The Best Day of My Life (11 page)

She left the chair beside me. I tried to ignore it, but it called to me. My knees bent. I sat down, and in moments I was sound asleep with my head on the bed.

‘Good morning, Valli.'

Dr. Indra had arrived.

‘Would you like to stop drooling on Laxmi and tell me why you are here?'

I shook my head clear of sleep and stood up.

‘My bandages fell off.'

‘You came here to get new bandages put on your feet?'

‘Yes.'

‘Anything else?'

I want to be you
, I wanted to say, but I couldn't.

‘Just the bandages,' I said. I hoped she would be able to guess that I wanted more.

Instead she shook her head and said, ‘Come with me.'

She led me out into the hall and sat down with me on a bench.

‘If all you want me to do is bandage your feet, then I'm afraid I can't help you.'

‘You won't help me?'

‘That would not be helping you. It would be hurting you.'

‘No, it wouldn't.'

‘Yes. You would go back out into the street and continue living your life, all the while doing more damage to your feet and to the rest of your nerves. I am a doctor. I took an oath to do no harm. Simply giving you bandages and letting you leave would be doing you harm. I would be going against my oath.'

‘What's an oath?'

‘It's a solemn promise.'

‘To who?'

‘To myself. And it's very important to keep the promises we make to ourselves. So, if all you want is a bandage, I can't help you.'

I hung my head and looked at my hands.

‘What should I want?' I asked.

‘You should want to get well. Leprosy is curable if you take the pills. Your wounds are treatable if you allow us to treat them. You are a child. As far as we know, you have no parents or guardian. I could arrange things to make myself responsible for you and force you to take treatments. But I want you to make the decision.'

‘What would I have to do?'

‘You would have to stay here for a while. We will test you to see what kind of drugs you need. Some people need only one pill. Others need up to three different kinds of pills. You would have to take this medicine every day for six months to two years, depending on the test results. And you would have to let us treat your wounds properly, which might mean surgery.'

I didn't understand the word surgery, but I had other worries.

‘I would have to stay here all the time?'

‘Yes. For a while. Then we'll see.'

‘But I could go out during the day and come back here to sleep.'

‘No,' Dr. Indra said. ‘Staying here means staying here. Not running off into the street whenever you feel like it or whenever you get scared. Living here.'

‘I can't,' I told her.

‘Tell me why not.'

‘How will I eat?'

She smiled. ‘We have food here. We fed you before. Don't you remember?'

Why couldn't she understand? I leaned in close to her and whispered, ‘I don't have any money.'

Dr. Indra laughed. ‘I didn't think you did! All over the world, people send us money so that you can get treated.'

‘Me?'

‘And others like you. But it's not a gift. They expect something for their money.'

‘What? I don't have anything.'

Then I remembered my talk with the old man and his pet goat. I had quite a lot, really.

‘They expect you to get healthy and go on to do great things with your life.' Dr. Indra stood up. ‘I have to start my shift. Sit here as long as you need to. Let me know when you have made your decision.'

She walked away, then turned back again.

‘One more thing,' she said. ‘There will be no more talk of monsters. You will treat these people with respect. You have the same disease they do.'

‘Will I end up like them?' I pushed in my nose and clawed up my hands.

‘No,' the doctor said, walking away again.

‘How do you know?' I called after her.

‘Because,' she called back, ‘you have me!'

I stood at the top of the stairs and watched her walk down. I went back to the bench and stayed there.

There really was nothing to think about. Free food, a free place to sleep on a mat that was even softer than the grassy graves in the Englishmen's cemetery. My feet would get fixed and maybe Dr. Indra would let me look through the microscope again.

‘Tea?'

I looked up. A woman with part of her nose gone was pushing a cart full of cups and tea pots. She was hard to look at.

‘Are you a patient?' I asked.

‘I used to be,' she said. ‘Now I work here. I'm the tea lady.'

She poured me some tea with a hand that had some of its fingers worn away. She held out the cup for me to take.

I stared at it. She put the tea down on the bench beside me and rolled the cart away.

I couldn't make myself pick up the cup.

Maybe I couldn't do this, I thought, as I watched the steam rise up from the tea.

The tea lady pushed her cart over to the nurses' office. I could see through the large window that several nurses were leaning over files and charts, writing and talking. They said, ‘Good morning' and ‘Thank you' to the tea lady as she poured them their morning cups, then pushed the cart into the next ward.

The nurses drank from the cups, talked and wrote. To them it was just another ordinary day.

I picked up my own cup and drank the tea.

It tasted good. It tasted like tea.

And then I went in search of Dr. Indra. I was ready to tell her my decision.

13

Clean

‘T
his will be your bed.'

I was back in the same ward, close to the same bed. My old bed was still occupied by the woman with all the bandages. They were putting me in the bed right next to her.

‘You're close to the window,' Dr. Indra said. ‘You can keep an eye on the world.'

‘Are you going to do that to me?' I pointed to the woman in the bandages.

‘If you give me any trouble, I might.' But she said it with a smile, so she was probably joking.

