Deaths in Darjeeling

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The sun rose golden through the misty backwater villages and I was instantly transported to a steam train of fifteen years ago, chugging through a timeless landscape. I was still as eager to drink in all the sights as we wended our way through West Bengal up to Siliguri. Though the Indian age of steam locomotion finally seemed to have passed little else had changed.

I was on my way to Darjeeling to meet friends, some of whom I had known since that first visit in the winter of ’85/’86. One friend who I would not be meeting was old Mr P. T. Lama. I had first met him through a chance meeting with his granddaughter, the ebullient nun, Ani Sonam Chodron. When she had informed her grandfather that she had just met a disciple of the English monk, Sangharakshita, he told her that he knew that monk very well and that he had visited their house many times back in the ’50’s and ’60’s. He told that though the English monk’s had resided in Kalimpong he, himself, had been his main translator and organiser in the Darjeeling area. P.T Lama was a slight old gentleman, dapper and well-spoken when I had met him and though he was old, he was very fit and daily used to walk the few miles up from Westpoint to the Mahabodhi Vihara by the toy-train station. A few years ago, after he was into his 90’s he had been knocked down on his daily pilgrimage and broken a hip. Even so, he was eventually a familiar figure again on the busy road, but hobbling slowly. Last night, Mrs K.B. gently told me that he had passed away since my last visit. And what about his wife? Ah, she too had passed away, only a bare few months after. Sad, I reflected, gazing out through early morning mists, never to meet again.

In Darjeeling one of the first things I did was to travel out to Jore Bungalow - about 6kms back up the hill from Darjeeling. Usually, on the way, I would stop at West Point and drop in on P.T.Lama and his wife but as the jeep wound its way up the hill past Westpoint again I felt a sad that I would never see this little, upright, Buddhist gentleman of the hills again, nor his Hindu wife. However, soon the remaining sights of the short journey demanded my attention: past Dale Gompa where the head of the Drugpa Kagyu has his base; up to Samten Choling, Tomo Geshe’s newer Gompa, a place where many Tibetans didn’t want to be seen going to due to the Rimpoche’s devotion to the banned deity Dorje Shugden; past the lane that goes to Dhardo Rimpoche’s Gompa, Yi Ga Choling; through Ghoom station where the tiny steam trains and rattling carriages have a rest after their journey up from the plains; then, finally, along the ridge to Jore Bungalow junction where one road branches off down to Teesta Bridge and another short road branches off and climbs up to one of Chatral Rimpoche’s Gompas. Of all the Gompas this is my favourite.

I wanted to visit a woman hermit called Ani Rindzin. On my first trip to Darjeeling in 1985-6, again, this was when I had first met P.T.Lama’s granddaughter, Ani Sonam Chodron. She had said, I just must meet her friend, Ani Rindzin, who was the wife of some Rimpoche or other, and who mostly stayed in her tiny hut doing her sadhana. She took me to see her and I was indeed impressed by the middle-aged woman who just stayed in her hut doing her pujas and sadhanas. There was something indefinable and beautiful about this quiet woman wrapped in her brown chubba with the beads of her mala slipping through her fingers. I briefly met her husband, and there too is another short story, but for another occasion. Her husband had died before my second visit but the aging woman just continued in her hut absorbed, exuding beauty and with the beads slipping through her fingers. Each time I had gone to Darjeeling I went out to Jore Bungalow to meet her. I always took her some presents. Noodles, butter, tea and so on. And she was always very friendly and delighted to see me. I also took others to visit her – Mokshapriya, Mokshananda, Amarajyoti and Padmakara. They were all very much impressed meeting her. On my last visit to the Gompa I was disappointed to learn she had left for Nepal, where I think on of her sons stayed and where her master, Chatral Rinpoche stayed. Again, in Nepal, she had continued her reclusive life. On this visit I thought I had heard that she was back at the Gompa again and so I went with some gifts and a scarf for her, and some photographs of our activities, which she always enjoyed seeing. It was therefore a great shock to learn from one of the monks that she had died two years previously. Apparently she had tripped while circumambulating a gompa, had broken her leg and had later died. However, I heard another story from one of her friends that she had in fact recovered from that broken leg and that it was some stomach trouble she had died from. It was hard to find out what actually happened. Whatever had happened I was very much saddened. After meditating for a while I left to make my oft repeated pilgrimage to Old Ghoom Monastery, Dhardo Rimpoche’s Gompa.

There were few monks around and it all seemed a bit quite, even deserted. However a stout monk let me into the shrine hall to make my devotions but he seemed so put out that I was taking my time that I left quicker than usual. He locked up after me and disappeared. I found a plank of wood doubling up as a bench and sat down in the courtyard. It now was nearly ten years since Dhardo Rimpoche had passed away and, though I had not known it till today, nearly two years since Ani Rindzin had died. And since my last visit P.T.Lama and his wife had both died. My mind turned to thoughts of sickness, old age and death. I was forty-seven, the age my mother had her first cancer and about the same age as my father when he had had two heart attacks in quick succession. Two years ago I had been treated for skin cancer, had a very serious accident that smashed my right shoulder and had two further operations on it, not all together successful. I’d had an abscess on my left knee that flared up so quickly that it necessitated an emergency operation the same day I had visited my local doctor. This type of operation required the wound to be left open to heal in its own time – seven weeks in all, laid up on a bed! Sitting in this deserted courtyard of Dhardo Rinpoche’s Gompa I felt the uncertainty and frailty of human life.

More intense than these deliberations on impermanence, sickness and the inevitability of death were reflections on the increasing frustration I’d felt over the last two years. I had been in the UK for two years, unable to return to resume my work with our Order and movement in India. I’d found myself based first in Birmingham and afterwards Cambridge doing what I could while I waited for health and the right circumstances to coincide so that I could return to that work. The work in Cambridge and Birmingham was, no doubt, valuable in itself but I knew that I was not working at anything like the level I should be. It felt as if I was ‘filling in’, or ‘marking time’, not able to fully take up any big project. This four-week break in the Himalayas, in a time of reasonably good health, was a period in which to rethink my future. I didn’t really have to rethink it, though. Intuitively I knew that I couldn’t continue the way I had over the last two years. I felt I would soon either have to return fully to work for our Movement in India or put my full energies into some other project within the Movement. If I didn’t do so the consequence would be that I would just fritter away my energies here and there and that I would, by the end of my life, deeply regret that I had not made as much of my life as I should have, or could have. It was the engagement of my energies in one big project that had brought out the best in me and demanded transcendence of my limitations. I really had grown since my involvement with the Ordination Process in our Movement in India and it was the sudden diversion of my energies for two years that had given rise to such frustration. I decided I would have re-engage with that work very soon, within a very few months, or I would have to take a new direction within our Movement. This decision was quite firm in my mind and my pensive mood lifted even though I was still saddened by the deaths of P.T. Lama and his wife and of Ani Rindzin.

While I had been reflecting one or two monks passed back and forth through the Gompa compound on errands. One of them eventually sauntered up to me and asked me where I came from and what my name was, who was my Lama and so on. He was a short in height, in his early twenties and not particularly Tibetan looking, I thought. His eyes, for one, were not Tibetan. They were light brown not dark black. He sported a red fleece sweater and a blue and purple woollen hat, with ‘BULLS’ written on it. He introduced himself as Tenzin Gelek. Realizing I had some connection with the both the late Dhardo Rimpoche and the present Dhardo Tulku he introduced me to three other young monks who lived in a room off the courtyard. They honoured me with tea and biscuits. They had virtually no English, nor Hindi, each having come from Tibet within the last few years. They had all studied at Drepung in Karnataka for a few years but had been brought here by an old Drepung Geshe who was now also staying in the Gompa. Tenzin translated for us and we five got on very well. As I walked away from Yi-Gha-Choling, through the I carried with me a new and deeper conviction: I should take every opportunity to practice the Dharma and not to let chances slip through my fingers through carelessness or laziness.

