Part 6 of 7 · 14 minTwo Deaths

The clerk at the district office laughed a second time at five o'clock, when he found her still there. She sat on the bench across from his table with her case book on her knees and her sandals set square on the floor, and since noon she had asked for nothing, not even water. At twenty to six he took the death register for the canal villages down from the steel almirah, dropped it on the table in front of her, and told her she could have it until he found his umbrella.

She did not need so long. A nurse reads a register the way a boatman reads water. Her finger went down the columns and stopped only where three things stood together: a man who was not old, a death in sleep, and the words heart failure. There were eleven such lines that year. She copied all eleven, with the villages and the dates and the names of the doctors who had signed, and she was capping her pen when the clerk came back with his umbrella.

"What will you do with them, Amma?"

"Visit," said Annamma.

Listen to how she did it, because it was nothing anyone would notice. She did what she had done for forty years. She took the first bus out and the last bus home, and got down at stops that were only a tree and a tea shop. She went to the wells in the afternoon, when the women came for water, and stood with them and waited, and when the widow came she did not say she was sorry. She said, "What time did he lie down?" And then, "Did he eat his night meal? Did he sweat? Did he rub his chest, or his left arm? Did he say he was tired?" The women answered, because nobody else had asked them anything.

Most of the eleven closed quickly. One man had drunk every night for twenty years. One had a weak heart the whole village had known about since he was a boy. She drew a line through each of them in the case book, one neat line, and wrote the reason beside it.

At Pedavanka there was a lane behind the bus stop, and in the lane an auto-rickshaw stood under a tarpaulin that had not been lifted for months. The name in the register was Nagaraju, twenty-eight, driver. Dr. Murthy had signed.

His mother was sitting on the step. Annamma had not finished her first question before the woman began, the way the families of the twice-spared always begin, as if the story had been waiting behind the teeth. The cobra in the paddy when he was nine, and the healer who cut a cross on his ankle and sucked. The night he was twenty-four, when the auto went off the bund, the raised bank of the canal, and he came up under the hood with his mouth in a pocket of air. Twice, she said, God had given him back.

"What time did he lie down?"

"After the market. He was laughing. He said he was tired like an old man."

"Was there any mark on him?"

The mother touched the outside of her own left arm, high up, below the shoulder. "Here. A small thing. Like an ant bite, with no swelling. When I washed him for the burning I wiped it with a wet cloth, and it did not wipe off."

Annamma wrote that down. Then she asked which market.

"The Tuesday market. The last Tuesday of November."

That night, under the tube light in the front room, with Prakash watching the news with the sound turned low and Chinnu asleep with her fist against her mouth, Annamma opened the case book on the table and ruled a page down the middle.

On the left she wrote Sattibabu. On the right she wrote Nagaraju. Under each, in the order in which a patient was entered at the Centre, she set down what she had.

Sattibabu, forty-five, lorry driver, Gannerulanka. The crash on the highway. Nineteen days of fever. The chariot festival at Sri Rama Navami, a crowd of thousands. Dead in his sleep the same night. Heart failure. Signed, Dr. Haritha. Mark on the left upper arm: seen by me, from across the ropes, as the needle went in.

Nagaraju, twenty-eight, auto driver, Pedavanka. The cobra at nine. The canal at twenty-four. The Tuesday market, the last Tuesday of November, a crowd of hundreds. Dead in his sleep the same night. Heart failure. Signed, Dr. Murthy. Mark on the left upper arm: seen by the mother; washed; did not wash off.

Two men who had each missed prana-gandam twice, the danger to life that is written in a person's stars and either takes them or passes by. Two crowds. Two nights. Two pin-points on the same arm, where a man who has held a thousand arms puts the needle without thinking. She read across the two columns line by line, the way one reads a chart against a chart, and at the bottom she drew a double line and wrote beneath it what she had been taught to write when two cases in two villages matched. "Same source."

From the sofa Prakash asked what she was writing. "A report." He turned the television up.

Now I must tell you where he was all this while, because he was never far.

