Independence, page 24
* * *
The next morning Priya goes to the clinic and asks Abdullah to put her to work.
Abdullah is happy to oblige. From morning until night, one sick person after another, and more women coming because word is out that now there is a daktarni in the clinic with whom female problems can be discussed without shame. More Hindus, too, because even the ill have preferences and prejudices. There is no time to think and that is what she craves; she falls into bed too tired for nightmares.
Priya has not told Abdullah the details of their rescue mission in East Bengal, and he, looking into her face, has not asked. But she does tell him about Sameera, how the child wriggles her entire body when someone tickles her; how loudly she laughs when she sees a bird on a sill, a lizard on the wall; how she has learned to say Dada and hold out her arms when she sees Somnath. Abdullah wipes his eyes and says he knows it is not safe for Deepa to come and visit him, word might travel to the wrong people. So he will go to Ranipur, yes, for the first time in his life and see his grandniece, because why should Somnath have all the fun? Can Priya manage the clinic for a few days if Salima helps her?
Priya smiles. It is the first time she has smiled since Amit’s death. “Indeed I can,” she says.
Now the carousel of work accelerates, now there is no time to draw breath. Cut, stitch, bind. Listen to the fitful heart, the groaning bowels, the wheezing labored breath. Here is a crusted lid, a tender spleen, a leg so swollen with pus it must be lanced at once. Sell the gold earrings so there is enough antibiotics, vaccines, bandages, disinfectant, pain pills, cough mixture, fruits and biscuits to hand out to too-thin children with too-large eyes. The grateful faces blur into each other, Thank you, Doctor-didi, dhonnobad shukriya. If only they knew that they are saving her, too.
Yet like a thorn the realization pricks her: there is so much she is ignorant of. There are days the sick come to her, and she has to send them away without help because she does not know what is killing them. Yes, Abdullah will return, though not for a while, he has sent a message saying he will be delayed. He cannot leave his grandniece yet, they have become great friends, Somnath is quite beside himself with jealousy. You will not believe it, Sameera looks just like Raza did at that age, she has all his little ways. She sleeps on her front with her hand tucked into her neck just like he used to as a boy. Your mother has made a beautiful quilt for her. She refuses to be parted from it even for a moment.
Yes, when he comes back Abdullah will teach Priya all he knows. But it is not enough. She is shaken by longing: if only there was a way for her to learn the latest methodologies, the current procedures, the newest sciences of healing.
* * *
A letter arrives from Jamini, an astonishment.
Sister, I am pregnant. I should have come to Calcutta and told you in person; that would have been the right thing to do. But it will cause me too much distress and might harm the baby—and that chance I cannot take. She follows with an apologetic explanation of how it came about, the three loveless nights she had begged for as her marital right. I want you to know he did it only as a duty. He was not attracted to me for even one moment. You were in his heart always, he was always true to you.
Priya believes that; she had seen Amit’s eyes, heard his final words in the boat. Still, she cannot stop herself from imagining those three nights over and over, the two bodies in the bed, though it makes her so ill she has to throw up, and is that not the bitterest irony for her with her empty womb. She cannot rest although she is exhausted, she must pace the Calcutta mansion for hours, she is bloated with rage, with the fever of jealousy and the unfairness of all that life has snatched from her and deposited elsewhere. Sleepless, she writes the harshest things she can think to Jamini, the vilest, most caustic epithets.
Dizzy and exhausted in the heavy hours before dawn, she thinks she hears her father as she folds her letter and puts it in an envelope. Priya, you are better than this.
I don’t want to be better, Baba. I am tired of it. What has being better ever availed me? What did it ever avail you?
Clearer than in months, his face rises in her mind, its sad nobility. Life is not only about availing, daughter.
Slowly the tidal wave of rage that engulfed her begins to recede; what remains is the last line of Jamini’s letter. I know you are furious with me, Priya. You have every right to be. But consider this. We thought Amit was lost to us completely and forever. But in this child, a part of him will live on.
