IT’S THREE NIGHTS BEFORE DIWALI. IN GURKOT, DAMINI will be lighting shell-shaped clay diyas to welcome Lord Ram back from Sri Lanka. But there are no clay lamps in the intensive care unit at Deluxe Hospital, where Nurse Anu is on duty.
She lit lamps the year she brought Chetna home. They flickered from the windowsills of the rooms she rented from Sharad Uncle and Purnima after they moved to Canada. And Chetna wept all night despite them. Her tears began after Anu called Rano’s family with Diwali wishes and Chetna took the opportunity to tell Rano she didn’t care if Lord Ram ever came home. She said she wanted to celebrate the Sikh festival Bandhi Chhord Divas, and Anu-mama didn’t know anything about Guru Har Gobind Singh-ji and wasn’t letting her. Then she asked Rano if she could please come home.
Nurse Anu leans from a window. Occasionally the honk of trucks and the rumble of buses bruise the night, but it is otherwise quiet. So quiet, Anu can hear peacocks calling—Keyoo, Keyoo!—from their perches on rubbish heaps. One storey below, frogs burp from a nearby pond. The night watchman’s bamboo walking stick shocks the night as it strikes the pavement.
Like the shock on Chetna’s face when Rano said that no, she couldn’t come back to Canada—Rano couldn’t look after two girls without servants. After that, Chetna went into what Damini would call Dipreyshun. Until Mumma came to Delhi to meet her. Mumma, who no longer calls widows loose or immoral, made Ovaltine-laced milk for Chetna. She called Chetna “beta” as she used to call Bobby, but wouldn’t stay more than a few days in case it made her look bad, living with her daughter. With Mumma, Chetna has forged the kind of bond Anu tried for, yearned for.
Nurse Anu straightens, and draws the window screen tight against mosquitoes.
Life takes strange turns. But is god involved? Maybe not at a personal level. Still she prayed her thanks by habit when some thugs in the mob who burned the church were sentenced—but they were acquitted on appeal. She prayed for help as plenty of money came from somewhere—presumably from Vikas and his RSS friends in the saffron organizations—but found that the Church could bring no corresponding pressure to bear on the legal system. Only Suresh is still in jail.
Cars are honking on the streets outside. A commotion is coming closer … Loudspeakers in the hospital corridors blare names of doctors. A doctor’s jacket hanging on a hook nearby begins ringing. Down the corridor, another cellphone amplifies as it demands an answer.
“Turn on the radio and the TV!” cries a doctor, shrugging her white coat over her sari as she goes out to meet the ambulances. Anu turns up the volume on All India Radio. Just music. Off the air.
She hurries to the nurses’ lounge, flicks channels till she finds New Delhi TV, which shows footage of bloody bodies on the streets. Men are hugging, women are weeping. The wounded are being carried to taxis. Most will be taken to government hospitals. The rich will be taken to private hospitals, like this one. Crowds surround reporter Barkha Dutt, who is questioning witnesses. A motorcycle lays charred, its wheels melted off. Shop fronts are shattered. Bleeding victims are crowding into the back of a tempo.
She flicks to CNN. “No Americans killed.” Yes, but what about others?
Sirens wail and wail. A few ambulances are flying up the arterial roads of New Delhi. Finally BBC’s Late Night News explains: “Terrorist blasts have torn through Paharganj and Sarojini Nagar—both markets were jammed with holiday shoppers. Another blast went off on a bus.” Later, she will learn sixty people have died and two hundred have been wounded.
She recognizes Vikas the moment he is brought in, though his scratched face has the grey-brown pallor of Delhi smog.
Lord Jesus, give her medical distance! Of the billion and more people in India, here’s the one person she doesn’t want to meet ever again, not even in a next life. Damini would say it was written in her bhagya. Sister Imaculata would say god works in mysterious ways. Professional training says she must deal with him as a patient.
He is dazed and grazed, but must have threatened loudly or bribed the police to get here. Must have shouted, “Don’t you know who I am?”
Right femur cracked in the stampede, left clavicle too. Fracture of right radius and ulna requiring bone setting.
Once a cast is on the leg and it is raised in traction, he is moved to a private room. Doctors dart in and out—Vikas is too drugged to notice.
His parents arrive with whisky and a pack of cards for the vigil at the bedside. Vikas’s uniformed servants bring ice and soda.
Nurse Anu exchanges room assignments with a younger nurse, newly arrived from Gujarat. Mrs. Kohli may not notice her nurse’s cap, white dress and stockings, her slightly grey hair, or her scarred face, just as she never noticed servants, but Anu can’t take the chance.