Back in Darjeeling town, then, I thought to visit another old friend. On my second visit to Darjeeling in 1987 I had put up in a hotel and had stayed in one of the cheap basement rooms. I had been looked after by the three mischievous hotel boys: Laxman - a Hindu; a Nepali who was Buddhist-Hindu, whose name I’ve forgotten; and Dorje a thin Tibetan boy who, at nineteen, was the oldest of the three. They had all been so good-natured and had helped me so much that I gave each of them a good tip before I left. Dorje being quite overwhelmed by the tip, which actually wasn’t that big, presented me with his black long-johns – he knew I had been finding it bitterly cold in Darjeeling. On subsequent visits I had always gone to see him (the others had since moved on) and, after his marriage a few years ago, I used to take him or send him a little money now and then for his baby. He always used to send me a card at Xmas and thank me for my friendship and wish that I would come and visit him again soon. Over the years we must have met seven or eight times. I had passed the Sunflower Hotel the previous day, my first full day of the visit, and thought to leave off visiting him till a little later. This afternoon I thought not to leave it any longer. I asked at the desk for Dorje, the Tibetan worker. “You mean the Tibetan lad, the servant?” “Yes.” The two men at the desk looked at each other and said something in Nepali. I explained he had worked here for a number of years and that on my last visit here, a couple of years back, he had still been working here. “Yes, yes,” one of the men said, “but he died a two months ago.” Seeing the shock on my face the man just said, “TB!” I asked if they knew where his wife and child were living but, Dorje being only a servant and a Tibetan one at that, they had never known where he stayed. I meditated long that night.

January 2000

The Boy and the Yeti and the Lama

Did you have old small town cinemas like we did in Scotland back in the fifties and sixties? People now call them flea-pits but I certainly never called them that. I remember, like almost all kids of my generation, going to the Saturday morning kids shows that had a whole mix of things to hold our attention for two or three hours at a stretch although, now, only a vague Batman stands out from a rather drab overall impression. I remember watching old black and white 'cowboys', - we never called them 'Westerns'. And early on Mum must have taken use to take us to see other full-length films. I remember a colour film set in Africa for the giant spider (giant for those days!) that crawled across the chest of the hero and a 'native' with glove of a tiger's claws that ripped through the canvas of the hero's tent. And I remember the Flight of the White Stallions more for a bad egg that I'd eaten beforehand that made me feel ill during the show and vomit afterwards. I have never really liked eggs since then. Some things stick in your mind.

But from that time there's really only one film that stuck in my mind, The Abominable Snowman. I watched it again a few days ago for the first time since I originally saw it in the very early sixties, when I was about ten. I think we must have been recommended to see it by my friend's elder brother, Terry. He was a keen film fan and used to send Robert and me to see films that he thought we'd like. We usually went on a Saturday afternoon. Of the many cinemas in Aberdeen we most often we went to the ABC, the Odeon or the Majestic but on this occasion, and I think it was my first time, we went to a small cinema in Diamond Street, The Cosmo. I'm not sure what I thought the film would be about with a title like that but I understood when I was told it was about the Yeti. I had remembered correctly the rough outline of the film. An expedition goes to capture a yeti in the Himalayas. Their base camp is a Tibetan Monastery where they meet the High Lama. Although they capture a yeti they are, finally, unsuccessful. More importantly they discover the Yeti is the missing link or a descendant of the missing link.

Three things stick in my mind. First was that it was set in a Tibetan Monastery – that stuck, although I had no images of it all except one when the expedition is climbing up the slope and nearly at the gates. You can see the Tibetan Monastery huddles under a cliff. What surprised me recently was recognising the original for this set. It's almost certainly taken from one of Lama Anagarika Govinda's paintings that he did in the thirties on his 'Tsaparang Expedition' to the lost kingdom of Guge in the Western Himalayas.
Second, as I said, the yeti was supposed to be the missing link. What sticks in my mind is that I really didn't know what the missing link was and I had to ask my friend Robert, and maybe later also his elder brother. The missing link was the missing, lost species, that connects man with the monkeys, I was told. This was suggested in the film but it became clearer as the film progressed that it was more that the yeti was a parallel descendent of the missing link – and one more advanced than us, with strange mental powers. That I didn't remember.

The third thing, again as I remembered it, was that you never saw the Lama abbot's face until the very end. We were shown the face of the Yeti and in the closing scene when I finally saw the lama's face I thought it bore a close resemblance to the yeti's. Actually, although I understood the symbolic significance of the climax of the film I remembered it incorrectly: it was the yeti's face we never saw till the end, the lama's face was visible throughout! Still, as I say, I made a connection and that moment stuck in my mind throughout all my years – a mystical face appearing momentarily from the shadow, except it was the yeti's face not the lama's. The point for me being, of course, that there was indeed a link between the Yetis and the lamas, with their mystical powers. The lama in the film had powers and could tell what was happening away on the distant mountains and the yetis could make you see things, hallucinate, sort of invade your mind. The lama and his attendant were portrayed in a slightly sinister manner, but then they did have the last of the Yeti, the last of the more-intelligent-than-human creatures, to protect.

Having seen the film again I'm still left with questions: why should this film have stuck in the mind of a little boy from Aberdeen? Why did not the monastery and the monks not stick more in my mind? The film got many things right – obviously a lot of effort was put into getting it right. The monk's robes were a bit more Christian like but other details were right. For the chanting you can hear the famous verse that begins, "May the Bodhicitta arise where it has not yet arisen…" (This is still chanted nowadays – I heard it this year chanted as a peaceful protest by Tibetans, monks, nuns and lay, during Tibetan protests against the Beijing Olympics!) Or did it all stick in my mind, only much more subliminally? And why should I have been captivated all these years by the face of the lama – except it wasn't the lama was it? It was actually the Yeti's face, which I thought (wrongly it seems from looking at the list of credits) was portrayed by the same actor as the lama. Why did the boy transpose that serene, mystical shadowy face to the lama? Strange – I remember being this boy! Is it strange then that I later gravitated towards the lamas, in my forties wrote a biography of a lama of Tibet and even, to be honest, have wanted to be a lama of some sort? And isn't it strange that I too, like the famous Czechoslovakian actor, Arnold Marle, who played the Lama, should in turn play the role of a red-robed lama in a Buddhist monastery.

The Softening of Nurse Voodoo

It was a dangerous name to be overheard using - it certainly wasn’t politically correct - and one never knew what to expect from her. It was Bill who first coined it, I think, and we all knew the name fitted to a ‘t’. But it was only used once and there was a tacit agreement that that was her name. There’s a certain smugness, mixed with revenge, that comes through the distillation of a nickname and, no doubt, we all felt it. Merv was her real name but we all thought of her as Nurse Voodoo.

For me it all started on my first morning the consultant and his band of obedient disciples were doing their rounds. My leg was still swathed thick in bandages after a night in casualty and it was agreed I needed an operation. The consultant casually picked up the clipboard of notes that hung on the rail at the foot of my bed. He knew his business and it didn’t seem necessary to unwrap all those yards of cotton strips. The interns all nodded obediently but I felt cheated. By next morning the bandages were still on and consequently nobody since the casualty doctors on the first night had seen my leg. I called sister over and she agreed the dressing needed changing to more manageable bandages before Doctor’s round. Sister delegated.

I’d seen the slightly sour looking black nurse in our section the previous day but hadn’t paid much attention to her or anyone else as I’d slept most of the day. This morning I tried to work out her status from her uniform – ward orderly, staff nurse, state enrolled nurse or what? She wore no name-tag.