She is honest enough to acknowledge the truth of her sister’s words. She crumples the letter she had written in her fist.
* * *
Birth and death, serpents swallowing each other’s tails. A father dies to make space in the world for the child who is coming. When a nation is born, how many must then die?
On the evening news the announcer is in tears, breathless and disbelieving; he has to go off the air midway and someone else must take his place, because in Delhi, as the Father of the Nation was on his way to a prayer meeting, he was shot to death by one Nathuram Godse, the editor of the Hindu Rashtra. Falling, he said, Hey Ram. Priya, listening, is in shock. Growing up with his stories, she had believed in her child-heart that Mahatma Gandhi, older than her father, older than anyone she knew, would live forever. Now his life has ended in a matter of minutes, and Nehru is weeping, he is saying, “The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere.” In the room they are weeping, too, Priya and Shefali and Banno from Lahore who knows about darkness. All over the nation people are weeping, they will weep for days, riots will break out for love of a man who prayed all his life for peace, cities will burn. But because even saints have enemies, some will be pleased. Secretly they will say, Good riddance, he was too fond of Muslims, because of him the country was broken in two.
All this Priya will learn as she sleepwalks through the next days doing what must be done at the clinic. She will keep the radio on day and night, though for what she does not know. Perhaps she wants to understand why such calamities occur, perhaps to see if what Nabakumar used to tell her is true: out of evil, good emerges. Half a million people follow Gandhi’s body, wrapped in the tricolor flag, to the funeral grounds beside the Jamuna River. Airplanes drop rose petals on his pyre. Messages of sympathy are sent from across the world by kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, writers and scientists. The leaders of India draw together in their bereavement. A giant among men has fallen in the cause of brotherhood and peace. His supreme sacrifice will wake up the nation’s conscience. A thousand years later, his light will be seen in this country, and the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts. Just an old man in a loincloth—yet when he died, humanity wept. Let us be worthy of him.
And then, as she is stitching up the head wound of a laborer injured in a careless dock accident, she hears on the radio a beloved voice. “Far greater than all warriors who led armies to battle was this little man, the bravest, the most triumphant of all . . . May the soul of my master, my leader, my father rest not in peace, not in peace, but . . . let the powder of his bones be so charged with life and inspiration that the whole of India will, after his death, be revitalized into the reality of freedom. My father, do not rest. Do not allow us to rest. Keep us to our pledge. Give us strength to fulfill our promise, your heirs, . . . the guardians of your dreams, the fulfillers of India’s destiny.”
Sarojini Naidu. The announcer says that in three days’ time she will visit Calcutta to speak to the people of the city the Mahatma so loved that he spent Independence Day here in prayer. Priya, jolted from the miasma of despair, rushes to her desk to write down the details: Sarojini will give a speech at the Maidan at three p.m. She will collect money for women displaced by communal riots, especially those from Noakhali, where Gandhi had spent time after the massacre of 1946. This time for certain, Priya promises herself. Let the world end, still I will be there.
What can stop her, now that all she cared for has been leached from her life?
* * *
On the day of Sarojini’s talk, Priya puts up a sign on the door: clinic closing two p.m. She has gathered all the money she has at the house, she has taken even the clinic money that does not belong to her. She plans to give it all to Sarojini. She will sell some more jewelry later to replace it.
At two o’clock she is ready, hair combed, face washed, wearing the white khadi sari that the excited Shefali had ironed for her. Her bones are as light as a bird’s as she locks the front door of the clinic; almost she could fly. Baba, what you wanted for me is finally happening.
But a mother rushes up the street carrying her child. Please, Doctor Memsaab, please.
Priya’s heart sinks. The boy has fallen and broken his leg, there is an ugly gash, the splintered tibia sticking out. The child screams until exhausted, then screams again. Salima has already left, so Priya must do it all on her own: administer an injection for pain, sterilize the wound, straighten out the bone as best as she can, put the leg in a splint, give the child a tetanus shot. The leg will have to be operated on quickly; the clinic does not have the facilities for that, nor is she trained to perform such a surgery. Knowing what happens when the indigent show up at the overcrowded hospitals, she calls a taxi because Somnath has sold the car. She takes them with her to a bigger clinic, pays in advance for the procedure, which uses up much of her money, suffers with impatience the mother’s teary gratitude.
