Authors: Padma Venkatraman
A Time to Dance (5 page)
“Veda, you've got a roommate,” a nurse announces.
A woman with a mop of gray hair
gives me a yellow-toothed smile.
“I heard you lost your leg. How?”
I don't want this stuffy space invaded.
Especially not by a chatty old woman.
I don't answer.
“Talking will help you heal, you know.
They cut my toes off. Diabetes.
Now tell me about you.”
I give her more silence.
“What's your full name, girl?
Veda what?
You can tell me that, at least, hmm?”
No.
I don't know who I am
anymore.
Nurses come and go,
black strands of hair escaping bleached white caps,
flowing saris peeping from beneath starched coats.
“Pain under control?” they ask.
As a dancer, how carefully I mastered
the mechanics of my bodyâ
learning to bear just enough pain
so I could wear it proudly, like a badge of honor.
I want to tell the nurses no scale can measure
the pain of my dreams
dancing
beyond reach.
and
PAIN
The nurse pulls the faded privacy curtain around my bed
to keep me partially hidden
from my roommate's curious eyes. Why bother?
The curtain isn't soundproof.
My surgeon, Dr. Murali, lists my injuries in a tired voice,
his limp hair matching the glint of his silver-rimmed spectacles.
Below-knee crush injury, concussion, two cracked ribs,
cuts on thighs and shoulders.
“Nothing more.”
Sounds more than enough to me.
My once-golden-brown skin
mottled with more blue-black bruises than a rotting mango.
My once-strong body
bandaged in so many places
I feel like a corpse someone started to mummify
and abandoned halfway.
“Will I have scars?”
“None a sari won't hide.”
My sigh of relief is cut short
by a stab of pain from my cracked ribs.
Dr. Murali says, “You may have phantom pain.
You might feel the part of the leg you lost
is still there.
Many patients say it feels
like when a part of your body falls asleep
and later the numb part wakes up with a prickling sensation.
Like pins and needles.
Except it hurts worse.”
Pain from the ghost of a leg that's gone,
adding to the excruciating ache
in my existing limbs?
Just what I need.
He continues, “Most patients get over it soon.
A year or two at most.”
Maybe when you've got
hair as gray and glasses as thick as he does
two years feels like a short time.
When my roommate and I are alone, she says,
“Sometimes they cure ghost pain
by cutting more off.”
Butcher what's left of my leg?
No, thanks.
STILL HAVE
Paati says, “You have your whole life
ahead of you.
You have
me, Ma, Pa, Chandra.
And God.
God is within you, Veda. So is His strength.”
I don't feel God is anywhere nearby,
let alone inside me.
“Your grandpa was a wonderful man,” Paati says.
“When your pa was a baby and I was widowed,
I fell from the heights of being
a joyful young wife and mother
into a dark valley of sadness.
I could have stayed there.
My in-laws wanted to look after me.
They were loving and kind.
And working widows were rare in my day.
But I didn't dwell on what I'd lost.
I returned to college, became a teacher,
grew independent.
Because I chose to focus on all I still had:
my son, my intelligence, my supportive in-laws.”
In the past, Paati's spoken of my grandpa.
But until now I never realized
how much she loved the man
her parents made her marry.
And how unusual and brave Paati was.
As she leaves the room Paati says, “Doesn't mean it was easy.
I still miss your grandfather. I think of his kindness every day.
Some things you never get used to being without.”
Like a right leg.
Like moving effortlessly everywhere.
Like dance.
My
VOICE
A nurse enters, carrying a sponge and a basin.
She draws the privacy curtain around my bed and starts
undressing me
as if my body belongs to a doll she owns.
My body is not hers.
It's mine.
I still have
most of it.
“What are you doing?” I'm surprised
I sound strong enough to make her step back.
“Sponge bath.” The nurse's voice wavers.
“I can do it myself.
I've got arms.”
I'm finding my voice
though I've lost my leg.
Dr. Murali is followed into the room by a strange man
with flame-gold hair and bright blue eyes.
Is my pain medication making me hallucinate?
“We're lucky,” Dr. Murali says, “to have, working with us,
Mr. James, from America,
who is collaborating with an Indian research team
to create cost-effective modern prostheses.
He's agreed to help with your rehabilitation
and
with the fitting and making of your prosthesis . . .”
He suggests I'm lucky, too, to be part of the project,
because my family doesn't have enough insurance.
I feel the American's eyes on me,
looking
as though I'm more than an amputee, a number, a chore.
He crosses over to me, his strides large, a broad smile on his lips.
“Veda? Did I say your name right?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Call me Jim. Please.” His left hand in his pocket,
he holds his right hand out to me.
As though we're equals.
“Thank you, DoctorâI meanâjust Jim,” I say.
He chuckles. “Haven't done anything yet.”
He
has.
No older man ever invited me to shake hands.
No other adult ever asked me to call them by name.
He even said “please” although I'm a patient.
A smile tugs at face muscles I haven't used for a while.
My hand slips into his
as though it remembers his touch
and we've held hands often
in a previous life.
“Think it over,” he says. “Take as long as you need.”
I let my fingers stay in his pale palm
like brown roots sinking into chalky white soil. “I'll do it.”
“Good,” Dr. Murali says. “He'll have you
walking fine in no time.”
“I don't want to walk fine.
I want to dance.”
The Americanâjust-Jimâlets my hand go,
but his gaze holds me.
His eyes, blue and bright,
light a sparkle of hope inside me.
I used to dream of handsome men
whose touch
made my skin tingle.
In the hospital's airless exercise room,
I hurt from deep in my ribs to the surface of my skin
when handsome Jim lifts me out of the wheelchair,
helps me hold on to parallel bars
to do the simplest of movementsâ
bending and straightening,
moving what's left of my legs.
“You're doing great, kiddo,” he says.
I don't feel great.
My shameful croaks of pain
grate on my ears, harsh as a frog's.
But when Jim says “great,”
rolling the
r
's around like melting sweets
in his American mouth,
when he calls my lopped-off leg a “residual limb,”
when he says I'm “differently abled,”
not handicapped, not disabled,
when he's nearby, using his kinder words,
he makes me feel
a little less ugly.
