Part 7 of 7 · 14 minHe Is Still Here

The government hospital for mental care stands at the edge of the district town behind a long yellow wall, with a yard of beaten earth and two neem trees inside it. The women's ward had twenty-two beds in two rows. Annamma had the fourth bed from the door, under a window with seven iron bars. The ward was on the ground floor, and the sill of her window came to a tall man's chest. It looked out on the yard where the visitors waited.

The mornings were tablets. The ward sister came down the rows with a steel tray of little paper cups, stood over each bed, and looked under each tongue. Annamma had carried a tray like that for thirty-five years. She did not waste her strength trying to beat one. She swallowed. The tablets made her slow until noon and heavy after rice, and by four they had worn thin.

Four o'clock was the visiting hour. From half past three the families gathered outside the iron gate: sons with tiffin carriers, daughters with permission slips, mothers with babies on their hips because there was nobody at home to leave them with. At four the watchman swung the gate, and they came across the yard and stood in a line along the wall under the ward windows while a clerk at a table called the names.

On her first evening there Annamma had heard the bell in that line, once under the wall and once farther off, and then only the traffic. She did not scream about it. She lay on her back and went through what she knew, in order, the way she had once gone through a labour chart.

She did not rave. That was what the other women noticed first. In the next bed was a woman who spoke every night to her dead husband about the price of paddy. Annamma made her own bed with the corners folded square, and she told them the rules in the voice of a nurse at a health camp explaining how to boil water.

"He needs forty people together. Below forty he has no hands. Only a person who has been saved from death twice can see him. You will hear a cycle bell. Babies cry before he comes. If you hear the bell in a crowd, do not turn round."

"And if I was saved only once?" said the woman in the next bed.

"Then you are nothing to him. Sleep."

The sister heard it from the door, and that evening she wrote in the file: persistent delusion, well organised, patient calm and cooperative. Dr. Mohan came on Thursdays. He asked Annamma the date, and what she thought the man with the bicycle wanted. She gave him the date, and then the answer: "Years. He takes the years a person has left and puts them in his own arm." He thanked her, wrote a line, and changed the colour of one of her tablets from white to pink.

Her case book had been taken from her at the door with her bag and her spectacles, and it sat in a locker in the sister's room. She did not ask for it. She kept it in her head. Every night, when the lights were put out, she said it over to the yellow wall, not loudly. Nagaraju, twenty-eight, auto driver, Pedavanka, the last Tuesday of November, a cobra at nine, the canal at twenty-four, a mark on the left arm. Sattibabu, forty-five, lorry driver, Gannerulanka, Sri Rama Navami, a highway crash, nineteen days of fever, a mark on the left arm. Names, ages, dates. She never missed a line.

Visiting days were crowds, and a crowd was what she watched. From the bars she counted heads in the line. Most days it was twenty, twenty-five. And on some days, not many, the babies in the line began to cry one after another, not all together but in order, the crying moving along the wall from the gate towards the far corner as if something were walking down the line and touching each child in turn. On those days she pressed her thumbnail into the plaster behind the head of her bed and drew one short line. By the end of the rains there were five lines, and she knew the date of each.

Now, you might ask what he was doing all that while. He was working.

Outside the yellow wall the delta went on as it always goes on, and he went with it. A ration shop queue on the first of the month: a woman with a thick black thread on her wrist and an old burn up the inside of her arm told the whole queue about the kerosene stove that went up when she was a girl and the bus that went over on its side when she was a bride. The babies along the queue cried. The bell. The woman turned. "Hold out your arm. It won't hurt." A cross in pencil, down the margin.

A wedding hall with a thousand leaf plates laid in rows on the floor, and in the kitchen behind it a cook's helper with his shirt off in the heat and a long ruled scar down his chest, the line of a heart operation, laughing about the doctors who had given him up. The bell, under the clatter of the vessels. He turned. A cross.

A fish landing at dawn, the boats coming in, the women with baskets on their heads, and an old net-mender who had been pulled out of the sea twice, and said so to anyone who would stand still. An old life is thin stuff. It kept the hands clean perhaps three weeks. A cross.

At each of them the same things happened, in the same order. The smell of spirit where no one had opened a bottle. Babies crying along a line. A child pointing at an empty space and being slapped for it. A white shirt at the edge of the crowd, which a grown person saw only once. And at each of them, somewhere, a child who would not stop screaming, and a hand held out towards that child with a peppermint on the palm.

Three certificates in three offices: heart failure, natural death, cause not known. Nobody laid any two of them side by side. Why would they? One death in a town is what happens every night.

At the Gannerulanka Primary Health Centre, one morning after the Tuesday market, they brought a mason in on a string cot. He was forty. He had eaten well, told stories at the market about the scaffold that fell under him and the lorry that missed him on the bridge, gone to sleep, and not woken. Dr. Haritha did the examination properly, because she did everything properly. She lifted the left sleeve of his vest. On the upper arm, a little below the shoulder, was a single pin-point, dark, no bigger than the head of a pin.

She stood and looked at it for a while. In the district office there was a file with her name on it, and in that file a line she had crossed out and left readable. She put the sleeve down. She wrote heart failure, signed, and dated it. Then she went to the tap in the corridor and washed her hands, and went on washing them after they were clean, until the attender asked whether she wanted tea.

The day came after the rains, on a festival Sunday, when every family in the district seemed to have a daughter or a mother behind the yellow wall and a sweet to bring her.

By half past three the line outside the gate went past the neem trees. Annamma was at the bars before the watchman opened it. She counted as they came across the yard. Twenty. Thirty-one. Thirty-eight. A family of six with a baby, forty-four.

