HOLIKA DRESSED AND left in the middle of the night, while I floated pleasantly in the cusp between sleep and waking, vaguely hearing her assurance that she’d call later that day. Then she picked up the pillow covering my head and leaned close to my right ear. “You will remember not to call my house.” Her sister Alka or her brother Ratish often picked up the phone and listened in and I was not yet privileged with her cell phone number.
I tucked the pillow back over my head and fell asleep.
In the morning after a leisurely breakfast of tea and doughnuts in the pastry café located in the lobby, which with the exceptions of the few touches of marble and gold, swirling Hindi symbols carved in the walls, could’ve been a five-star hotel in Anywhere, AmericaWorld. I left the hotel, walked almost jauntily down the long driveway, a sanctuary path leading into the streets of New Delhi. I jogged across the street and cut through a gas station filled with rickshaws and taxis and cows. Like life in New York, where I barely noticed the thousands of leashed dogs (and we treated scores of dog bites in the ER) and rats and their shit, I’d become blithely accustomed to the cows and their dung.
I crossed over Humayun Road and went to the Jewish cemetery about three hundred yards down the block, where I stealthily opened the blue gate. The street-families sat outside their tents beside warm fires, preparing for their low labor jobs or begging. The children readied for their ragpicking and maybe, if they were lucky, attending a school for a few hours before resuming their stations for afternoon rush hour begging. I smelled bread cooking over an open dung and wood fire and heard the TV playing with electricity siphoned from the temple. The squatters stared warily at me. I wandered deeper into the cemetery, over a mound of graves beyond the tents. The dogs began to bark; I reached for my mace. Two young boys held them back. One spindly legged young man dressed only in his undershorts and scruffy white T-shirt approached me. “You are Jew?”
I nodded.
“No worry, please come, we watch cemetery for you.”
“Thank you.” I thought he wanted money and I reached into my pocket to give him some rupees. He waved me off.
Among the newer graves, I spotted the headstone of Hannah Furstenblum, Levi’s second wife. I picked up some small stones and placed one on her gravestone. The Jewish tradition of leaving stones rather than flowers on graves dates back thousands of years. Stones became the sign of visitation because they represent a sense of permanence. The Talmudic rabbis thought flowers, which soon wilt and die, were too close to pagan customs. They also calculated with their secret formulas that the soul might hang around for awhile, doing what, the rabbis couldn’t say (enjoying a last nosh?), before it took off for destinies elsewhere. They used the same reasoning for the yearlong wait to unveil the permanent headstone.
At the front of the cemetery, I placed three small pebbles on the headstone of young Rachel Mulemet. I said no prayer for Rachel, only mouthed soundlessly that I, at least, remembered her.
I started back toward the Taj to catch a taxi home, but in the middle of Humayun Road, mixed in with the cacophony of sputtering engines and clanging horns, was a circling crowd. I saw a woman lying on the ground cradling a child. A man, it turned out to be her husband, head cupped in hands, stood shaking and talking in Hindi. Others yanked at the woman’s sari that had gotten caught in the spokes of the scooter, which had flipped out of control. I yelled “Doctor, doctor” and a man grabbed my arm and pulled me through the crowd. Blood oozed from the woman’s skull. I knelt down, took off my jean jacket and used it as a pillow and a tourniquet. A young guy appeared with a rather intimidating-looking knife, and sliced the cloth of her sari so her body came free. A woman gently took the baby from the mother’s arms. In the snarled traffic someone found an empty taxi, by the time an ambulance showed up we could all be dead. The driver hesitated when he saw who I wanted to put in his taxi. Knowing how cab drivers worked in New York, I waved a five-hundred rupee note in his face. With help, we lifted her into the back of the taxi. The husband, sensing the potential loss of his most needed possession, managed to start his scooter and followed the taxi to the compound.
At the embassy gate, the guard recognized me; he too hesitated before I yelled to let us through. We stopped outside my office and two Marines helped the woman into the examining room. Her husband halted, afraid to enter. I waved him in and spoke authoritatively, though he didn’t understand, that it was safe for him to enter. I did a thorough exam. There were no signs of internal bleeding or severe edema. I took x-rays. All revealed nothing serious, only a mild concussion. I put in eight stitches. I wrapped her twisted knee in an ace bandage. The baby seemed physically unharmed.
I called in one of the Indian assistants and asked him to explain to the woman that she should wear a helmet; especially if she were going to ride sidesaddle with a child in her arms. He laughed and explained to me that the law, after a series of revisions to accommodate the Sikhs on religious grounds and women who claimed helmets would ruin their appearance, applied only to non-Sikh Indian men. I asked him to tell her to wear one anyway. Then we called a taxi and I paid the driver to take her to their home; no riding on the scooter yet. They didn’t have a phone but I gave them my number and said they should call from one of the thousands of STDs—public phone stands, not sexually transmitted diseases—located all over Delhi, if she got a headache or felt any other side effects.
An hour later Paul Schlipssi, “the admin,” and my ostensible boss, who fashioned himself a no-nonsense guy, marched into my office. His step mirrored the erect, stiff-necked gait of a military man, although like so many of his bombs-away ilk, he had dodged the draft during Vietnam by staying in college forever. He declined my offer to sit, preferring to stare down at me with his brown eyes attempting to look tough, as if that would make me feel inferior.
“Listen, Downs.” He didn’t like me because I was not Foreign Service or military, and I was a pet of Charlie’s. “You have a list of people who get treated in this office, no one else without my permission. You’ve already allowed too many Americans of no account to come here.” He leaned over the desk and placed the computer print out of the list on my desk, deliberately turning it until it faced me.
“Sure.” Donna had already warned me that I’d permitted more nonlist people to come to the embassy than had the previous doctors.
“And next time you want to play ‘save the Indians’ take her to AIIMS or NDP.” AIIMS and NDP were the two largest public hospitals in Delhi. “Treating the low-caste or homeless Indians is trouble. The Indian authorities do not appreciate our beneficence. You have heard about that German doctor?”
I nodded. Dr. Henreich Blaumer, after he retired from his practice in Frankfurt, moved to India and began his own street clinic in Connaught Place, the showcase tourist center of Delhi, peopled with thousands of beggars, whom he began to treat free of charge. The authorities didn’t appreciate his interference and arrested him twice, and they kept him in jail for pederasty, of which he was innocent. After years of resistance, they gave him tacit permission to practice if he kept a low profile.
“I’m a doctor first and your employee second.” I stood up so we faced each other eye to eye. “I don’t care what you or the Indian authorities have to say. I was trained to help people. To save lives and minimize pain. You have your job and this is mine. If I can’t help someone bleeding on the street, I’m outta here.”
Even Schlipssi wasn’t that callous. He nodded. “Just be judicious in the use of your abilities and the magnanimity of your heart.”