Merv was tall and probably in her fifties with a bush of stiff grey hair. Her bottom lip hung far out and bequeathed a sulky look and as she frowned over her half-moon glasses she looked more than just surly, even down-right bad-tempered. There was nothing remarkable about changing the dressing. She unravelled bandage after bandage till my inflamed and grossly swollen knee was uncovered. She ripped open sterile paper packages, laid out cotton wool pads, gauze, latex gloves and tubes of sterile water so on, and she washed my leg from thigh to shin. With my knee clean and exposed again Merv went off to fetch another dressing and I took the opportunity to examine the swelling in another attempt to divine how it had become infected. Merv returned muttering under her breath, peering over her specs checking her six charges in the ward bay. Nothing was amiss so she turned her attention to me. She was still muttering while she ripped of the new sterile packaging with a fierceness that was frightening. I couldn’t catch what it was she was muttering. Merv examined the new dressing – about eight or so square inches of plastic with a small cotton pad lost in the middle of it. Merv peeled the back-paper off the dressing and looking over her half-moon’s grinned at me. She centred it over my knee and let it gently descend… and I knew disaster had struck. It gripped with a desperation like the thing that gripped John Hurt in ‘Alien.’ My knee was super glued with cling film.
“There! All done.” And she grinned.
And she marched off with the bits and pieces of her trade leaving me in shock. She must have known it would bind to every hair on my knee and leg. She must have known! And that grin, what of that? And how to get this thing off before Doctor’s round in ten minutes. As the minutes passed it was as though the plastic were shrinking and gripping tighter and tighter. I tried surreptitiously to free an edge of the cling-film stuff from the hairs of my leg. It was agony beyond description.

The young nurse Eugene appeared and I called him over. He looked horrified, “Oh Sweet Mary! What have they done? Not one of those! And the consultant is on his rounds now!” He knew he had only minutes. As he made to leave to get some help Merv returned and scowled at the two of us.
“What he been saying?” she asked Eugene.
“O just men’s talk!” It was a smooth cover up and she knew it was. I received a dirty scowl.
But, then, there was nothing to be done - the consultant had arrived, his inferiors still obediently following him, trying hopelessly to look superior in front of Sister. I rolled back the sheet and exposed the leg encased in its super-glued cling film. Sister and Doctor both drew breath at the same moment and looked at me for some sort of explanation. I could only shrug my shoulders. Sister was terribly upset – whether on account of the reputation of the nursing in her ward or whether in sympathy with me I couldn’t tell.
“Well, we’ll just have to pull it right off,” announced the doctor.
“No, no, we’ll have to do it slowly and gently,” Sister insisted, “No, no. Straight off in one go!” said the doctor.
Sister was prising and teasing one corner of the dreaded plastic coating while Doctor ignored her and pulled and tugged at another corner. For all his insistence on the fast method he could not move the wretched thing. And so continued the tugging, prising, and pulling, Doctor and Sister arguing the virtues of the respective methods. Sister with one hand tried to restrain Doctor while trying her best to inflict the slow treatment with her other. One tugged hard while the other pulled and prised, neither to any avail as each was trying to interfere with the other.
Exasperated, Sister pulled rank.
“This is nursing matter. It is my province!” she said.
She and another young black nurse set to and with steady application of scissors began to cut the thing loose from the hairs.
“God, this stuff should be banned!” Sister said in exasperation. Merv was no where to be seen.

That night a sign was hung over my bed, ‘Nil by mouth.’ I was on the run up to the operation. Two night nurses seemed to be running the whole ward overnight. They seemed both to come from the same Caribbean Island. Their voices warbled and gurgled with laughter close by in the nurses tea room.
“And my old man came in drunk as a lord.” (Warbles of laughter.)
“I thought you told him?”
“Told him? I fixed him – just pushed him in the bath and left him!” More hoots of laughter.
“My, oh my.” …and so on.
Eventually they came on their night drug round. Two little curly haired women in their fifties pushing a trolley. Every night it was the same – tea, gossip and lots of laughter. I often wondered what it was about their laughter that you could tell they were Afro-Caribbean? Yes, understandable that accent, dialect and intonation can pinpoint someone’s background, even to the extent of a town in a particular country. But laughter? These two unremarkable women who worked all night, no doubt just for the money, and had been doing so for probably for some years, were two of the cheeriest souls on the ward. Towards morning time one of them woke me and changed me into a special gown for the operation and injected something that made me sleepy and woozy.

After the operation I think I must have slept much of the day but I remember being very hungry and thirsty and drank quite a lot. It was the next day before I felt any better. I was wakened at some point for a bed bath by Mavis. She was from Trinidad. Her coffee skin was freckled and her frizzy black hair was swept back and tied behind with a little band. She was as cheery and bright as Merv was brooding and sullen. I saw her eyeing the Wordsworth biography on my bedside cabinet.
“Oh I really love poetry, you know,” she said. “I really love it. You know at school we read all the famous poets,” and in an extraordinarily rich voice she declaimed, “ ‘Underneath the spreading boughs of the chestnut tree.’ ”
Hearing such poetry recited with so much feeling in such an environment seemed to lend even greater height and colour to the lines. They seemed to flow with the freshness of a summer breeze.
“O that’s lovely and you say it so well,” I told her. “Who’s that by?”
Her face puckered and her eyes screwed up, “Hmn. I forgot. Was it…hmn.”
“Shelley?” I suggested.
“No!”
“Keats?”
“No.”
“Byron?”
“No. Who’s the one who wrote Hiawatha?”
“Longfellow!”
“Yes, that him – Longfellow. Yes, I really love poetry. You know,” she said, “I’ve got an old poetry book at home. You know, really old, with coloured paper at the end and real leather covers. O, it’s really beautiful. I’ll bring it in and let you see it. I keep it in a shoe box in the cupboard - in the glory hole!”
It seemed a lovely image. A woman from Trinidad and she keeps an old book of poetry in a shoe box in the glory hole.

We had a new arrival that day, Fred. He was a big bloke, about 16 stones, brought in with severe pains in the leg and groin. He spoke in a deep breathless voice that seemed to be dredged up through miles of wheeze before it burst out. And burst out it did in loud Midland accents. And old and fat though he was he still flirted atrociously with the nurses, otherwise he was well-behaved and very cheery. He had a unique manner of throwing himself about the bed when he wanted to turn. His arms and legs would fling violently in the general direction he wanted to move and his huge body had no option but to eventually follow suit. “Bloody hell!” he’d shout in pain as he thrashed about on his bed. And since his pain never let up he’d fling himself this way and that and seemed to find the only respite in his cries of “Bloody hell!”

Fred sweated profusely overnight in the hot ward and in the morning he called to Merv asking if he could have a wash in his bed. Merv said nothing but only peered at him over the top of her glasses. She wandered off and returned with a basin of water and a towel. Fred at this point was stranded flat on his back and had been trying unsuccessfully to raise himself up.
“Can you give me a hand up,” he wheezed.
“You’ll have to get yourself up. I’m not doin’ it!”
Fred flung himself to and fro, wheezing the inevitable expletives all the while and eventually raised himself half way up the pillows. This degree of success was perhaps the sign that seemed to indicate that he was also capable of giving himself a bed bath.
“Wash yourself. I’m not doing it,” and she flung the towel in his face.

During the day ‘nature called’ and Mavis and another white nurse came to help me get up but they both had different ideas about how it was done. The white nurse who had been on this ward for some time advocated the painful procedure I had gone through the previous day. Although Mavis was new to the ward she was not new to nursing. In fact she had been a ‘staff nurse’ before she had given up nursing to have the first of her two children. Mavis was firm with the other nurse, we would do it her way. She moved me to the edge of the bed and told me to hook the foot of my good leg under the ankle of the bad leg. By leaning back I could perform a trick of balance raising my bad leg a few inches using the firmness and strength of the good leg and pivot on my buttocks. I swung round and lowered the bad leg to the floor. It was such a simple little manoeuvre and took out all the strain and pain of the pushing and pulling that I had gone through the previous day. Mavis had the pleased expression of a minor triumph on her face. The other nurse took it in good grace and I set off on crutches to the toilet.