She doesn’t have to walk past to hear when the Gujarati nurse is helping Vikas to the bathroom or bringing his pills. And she jumps every time she hears him bark buy-and-sell orders into his cellphone. Once in passing she risked a glance into his room to see the nurse listening to his heart. Maybe he has one.
His sycophants arrive, bow and scrape before him. Nurse Anu would like to chop him to pieces before their eyes.
Around midnight, Nurse Anu enters Vikas Kohli’s room.
That fearsome face, innocent in repose. Any minute now, he’ll open his eyes and try to charm her again with his movie-star smile. She clasps her wrist. Pulse: normal.
Feelings? Complete detachment, as if she were soaring above, everything two-dimensional below. Here nothing matters, everything is temporary. The larger story is all she can see. She thinks, This is what Tagore called Airplane Morality.
If she does what she is considering doing, she will pay. Her soul will enter fish, fowl or insect. What if she returns as a man and Vikas’s soul is sent to be her wife? Wouldn’t that be karmic justice? Nurse Anu almost laughs out loud.
Only in Bollywood do women turn into avengers. Only the slayer-goddess Durga Devi wreaks havoc. Only in the Canadian novel Rano sent can a woman escape by hiding in the hills while the war against women continues. If she does what she is thinking of doing, redemption will require the appropriate penance ritual, the feeding of many brahmins, donations to the poor, and the full recognition that retribution was not hers to deliver.
And there’s that inside little voice … that goody-goody voice. It tells her to find a priest right now on this Diwali night, confess and say “through Jesus Christ our Lord” and save herself from sin.
No—visit a priest afterwards.
At 9 a.m. the next morning Nurse Anu is walking out of the hospital lobby after her shift, when she hears a young woman say Vikas’s name. She’s dressed in a lemon short-sleeve shirt of a material that stretches tight over large breasts. Spikey sandals below her jeans. Twenty-four? Twenty-five? Straight hip-length hair tied at the nape of her neck. About Anu’s height, but a little heavier. She stands at the reception kiosk and asks again for Vikas’s room number in a tentative voice.
Even at this distance, Anu can almost taste the fear in that young woman’s mouth.
“Your good name, please?” The receptionist demands, looking up.
“Nisha Kohli.”
Very sweet, very docile. Mother of Vikas’s two sons.
The receptionist’s gaze slides sideways. She shuffles her paperwork strangely and looks uncomfortable.
Nurse Anu approaches. “Mrs. Kohli? I was just going to his floor. I can lead you there.”
In the elevator, Nisha Kohli keeps her gaze on the ground. Anu’s eyes travel from the massive solitaire on Mrs. Kohli’s ring finger to the bruises that run between her gold bangles all the way up her forearm to the hem of her sleeve. Are these what caused the receptionist’s discomfort?
Anu reaches out, touches the closest bruise. “Were you hurt in the bombing?” she asks.
The younger woman jerks away. “Oh no, no. I—uh—fell.” Her gaze drops to the floor again.
“Very bad bruising, Mrs. Kohli,” says Anu. “It doesn’t look as if it’s from a fall. Did someone hurt you?”
“No, Sister,” And after a pause, she says, “Dhanyavad—thank you for asking.”
One more story. This young woman’s parents have sent her into battle without training, weapons or armour. She is locked in mortal combat with no strategy for attack or retreat. “Please tell me, do you need help? Is someone hurting you?” Nurse Anu steals a glance—above her kajal, Nisha Kohli’s eyes are rimmed in red and shimmering with tears.
Only a few days ago, thanks to activists and women’s organizations, Parliament has declared that beatings, insults, ridicule, humiliation, name-calling, threats, disposal or keeping of a woman’s wedding gifts are crimes against women’s human rights. But laws don’t transform society overnight, and Nisha Kohli must be trying as hard as Anu did to stay married.
“No, no, it’s all right,” says the younger woman.
The doors swish open. A man in a business suit turns from his vantage point in the hall. “Mrs. Kohli!” He rushes to the doorway. Does he not see the young woman’s state? A reporter in salwar-kameez rises from a chair, microphone in hand. “Hello, ma’am,” she says, as if the woman she addresses looks whole and hearty. “What do Mr. Kohli’s doctors say?”
The new Mrs. Kohli brushes her forefinger across the corner of each eye, raises her chin, and strides forward to meet the press.
