Leena was touched by the obvious affection the children had for Girish, and he for them—a good sign, she thought.
Girish’s elder brother’s wife appeared from a hallway leading to the back of the house and grabbed each child by the wrist, scolding them as she took them away. Leena was eager to get to know her new sister-in-law. Rekha had been kind during the wedding functions, complimenting Leena on her hair, her jewelry, her outfits. She seemed like the kind of person with whom Leena could have an easy friendship, perhaps even a sisterhood.
“Come,” her mother-in-law said once they were inside, and she led Leena into a small bedroom converted from a sleeping porch, just big enough for the bed and metal cupboard it contained. “You will be comfortable here,” she said, as if reading Leena’s concern. The older woman turned to Leena and held her face firmly in her plump hands. “You call me Mother, okay? I don’t stand on formality. No need for ‘Memsahib.’”
Leena was touched by the gesture, though she had never considered calling her new mother-in-law “Memsahib,” as a servant would.
Her mother-in-law smiled widely, revealing an open space where one of her back molars should have been. “Come now, child. Say it.”
Leena looked down for a moment and summoned a smile. “Yes . . . Mother. Thank you.”
The older woman opened the metal cupboard and shuffled some items around inside. “You can put your things here.” She pointed to the newly cleared shelf. Then she leaned down, opened Leena’s trunk, and began lifting
out the saris her mother had carefully wrapped. “Hmm,” she said, fingering the gold embroidered border of one. “Whatever doesn’t fit here, I can keep in my room for you. These silk saris, you won’t need them for everyday wear.” She collected a few of them in the crook of her arm and squeezed through the narrow space to the door. “When you’re done, come to the kitchen. Almost time for dinner.”
Leena turned back to the cupboard, filled with her husband’s clothes. She ran her palm lightly over the stack of folded shirts and lifted one to her face, trying to detect its scent. Who was this man? And where was he? She had expected him to be here with her in their first hours alone as a newly married couple.
After unpacking her belongings and stowing her trunk under the bed, Leena went to look for Girish when she heard someone calling to her. “Leena, come.” Rekha was beckoning to her. She led Leena to the back of the house and into the kitchen. “There’s the stove,” she said, pointing. “Fuel is by the dose. Don’t waste it, it’s costly.” Rekha moved briskly around the kitchen, showing Leena the cooking vessels and utensils, and where the grains and lentils were stored. She pulled down the tin of spices from one of the upper shelves. “Watch carefully. Sahib has particular tastes, so you need to learn. I’ll show you today. Tomorrow, you’ll do the cooking yourself.”
Leena was startled by Rekha’s brusqueness, the sudden change in her demeanor. She must have been tired from the wedding and the journey, worried about getting food prepared for everyone. “I will help, don’t worry. I can prepare the rice?” Leena offered.
“The rice first, then the chapatis,” Rekha said without a hint of warmth. “The dough is there. Sahib likes his chapatis very thin, so don’t tear them.”