Part 2 of 7 · 14 min1976

You have seen what he is. Now come back fifty years with me, to a wet August in Gannerulanka, and see what he was. This is the only part of the story with a reason in it.

The Primary Health Centre was a yellow building of three rooms. At seven in the morning its verandah smelled of kerosene and boiling water. On a stove in the corner sat a steel steriliser box with its lid rattling, and inside it a glass syringe with a steel ring on the plunger, and a dozen needles, turning over in the bubbles. Peddinti Suryanarayana, whom the whole village called Suryam, stood over it with a pair of forceps. He did not watch the clock on the wall. He watched the shadow of the window bar crawl across the floor, and when it reached the third tile, the needles were done.

He was twenty-nine that year, lean, with a neat moustache and the pock marks of an old smallpox on his left cheek. He was the attendant. He boiled the needles, swept, fetched, and held the arms. He could not read or write. On pay day he pressed his thumb on the ink pad and then on the pay book, and beside the blue whorl Annamma wrote his name, so that the district would know whose thumb it was.

Annamma was the auxiliary nurse midwife, twenty-four years old, and she did the rest. She read the vials. She gave the needles. She kept the register, a thick book with a brown cloth cover and a red spine, and every name, house, dose and date in it was in her small upright hand. She was not easy to work for. She counted the cotton. Once he lifted the needles out when the shadow was on the second tile, and she did not look up from her writing.

"Again, Suryam," she said. "From the beginning."

He boiled them again.

When the round began, she took the syringe and he took the arm. He held it at the elbow and the wrist, firm enough that it could not jerk, and she swabbed it with spirit, put in the needle, pressed the cotton down. To every single person she said the same words: "Hold out your arm. It won't hurt." After a while the words were in his mouth as well, and he said them with her, half a breath behind. He knew the order of her hands as a drummer knows a beat. Swab. Needle. Press.

Then he tied the box to the carrier of his black bicycle with a strip of old cycle tube, filled his shirt pocket with peppermints from a glass jar, closed the cycle clips over his trousers, and rang the brass bell. Tring-tring.

Every child between the Centre and the canal knew that bell. They came out of doorways and ran behind the bicycle in a string, calling for sweets, and he threw peppermints over his shoulder without turning round. The babies were different. A baby on its mother's hip would see the steel box go past and begin to scream, because the box meant the needle. Remember that. Even then, the babies cried when he came.

In that country people speak of prana-gandam, a danger to life written in a person's stars, which either takes the person or is missed. Suryam had missed two. Smallpox came for him when he was seven, in 1954, and left with nothing but the skin of his cheek. Then, in the cyclone of 1969, on the night the water broke over the canal bund, he held on to the trunk of a palmyra palm until morning. On the next palmyra a boatman named Pothuraju held on as well, and the two of them shouted each other's names through the dark so that neither would sleep and let go.

Then, in August 1976, the river came over. The floods stood in the low streets for nine days. Within the week there was cholera in the canal villages.

The doctor kept the sick at the Centre on cots and then on mats. Annamma gave the cholera needle from first light until she could not see the arm in front of her, and Suryam held the arms, boiled the needles and fetched the vials. He knew them by their places. The new boxes came from the district on the bus, and she kept them on the second shelf of the cupboard in the back room. The cupboard door had never shut properly.

On the bottom shelf of that cupboard there was another box. It held vials from the spring, past their date, set aside to be sent back to the district store when the van next came. Annamma had written on its lid in blue ink, in English and then again in Telugu underneath, and drawn two lines under the writing.

You will want to know what it said. I will tell you, because he never knew. It said: Date over. Do not use. Return to district.

He had moved that box a dozen times while he swept. It was in the way of the broom.

On the Sunday evening a boat came across the canal from the island hamlet. A woman there had been two days in labour and the child was lying wrong. Annamma packed her delivery bag, and because there was cholera on the island too, she took the new vials with her, all that were left, and the second syringe.