Three-forty a.m. by the clock above the nurses’ station. Pre-Diwali fireworks crack to life. A car honks, a scootie-horn blows on the street below. Nurse Anu’s inner voice is silent. Her oath. Her vow of healing. There’s a blank spot in her memory where they should be. This is the test of all her training, the only test that matters.
Jesus says forgive, turn the other cheek. Gandhi taught non-violence.
And look what happened to both of them!
Luck doesn’t always come calibrated correctly. It needs manual adjustment from time to time.
Do the right thing just because it is the right thing, with the professional’s detachment. Play your role like Dr. Gupta, regardless of who is the patient, regardless of the effect on said patient, without attachment to outcome.
Just as Lord Krishna counselled Lord Arjun.
The Gujarati nurse has been fasting almost 37 days and with only a few days to go before the end of Ramadan, can hardly stand up. “Go home,” Anu says to the grateful young woman. “I’ll look after the patient.”
What is right action? What is dharma? Is it not to go to the defense of a woman whose soul is being crushed, who cannot act for herself? Is it not to do what should be done for justice to prevail? Not the law—justice! Oh, where is Lord Golunath? She has no idea where to find an ojha in Delhi.
If she does not act, her experience will be of no use to other women. But is this the right act? Nurse Anu can persuade herself it is, even without extensive proof. Still she arms herself with one of the digital recorders used by the doctors.
Could Mrs. Kohli’s bruises be caused by someone else? No.
Thy Will be done—but how can I know what is Thy Will and not my own?
She must overcome conscience and empathy to become a selector of souls, and do what must be done.
Nurse Anu takes four potassium chloride ampules from her tray and fills a syringe—50 cc. She enters Vikas’s room. The IV-pack is dripping sweetness into his dreams. He sleeps—baby boy innocent, just as he would after hitting her.
An intense act of will brings her forward. Rational anger courses through her nerves like fire. She disconnects the tubing running from the IV to the cannula jabbed beneath his skin.
For the sake of the young woman in a lemon shirt with bruises down her forearms—hopeful young wife, as Anu once was. For killing her love, for robbing the beauty from her life. For the years in which death claimed Anu while living. For the years of Chetna’s life that she missed. For a brave man shot in his blue eye, for the many Christians who lost the focal point for their prayers. For the witnesses who disappeared, the judges who were transferred. Non nobis solum.
If she fixes her syringe to the cannula and shakes Vikas awake, two slits will open on his face. Thin lines of glittering jet eyes will look into hers. They will light with recognition for one instant.
Memory will pin him forever to that moment, half-risen, mouth a little open, eyes bulging in shock. Hands rising to clutch her throat, then clutching his chest instead. His well-feared face will turn into a cartoon. Two ruby drops of blood will appear where the cannula went in. One swab—they will be gone before they can brown. Oops, Mr. Kohli—your nurse made a medical mistake.
Something will leave her when the deed is done. The day nurse will arrive. Nurse Anu will discuss charts, changes in treatments, lab work to be sent in that day, x-rays and ultrasounds to be carried out. She will deal with the pain of others. She will transfer her patients to the next nurse—all will be well.
Nurse Anu will wait so no one will think she left in haste, till the raucous chittering of birds ushers in a blue-tinted dawn. In the nurses’ changing area, Anu will remove her cap and apron and make a cup of strong Nescafé. Doctors’ rounds will begin. The day nurse will visit patients who need medication, then the nurses aides will do their rounds. Vikas’s body will be discovered. The press will descend.
She will be questioned, but the post-mortem will show cardiac arrest. So many bodies are piled in Delhi’s morgues, it will take months. And no one will dream of checking potassium levels.
Mrs. Nisha Kohli will be a widow, but at least she will no longer feel the mind-numbing panic Nurse Anu remembers so well.
You want to kill a man, a conscious, living breathing person, another human being. Is this Anu?
Would it be an act of generosity or one of selfish revenge?
For conceit, for lack of empathy. He who has none, deserves none of mine.
You have no right—only his mother had that right, and only before he became conscious. Because it’s creating that is difficult.
She should believe as a Christian that his soul will suffer in hell for the suffering he has caused her and Chetna, for the suffering of Father Pashan. When you’re Christian, you don’t have to be judge or executioner. But she can’t help it—she believes as a Hindu that his soul will return. As a rat, a frog, maybe a crow.
Better still, may he return as a Muslim, a Sikh, a Christian, a Parsi or a Jew. Karmic justice, if there is any.