By the time she reaches the Maidan it is past five. The speech is long over. But of course. What had she hoped for? Workers are dismantling the stage, loading bamboo poles onto a truck, folding away flags. Has Sarojini left the city? She rushes up and down, searching for someone who might have information. Finally a man in a kurta and Nehru cap takes pity on her desperation and tells her that Sarojini may have gone to the Hyderi Manzil in Beliaghata, where Gandhi had lived for a month last August.
Again a taxi that she can ill afford, again the driving across the traffic-jammed city. They pass Dharmatala and Bowbazar and Entally and Tangra, getting lost twice in dead-end alleys. Is the driver, sensing her ignorance, giving her the runaround? But no, she has maligned him, here is the dilapidated old villa, whitewash faded, precarious pillars holding up an entryway blackened with mildew, a pond covered in scum. It looks deserted.
Heaviness in her chest. She pays off the driver, who asks with some concern if he should wait for her, it is not the best of neighborhoods for a young lady. Wearily she shakes her head. She has lost her chance to meet Sarojini, but she will sit on the steps where the Mahatma used to sit, where perhaps Sarojini, too, rested earlier in the day. She imagines Gandhi coming down the steps to the pond to wash his clothes, his dishes. Nabakumar had told her he used to perform such chores himself.
There are footsteps behind her, two young women carrying books, boxes, writing materials, eyeing her questioningly. And behind them, an older woman who moves with an uncertain gait, calling to them in a tired voice, asking when her train leaves Howrah Station. Soon, says one of the assistants, we must load the car quickly, the traffic is always bad in this city. It takes Priya a moment to recognize the older woman. Sorrow and exhaustion pull at her features, making her appear far older than her newspaper photos, but it is Sarojini.
Priya stands up. Sarojini’s companions—there is a man, too, coming out of the house—try to block her off. They are nervous after the recent tragedy. But Sarojini waves them away and asks her what she wants.
How to answer such an immense query? Through the blood beating in her ears, Priya can only say, “I had to meet you. I have been trying for years. I am Nabakumar Ganguly’s daughter. You will not remember him, but he talked of you often, he went on the Salt March with you many years ago.”
Sarojini smiles a surprisingly sweet smile. For a moment the deep grief recedes from her face and Priya can feel her charisma. She understands why so many people, including her father, worshipped this woman. Why they had walked with her into danger assault imprisonment death.
“I remember Nabo,” Sarojini says. “He liked to sing. Where is he now?”
The story spills from Priya, the tears also. Sarojini sits down on the broken steps and gestures to Priya to join her. She sighs. “So much death in spite of everything Bapuji tried, everything we tried alongside him. But we must go on, carrying the vision forward. It is the only thing we can do to honor the dead.” She ignores her assistants, who are trying to get her to leave, and takes Priya’s hands in hers. “What do you plan to do, Nabakumar’s daughter?”
Priya is taken aback at the genuine interest in Sarojini’s voice, in the tilt of her head. This, too, must be what made people love this woman, the complete attention she gave to whomever life had placed in front of her. She takes a deep breath.
“I want to be a doctor like my father.”
That story also spills out: the entrance exam, the unfair results, the journey to America, the family responsibilities that pulled her back, the rescue mission in East Bengal, the expulsion from the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia, the work she is doing in the clinic now, important but frustrating, the reason she was late today.
Sarojini sits so still, she could be a statue. When Priya is done, she gestures to one of the women for writing materials, a sheet stamped with her name. “You are intelligent and focused, Priya, the kind of woman India needs,” she says. “You must try again. No need to go abroad for studies, now that the country is ours. I will write a letter for you. Let us see if it gets you into Calcutta Medical College. You will have to take the entrance examination again, for fairness, but I do not think you will have problems passing. If for some reason it does not work, come to me in Uttar Pradesh. They have recently renamed the Agra Medical College after me. I allowed it because they promised they would make a special effort to educate women doctors. There will be a place for you there.”