Not long after ‘nature called’ to Fred and he called Merv and asked for her help. “I’m not movin’ you. Get yourself up,” she said, and she stood watching him. Fred really was so huge that any movement required phenomenal effort and she watched while he thrashed again this and that way on his bed. No ‘bloody-hells’ this time – he seemed as determined as Merv was obstinate – and there was nothing for it but to shift himself. By dint of strength he eventually managed to hang his legs over the side of the bed and sit up. Of course his face had turned beetroot red with the effort and the deep bronchitic noises gurgled from his chest. Merv was satisfied, he could move. She walked off and left him.
But, was it fate or chance, a nurse passed by with a wheelchair and the way we all hailed it one might have thought it was rush hour on 42nd Street and that she was a taxi driver. She wasn’t too busy to stop within minutes she wheeled the bulky man the few yards to the toilet and continued once more on her way with the wheelchair. After some time the toilet emergency light and buzzer rang.
Merv was close by and checked but seeing it was only Fred she told him, “You can get yourself back to your bed!” and she held the door open for him. Every effort of his she scrutinised, on the lookout for any indication he was ‘putting it on’. Of course we others had known that Fred hadn’t gotten to the toilet under his own steam but, to be fair to Merv, she didn’t know, so she just stood by. With every faltering step his whole frame shuddered and quaked and his face purpled again and poured in sweat. Although she was still peering over her glasses doubt had stolen across her face. It seemed Fred was on the point of collapse. His chest heaved and his eyes, starting from their sockets, had seemed to have lost their focus. Merv’s brow was now a furrow of wrinkles and she chewed her bottom lip. Two more small steps and Fred was hanging on the frame of the nearest bed, his legs were already buckling under him. It was obvious he was going down. Amazingly, before his legs fully folded Merv was there and she caught his full weight.
“It’s alright love. I’ve got you. It’s alright. Lean on me. You’re OK, just take your time. Get your breath.” Fred gasped raggedly as he tried to thank her.
How Merv managed to get him back to his bed I could hardly credit, he really was quite a massive man. He was not only back in his bed but Merv had lain him back and piled him all round with soft pillows. His breath slowly steadied and his eyes closed and he fell into a doze while Merv bathed his face with a towel dowsed in ice-water, her face all softness and tenderness.

Poppies - Suvajra in Hospital 1

Eugene took my details. “And when did the trouble start?” he asked in his Dublin tones. He had a boyish look to him with uncut hair flopping down in an old fashioned fringe at the front but when I looked closer I could see he was older and maturer than the impression he gave. “I’m sorry I’ve got to ask all these stupid questions when you’ve been asked them all before but to me it’s all part of the process of getting to know the patient. And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it now?” I didn’t mind in the least. Suddenly looking up in puzzlement Eugene called out, “Dan, what’s the team called?” Dan, the other nurse, was changing a bed just opposite us. He was good looking but rather too well-built, in fact, on his way to tubbiness. He looked up from his task – “What team?”
“Our team!” Dan still looked vacant. “The team that runs this bay – what’s it called?”
“Poppies! This is Poppies!”
Eugene explained that each bay of the ward was named ‘Poppies’ or ‘Lillies’ or something. The fact this bay was a men’s bay and was called ‘Poppies’ seemed a little absurd! We were six men with leg injuries. ‘Lillies’ was the next bay with six old ladies with broken hips.
Eugene settled me in my bed promised a jug of iced water and a glass. I took a deep breath, one of those long relaxing breaths that indicate – well, you never quite know what they indicate but they indicate something.

The promised jug of water never appeared and the night team soon took over. I had spent nearly all day in casualty without a single drink and I was now desperately tired. I gathered up courage and pressed the call-button. The night sister strode into the bay. She was a slim woman in her late thirties. “What is it?” she asked in a mild Brummy accent.
“Could I possibly have a cup of tea or a jug of water. I’ve not had anything to drink since...” Sister’s amiable smile changed instantly, “Do you mean to say you called me up here for a cup of tea?” Her withering look silenced the protest that had gathered on my lips. She was already off, her thick auburn hair bouncing as she went. It was only later I found out you didn’t disturb the night team when they were just taking over from the previous team - so many important things to be done. A few minutes later, Night Sister returned with tea, a jug of water and a glass. Was that a faint smile on her lips? I couldn’t tell. “Do you mean to say...Do you mean to say,” was still ringing in my ears.

Next morning I was still the stranger in he bay and was slowly getting to know the other patients when the young man in the bed next to me called one of the attractive female nurses to him. “What is it Paul,” she asked.
“Yesterday I was feeling very irritated and depressed. Can you tell me, would that have been an effect of the drugs I was on yesterday?”
“Well, it might have been,” she answered. “It’s not a usual side effect. But it could have been.”
“Yeh, because, I felt really, really depressed yesterday. And very irritable. I couldn’t speak to people and just wanted to hide away. Oh, and I had a headache as well. It was...”
“I’ll go and get ‘Staff’ and see what she says.” And with that the nurse was off. One of the Staff nurses appeared immediately afterwards. “What is it Paul?” she asked in a matronly manner, although she was far from matronly. Paul explained again while ‘Staff’ looked over his charts. Paul was still rambling on when she turned to one of the younger nurses and asked her to check Paul’s temperature and blood pressure and strode off. Paul’s monologue of complaints trailed off. A few minutes later a young doctor appeared and Paul had to go through his story again. This time Paul didn’t seem interested in telling his story to the young male doctor. The whole episode had slightly bizarre quality to it.
Paul’s bed was adjacent to the ward corridor and he had to bear the brunt of all the visitors, medics, porters nurses and doctors who paraded past his bed day and night. At night he slept with curtains pulled fully round is bed – he was the only one us who did so. He was a Midlander with a shock of thick fair hair. He would have been quite good looking but something marred that impression. Was it something in the podginess of the face or something in his character? It was hard to pin down.

After the breakfast ritual had been completed a doctor passing our bay with a couple of his colleagues launched into a harangue at Paul. “I’ve told you before,” he said in his clipped Asian tones, “you must rest your leg. You never do what we tell you.” The young man tried to defend himself. “I do! I rest it a lot. I was just coming back from the toilet.” The doctor would have none of it.
“No! You’re always up and about and you’re supposed to be resting. You should have your leg raised up,” and looking around the bay saw the man by the window with his leg raised high up on a frame, “like that man over there. Look, if you’re not going to help us to get you better at least you should try and do it to help yourself.” Good argument, I thought, but it cut no ice with the young man. After the doctor had passed on the young man expostulated with us about his innocence. The man with the raised leg piped up. “ ‘E’s got a point, Paul! You’re never here. You’re always nipping off for your Mars bars.” Everybody laughed, including the Paul.
“Well, what am I supposed to do? Starve?”
Eugene brought a frame for Paul’s leg and Paul suffered his bandaged leg to be hitched up onto it but it wasn’t long before Paul was out of the bed again. He quickly checked up and down the corridor - no sign of the Doctor. He pulled on a jacket and set off, his crutches splayed out to the side, like some giant insect.
Old Charlie in the bed opposite mine shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of helplessness. Charlie was very friendly with Paul. Of the six of us Charlie was the veteran – he’d been in for nine weeks. He’d been knocked down by a car late one night and broken both his legs and wrists. He’d been on his way for a fish supper intending to sober up after a hard night at the pub. “Well I’d no idea where the car came from,” he told us, “One minute it wasn’t there, the next it hit me. Just goes to show you I’d ‘ave been safe if I hadn’t tried to sober up.” We all laughed – he must have told this to dozens of people over his nine weeks in Poppy Bay.
Some time later Paul reappeared looking a bit sorry for himself. I asked what was wrong. “Fell down the stairs,” he said.
“What!” I exclaimed.
“Yea. I got to the steps downstairs and lunged the full length. I went down flat on my face.”
“Are you hurt,” Charlie asked.
By this time he was sitting on his bed rubbing his the ankle of his good leg. “No, I’m ok. My ankle’s a bit sore. I damaged it a few years ago and it was just getting better. Here I am thirty-six and can’t even go down steps without falling over,” he said morosely. He curled up and slept.
When Paul woke up Fred, he was the one with the leg raised up, asked him “Did you get your Mars bars then?”
“No, I didn’t even get that far!” said Paul, now laughing, “I’ll just have to go back again. And I’ll need to go to the Cashline point. You know I’ve spent over £60 this last week in here?”
I was astonished. Sixty pounds – what on earth was he spending it on? Paul told me he only ate Mars bars and drank Pepsi Max. “Well how many Mars bars?” I asked. “Oh, about fourteen a day!”
I thought he was joking until he told me that after his Mum left home when he was young his father used to take him and his sisters down to the off-licence for their supper. The father would buy drink and he and his sister would buy sweets. “Yes, but that’s when you were young,” I said, “and didn’t know any better. Surely you’ve got the ability to choose better now?”
“Yea, but its the habit, you see!” As if that explained it all. And with that off he was off again to stock up. After half an hour he returned safely, a little cellophane bag of brown bars and Pepsi-Max’s swinging in time to his crutches. Funny, I never saw him eating the Mars bars although I often say him drinking from the blue cans.

