Page 3 of Six Days in Bombay

I followed Indira down the hall. Perhaps she needed my help changing a bed. But she opened the door to the stockroom and said, “Lock the door.”

Puzzled, I did as she said.

Then she turned and lowered the stack of sheets that had obscured her face. There was a cut on her upper lip and a bruise on her cheek.

“Oh, Indira.” I rushed to my friend and took the sheets from her, setting them down on the bench in the middle of the room. “Let me see.” Gingerly, I touched her cheek where a red spot was starting to bloom. “Sit down,” I commanded. Like a child, she did as she was told and started to cry.

The stockroom consisted of a wall of shelves where sheets, towels and pillowcases were stacked. At the far end was a first-aid closet. The nurses’ lockers were on the opposite wall. (Doctors had their own changing room.) I loved the clean scent of this room: lavender, linen, rose water, a hint of antiseptic.

I hurried to the first-aid closet and removed the hypochlorite solution, antiseptic ointment and gauze. Back at the bench, I found Indira delicately trying to wipe away her tears, wincing when her hand touched the bruise.

As I cleaned the blood from her lip, I asked, “Balbir?”

She nodded.

I grit my teeth. It wasn’t the first time her husband had laid a hand on her. “The cheekbone isn’t shattered. Small comfort.” I dried the cut with gauze, cleaned it with the antiseptic and applied a little ointment. “Was it the same this time?”

“Hahn.”She dropped her voice a few registers, imitating her husband. “‘Three girls and no son! What is the matter with you?’” She switched to her normal speech. “As if I could do anything about it!” She was crying in earnest now, not bothering to wipe the tears.

“You’ll ruin all my good work, you know,” I said gently. I squatted in front of her and took her hands in mine.

She tried for a smile but the cut on her upper lip stopped her. “I know what you’re going to say, Sona.”

“And what’s that?” I released her and bit off a strip of gauze, which I used to pad the swelling below her eyes.

“That having a son is beyond my control. I’m a nurse, Sona! I know that. But he doesn’t believe it. You want me to leave him. You’ve never said it, but I know. And if I leave him, where am I going to go? His mother and father would throw me out of the house and keep the girls.” She sniffed. I gave her more gauze to blow her nose. “Can you imagine what their lives would be like? I can’t let that happen.”

I sighed. Short of treating her wounds, there seemed to be nothing I could do for her. Centuries of tradition had made daughters, wives, mothers dispensable. They either did what their men and their in-laws wanted or they paid an untenable price. To say my mother had been lucky never to have met her English in-laws was laughable. She’d suffered also. When she took up with my father, her family had cut her off as cleanly as an errant thread on a sari.

In my locker, I kept a compact. My mother used cedarwood, sesame seeds and costus root to blend a face powder that made her skin tone lighter. She’d always been proud of my fair skin, which Indians prized for its ability to attract suitable mates, but she still wanted me to use the powder. She also swore by Afghan Snow, a beauty cream endorsed by the king of Afghanistan. I refused to use either, but to appease her I accepted her gifts and kept them in my locker at work. Now, I lightly dusted Indira’s cheek and the top of her lip with the face powder.

Indira watched me. “Balbir wasn’t always like this. Until our second was born, he would bring me aladdoofrom the vendor down the street or a sari he’d seen at the bazaar. I loved him then. That was before he started going to Mahalaxmi.” With the pressure of so many daughters and the dowries he would have to pay for their weddings, Indira’s husband had started trying his luck at the horse track. So far, he’d been losing.

I put my hand on hers. She had happy memories of her husband,and that was good. But those memories paled in comparison to what he’d become.

A knock at the door startled us. Indira and I both stood up. I looked a question at her, and she nodded, straightening her nurse’s apron. I unlocked and opened the door.

It was Rebecca, the other half-English nurse who worked at Wadia’s. Her eyes narrowed when she saw us. “Don’t you two have work to do?” She looked first at me, then at Indira behind me. I shielded Indira from Rebecca’s scrutiny.

I gave her my warmest smile. “How are you, Rebecca? Your parents keeping well?” When I first came to Wadia’s, I’d assumed she and I, because we shared a common heritage, would become friends. In the end, it was Indira and I who had become close. I wondered if it was because Matron assigned the patients who required the most sensitive handling to me, even though Rebecca had been at the hospital longer. And perhaps the rumors, which might have swayed Matron, were true. Supposedly, Rebecca had become involved with one of the married doctors, who had subsequently transferred to another city. I’d been the subject of rumors long enough—Sona’s father was an escaped convict who had to be sent back to England; he stole from the army before he left; he drugged her mother to bed her—to know they rubbed your skin raw, making it bleed on the inside. I had no desire to defend my father, but I also didn’t want Rebecca to assume I was one of the rumormongers. Sometimes, I brought her slices of toffee butter cake my mother had made or a pink peony from our garden to soften her, ease her into a friendship. So far, it hadn’t worked.

Rebecca assumed a strange smile, full of teeth and no feeling. “We’re all well, thank you. My sister is pregnant again. And your mother, Sona? How is she keeping? Not too lonely, I hope?”

I flinched. Rebecca still had both her parents. Her English mother had fallen in love with her Indian math teacher while she was at boarding school and married him. Rebecca had two siblingsfrom that marriage—a real family—right here in Bombay. My father had abandoned my mother with two small children. It was something I confided to Rebecca when I first started working at Wadia. Then, she’d seemed friendly enough, gifting me a copy ofJane Eyre. Now, she was taking pleasure in reminding me that my mother had been deserted, and I regretted having been so indiscreet.

I felt my face grow warm, even as I answered, “She has her sewing.”

Rebecca stepped closer, close enough for me to see the acne scars on her cheeks. “Seamstress for hire,” she said, her head tilting in a gesture of concern. “Poor thing.” She put a sympathetic arm on my shoulder. It made me shudder, and I stepped back until her arm fell away.

“I need to stop at the pharmacy.” I excused myself, skirting around her to leave the stockroom.

Behind me, I heard Rebecca, her voice deceptively warm, say, “Did you fall down again, Indira?”

***

The hospital pharmacy was a small windowless room lined with shelves containing bottles of pills, herbs and liquids. It was staffed by a short, humorless man named Horace. Word had it that he was an Ayurvedic compounder long before the designation of pharmacist became official. Even without that title, Matron trusted him, having worked with him for twenty years. She also trusted us to sign out only the medication we needed when he left for lunch or for the day. Those of us on the night shift were used to recording which drugs we’d removed on behalf of which patients. I made a note on the clipboard attached to the door of his domain:Mrs. MehtaandMiss Novak.

My next stop was Mrs. Mehta’s room. A woman of forty-five, she was a regular at the hospital. Sometimes complaining of back pain, sometimes indigestion, sometimes migraines that needed immediate attention. I’d learned over time that she had a verytrying father-in-law, who lived with the family, and found fault with everything she served for dinner or the way his shirts were ironed or the chai that was served too cold. The only way she found relief was to spend a few days in the hospital.

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