To do her work she had to go through crowds, and wherever a crowd was, he could be. At the district bus stand in the morning rush he stood under the timetable board, which he could not read, with the black bicycle leaning on the pillar beside him and the steel box open on the carrier. He was working the queue for the Pedavanka bus. Swab, needle, press. Swab, needle, press. Nobody felt it. Along the queue babies woke on their mothers' shoulders and screamed, and the mothers looked about for the reason and saw a timetable, a pillar, nothing.

When Annamma came in off the road he stopped with the cotton pressed to a stranger's arm, and turned his head, and watched her.

She saw him: the white half-sleeve shirt, the cycle clips, the pock marks on the left cheek. In fifty years, every person who had seen him had been dead before the next dawn. She had been seeing him since April. She looked at her watch, wrote the time in the case book, and got on her bus.

At Pedavanka, on the Tuesday, he was standing at the edge of the market where the tamarind roots break the ground. He watched her go down the lane to the mother's house, and he was there when she came out. A boy selling groundnuts in paper cones saw him, dropped the cones, and ran behind his mother's sari. The man with the box took a peppermint from his shirt pocket and held it out to the place where the boy had been, and held it there, patiently, while the boy screamed.

He did not take her. I cannot tell you why, because after 1976 there is no why in this story. I can tell you only that he stood always one crowd away from her, and waited. Patience was the one thing he had never run short of.

Dr. Haritha was not yet thirty. She had the Centre and nineteen villages, and she ate her lunch standing. She had signed Sattibabu's certificate at seven in the morning, with his family waiting at the door for the body. She read Annamma's two columns once, fast, and then again, slowly, and on the second reading her hand went to the pen in her coat pocket and stayed there.

"Come with me to the district medical officer," said Annamma. "Today."

"Amma, I have eighty patients outside."

"Then after the eighty."

The district medical officer had a glass top on his table, with a calendar pressed under the glass, and a fan that turned the corners of his papers. He listened for two minutes, looked at his watch, and said he had a meeting.

"I will wait," said Annamma.

"Madam, it may be a long meeting."

She sat down on the chair in front of his table. She did not look at the door. The peon came in and stood beside her and coughed, and she did not look at him either. A nurse who has sat all night beside a woman in labour does not get up from a chair because a man coughs. At last the officer sighed and sent the peon for the two certificates.

When they came she did not touch them. She pushed them across the glass to Dr. Haritha. "Read them. Aloud. Both together."

The young doctor read. "Sattibabu. Male. Forty-five. Died in sleep. Cause, cardiac failure." She turned to the other sheet. "Nagaraju. Male. Twenty-eight. Died in sleep. Cause, cardiac failure."

"Now line by line. One from each."

"Forty-five. Twenty-eight." Her voice went on by itself. "The night of the chariot festival. The night of the Tuesday market. No previous illness. No previous illness."

"And the arm," said Annamma. "Read me the arm."

There was nothing on the certificates about any arm. The room was quiet except for the fan.

For one moment Dr. Haritha saw it. You could have watched her see it. Her eyes went from one sheet to the other and back again, and the colour went out of her lips, and her right hand came across her body and closed on the outside of her own left arm, high up, below the shoulder. She had lifted Sattibabu's arm that morning to feel for a pulse that was not there. She had seen the mark. She had thought of the village quacks and their injections, and of the family at the door, and she had not written it down.

"Doctor," said the officer, "did you note anything on examination?"

Dr. Haritha let go of her arm. She put her pen back in her pocket. Then she turned to the old woman, and her voice was gentle, and it was the gentleness that closed the door.

"Amma, where did this idea come from? Who told you to look for a mark?"

Annamma did not soften it. She had never softened a history. "A man who drowned in 1976. Peddinti Suryanarayana, called Suryam, the attendant at the Gannerulanka Centre. He could not read. He gave expired vials to children while I was away, and four of them died, and the men of the village put him in the canal. He is at the crowds now. I watched him put the needle into Sattibabu."

Dr. Haritha let out a long breath and began to gather the two sheets together.

"Thank you, Amma," said the officer. "We will look into it."