She hums a song absently as she writes. Priya recognizes the tune. It has been on the radio constantly the last few days because it was Gandhi’s favorite. Vaishnava jana to tene kahiyeje piḍa paraayī jaaṇe re. Only those who feel the pain of others may be called truly good. Sarojini sees her listening and says, “A doctor is like that, no?”
She gives the letter to Priya, she holds her hand and tells her one last thing.
Her companions are fidgety with distress, the man clears his throat twice. “All right,” she tells him. “I’m leaving now.” A car rushes from the shadow of the mango trees, she climbs in and like a dream is gone.
The letter is addressed to Bidhan Chandra Roy, the newly appointed chief minister of Bengal. Priya recalls hearing that he used to be Gandhi’s doctor; he, too, had gone on the Salt March.
Bidhan,
I am sending you a smart young woman who wants to be a doctor. Before independence, she was excluded unfairly from Calcutta Medical College. I take it you will now give her the chance she deserves. If not, I will steal her away.
Here comes her taxi driver; he has been waiting all the while on the street. “Didimoni, I didn’t want to leave you alone here in the dark.” She follows him to the car. The world is full of good people, too, living their quiet workaday lives. She sees it now.
In the taxi she opens the window. The smells of the city flood her: petrol, sweat, street snacks, garbage, flowers. She holds fast to the last thing Sarojini said. You are a daughter of independence, the country’s future. Women like you are the ones for whom we fought and died, the ones who will transform India. You must carry the flag forward. You may fall from time to time. We all did. What is important is to get up again.
Epilogue
1954
On the veranda of the old mansion they are playing chess, a white-haired man and a girl of seven. The man is letting the girl win; the girl, bent intensely over the board, does not know this.
Priya, returning from the clinic, sees them and smiles, remembering. Somnath used to do the same for her when she was a girl, but then she grew up and began winning for real. She guesses Sameera, too, will do that. The girl is smart, and there are already arguments about where she will study. Deepa thinks the village school is good enough, but Priya says no, not if they want Sameera to have a career, and surely they do, so many opportunities are opening up for women in the new India.
Priya sets down her medical bag and calls out a greeting. Somnath sends her a preoccupied wave; Sameera announces cheerfully that she is beating Som-Dadu. There are rapid footsteps, a boy of five comes running. Pia-Ma! He holds out his arms so she will lift him up, Jamini’s son Tapan, who has Amit’s smile and also his temper. Both children call her Pia. They could not say her name when they were little and now it is a habit, she has grown used to it, the word no longer rakes her heart.
Jamini leaves the quilt she and Bina are working on and hurries to the veranda, scolding her son. “Pia-Ma has just come home from a long day at work, let her have her tea, don’t bother her. In any case, you are too big and heavy to carry.”
The boy takes exception to this. “I am not bothering her. And I am not too heavy. Am I, Pia-Ma?”
Priya assures him that he is the best of boys, incapable of bothering anyone, and light as a cloud.
“You are spoiling him,” Jamini says, displeased. She is perhaps right, but Priya does not care. She loves Jamini, she bears her no ill will. Should Jamini fall into danger, Priya would willingly risk her life for her again. Still, if once in a while she looks at Tapan and sees his father’s eyes, if once in a while she thinks, He should have been mine, who can blame her for it?
Manorama comes up from the kitchen, slower than before but still majestic in gait, her keys still proudly hanging at her waist. She calls to Pari to set out tea, the children’s milk. Pari brings coconut narus, crisp singaras, puffed rice. The snacks are tasty but not lavish as in previous years. Deepa, who manages the estate as well as the household finances, has declared sternly that there is to be no waste, the Chowdhury family is not as wealthy as before. When Deepa is stern, even Manorama does not dare to argue with her.
