Of Marriageable Age (7 page)

Nat wanted to cry but he wouldn't. He wanted to talk but there was nothing to say. Nat had seen things like this and even worse many times; many times they were shaken out of their sleep by someone who had come far, usually someone dying because if they were not dying they would wait till morning. Sometimes Nat's father could save the person; sometimes he took the person to hospital in Town on the back of his motorbike; sometimes he pressed a torch into Nat's hands and sent him running to wake up Pandu who slept in his cycle-rickshaw in the village, and Pandu would come and take the patient in the rickshaw to the hospital and Nat's father would follow on his motorbike, and Nat would have to stay behind and try to go back to sleep, but he couldn't.

Nat knew his father didn't like him getting up at night for the emergency patients and at the beginning had made Nat stay in his
sharpai,
but since Nat didn't sleep anyway, finally he had allowed him to get up and help. If the treatment took too long he'd send Nat back to bed, but he couldn't make him sleep; it was only when Nat knew there was nothing more to be done, because the patient had died or because his father had given a pill or an injection to stop the pain and make the patient sleep till morning, or the patient was able to leave and go home, that Nat had a quiet mind that allowed him to sleep.

It had always been this way. Ever since he'd had a father Nat knew that the nights were not their own. But then, nothing at all was their own.

W
HEN
N
AT CAME
to live with Doctor two years ago he had noticed at once that he was different. That was because his father was a
sahib
, and not just any
sahib
, but a
daktah sahib.
Wherever they went people would lay their hands together and bow their heads slightly in greeting. Sometimes people would bend over and touch his father's feet. Some of the men would even prostrate themselves before him on the ground, stretched out full length with their hands on Doctor's feet. Or the women crouched down before him to rest their heads before his toes. His father didn't like these prostrations at all; he had told the people hundreds of times and always bent over to raise the person up, but still they did it.

At first, when Nat saw the people bowing down to his father, he had thought his father must be God Himself.

'Why do they bow down, Daddy? Are you God?' he asked, because in the great temple in Town he had seen the people bowing down to the Lord Shiva, who lived in the innermost shrine in the temple, in the Holy of Holies, prostrating themselves before him just as they did to his father. His father chuckled, and shook his head.

'They see God in me and are thanking Him because I have cured them, and so they bow down to God in me, Nat.'

'But
you
cure them, and not God!'

'Yes, but I could not cure them without God's help and His power, Nat. It is He who cures them through me. I am only an instrument. It means I must serve God with all my life, and see Him in all who come to me, in the very lowliest, and thank Him for His gifts.'

Yet still, Nat knew that for the people his father was God, and he knew they were different. It wasn't just that their skin was not black and that they were tall and strong. Look at the house they lived in: it was bigger than all the other houses in the village, and so much better, a flat-roofed brick house in a garden at the edge of the village, painted white and with a thatched-roof verandah all around it. The house had two rooms, a small kitchen and a bathroom. The smaller room was where his father treated his patients, who would be there long before dawn, squatting in the dust on the road outside the gate and patiently awaiting their turn. Father and son slept in the bigger of the two rooms, which contained the two
sharpais,
a wooden cupboard where they kept their clothes, the fridge which was half-full of medicines, and a low wooden desk with a lid that clapped up, where Nat's father wrote his letters and did his business, sitting cross-legged on the mat-covered floor before it.

The room had several windows, arranged in threes one above the other around the room, with wooden shutters which folded inwards so you could open them to let in the breeze or close them to keep out the cold in winter. When all the windows were open it was almost like living outside, for the windows started low down in the walls and ended close to the ceiling. They had iron bars to keep out thieves and wire mesh to keep out mosquitoes and monkeys. If the monkeys came in they would wreck the room, Nat's father said. They would steal all the bananas and empty all the jars of rice or sugar or flour on the floor, and they'd open the fridge and dash the medicine bottles to the ground.

The monkeys came in big groups led by a huge monkey-king the children called Ravana, who would crouch up in the mango tree near Nat's house and glower down at the village, baring his teeth and hissing, jerking his head back and forth if anyone came too near. The other monkeys, his wives, would arrange themselves on the branches behind Ravana. Some of them had babies clinging to their tummies, and some of the babies sat beside their mothers on the branches or played together just like real children.

If there was no-one about, if the children were at school or helping their parents in the fields and the men were at work and the mothers were at the well fetching water, the monkeys would attack. They'd all of a sudden swarm down from the tree and go through the village, looking for open doors and windows or a small child alone with a banana in its hand. There was never much to eat in the houses, so in their rage they'd wreck whatever could be wrecked and that poor child would scream in terror when Ravana or one of his wives grabbed the banana out of its hand, and the mother would run out of her home shouting and throwing stones, and gather the screaming child in her arms. So it was up to the boys to keep the monkeys away.

One of the first things Nat learned when he came to the village was to use a sling-shot, and now he was six he could hit whatever he wanted, moving targets and tiny ones, and a monkey-wife up in the branches of the mango tree. He'd never aimed at Ravana yet, because if Ravana saw one of the smaller boys picking up a stone for his sling-shot he'd very likely attack that boy, jump on him and scratch and bite, so Ravana was reserved for the big boys. If all the boys attacked at once, charged through the village towards the mango tree brandishing their sling-shots, if they all stood beneath the tree yelling their battle-cries, if they all fired their stones at the monkeys while shouting and kept up that fire and showed the monkeys who was stronger, then Ravana would give the command and lead his troop away, which meant crossing a stretch of field where there were no trees at full pelt, with all the village boys tearing behind them, firing their stones and yelling. But the monkeys were faster, and would reach the grove at the other side of the field, lose themselves up in those branches, and disappear. But sooner or later they'd be back.