The first baby began at the gate. Then one halfway down the line, on a young mother's shoulder. Then a little girl of three or four, who had been sucking a sugar stick, dropped it in the dust and turned her face into her father's knee and would not turn it back, and the father said, "What is it? There is nothing there. Stand up."

The woman in the next bed sat up. "Annamma. You said do not turn."

Annamma did not answer. She tucked the loose end of her sari into her waist, as she used to do before a delivery, and smoothed her hair back with both palms. She did not go under the blanket. She stood square to the bars and put her face close to them. She had decided, some time in those months of lines on the plaster, that she would be the one who looked.

Tring-tring.

It came from the middle of the line, near the second neem. She looked, and she saw him.

He was just as she had always known him. The white half-sleeve shirt, the khaki trousers with the cycle clips at the ankles, the rubber sandals. The black bicycle stood against the tree, and on its carrier was the steel steriliser box, tied down with its strip of cycle tube. He was going down the line arm by arm. The cotton, the spirit, the needle, the press. Nobody in the line felt it. The smell of spirit came up to the window on the warm air, sharp and clean, the smell of every morning of eight years of her working life.

When he reached the little girl at her father's knee, he stopped and put his hand in his shirt pocket and held out a peppermint on his open palm. The child screamed as if she had been burned. The father picked her up, angry, and carried her out of the line to the gate.

Then he looked up at the window.

He left the bicycle and came across the beaten earth, not quickly, and stood with the bars between them, close enough that she could see the pock marks on his left cheek and the grey just beginning at his temples.

Annamma spoke first. She did not say his name this time. She gave it to him the way she had given case reports to the doctor for thirty-five years, flat, in order, with nothing left out.

"August 1976. Cholera in the canal villages after the floods. I was called across the canal to a hard delivery, two days. In the cupboard, bottom shelf, was a box of vials past their date, set aside to be sent back. I wrote on the lid, in ink, what it was. You could not read it. You took it because it was within reach. You gave the needle to children. Four children died in two days. I wrote their four names in that register you carry. You have carried them fifty years and never read them. Forty men took you at the Tuesday market. I signed a paper that you slipped."

He listened to all of it. He stood with one hand resting on the sill, the way he used to stand at the door of the labour room waiting for the nurse to finish with a mother and tell him what to fetch. Nothing in his face moved. When she was done, he waited a moment, in case there was more. There was not.

"Hold out your arm," he said. "It won't hurt."

"It hurt them," said Annamma, and she kept both her hands folded at her waist.

It made no difference. She had seen him. He reached through the bars and took her by the wrist, as he had taken ten thousand wrists, and drew her arm out into the light, and she let him, because she had never in her life pulled away from a needle and she would not begin for him. She did not look at his face. She watched his hands. The cotton wet from the bottle, the swab in small circles going outward, which is the correct way. The glass syringe with the steel ring on the plunger. He had not boiled it. He never had, after.

The cold dot. She drew in her breath through her nose and let it out.

The pale stuff came up into the glass, the colour of lamp-light on ghee, and rose a finger's width and stopped. That was all there was of her. He pressed the cotton to the place, and she put her own thumb on it without being told.

He turned the needle into the inside of his own left arm and pressed the plunger home. The grey went from his temples.

Behind her the ward saw an old woman standing at the window with her arm pushed out through the bars, talking to the yard. The sister came quickly down the aisle. "Annamma, arm inside. Inside. How many times." She drew the arm back in, and turned it over, and found nothing on it worth writing down.

Under the window he took the register out from beneath the box. Brown cloth cover, red spine, the pages soft and grey at the edges from fifty years of his thumbs. He opened it at the page where he was, and down the margin, beside a column of her own handwriting that he could not read, he drew one cross in pencil. Then he went back to the second neem and took up the line where he had left it, at the next arm.

Annamma ate all her rice that evening. She washed her plate at the tap at the end of the ward and stood it on its edge to dry. She lay down on her back with her hands on her chest, and when the woman in the next bed began to talk to her dead husband about the price of paddy, she said, "Sleep," once, and turned her face to the lines on the plaster.

The night sister found her at the five o'clock round. Dr. Mohan came at nine, read the file, asked her age, and wrote heart failure. There was a pin-point inside the left elbow, and nobody looked for it. An old woman, a mental patient, seventy-four. Nobody wondered.

Prakash came in the afternoon for her things. The sister gave him the bag, the spectacles, and a school notebook with a torn cover, which was the case book: two names, two ages, two places, two dates, and two marks on two left arms, in his mother's upright hand. He did not open it. He carried it home on the bus on his knees, and put it up in the loft with the old tin trunk and the rolled mats, where things go that a family does not throw away and does not look at again.

That is how it ended for Annamma. It did not end for him.

A bus stand, now, this evening, while you are reading. The last buses to the villages are in, their engines running, and there are people enough on the platform, a hundred, two hundred, students and vendors and women with bags of vegetables.

Tring-tring.

At the far end, by the timetable board, a baby on its mother's shoulder begins to cry, and then another one on a bench, and the crying moves down the platform, one child after another, as if something were walking there. There is a smell of spirit, though no one has opened a bottle. A small boy points at the pillar by the tea stall and is told not to be silly.

And somewhere in the crowd, a man with an old scar on his ankle and a thread on his wrist, who has told his friend twice already this evening how he was let off, hears a cycle bell behind him, and turns his head.

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

One more cross, in pencil, down a margin that is already thick with them.

So count again, as I asked you at the very beginning. Count the times death came close to you and missed. If you count one, go easily. If you count two, I cannot tell you to keep out of crowds. Nobody can live like that, and he knows it. He has all the time there is.

I will tell you only this. If a child near you in a crowd begins to cry at nothing, do not scold the child.

Pick the child up. Walk on.

And do not turn round.