I started to sit on the bed but she stopped me.

‘You're filthy.'

‘Do you want me to go down to the river to wash?'

She had something else in mind.

The tea lady, whose name was Usha, did more than just pour tea.

‘The washing room is through here,' she said. ‘Let's get you clean.'

At the end of the ward was a small lavatory with showers.

‘I can do this myself,' I said.

It was just the two of us in the washroom. Usha stood between me and the door.

‘Dr. Indra asked me to help you.'

‘I can do it,' I said again.

She stepped toward me to help me take off my kurta.

I stepped back.

‘Valli, look at me.'

I raised my eyes to her face, then looked down again.

‘Don't look away,' she said. ‘Look as long and as hard as you need to. Look at me until you see me.'

She held up her hands so I could look at them, too, the fingers only half of what they should have been.

I did as she asked.

I looked. Hard.

And something happened.

I stopped seeing the caved-in nose. I stopped seeing the damaged eye with its drooping eyelid and milky-looking eyeball. And I stopped seeing the stubs of fingers.

Instead I saw the face of the woman who had brought me a good cup of tea. I saw little lines around the corners of her eyes. I saw kindness in her smile. I saw a woman who was stubborn and hard working and did not want to hurt me.

‘I see you,' I said.

She smiled. And then she scrubbed.

Usha didn't have all her fingers, but what she had left were strong. She rubbed and scrubbed even harder than the women at Mrs. Mukerjee's. I kept saying, ‘Owww!' and all she said was, ‘Oh, does that hurt?' and she kept scrubbing.

She handed me a hospital gown and had me stand in front of a mirror while she combed out my hair.

I hadn't had many chances to look at myself in my life. The woman who was not my aunt had no mirror in her house. Well, she had a small one once, but the man who was not my uncle broke it when he was drinking.

I had looked at my reflection in shop windows, and a furniture store on Park Street had mirror squares stuck to the outside of it. In the early mornings the shop front would be crowded with women and men who lived on the pavement and were checking their hair before going off to work.

But a whole big mirror like this? Never.

I took a good long look at my face. I liked what I saw. If I tilted it a certain way and let one side be partly in shadow, I looked a little like the movie-star women whose pictures were on posters and billboards.

Then I covered up part of my nose and pretended it had been taken by leprosy, like Usha's.

I still looked good, I decided.

Then I backed up and started to do a Bollywood dance that I had learned in Jharia. I watched myself sway and twist.

Again, I looked good.

‘Hold still,' Usha said, but she wasn't angry. ‘No lice. Good for you.' She put a part down the middle of my head and wound my hair into two long braids that hung down my back. ‘Maybe we can find some ribbons for your braids.'

It felt funny walking back into the ward in a gown with no trousers. But I liked the feel of the braids bouncing against my shoulders.

‘Here she is,' Usha announced to the other women. ‘All clean and fresh. Everyone, this is Valli.'

I really looked at the other patients for the first time. Some looked normal, like any other women, and had just small bandages on their hands or feet. Others had feet propped up in big casts and bandages on their faces. Some were sitting up and reading. Others were resting.

They all smiled and said hello.

Except one.

‘Is she going to wake us up rudely every morning like she did today?' she asked.

‘As I recall, Mrs. Das, you brought no peace to us in your early days here.' The woman in the bed beside mine put her hand over her cellphone to talk to the grumpy-looking woman who didn't like me. She then went back to her phone conversation. File folders and notebooks were open all over the top of her bed, and she kept looking at them as she talked.

I sat on the edge of my bed. The last time I had been too sleepy and too scared to notice much. Now I wanted to notice everything.

In the home of the woman who was not my aunt, I had slept on the floor. Everyone did. That was all there was. In the streets I slept on sidewalks and benches, parks, graves and beaches.

This was the first time I would have a bed.

‘Do I have to share this with anyone?' I whispered.

‘It's all yours,' came a voice.

The woman in the bandages could talk.

I swung my feet off the edge of the bed. It was fun.

‘Can you swing your feet?' I asked the bandages.

‘Maybe soon,' she replied. ‘My legs aren't too bad.'

‘I'm Valli,' I said.

‘I'm Laxmi.'

‘Do you have leprosy, too? You must have it bad.'

‘I was burned,' she said.

‘It was one of those kitchen accidents.' The woman with the cellphone was finished with her phone conversation. ‘Her husband's family wanted more dowry. When there wasn't any more, someone poured kerosene on her and set her on fire. I don't know how she's still alive. And I don't know how she stands the pain. At fifteen!'

I looked at Laxmi. I thought of Elamma. I thought of the man who was not my uncle. It made me want to go back to Jharia and get her.

The cellphone rang again, and she started another call.

Some of the patients propped up their pillows at the back of the beds. They leaned against them when they sat up.

I did the same. It was comfortable.

I looked around the ward. Everyone was ignoring me. Some were dozing. Laxmi's eyes were closed. The grumpy woman was scowling at me. I ran my hands over my new braids, breathed in the clean smell of my skin and clothes and waited to see what would happen next.