N
AT
and his father slept on
sharpais
and had mats on the floor, which was made of stone. The other people lived in huts built of mud; they used watered-down cow-dung to plaster the walls and the floors to keep them clean, and had no doors and windows, only doorways and little holes in the walls so that inside all was dark, and they slept and lived on the dried-mud floors.

Nat and his father had long wires which came on high poles from Town all the way to the house, bringing light to the bulbs and making the fridge work, and they had gas bottles under their stove so all you had to do was turn a switch and light a match and you could cook. The other villagers had to gather dried wood and dung and make dung cakes for fuel before they could cook. They dressed in rags and even though they washed their clothes often at the water tank, pounding them against a stone to beat out the dirt, somehow they never really looked clean. Whereas Doctor and Nat never had to wash their own clothes. Once a week a
dhobi
came to take away their dirty laundry and brought it back in a bundle, freshly washed, ironed and folded, smelling sweet from the Surf powder supplied by the doctor.

But the main difference between Nat and the other children was one he wished didn't exist. The other children went to the village school, if they went to school at all; which most of them didn't, especially not the girls. Nat went to school in Town. Every morning Pandu would come in his rickshaw, and Nat would take down his bag from the nail in the room and get in the rickshaw, and Pandu would drive him into Town to the Government Primary English Medium school where he learned to read and write English as well as Tamil and a bit of Hindi.

Nat was the only child from the whole village who went to this special school, which Nat thought was unfair, but which his father said was a privilege. The other children looked after goats and cows and babies or went out to gather dung or dried sticks for fuel or cut down branches of the little trees the Reforestation Agency had planted, or fetched water or planted rice or picked peanuts. And even if they did go to school Teacher came sometimes and sometimes he didn't, and the children didn't learn much. So Nat's father made him go to Town every morning with Pandu. Which was unfair.

W
HEN
N
AT CAME
to live with his father he noticed the photograph of a lady hanging on the wall above his father's
sharpai.
It was a large photograph, almost life-size, showing just the lady's head and shoulders. The lady was so beautiful, Nat stared at her for a long time, looking into her soft, gentle smiling eyes, dark and shining, that seemed to say so much. The lady was his father's wife, and she was dead. She was not a
memsahib
but an Indian lady, because her skin was dark, even darker than Nat's, and she had a
tika
in the middle of her forehead, and wore a sari crossed over and covering one shoulder. If Nat could have just one more wish come true then it would be that this lady could be his mother, that she would not have died but would be living there with them, in that little house, cooking for him like the other mothers did and pressing him to her soft bosom, rubbing him down with oil till his skin glistened and telling him stories sitting in the cool of the verandah with him in her lap. But then again, if she had lived Nat would probably not have come to live with his father, for the lady would have had children of her own and Nat's father would not have had to go to that place to choose Nat. So Nat always reminded himself how lucky he was to have been chosen at all, and not think too much about the lady and what it would be like to have a mother who loved him and looked after him. He had a father; and that alone was an answer to a prayer.

T
HE WOMAN
and the boy had breakfast with Doctor and Nat. The village was alive with sound; you couldn't see anything because of the high walls of cascading bougainvillea, pink, orange, and wild purple surrounding their house, but you could hear the clanging of the metal vessels, the swishing of coconut brooms, the splashing of water as the mothers sprinkled it outside their huts so that the girls could draw the wonderful
kolam
pictures in the damp earth before their doors, their wrists twirling and swirling to let the chalk powder flow out.

Pandu's youngest daughter Radha, who was thirteen, came over every morning to draw a
kolam
for them, and it was important to have one because it gave you good thoughts before you entered the house or left it. Doctor gave Radha one rupee every day for drawing the
kolam,
which she would accept between the palms of her hands and raise to her forehead in thanks before turning to run home and help her mother cook.

Radha did not go to school. She would be getting married in a year or two, Pandu hoped, and they were worried about the dowry, because husbands were very troublesome when it came to dowries. It had been bad enough with Pandu's elder daughter who married last year. The first boy who had offered to marry her had wanted a motorbike as dowry but of course Pandu had not been able to afford that so it hadn't worked out. The next boy had wanted a wrist-watch, but that too was too expensive. Finally they found a boy who had been content with a nylon shirt from Town, and the wedding had taken place, but now Radha's turn was coming up and Pandu never talked of anything else when he spoke with Doctor.

E
VER SINCE THE
trouble with Pandu’s elder daughter (who, to make matters worse, was not beautiful) Doctor had presented to every family at the birth of a daughter a teak sapling, which the family could plant in Doctor's field behind the house and tend while the girl grew. When she was of marriageable age it would be a big teak tree which the family could sell for a
lakh
of rupees and so acquire a good husband for the girl. It wasn't a solution, Doctor said, but at least it got the girls good husbands and you could only hope the husbands wouldn't spend the money on drink and beat the wives.

Radha reappeared now with a tiffin carrier filled with
upma,
which was to be their breakfast today, prepared by Pandu's wife Vasantha. Doctor had sent an early morning message that they had guests, so Vasantha had cooked enough for everyone, and the woman and the boy ate with great appetite. When they were finished Pandu himself and his son Anand were already standing at the gate, waiting, Pandu with his rickshaw to take Nat to school in Town, and Anand to take the woman home on the motorbike.

Nat's father was training Anand as an assistant. Sometimes Anand worked with the patients and sometimes he ran errands on the motorbike, because Pandu worked in Town during the daytime so Anand would fetch medicines or take patients to hospital or, in certain cases like this woman, take them home if Doctor didn't think they should walk. So Anand took the woman home to her village with the dead infant in her arms and the little boy between them, which meant that Doctor would have no assistant in the clinic that morning. Which was not good, because already four people were squatting in the dust outside the gate, waiting for the clinic to open.