Page 11 of Six Days in Bombay

When I got home, my “report card” was full. There was Mira’s talk of Paolo and Mozart, Mr. Hassan’s heart attack and Mrs. Mehta’s tirade.

There was also, of course, Dr. Mishra. Just thinking of Dr. Stoddard calling himmy handsome doctormade my face warm. I didn’t tell Mum about that. Nor did I tell her how I felt when Dr. Mishra touched my hand. She would jump to conclusions, and I didn’t want to encourage her.

It had been an exhausting night, and after dinner, I immediately lay down for a nap. I stroked my cheek with the hand Dr. Mishra had placed on Mira’s belly. How cool and dry his touch had been.

Two hours later, when sunlight filled the room, I decided to cycle to Indira’s house. I’d asked Matron during my shift if Indira had called. Matron had scowled; she was disappointed in Indira. My friend had not sent a note to say that she had a cold or had been in an accident or was at home with a sick child, and Matron had stayed late, as she often did and was expected to do, to pick up the slack. That wasn’t like Indira, who was conscientious to a fault.

By the time I got to Indira’s house, my neck was damp and the backs of my knees were sweaty from cycling. Her family lived in a chawl built for mill workers over forty years ago. Age andneglect had blackened the timber and pitted the brick buildings. I stepped over exhausted laborers sleeping on the streets. Posters for the film Mohan had invited me to see,Duniya Na Mane, covered the walls of apaan-wallanext door. This was not the Bombay the English knew. I looked for Indira’s building number. On the ground floor was a barbershop. Off to one side was a stairwell that reeked of urine and turmeric, made more pungent by the close quarters. I mounted the stairs to the fourth floor, covering my nose with my hand. I couldn’t help but thank our good fortune—Mum’s and mine—to have found a cheap room—that we generously called a flat—in a simple two-story house pressed up against the train tracks. At all hours of the day, we heard the melancholy howl, the hissing and puffing, the screeching of trains. After a few months, we became used to the noise but not the quaking of the building as the trains sped past. Still, the only smell we had to endure was the belching of coal smoke, a smell I had learned to tolerate.

I knocked on a door that had once been painted green. It was evident that the next layer down had been blue. Where both colors had worn away was bare wood. The walls were scarred with spit frompaaneaters who spewed red juice wherever they walked.

A man with plump cheeks and smallpox pits across his nose answered the door but only opened it halfway. A small girl—somewhere between two or three years—clung to his leg. She smiled shyly at me, pulling on her pink skirt. I thought of Rajat and his gummy smile, and I felt a hitch in my heart. What a lovely thing it had been to feel my brother’s tiny body pressed against mine in sleep. I missed him terribly after he died, but for Mum’s sake, I buried the feeling. It was only when I came face-to-face with little children that memories surfaced—like divers rising from the water, gasping for air—how his laugh had sounded like a hiccup, how he had loved playing with my hair. I swallowed.

Indira’s husband wore a white undershirt—or it had been white once upon a time—under a plaid short-sleeve shirt and tan pants. He was in the process of putting on a silver-colored watch, the edges revealing brass links underneath. His frown had chiseled two permanent gouges between his heavy brows. He looked me up and down. My long skirt and shirt must have tipped him off to the half of me that wasAngreji. In this neighborhood, I would have been better off borrowing my mother’s sari.

“Namaskar. I’m looking for Indira.”

“She is sick.”

“Oh. She hadn’t called the hospital. We were worried.”

“Too sick to call.” His black eyes were burrowing holes into mine. My knees trembled. I, who prided myself on my boldness, felt fear, the kind I imagined Indira felt every day. I looked at the little girl. She picked her nose and went inside the house, bored now by the stranger.

“May I see her? I need to know if she’ll be coming to help me with the patients later today.” It was a tiny lie, but at its heart, it was trying to be true. Indira was assigned to a different roster of patients. My hands had curled into fists, and my fingernails were carving moons on my palms. In my ears was a high-pitched alarm that I knew no one else could hear, like dogs who sense danger before humans do.

“She’s sleeping. And I need to leave for work.” He managed to slide his body out of the half-open door and shut it behind him. He used his keys to lock the door. Extending his arm to indicate that I should precede him down the stairs, he left me no choice but to leave without having spoken to my friend.

By the time I got back on my bicycle, which an old Muslim man had been guarding for me, my whole body was shaking so much that I had to dismount and walk with the bike until I felt able to steady myself on it.

Chapter 3

That evening, Matron found me as I was changing into my uniform. She asked me to come see her when I was done. I assumed it was because she wanted me to cover Indira’s patients. Perhaps my friend had called in sick again?

Matron’s office looked like a monk’s sanctuary. There was a large wooden cross on the wall behind her desk. A smaller one hung next to a Jesus statue on one wall. Every paper on her desk was neatly arranged. There were no stray items or medical apparatus or even a wayward pencil anywhere. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the file cabinets had organized themselves. She’d been trained in the Florence Nightingale School and followed its tenets of obedience, discipline and strict adherence to protocols.

She was sitting behind her desk, writing. Matron was a large-boned Englishwoman with ramrod posture and a dark birthmark on one cheek that resembled a cross. When she saw me, she indicated the plain wooden seat in front of her desk. Laying her pen down, she took off her gold-rimmed spectacles. I waited for her to start; it was customary. We both sat for a few moments looking at each other. Her uniform was spotless, crisply ironed. It was this attention to detail and her management of the nursing staff with perfect precision that commanded the respect of the hospital’s doctors.

“I’ve heard troubling news,” she said.

My heartbeat quickened. “About Indira? Is she alright, Matron?”

She played with the earpieces of her eyeglasses. “It’s about you.”

My heartbeat quickened. I sat up straighter in the chair. What had I done? Had I been negligent in my duties with a patient?

“Yesterday, you and Rebecca assisted in a critical situation. With one Mr. Hassan.”

I nodded. “Yes, a heart attack.”

She tilted her head. “Dr. Holbrook begs to differ with Dr. Mishra on that. In any case, you compromised the health of the patient by jostling Nurse Trivedi’s hand, which at the time was holding a syringe loaded with morphine.” She folded her hands, one on top of the other, on her desk.

My mouth opened. I clamped it shut. Anger, hot, molten and swift, shot up my spine. This was what Rebecca had threatened.When I tell Matron no doubt she’ll take your side…Instead of getting credit for a job well done, which I hadn’t even sought, I was being held accountable for an imaginary failure. I wanted to shout:A man’s life was saved!But I forced myself to count to ten, as my mother had taught me. I could not lose another opportunity to set a little aside for a bigger flat for Mum and me. I waited for Matron to continue.

“It is my responsibility at this hospital to ensure the well-­being of our patients while they’re in my nursing care. Your action yesterday might have resulted in a fatality, which would have meant I’d been derelict in my duties as the guardian of our patients. You are a good nurse. Efficient. Well-liked by the patients. Reliable. What happened?”

My hands had gone cold. I folded them, one on top of the other. I was taking time to gather my thoughts, carefully choosing my words. “It was fortunate, Matron, that Rebecc—Nurse Trivedi and I were able to support one another in a crisis situation.”I paused. “She is an excellent nurse. All would have been well had Mr. Hassan not elbowed her while she was administering the injection. The needle was headed for his lungs.” I looked down at my hands, as if they could tell me what to say next. “Which would have been disastrous.” I met her eye again, imploring her to understand what I wouldn’t say out loud. That Rebecca had been about to make a costly mistake, and I stopped it from happening.

Matron frowned. “I see.” She unclasped her hands, steepled her fingers. “As to the other point…”

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