That night on goes his jacket and he makes off to go. Fred called, “Where to this time?”
“Cash point!”
“But why don’t you get enough for a week instead of going every day,” Fred asked in genuine puzzlement.
“Don’t know.” Said Paul shrugging his shoulders with a little laugh. He was off again – but not before checking to see if the coast was clear.
A little later he returned wearing his sorriest expression. “Fell again!” His pyjamas were torn at the knee and there was blood on his knee and hands. Sitting on his bed he was rubbing his bandaged leg and looking really sorry for himself.
“You’d better get that seen to,” I said, but he just got up and went off again.
“Where to now?” Charlie exclaimed, but too late, he was gone again.
The Night Sister appeared. “Where’s Paul?” There was an awkward silence in the bay. The Sister’s face changed to one of deep concern. “What’s happened?”
“Paul’s fallen over and hurt himself,” I said, “and I think he need might need some attention.”
“But where is he now?” the worried Sister asked.
I said, “I don’t know, he just went off again.”
Sister swung into action and strode out into the corridor but Paul was nowhere in sight. She returned after a few moments and dashed down the corridor. Presently she reappeared with a few other nurses and off they went to scour the hospital corridors and toilets. While they were out Paul returned and climbed on his bed rubbing his bad leg. Sister burst back in, “Where have you been,” she said, biting back the accusing tones. But before Paul could answer she said, “You’ve had a fall!”
“How did you know?” said Paul in genuine surprise. I think he wanted to be the one to tell her.
Covering for me, she looked him straight in the face, “There’s not much I don’t know,” she said. “Here, let’s have a look!” The curtains swished round in one efficient sweep. One by one other nurses joined in. Fred, Charlie and I could only hear the various exclamations: “Oh Paul!...Oh, look what you’ve done...Oh dear, we’re going to need to call the doctor out for this.” Paul had burst his stitches.

Paul slept long the next morning and Fred and Charlie were taking bets as to how long it would be before he was up and off.
“ ‘es got no money, you see!” whispered Charlie to Fred.
“Well, I’ll lend him some to get his Pepsi’s and Mars,” Fred replied.
“No, ‘e won’t take it. Tried!”
“But why? What’s it all about anyway? It’s not about Pepsi and Mars. Pound to a penny it’s not!”
The lunch trolly and Paul was up. Vegetable soup, Cornish pasties, cauliflower cheese, meat balls, apricot pie and custard, or yoghurt. It was hospital food but it was fairly good. Paul didn’t fancy the main course options - he was off his food – but could he have just pie and custard. Charlie said, “ ‘ere, you can have mine extra, I don’t want it.” Then Fred offered his up and the little Irish lady with the food trolly said, “Well if you like it that much, here, have another!” Paul had four full plates before him. The others laughed but I couldn’t. Something seemed wrong.
The rest of the day Paul was either on his bed or sitting chatting by the beds of some of the old chaps. He was really quite personable and seemed to take a genuine interest in some of the older men and they all seemed to like him. The whole of our bay had begun to become to focussed around Paul and we all awaited the next episode in the saga. There wasn’t much else going on.
Night shift breezed in just before ten. Paul bided his time. Then, this time, just when Night Sister was in our bay sorting out a bed space for an incoming patient, Paul puts his Jacket on and is about to leave. I can see Charlie looking at Paul and the Sister. Fred is looking at Paul and me and back to Sister. Sister caught Fred’s eye. She straightened up from her task knowing that something was going on. Her thick auburn hair bounced as she looked swiftly from Fred to Charlie and then to me. Then she sees it - Paul has his jacket on.
“Paul!” Her eyes flashed and in a very controlled voice she enquired, “where are going?”
“I’m going to the cash point.”
“Paul, I really would rather you didn’t go.”
“But I have to go. I’ve no money.”
“Well, I really would rather you didn’t go. It’s late at night and there’s nobody to go with you. I really don’t want you to go.” Paul was a little stumped by this.
“But I need the money.”
“If you really need money,” Fred buts in, “then that’s no problem. I can lend you money till tomorrow morning.”
“No. I never borrow money. It’s a matter of principle.” Charlie looks knowingly to Fred. Sister by this time is looking exasperated. “Paul,” her voice is firmer but at the same time pleading, “It’s late at night!” Paul stands looking at her. Her expression wavers for a moment and she relents a little. “Where is the cash point? Which floor is it on?”
“Oh, it’s not in the hospital. It’s across the road.”
“What? You mean the road on the other side of the Out-patients Department.”
“Yes, but I go out the side door of this building and take ...” Sister cuts him short.
“Paul, I really don’t think it’s necessary. It’s late at night and I really don’t want you leaving the ward and you’ve already fallen several times.” Then, seeing him waver for a moment, she takes the opportunity and her voice softens a touch. “There, that’s it!” Then very gently, “Now put you jacket away and settle down.” I realize she’s a master. How many difficult patients have you dealt with in your time, I wonder? Just the firm but gentle, resistant but pliant, realisitic but encouraging. Yes, she’s a master, this one. Sister finishes the bed she is working on and leaves. “Night gentlemen!”
By this time Paul’s curtains are drawn. Charlie’s is watching for Paul.
Right enough, after a while I hear the zipper on Paul’s jacket and he’s off again.
“Paul! Where are you going?” comes the contralto voice.
“Gaud! He’s caught again!” Charlie says.
“Off to the cash point!” Paul replies.
“Paul, I thought I made it clear, I really don’t want you going off the ward.” And so it repeats all over again. Except this time another young Sister comes in and seeing Paul and the sister tete-a-tete, asks her what is it. Sister explains that this patient is intent on going outside at this late hour to the cash point. The other sister says quite straightforwardly, “Oh no! You mustn’t do that. Even we don’t do that. We’re not allowed to go out at night there. We’ve had a notice sent round warning us of muggings at that cash point. It’s such a dangerous area at night. No! No! Back to bed. Come on! Back to bed.” Paul returns to bed and both Sisters thank him and say goodnight. Is this the end of it I wonder?
It’s half midnight and Sister comes to our bay. I’m the only one on my bay to get night injections of antibiotic. As usual she has them all prepared and sits down on the side of the bed and slowly injects them in through the ‘vent-flow’ on my wrist. I ask her if it’s a busy night. She says that its not to busy. I look at her pleasant face and richly coloured hair and I notice how my view of her has changed since that first night when I asked for a drink. I can see her humour and her patient strength. We chat for a few minutes, about nothing really, and then she says sleep well and is off.
A few minutes later I hear Paul behind his curtains. “Huh, she’s ignoring me now.” I can hear the upset in his voice. Then he’s up and rummaging in his cupboard. Paper is ripping. More paper is ripping – into tiny shreds. He’s mumbling away. Then, too, cardboard is ripping. Big pieces of cardboard – I wonder what on earth he can have found to rip up. It’s not just upset – it’s fury. Then his jacket is on again. “Oh no,” I think, “trouble again!”
“Paul, what are you doing?”
“Going to the cash point!” he says defiantly.
“Paul I thought we had all this sorted out.”
“Yes, but you were ignoring me.” There’s moment of absolute silence as Sister’s absorbs this piece of logic.
“I beg your pardon?” Sister says.
“You were just ignoring me,” Paul repeats.
Sister asks in an incredulous voice, “Paul, what are you talking about?”
“You were talking to the other patient,” that’s me, I thought, “but you just ignored me.” By now Paul’s upset is betrayed by his voice.
“Paul!” I can hear the hidden outrage. “I was not ignoring you. I had work to do with that patient and then I had to go and do other work. I was not ignoring you.” I can hear the control, too, in her voice, trying not to get drawn into the maelstrom of Paul’s emotions.
“But you just walked past my bed and ignored me.”
“Paul,” she repeats, “I was not ignoring you. I saw you but I just had other work to do. That’s all. Now come on, go back to bed!”
Paul retreats back to bed. Is this the end of it, I wonder? I can’t stop thinking about that exchange between them. Paul is tossing and turning in his bed – it’s obvious that he can think of little else. And what about Sister?
After some time I hear her footsteps as she comes back up the ward. Paul’s curtain is pulled back. “Paul! I did not ignore you. I just had other work to do.” She doesn’t plead for him to understand her position; she just repeats her previous words this time as a statement of fact. “I was not ignoring you.”
“I’m sorry. I think I was just a bit over sensitive.” This, in a conciliatory tone.
“Yes. I should think you were.” Paul’s curtain closes and Sister’s footsteps disappear down the ward.

