Page 1 of Six Days in Bombay

BOMBAY

MAY 1937

Chapter 1

Mira winced as a spasm of pain shot through her. I put my palm on her forehead. Her skin was burning, like ajalebifresh from a pot of boiling oil. I grabbed a cotton towel from a stack by her bedside, wet it in her water glass and pressed it to her forehead. Her brow relaxed. She let out a sigh.

“What about the baby?” she asked, her speech slurred.

I opened my mouth to tell her, then thought better of it. “Let me get the doctor for you, ma’am.”

Her eyes shot open, as if she realized what I was going to say. “Oh, no!” Her eyes filled. “We must tell Paolo.”

I blinked. According to her chart, her husband’s name was Filip. Was it the morphine speaking? “Paolo?” I asked cautiously.

“My love. Taught me how to paint portraits. Until I met him, I could only paint landscapes. After that, it was as if people were the only things I could paint.” She spoke breathlessly, as if she were trying to catch the words before they floated away. “And now, Whitney has him copying the masters, which is a pity. What a waste of his talent! People like hanging the fakes on their walls, hoping their guests won’t know the difference. Most people wouldn’t.” She gripped my hand. “I’ll have Filip bring my paintings.” Her mouth twisted. “Of course, I only have the four left.” Her English was inflected with something other than thespeech of theBurra Sahibor the lilting way we Anglo-Indians spoke. It was softer, the hard sounds squashed down.

She groaned, loudly this time, squeezing my hand so hard it hurt. The morphine was wearing off. I glanced at the wall clock. Two more hours before her next dose.

I eased my hand out of hers, removed the compress from her forehead, now warmed from her skin, and immersed it in the water glass. When I replaced it on her brow, she seemed to relax a little. “You have a lovely smile.”

A blush crept up my neck. Once, one of my teachers in third form had said the same thing to me within my mother’s hearing. My mother had spat on the ground to ward off evil spirits who didn’t approve of vanity. Ever since, I’d been wary of compliments, worried they might cause my mother to fall on her knees and pray to Krishna for my safety.

“Talk to me. Please,” the painter pleaded as she clasped my hand once more, wanting me to keep her pain company. I looked at our joined hands, a study in opposites: hers blue-veined and pale, nails bitten to the quick, remnants of paint embedded in the fingerprint swirls, and mine the color of sand, scrubbed clean, slightly chapped at the fingertips. The warmth of her skin, slightly moist from the fever, was strangely comforting, the way my mother’s touch was. Mira Novak seemed to crave intimacy as intensely as most patients avoided it; they wanted only to reclaim their body—the one we poked and prodded—as soon as possible, shrugging off the memory of their convalescence.

***

They had brought Miss Novak to Wadia Hospital around eleven o’clock at night. She was feverish and agitated, cradling her stomach with her arms. The back of her skirt was soaked with blood. Her husband, a pale man with broad shoulders, said she’d been complaining of pain for a few days.

The husband hadn’t stayed. He left shortly after bringing her in.

When Dr. Holbrook, the house surgeon, finished tending toher—she’d needed a few stitches and quite a bit of morphine—Matron assigned me to nurse her. This was not unusual. Patients who were the least bit foreign were assigned either to me or to Rebecca, the other Anglo-Indian nurse on the night shift, because we spoke fluent English. In the daytime, Matron would assign another Eurasian nurse or take care of the patient herself.

“She may be here awhile,” Matron whispered, with a meaningful glance at me.

We’re a small hospital, and the patient had been given a private room. It did not escape my notice that she could have been taken to a larger hospital popular with the British but, apparently, there had been need for discretion. Even so, rumors ricocheted around the halls.This was no simple miscarriage.She had tried to do it herself. Her husband had done it. She had tried to take her own life.I paid no attention. It was enough to know that a woman needed our help; our job was to heal her.

Even before I read her chart, I knew who she was. Mira Novak. The painter. Famous, even here in Bombay. I’d seen her photo and read about her in theBombay Chronicle. The article said she had studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenza in Italy when she was just fifteen, the youngest student ever admitted. Her Hindu mother, a woman of high caste, had accompanied her daughter from their home in Prague to Florence, and ultimately to Paris, to nurture Mira’s talent. Until the age of twenty, Mira had never once stepped foot in India. But when I looked at the images of her paintings in the article, I didn’t see Paris or Florence or any of the other faraway places I dreamed about visiting one day. I saw village women in saris, their skin much darker than mine or Mira’s. In her paintings, the women sat quietly, somberly, as they painted henna on each other’s hands or tended sheep in the hills or pasted cow dung on the walls of their homes. Why was a young woman of privilege obsessed with the ordinary, the poor? I wondered.

She was six years older than I was—twenty-nine by the dateon her chart. To my mind, she was lovely. Smooth, unblemished skin. A brow line that angled toward hollowed cheekbones. Even though her eyes were closed, I could tell they were large, perhaps a little protuberant, but in a way that would be attractive in her face, dominating it, demanding the viewer’s gaze. Her nose, which ended in a slightly upturned tip, gave her an imperious look. That must have come from her royal bloodline. She wasn’t beautiful. My mother would have said she was striking, that her face had character.

***

Now she blinked, her eyes round, regarding me curiously, as if we hadn’t spoken a few minutes earlier. Her pupils were constricted, and she seemed disoriented.

“Mrs. Novak?” I waited for a flicker of recognition. “You are at Wadia Hospital, ma’am. In Bombay. You were brought in several hours ago.” I spoke quietly, in English accented with Hindi.

She frowned. She looked down at her torso, then back up at me. “Not Mrs.,” she said, “Miss Novak.”

“My apologies, ma’am.” I didn’t quite understand but I didn’t let it show. How could a woman be married and still carry her maiden name? Still, my job was not to question, and after what happened in Calcutta, I was wary of speaking what was on my mind. There, I wasn’t the only nurse whose breasts and behind were pinched by male patients, but I was the only one who had complained—often and loudly—which gave the Matron at the Catholic hospital a migraine and the license to banish me from her sight. I was a troublemaker, she said. Why hadn’t I just kept my mouth shut like the others?

But I wasn’t in Calcutta anymore. I was in Bombay. And I promised my mother things would be different here.

“How are you feeling, ma’am?”

She closed her eyes and laughed lightly. “I’ve been better, Nurse…” She let it hang, waiting for me to fill in the blank.

“Falstaff, ma’am.”

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