The anger remained with her throughout the night as she cleaned and bandaged her husband’s injuries. The next morning she noticed her daughters’ despair as they got dressed. A few hours later she was turned down by doctor after doctor in Princes Town. Janak was surprised to hear this quiet, shy-looking woman quarrelling with such gusto. “Money-sucking leeches.”
“I drive out a few of them. You would surprise to know how they does suck rum. It have nothing they could do that Doodoon can’t do.”
“He is another doctor?”
“Sort of.” After a while he said, “He does make false teeth. Living just half a mile from me. You want to try him out?”
“Leeches, leeches.”
When Doodoon emerged from his rickety office in his soiled coat, Dulari was too desperate to be skeptical. He was a short, chubby man with bushy hair jumbled around his ears. His open mouth and huge sunken eyes gave him the appearance of being perpetually surprised, but once he arrived at the house, he got busy and efficient. “Foot break.”
“It will heal?” Dulari asked.
“Everything does heal. In it own way. If you give it time.” He spoke in abrupt snaps.
“He cough up blood last night.”
“Bad sign.”
“What it mean?”
“Lung. Belly. Throat. Foot.”
“You could fix him up?” Janak asked.
“Everything could fix up. If it want to fix up. It could go this way. Or that.”
“So what you going to do?” Dulari asked.
“Plaster Paris. Have a lump somewhere in my office.”
The next day he arrived with a bag of plaster of Paris, a basin, and a bent long-handle spoon. Narpat gazed dully as Doodoon mixed and stirred and applied the paste to a piece of gauze, which he wrapped around the injured ankle. But when he returned two days later to examine Narpat’s chest, his patient, slightly more alert, told him, “Just a minor bruise.”
“You will put a cast on it?” Dulari asked.
“Can’t cast chest. Chest does breathe. Plaster does crack. My job finish.”
“Mammy.” Dulari went to Narpat. “Ask the doctor how much people he kill this year?” And when Doodoon had left in a huff, Narpat twisted his head on the pillow and grinned; and his wife wondered how he could so easily have forgotten that less than a month ago he had stormed through the house, pulling down the furniture and evicting his family. She avoided looking at him when she passed the couch on the way to the kitchen; tried to ignore his lighthearted banter too, until one morning she realized that though he spoke of the unfinished tent and his tractor soaking in the rain and the weeds sprouting in his field and his factory, he had not uttered a single word about his injury. She walked over to him and wiped away the scabs and the plaster residue from his foot. Her daughters sometimes came across this scene and retreated swiftly to their room, but Jeeves, forced once more to sleep on the fibre mattress, listened to his father saying that when his foot was healed and the cast removed, he would have to work harder than ever in the field. Maybe he would buy another tractor.
One week after the accident Huzaifa appeared with a walking stick. “Just hear the bulletin this morning. Ray tell Janak and Janak tell Poolchan and Poolchan tell Kumkaran. And the minute I hear the news, I see this walking stick looking at me from below the table.” He tried to spin the stick like a baton twirler. “Was looking for it months and months. Never find it. Then braps! I see it looking at me from below the table.” He thrust out his hands. “Good solid guava. Have it for years. Was a sentinel stick.”
Narpat practiced walking in a little circle. He found that by slightly dragging the injured leg and half-hopping with the other, he was able to move from kitchen to porch. When his three daughters returned in the evening, he joked about the cast while he practiced: “Trip trap trip trap, went the hooves of the old Billy Goat Gruff as he tripped trapped over the wooden floor.” As word of the accident spread, he was visited by several villagers who had not been impressed with his feats in the gayelle nor with his previous moodiness—mental problems were seen as self-indulgent—but who now offered genuine sympathy. Soogrim and Assevero and Premsingh and James each asked about the fall and each tapped the cast and contended Doodoon had done a splendid job. Kumkaran came too, sprouting cryptic religious epithets. “Man propose and god compose and woman oppose and animal dispose.” Huzaifa became a regular fixture in the house and to each visitor he remarked on the walking stick that had miraculously appeared beneath the table. He was thrilled when Kumkaran referred to the stick as a staff. Narpat enjoyed the visits and all the attention. He asked Dulari to boil tea, and while the guests sipped slowly, he remarked that his swift recovery was due to his diet. “I flush out the toxins years ago.” He tapped his chest. “Inside here is like a field of ice. Any germs that try to enter will get frozen instantly. And even if they get in, the general here”—he pointed to his head—“will outflank them. Out-think them.”