----- O O O O O -----

If you'd ever met Bheema...

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India: Pune - Winter 2002

If you’d ever met Bheema you’d know what I mean when I say it’s hard to forget him. He’s such a striking character and, under other circumstances, you might even have thought of him as a young lord. But not under these circumstances – oh no, definitely not.

He lives in a tent made of cardboard, sacking and plastic. That’s what he calls his ‘house’, his ghar. It’s not his home, that’s in Karnataka where his father has a farm with a few fields. But there are too many in the family to support for the size of the farm with it’s few buffalos, cows and chickens. That’s why Bheema, one of his younger brothers and his mother stay in a tent in Pune and work on building sites. And Bheema is not unusual in this – on my road there are five such tents from the same village in Karnataka nestling under a block of flats that they themselves have built and in which the ‘more fortunate’ now live. And in my locality, Sangvi, there are many such clusters of tents. After all there’s a building boom and the whole of Pune is expanding at a phenomenal rate. There’ll be no shortage of work for Bheema or the many young men like him around Sangvi, or Pune, or indeed any city in India right now.

But how did I, a foreigner living in a flat that he has built, ever come to know Bheema’s story?

There are a quite a few foreigners in Sangvi, mostly students who have come to take advantage of the cheap and reasonably prestigious education that Pune provides. There’s Boss, the Thai monk, and his friend Panya who live in the flats opposite mine. Lee and another couple from Korea live in the Block B of the flats that Bheema’s little tent village nestles against. A few other Africans live in the next street and some Bangladeshis in another, and so on. A foreigner is not so unusual in Sangvi, except that I am the only European foreigner. Bheema and his friends must have noticed me when I first moved into my flat just along the road from their tents. I was often washing or polishing the jeep when they went off to work in the morning, a garrulous group of men and boys, freshly washed and bright-eyed, in old clothes carrying Indian shovels over their shoulders. It was hard to believe they were the same group when they returned in ones and twos in the late evening or even late night – silent, slow and begrimed with cement they plodded in ones and twos past my flat to fall down exhausted outside their tents.

One day very soon after I moved in a couple of city workmen came and dug a very deep ditch from our block of flats to the central drainage chamber in the middle of the road. They replaced a pipe or something. It was done very fast for Indian workmen and I was surprised when I returned in the evening to find the soil they had laboriously shovelled out had been hastily dumped back into the ditch. Instinctively I avoided the hump of rubble over the ditch and took to the other side of the road, reversing to park the jeep at my usual spot on the road, underneath my top flat window. Late that night there was an unusual racket on the road from a truck. It’s not a busy side road, and rackets too are not unusual and trucks do use the road for building work. Even so, something told me to go and look to see what was happening. And there underneath my window I could see forthcoming disaster. A truck, overloaded with floor tiles, had gone over the hastily filled in ditch and one of it’s wheels had sunk a full foot below the level of the road. The truck was pitched over at a crazy angle and the driver was revving backwards and forwards in a desperate attempt to get it out – na halling, na dooling only pong pong karing as the Marathi joke goes. So overloaded was it though that it only sunk deeper and deeper and the truck canted over to such an angle that cement tiles slid off and clattered onto the road narrowly missing my jeep. Every extra effort only made the situation worse and the truck was tilting further and further over towards my jeep. And late though it was there was much discussion on the road. Driver, neighbours, passers by all were talking and gesticulating at the same time. Everybody had their own solution of what to do. There was much shouting and gesticulating at my jeep as more tiles slid off the truck. It was obvious that if the truck tilted any further the whole top load would slide off right onto the jeep.

I’m not sure how the Karnataka guys got involved – maybe they were passing by, just back from work and exhausted at 11.00pm, or maybe they just saw the commotion and came down the road to see what was doing! At any event they had the definitive solution and one that no one else but them could possibly have undertaken. The tallest of the guys, who I noticed was the sort of leader, organised the gang, about eight of them, to unload the truck and carry the tiles a few at a time (cement tiles are very heavy) to their destination 200 metres down the road. It was a mammoth task. There were 40,000 tiles.

As the work progressed and since there was no more drama to be got out of the situation the crowd dwindled and the street was relatively quite while the barefooted young guys silently slogged away. I watched the whole process with the fascination of a story-teller who sees a tale in the making. There was the little ugly boy of the group with spiky hair, his voice just in the breaking; a young guy with a manly face and teeth discoloured by chewing tobacco; another guy with a great physique but with one squint eye that marred his looks and who always managed two extra tiles; and there were two guys who obviously were bothers. The younger of the two had the same strong long bones as his brother but, being younger, was smaller and of slighter build. His snub nose and curly hair made his dark face look sort of cute. The older brother was the tall guy of the group. He was also one of the darkest and had the exact same features as his younger brother only they were developed to maturity. His hair was not curly though. He was dressed in very traditional style with long cream-coloured Indian kurta shirt and flowing white muslin dhoti. But there was a strange contrast in his character. Although he carried himself with a very dignified bearing that lent something of the young prince to his character at the same time he, as with the others, was very humble. He knew his place it seemed! They were all intensely aware of me but at the same time would hardly raise their eyes to meet mine. It was one of the situations in which I could almost imagine what it must have been like in the times of the British Raj.