At the door she turned round. "No needles till I come back," she said. "Nobody. If they come, send them home. The doctor comes on Thursday."

She was gone two days.

By Monday morning the word had gone round the village that the needle had saved the potters' street, where every house had taken it and nobody had died. The mothers came to the Centre. Fifty of them, with children on their hips and at their knees, filled the verandah and the yard. The children were crying because the mothers were frightened.

"The nurse is not here," he told them.

"You are here," a woman said, and put her son's arm into his hand. "Give it to him. You have given it to the whole village."

He had not given it to anyone. He had held it.

He stood there with the thin arm in his hand and the verandah shouting at him. Then he went into the back room. The second shelf was empty. The box on the bottom shelf was within reach.

Mark this, because it is the whole of the reason. He did not know what the lid said. And he did not go and find someone who did. There was a boy in the fifth class sitting on the verandah steps with his little sister. A man who cannot read has a hundred ways of asking. Suryam used none of them. He carried the box out, set it on the table where Annamma sat, lit the stove and boiled the syringe until the shadow reached the third tile.

Then he did what he had watched a thousand times. He swabbed the arm with spirit. He put in the needle. He pressed the cotton down. His hands did not shake once.

"Hold out your arm," he said to each child, in her words. "It won't hurt."

After each one he gave a peppermint. The line went on all that day, until the lamps were lit. The smell of spirit hung over the verandah, and the crying went on, one child starting as the last one stopped.

The first of them was a boy from the fishermen's hamlet, who would not wake on Monday night when his mother lifted him. By Tuesday morning there were four. I will not tell you their names. The village knew them. It is enough to say that a child's bier is short, and one man can carry it on his shoulder, and four times that morning a man walked to the burning ground with a bier on one shoulder and the women behind him without a sound. There was no drum.

Somebody went to the Centre. The box stood open on the table where he had left it, with the lid thrown back and the empty vials in their rows. The boy from the fifth class was brought, and made to read the lid aloud. He read it twice, because the first time nobody said anything.

The Tuesday market was held on the bund, just below the lock gates. There were baskets of brinjal, dried fish on sacking, the big hanging scales with their iron weights stacked beside them, bullock carts unhitched with the yoke poles lying across them. Suryam came to it as he came every Tuesday, with the box on his carrier and the peppermints in his pocket.

There were forty of them. They came with what a market has to hand, the yoke poles from the carts and the iron weights from the scales.

What the rest of the market heard was this. The scale pans clanging empty as the weights were lifted out. The steel box going over, and glass. Wood, several times. The brass bell, struck once by something that was not a thumb. Then nothing, not even the crows, for as long as it takes to say a short prayer. Then a heavy splash in the canal, and a second splash with the bell in it, as the bicycle went in after him.

Afterwards the men did small things. They put the weights back beside the scales, the largest first. They laid the yoke poles across the carts again. One man washed his hands in the canal, and then washed them a second time. A few peppermints lay in the dust, and nobody's child was allowed to pick them up.

The record says drowned. He was twenty-nine. The third prana-gandam was not missed.

Annamma came back across the canal that evening with her delivery bag. She saw the box on the table, open. She did not need the boy from the fifth class. She read the lid she had written herself. She counted the empty vials, twice. She went to the back room and looked at the bottom shelf. Then she sat down at the table, opened the register, and wrote in the four names, the ages, the houses and the date, one under the other, the way she wrote everything.

At lamp-lighting the elders came, with the Munasabu, the village officer, and a paper already written. It said that the attendant Peddinti Suryanarayana had slipped on the wet bund in the rain with his bicycle, and gone into the canal, and drowned, and that the nurse had seen it. If it said that, nobody from the district would ask what a box like that was doing in her cupboard.

She read the paper through once, all of it. She did not argue and she did not ask anyone's pardon. She took the pen from the Munasabu's hand and signed her name at the bottom, and the elders went away.

Then she put the register back on its shelf and lit the stove, because the cholera was still in the canal villages, and the doctor was coming on Thursday.