Kill Vikas and he will have won by making her act like him. But … kill Vikas and she will feel larger, no longer helpless. Will that change be reversible?
She approaches the bed.
The glittering eyes are open and he is staring at her. “Anupam! What’s in that syringe?”
“Could be sodium pentothal, could be potassium chloride.” Her voice comes out evenly, as if her heart isn’t jumping in surprise at his sudden recognition. “If it’s sodium pentothal, you’ll talk and talk, and you might even tell the truth. If it’s potassium chloride …”
She describes how he will die, and how his death will feel. And Vikas yells. He grabs for her but is restrained by his leg still hung in traction. She backs away a safe distance.
“The doors and walls are thick here, Vikas. And I’m the only one on duty in this ward. It seems you have been cruel, not only to me …”
Vikas is pressing back into the pillows now, recoiling from her upheld syringe, “Anu, I didn’t know your precious padri would die!”
The mistaken confession takes Anu’s breath away. “I was referring to your cruelty to your wife.”
“Oh—”
“But you’ve just provided more reason why justice should be done.”
“You’re still angry about that little church and that padri, after eight years? Burning churches and gurdwaras is just a first step.”
“Toward what?”
“A pure Hindu Reich. By 2025 we’ll have no more Muslim, Christian, Sikh or Jewish terrorists. No more Muslim bombs like the ones today. Think of it! Frighten non-Hindus enough to make them leave, and eliminate the rest.”
He makes it simple enough that it almost sounds profound.
“And women?”
“Oh, mothers shall be honoured!”
“And daughters, sisters and wives? Must they be beaten, as I was?”
“What lies you make up, Anu,” says Vikas. “Look at you, so full of anger. Why do you make up such lies? Why do you hate me so?”
Nurse Anu says, “I met your second wife in the elevator. I saw her bruises.”
“All these new glass doors in the city. Must have walked into one.”
She answers this with silence.
“Aha—you’re jealous, you’re jealous!”
She stands looking down at him.
“C’mon, yar! You’d kill me just for hitting her once or twice?” Vikas gives a hard-edged laugh. “Why not let me off with a lecture?”
Nurse Anu holds up her recorder. “I could just put your confession on the net and it will become like the stains of your karma. Or I could give it to Amanjit Singh for evidence.”
Vikas tries to laugh, but stops in a spasm of pain. When he collects himself, he attacks, that voice hammering at her. “Seven years after we exterminated your lover and his conversion factory, we’re still here. RSS leaders said Gandhi would be killed for giving half of India to create Pakistan—it happened. We said the Babri Masjid would be demolished, and wasn’t their damn shrine brought down brick by brick? We said that India should be nuclear, and it happened a week after our chaps in the BJP were elected. What we say will happen, happens.”
“Justice can also happen, Vikas.”
“Ha! Three years ago we exterminated thousands of Muslims and all that happened was inquiry after inquiry. Each time our money and connections move us closer and closer to the magic word. Power. Power suit, power lunch, power drink. Total Power!
“And we will come to power again, because those who go to the polls worship Mother India and don’t read English. Majority rules, darling, the majority Hindu community!” He winces, and all of a sudden has run out of energy. He lies back on the pillow, his face grey.
He must be very tired, his whole body must be hurting. How pathetic he looks with his leg suspended, and one arm in a cast. Her gaze drops to the syringe, to her hand holding the syringe. “In a few minutes, the great Prince Vikas might turn into a frog. Or come back as a woman,” she says.
“Bloody rubbish.” Vikas strains to sit up, to get at her, as monitors of his vital signs arc and flash all around. “Touch a hair on my head, and you’ll be in trouble.”
“Sometimes,” Anu says, “people in intensive care can become paralyzed after accidents. Some fall into a state of coma for long periods. It’s a strange feeling, Vikas, like going back to a time before birth. You’ll be unable to lift a finger. You’ll be dependent on the kindness of nurses, as you were dependent on the health and kindness of your mother. Would it be better for you to die than to live?”
True fear, the kind Anu felt every day for nine years, dawns on Vikas’ face.
“Help!” he yells.
Everyone will hear. But most will feel it’s Nurse Anu’s dharma to answer.
She turns her cheek. The one with the faded scar, in which sensation is not the same as in the other. She could be considering his plea, she could be steeling herself against him.
The needle in her hand approaches Vikas’s skin. Her gaze rises for a moment—outside, the sun is lifting off into incandescence. The wisdom of the universe vibrates around her.