An hour hardly seemed to make a dent in the load of tiles. I brought down a couple of jugs of chilled water and passed round glasses of water. Work stopped and despite the cool of the evening air rivulets of sweat running down right down their necks had to be mopped. With heads tilted back water, Indian style, gurgled directly down their gullets by the glassful. I soon retreated upstairs for more water. The tall brother’s eyes caught mine as he drained his glass – he face broke into a smile that revealed his even pearly white teeth. The younger brother was much too shy to look at me but I caught him peeping at me afterwards when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. For another three hours till 3.00am I kept them in water till it was decided that truck with the remaining 10,000 tiles might be moved by the combined efforts of the engine and the work gang. Besides, the tiles were now well below the level of the sides of the truck and there was no danger of any slipping out and damaging my jeep. The driver roused himself and with some to-ing and fro-ing the young heroes pushed the truck out of the now very deep rut. They whooped and cheered and capered about. More water lubricated gullets and there was much shaking of my hand. The tall guy, his brother, the one with the broken voice and the tobacco chewer were still all standing with me and they were discussing something in Kanada language. I knew that they must be wondering who I was and where I came from and so I tried Hindi. I asked the tall guy his name. Bheema! This was Bheema who later was t become a good friend. His younger brother was Bhasraj. The spiky haired boy with the breaking voice was Mudkapa and the tobacco chewer was Nagapa. Now they knew that I could manage a little Hindi Bheema was delegated to ask where I came from and what was my name and what was my work in India. It took me a bit of time to make out the Hindi from a Karnataka tongue and sometimes I had to decipher the Marathi words mixed in. But we managed, as I knew we would, and before ten minutes had passed they considered me their special friend. I asked why they had spent four hours doing work that was not theirs and the answer was that my jeep would have been damaged and no one else was prepared to save it. I offered to give them some money for their efforts, but – no, no! Almost an outraged no! They did it for me, not for the money. And before I could insist they quickly they disappeared down the road and were, no doubt, fast asleep within minutes. This was how I met Bheema, Bhasraj, Mudkapa and Nagapa.

Of course, from then on they always felt they could say hello to me in the street and they did. I’d always ask them where their work was going to be that day or what work they had just done. Most of the guys would just give the minimum replies like “work in Old Sangvi today” or “today digging” but if Bheema was there he at least would talk longer. Invariably Bheema was always with Nagapa, his best friend. Amongst the younger guys they’d form pairs or trios: Bheema and Nagapa; Kanakapa and Ardapa; Bhasraj and Murkapa and Hingapa and so on. But I was soon in confusion because there were two Bheemas, three called Bhasraj and two sharing the name Murkapa. After about 9 months I had the names sorted out but not the relationships. Bheema, who was about 19 – he wasn’t sure as no proper date had been recorded – had one of the Murkapas (20) for an uncle. Ardapa (17) was Murkapa’s younger brother and so also an uncle of Bheema. Bheema, Ardapa and Murkapa all were uncles to another Bheema! Who are cousins to whom I’ve not even tackled. But, anyway, yes, slowly I got to know who was who. They had been in the habit of using the street water-tap of the block of flats opposite my block but after they got to know me they’d come and use our street tap if they saw me there. But my relationship to them changed one day when Bheema brought me an ashen faced Kanakapa – he had crushed the end of a finger between two concrete blocks. Bheema asked if I had any ‘battery-ka paani’. There are two ways you could understand this – either ‘water for a car battery’, i.e. distilled water or ‘liquid from the car battery’, i.e. acid. I understood they wanted distilled water to wash the wound and so I gave boiled water which was as good as distilled water. Having washed the wound in my flat I could see since it was just the end of the finger there was very little chance that any bone was broken but that the skin was so mangled that it required stitching. I insisted to Bheema that he take him to a doctor, which he did, and later that night they both returned to show me, with some triumph, the bandage. There were two stitches. This was the first time that any of them came to my flat.

Bheema looked all round my flat, picking up first this and then that, asking what was this for and how much did that cost and so on. I was used to ‘price questions’ – everybody in India wants to know who much things cost. But clearly, from a tribal village and living in a tent he had never seen many of the things I had – the electric water kettle, the computer, the paper stapler, the electronic talking gift tag – so many things. I felt a little insecure as he walked round – I just wasn’t sure yet of these guys. I wanted to trust but I didn’t yet have the basis.

(That trust developed in time because Bheema and Nagapa came many times to see me in my flat and later after Nagapa went home for a few months to his village Bheema chummed up with little Murkapa, the one with the spiky hair and voice seemingly in permanent process of breaking. They were all fine and caused no problems. Of course I learned to be sensitive too – no leaving money about, which would been an unfair temptation.)

Some weeks later there was another accident, this time with a toe. Again I gave distilled water and again sent the patient to the doctor. I was asked also for headache tablets, sticking plaster, and medicine cuts and scrapes. In this way I got to know quite a few of them and they knew they could trust me to help them. I’m sure, too, that they knew they could approach me quite directly at any time without fear.

Sarajit came and stayed with me for a few days and I’d not said anything about these guys. I wanted him to form his own impression. Then, one morning, after morning bath, Bheema and Nagapa came to see me. At first they were a little shy but then they soon opened out. Sarajit was very taken with Bheema – he afterwards tried to put into words his impression of Bheema – like a young warrior, or a prince or a lord or something. And, yes, that is how I had felt too. We took photographs of them both with Sarajit.

After Sarajit left and after Mokshapriya and the others had visited, Bheema came a lot to see me usually with Nagapa but then both went back to Karnataka for several weeks to stay with their family. During that time Adhapa, one of Bheema’s younger uncles, and his friend Kanakapa used to come and see me. Again they’d ask for medicine and so on – good boys. Then, after many weeks, Bheema returned changed. Gone was the healthy moon-face, his high cheek bones protruding instead. The strongly developed chest was gone and his hip bones stuck out from a slender waist. What happened that he had lost so much weight I never found out and, although later, we gave him a good check-up, blood and urine, and found out that he was as healthy as an ox, still the extra weight never returned.

One evening we were talking in our own way – him in Hindi and me trying as best I could to follow and pitch in with pigeon Hindi. “Tension – bahut tension!” He was under great tension he told me. Why? The reason seemed to be that his eldest sister had to get married and they still didn’t have enough money. This I already knew but his tale of woe, on this night, went further. He told me that he was stuck in his life – he was earning 90 rupees a day at that time and that unless he tried doing something else he would doing this work for the rest of his life with no way out. What to do? We worked out how long it would take for him, his younger brother and mother, all in Pune, to save money for his sister’s marriage. At a combined rate of 230 rupees a day it would take about a year to pay for it. That certainly cheered him up. “But how long to marry us all?” he asked. When we worked it out the length of time was about seven years. “Saat sal? Saat!” Yes, seven years provided all were in good health and provided they worked every day. “But, then, supposing I did different work with more money?” Well, then it would take less time, I said, but what was it that he could do. “You teach me driving. Driver’s get more money.” Hmm!

A Scalding and Two Injections

Just after breakfast there was a knock on the door and Nagapa and Little Murkapa with the spiky hair stood on the threshold. Nagapa asked for something but I couldn’t catch what it was as he seemed to be in a fluster. At one point it seemed as if he wanted matches but when I fetched a box it wasn’t that. After a few more tries the story came out. A baby had been scalded and it was medicine for burns they wanted. I knew enough to know that burns, especially on a baby, can be very serious and since I had no medicine I recommended that they take the baby immediately to a doctor. But, after they left I was filled with trepidation. These tribal workers they never go to the doctor unless they really have to – maybe it’s the money, maybe it’s the way they are treated as the dregs of society. Whatever the reason I knew it was likely they would delay any decision till most of the men and the father returned from work. I looked with worry from my balcony over to the tents where they lived. No, I decided, I had to go down and see what had happened.

The tents, five of them, are squeezed between one block of flats that they themselves had built a couple of years before and new block they are currently building. And tents isn’t really the right word. We think tents are for camping but these tents aren’t anything like this. I’ve seen them erecting them. The ground is first beaten flat with a big stone then poles and hoops of bamboo cane are lashed together to form a strong frame. Then comes the covering, the tenting – old flattened cardboard boxes; rags; rush matting, pieces of tarpaulin, torn plastic – almost anything really that will provide protection from the searing midday sun, the blast of the dusty afternoon winds, the chill of the winter nights, and the torrents of the monsoon. Once the frame is covered it looks nothing like the tent of our imagination. Still, these are their homes for as long as they work for the ‘builder’ and for which, more importantly, they pay no rent.