During the mornings he got out a thick brown book titled Virology and read intently of diseases and remedies. He underlined and made notes at the sides of the pages.
He gave Chandra a list of topics: diseases, herbal remedies, nutrition, and virology. She joined the Princes Town library and returned with stacks of books. Sushilla brought simpler children’s books from her school library. Narpat read and reread each, and frequently he would surprise his guest with a detailed history of some disease and its remedy. He told them of eugenics, which recommended sterilization or worse for the disabled, of leeches sucking away at the infirm, of bloodletting and colonic irrigation.
He instructed his daughters to borrow books on ancient poultices and elixirs, and was surprised at the practicality of the ancient remedies prescribed by the Chinese and those found in the ayurvedic texts. These prescriptions whetted his appetite for the ancient Aryans, and Huzaifa, the bestower of many of the health books, was disturbed by the reappearance of this old obsession. But Narpat now read his Vedic books as carefully as he had studied those on medicine. He contemplated the appropriation of Sanskrit symbols like the swastika and reflected on the debate about whether the Aryans had invaded India or were indigenous to the area. Every weekend he held lengthy discussions with Kala and was pleased to note her developing cynicism of ritual and tradition. “A ritual serve a time and a purpose, and once that time pass, the ritual get useless and dangerous. A man with seven or eight wife nowadays is just a vice. Facing a particular direction when praying is just stupidness. Making a set of noise with a conch shell is just inconsiderate. You know what is the biggest vice in the world? Superstition. Honey flowing out from picture. Milk springing out from stone. Angel flying all over the place. Every day people seeing spirit and ghost, Mammy.”
“Why people still believe in these thing?” Jeeves asked seriously.
“Because they don’t want to be smart.”
“Why?”
Narpat answered quickly. “Because is a pain. The superstition just like this cast here. It preventing me from seeing the cut and the pus and the scab. The worm.”
Kala told him, “You could open your own office right here, Pappy.”
“Across the road from the Brahmin. One man selling magic, the next man selling science.” He smiled, pleased with the image. He glanced at the Brahmin smoking and rocking gently and wondered why the pundit had not visited him nor offered a word of sympathy. That man don’t have peace in his mind, he concluded. He is a troubled man. The notion strengthened him, and frequently he brought out his books to the porch, and with his cane against the railing, and the Brahmin singing and waving opposite, he read intently, paying attention to all he had previously ignored or trivialized. He read that the universe’s origin was an act not of creation but of organization. Every single act of creation, of initiative, was a campaign against chaos. When he came across a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, he read aloud, his voice drifting across the road. “‘No one can destroy this unchanging reality. It is not born; it does not die. Unborn, enduring, constant and primordial, it is not killed when the body is killed.’”
The Brahmin stopped his waving.
“‘Every single thing is in a state of flux,’” Narpat repeated to his family. And in this mood he convinced himself that his infirmity, like his problems with the factory, his haze following the battle in the gayelle, and the Brahmin’s successes were each a chaotic strand that would soon be organized into an understandable pattern. The world would synchronize itself. He just had to wait. One night he told his wife, “The real difference between the advanced mind and the savages is that one could see far in the future and the other could only see what going to happen tomorrow. All we have to do, Mammy, is to wait.”
She paused in her rekindling of the fire before she threw in some fresh wood. Sparks scattered above the chulha and fell onto the pot of milk, blemishing the surface with gray dust. The following morning, while Narpat was chatting with Huzaifa and Soogrim, Jeeves asked her, “Pappy get back better now?”
“Only as long as he have these people here listening to him. Just wait till they get fed up and stop coming.”