He was standing in the market. It was the next Tuesday, though nobody told him so.

The noise came first, the haggling and the crows. Then the bell was under his thumb. Then the handlebars, then the bicycle, black and dry, and last of all his own two hands upon the grips. The box was on the carrier, tied with its strip of cycle tube. The peppermints were in his pocket.

He opened the box and went to the first man in the row of vegetable sellers.

"Hold out your arm. It won't hurt."

The man went on weighing onions. Suryam took his arm as it hung, swabbed it, pricked it, pressed the cotton down and moved to the next. The smell of spirit rose in the heat. Nobody flinched. Nobody rubbed the place.

It was the children who saw him. A baby on its mother's hip arched its back and shrieked as he went by, and then the next baby, and the next, so that you could have followed his path along the bund by the crying. A girl of four looked straight at his pocked cheek, backed into the folds of her mother's sari and pointed, and the mother smacked the pointing hand down and went on choosing chillies. Suryam held out a peppermint. The girl screamed until she was carried away. He took the arm of a boy who was too slow to run, and the needle stopped a hair from the skin and would go no further, as if a pane of glass lay over it. He tried once more, on another child, and then left the children alone.

In the afternoon the market packed up. The crowd thinned along the bund. A little beyond the last stall the pedals went soft under him. His hands paled on the grips, and then there were no grips, and the bicycle went the same way, until on the empty road he was thinner than breath on glass. Last of all went the bell, a small tring-tring from a road with no one on it.

Now remember forty. It was the number of men who came down the bund with the yoke poles. It is also the number of people he needs about him to have hands at all.

He was in the market again the Tuesday after. By noon he could see the handlebar through the back of his hand. He worked down the row all the same.

"Orey, Suryam!"

It is what a man calls his younger brother. The bell rang against his wrist as he turned. Pothuraju the boatman was coming up the steps from the ferry, forty years old, thin as his own punt pole, with a hospital bundle under his arm.

"Three weeks in the district hospital," Pothuraju said, laughing. "This same cholera. Twice they gave me up. I came by the first boat this morning, I have not even been home. First the cyclone, now this. It is a rebirth, Suryam. But you look worse than I do."

Suryam looked at him for a long moment. Then he said what the years had put in his mouth.

"Hold out your arm. It won't hurt."

"More needles?" But Pothuraju was still laughing, and he held out his arm the way a man does for a friend.

Swab. Needle. Pothuraju flinched. "Cold," he said, surprised. "Like a drop of well water."

Suryam had drawn nothing into the syringe. Yet the steel ring of the plunger was rising against his thumb by itself, and the barrel was filling. It was not blood. It was something pale, the colour of lamp-light on ghee, which is butter boiled clear. Pothuraju yawned.

Suryam pressed the cotton on the place. His wrist turned. The needle went into the vein of his own left arm, and his thumb, which had pushed ten thousand plungers for other people, pushed this one home.

"I am tired, all at once," said Pothuraju. "It is the journey. Come to the boat tomorrow, I will take you across for nothing." He went off along the bund, rubbing his arm. He died in his sleep before dawn. His people said his heart had stopped, and nobody found it strange. On his arm, among the marks of the hospital needles, there was one more, the size of a pin-point.

Suryam held his left hand up against the sun. No light came through it.

That afternoon the district team had come to the Centre with a new supply, and the whole bund was lined up for the needle, far more than forty. He leaned the bicycle where he had always leaned it and went in among them. Annamma was at the table with a fresh register open, giving the needle, saying the words. She did not look up. She could not have seen him if she had. Not then.

The old register was on its shelf in the back room, brown cloth, red spine, every page full of her writing. Somewhere in it, in a line he could not read, were four children. He did not look for them. He opened the book at its first page, and in the margin, beside her careful rows, he drew with a pencil the mark a man makes when he cannot write his name. One stroke down. One stroke across.

Then he tied the register on the carrier above the steel box and rang the bell once, and all along the verandah the babies began to cry.