‘The Tents,’ too, are a sort of ‘no-go area.’ Apart from the ‘builder’ who employs them who would have cause to go there? Certainly none of the residents in the flats – they, no doubt, along with the majority of city dwellers, just see ‘the tents’ as an encroachment that brings disease and dirt closer than comfort and probably regard the tribals as just one step up from beggars. Even so I’ve been down to the tents two or three times. This is where Bheema lived till a few months ago when he and a few other families were shifted to another street.

One time I’d sat on their mats under the block of flats on an unbearably hot night talking with them. Another time I had to go and say goodbye to a family who were returning to their village in Karnataka – they wanted to thank me for the medicine I’d given them. They all know me and I know many of them. There’s little black ten year-old Nagama, who apart from her own Kanad language, knows Marathi and Hindi, and her infant sister with the stiff black hair whom she nurses; the old man with the polio-deformed foot who leans heavily on a stick; the old granny who stays back when all the others go to work; strong masculine Shanapa with the squint eye whose wife all the others are devoted to because of her kind nature; Mama Murkhapa with the flat nose and big grin who is the same age as Bheema and at the same time his uncle; little Murkapa with the spiky hair who is nineteen but looks like fourteen and has, as I later found out, an extra thumb on one hand; Kanakapa and Adhapa who are inseparable friends; And Hanumanta, another of the uncles, who is younger than Bheema. These are the people who made up the little community of tent dwellers who lived on my road and whom I knew I had to visit again.

There was an ominous gathering of a few guys by the tents – it looked more like a funeral party than anything else. Big Murkhapa – Mama Murkhapa – was nursing the baby and the mother was sitting helpless by her tent – a dark figure in a deep purple sari with tears streaming down her cheeks. The baby was Murkapa’s elder brother’s baby, an ugly little thing, I thought, a girl – sort of wizened. She wasn’t crying and although not sleeping didn’t seem to be very conscious either. To me it didn’t look good. Murkapa showed me the burned hand and I was horrified to see that they had plastered mud over it, no doubt a tribal remedy for burns – mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood! Yes, one could follow their thinking – wet mud would be cooling as it dried, but at what risk of infection? It was obvious I would have to take the baby to the doctor.

I arrived with the Jeep. Murkhapa still had the baby in his arms and though the baby was awake she still seemed to be ominously quite and her eyes were filled with tears. She looked a sorry sight. Murkhapa and his sister-in-law, the mother, prepared the baby for the doctor – the mud on her hand was washed off with cold water. The baby struggled and writhed in pain but still no sound. And again tears welled in her eyes. When I saw the hand fear filled my heart the hand was mottled blue in colour. After the washing mother disappeared into the tent and reappeared with a tiny, clean, lime-green dress. The old rag was pulled off and the baby was squeezed into the new clean one at the cost of some pain. The wizened face puckered up in pain and tears rolled down her cheeks and dripped off her chin. A clean dress wasn’t really necessary but it was obvious that the mother didn’t want her baby to be taken away without clean clothes on.
I thought the mother would come but she didn’t, only Murkhapa and the baby. He was very good with her – talking to her, blowing on her hand and when we sat in doctor’s anteroom he played with her trying to distract her from the pain. Sometimes he tried to get her to rest on his shoulder but in whichever position she rested tears were always in her eyes.

Doctor Wable was out but after a few minutes his wife, also a doctor, appeared and she soon saw the baby. She was told what had happened and she looked at the hand and pronounced that it didn’t seem too bad today but that the second day was the telling time, only then would we know how deep the burn had gone. Today she would prescribe cream to cool the hand and antibiotics in case infection set in. It wasn’t really a good idea she told Murkhapa to put mud and ink on the hand. Ink, I thought, ink! That’s why the hand was blue. But why ink? Maybe they thought that ink had some special virtue. It was only later that Malati, a close friend from our medical project, told me that doctors often dowsed burns in a deep blue solution and maybe these people thought that it was ink. I guessed that was it. Doctor Mrs. Wable though instructed that the hand be cleaned in an iodine solution and told us to bring the baby back, without fail, the next morning.
The next morning the baby seemed much better and Murkhapa having left for work it was left to little Nagama to accompany the mother with the baby. Both the Wable doctors were present that day and having checked the baby they pronounced that that the burn didn’t seem so serious but to bring her back at night just to check. The baby came with Murkhapa at night and both doctors were satisfied that the baby wasn’t in any real danger but that the antibiotic course should be continued until the end. It was at this point that Murkhapa showed Dr Wable his foot that had been pierced by a nail that afternoon. There was some discussion and it was agreed that he be given a tetanus injection. As he lay on the couch with his hip bared Dr Wable rubbed a small area with cotton wool soaked in alcohol. The cotton turned dark brown. When a second piece still hadn’t removed all the dirt Wable showed me the cotton and said, “See, these people don’t know how to wash!”

The remark wasn’t at all fair, I thought, but I kept my peace. Murkhapa, like all the others had been out at a hard days work on a building site and after work there is virtually no chance of washing. Where would they get water at night? Bathing is their first activity of the day when the taps are running and when they can easily fetch water for the days needs. At night all they can do is rub off as much of the muck as possible with water at the building site. But, by and large, at night they return with skin dry and pale from cement.

After three or four goes Wable was convinced the skin was clean enough and proceeded with the injection whereupon Murkhapa burst out laughing. Wable looked at his wife and said, “See, this boy gets an injection and he laughs!” and turning to his patient he asked, “So, what’s making you laugh?” Murkhapa replied, “Oh I thought it was going to be painful but it wasn’t really at all!” With that we all laughed. Murkhapa pulled his trousers up and we left collecting the baby, Mother and Nagama from the waiting room.

That should be end of this story but there is a little sequal to it that followed. Back home later that night Bheema met me. He still wasn’t looking well. He hadn’t put on any weight since his visit to his village a few months ago. If fact for the last week to ten days he hadn’t been feeling well – lethargic, not eating properly, headache and just today his urine had turned bright yellow and, when I looked his eyes too were not white but dull yellow. It was hard to get him to agree to visit the doctor. He had only agreed once before to visit Wable Doctor when I promised he wouldn’t get an injection – and he didn’t. This time he wasn’t so sure and looking at his own eyes he agreed that they had gone yellow. That worried him more than bright yellow urine.

Next night we saw Dr Wable very quickly and looking him over Wable agreed that they eyes were yellowish although his sample of urine wasn’t too yellow. There was lots of talk about how much water he should be drinking in this hot season – four to five litres Wable thought if you were working hard under the sun. But if he did have jaundice we really needed a blood sample too to find out how far it had gone.
“That means an injection!” Bheema objected.
“No, not an injection. Nothing is going in, only some blood we will take out.”
“No, but that still means the needle is going in!”
“Correct,” Doctor admitted.
“Then it’s an injection!”

Even so Bheema reluctantly agreed to the blood sample. We sat in the waiting room Bheema almost paralyzed with fear. Every so often he’d look at me and he’d just say one word – Dhar – fear. The technician was a long time in coming and this only served to heighten his anxiety and when he did come he asked Bheema to lie on a bed. Bheema’s eyes fixed on the long needle as if it were a deadly weapon. I asked him what was that on the wall next to him. He looked. “What thing?” I pointed to the blank plaster – “That there!” Of course he couldn’t see anything, this was only my distraction tactic.
The technician said, “OK, that’s it!”
“What do you mean that’s it?”
“I’ve got the sample, now I’m finished.”
“Finished already? Where is it?” The technician showed a standard tiny 5ml bottle filled with blood.
“So much!” Bheema said with shock.

We were called back into Wable’s surgery and Bheema told us that he thought that he would be on the bed for about two hours while the blood was taken. Two hours! Not much wonder he was so frightened – he must have thought that most of his blood would be taken in that time.
“How much blood is in my body?” he asked.
“Oh, about six litres.”
“Arey!” he said in surprise, “six litres!”
Then his brow wrinkled in perplexity. “So, where is it all kept?”