Prakash was waiting at the bus stand when she got off at Gannerulanka. The officer had telephoned him. He began to speak, and she spoke over him. "The evening passenger," she said. "Come to the station. I will show you."

By half past five the station platform was full. It has one platform, with a tin roof over the middle and a neem tree at the far end. Women going home from market sat on their heels beside baskets of mangoes, for it was May, and the whole platform smelt of mangoes and diesel and hot oil from the tea stall. Along the length of it, first at one end and then nearer, babies began to cry.

Prakash came on his scooter with Chinnu standing in front of him. Annamma took him by the wrist and turned him. "There. By the last pillar. White shirt. The box on the carrier."

He was going down the waiting line from the neem tree towards the ticket window, the bicycle on its stand behind him. Swab, needle, press. A student, a porter, a woman with a basket on her head. Nobody felt it. The smell of spirit came up off the cotton, sharp and clean through the mangoes.

"Amma, there is nobody."

Chinnu pressed her face into her father's trousers, and without lifting it she pointed. "That uncle. With the box." Prakash pushed her hand down.

The rails began to sing. Round the bend came the headlamp, yellow in the dusk, and the horn, and the whole platform rose and pressed forward and stood along the edge. The man with the box wheeled his bicycle to the very edge to begin again at the head of the line.

Annamma walked down the platform behind him, not fast. Then her hands were on him, one flat between his shoulder blades and the other on the steel box, and she pushed with all the strength of a woman who had turned heavy patients in their beds for forty years. Her hands did not pass through. She could see him, and so her hands found him, as his needle would have found her. He went over the edge with the bicycle. The bell struck the rail and rang once. Tring.

He stood up between the rails. He lifted the bicycle upright. The engine was on him.

It did not strike him. It came through him the way wind comes through a wire fence, and the fence stands. There was the blunt yellow face of the engine and the heat of it, and the wheels turning through the place where his shins were. Then the coaches came, one after another, and he stood inside each of them for the space of a breath. A row of knees. A man asleep with a towel over his face. In the fourth coach a small boy at the window looked down and saw a man with a bicycle standing up to his chest in the floor, and opened his mouth, and was carried screaming into the station.

The guard's van went over him last, with its red lamp. The track at the far end lay bare, and he was standing between the rails with the syringe in his hand, looking up at her.

I will tell you what the platform saw, because the platform's account is the one that was written down. An old woman walked along behind the waiting line, talking. When the engine came in she ran at the edge with both hands out in front of her and shoved at nothing, and nearly went over after it. The tea vendor dropped his kettle and caught her round the waist a foot from the edge. Two students took her arms. They dragged her back to the wall, and she fought them all the way.

"There! Between the rails! I put it under the engine and it is standing there. It won't die!"

They looked. They saw rails, and stones, and a paper cup rolling over in the wind the train had left behind it.

The station master sent a porter to the police outpost. The police sent for the doctor at the Centre. Dr. Haritha came in the jeep and sat with Prakash outside the station master's room while he cried. The next morning at the district town she signed the papers with him, and Dr. Mohan, the psychiatrist, admitted Annamma to the government hospital for mental care. At the desk the clerk wrote her name with one letter wrong, and Annamma made him cross it out and write it again. Then she told Dr. Mohan the time of the push, to the minute.

That night, at the kitchen table in her quarters, Dr. Haritha wrote her report. She wrote it well. The two deaths, examined; the cause in each case, cardiac failure; the complainant, a retired auxiliary nurse midwife now under psychiatric care. "No relation established." Below that she wrote one more line, because it was true.

"Both men had a single puncture mark on the left upper arm."

She looked at it for a long time. Then she drew one line through it with the side of her pen. It was a thin line, and every word could still be read under it. She put the report into the file, tied the tape, and before she turned out the light she pushed up her own left sleeve and looked at the skin, and pulled it down again.

In the women's ward, on the third day, at four o'clock, the visitors' queue ran along the outside of the wall under Annamma's window, sons and daughters carrying tiffin boxes. She was at the bars when the first baby began to cry in it, and then another, farther along.

Then it came, from somewhere in the queue, unhurried. Tring-tring.