Around India in 80 Trains (38 page)

The afternoon wore on and the line by Roshni eventually grew to include Yogesh, a clingy baby with floppy legs; Preethi, a 3-year-old narcoleptic in a party dress and Mona, a 7-year-old who wept quietly into her dupatta, swinging her withered leg like a pendulum. Mona’s mother was dead and she had come alone. Both ceiling fans slowed to a halt, the power-cut deepening tensions. It was a far cry from the Accident and Emergency (A&E) ward at home. Babies suckled in peace, while others hopped and shuffled around the floor, smiling and clutching at parents who touched the doctors’ feet. In two hours, Dr Agarwal and his team screened 90 adults, children and babies and selected just 17 who were invited to the train the next day for operations.

Just after 8am a line of saris curled its way up the ramp to the main door. Yogesh bounced on his mother’s hip, Roshni grinned, Mona’s grandmother was now by her side and Preethi had lost a little lustre, eyeing me from the crook of her grandmother’s neck. They were shown into the waiting area by the theatre where they sat quietly, parents cajoling the frightened with whispers and hugs. In the lounge the doctors had finished their idlis and sambar and were scrubbed. The theatre door slid back and forth every minute, but little seemed to be happening. In his office, the colonel was an unhappy man. The start of surgery was delayed as a couple of doctors had gone to the tiger sanctuary at nearby Bandhavgarh and had not yet arrived.

At around 11am the first patients were carried into the theatre. Jiten, a 2-year-old with a leg shaped like a hockey stick was taken in while his mother waited, her turquoise sari pulled tightly over her shoulder, her eyes glued to the door. She sat motionless, her lips pressed together, magnifying her cheekbones. Although weathered, she was a defiantly beautiful woman. When the door opened again, Jiten was carried out in a blanket and placed behind her. The effects of the anaesthetic were still in place and she stroked at his hair and tapped his face. Her shoulders relaxed as he stirred.

‘Preethi Chaudhuri?’

As one child came out another was carried in and the waiting area now doubled up as a recovery room. Babies who had neither eaten nor drunk since the early hours were beginning to cry and paw at their mothers’ blouses, triggering a collective howling, while others lay in silence, limbs in wet plaster. Preethi was plucked from her grandmother’s arms, and carried away as the elderly lady dabbed her eyes with the corner of her sari.

Eerie beeping punctuated the silence as Preethi was sedated. At 1:20pm her chest stopped twitching, her lids closed, and her leg was cleaned and opened. At 1:50pm her leg was sutured and plastered and she was carried out. Thirty minutes was all it took to change her life. Her grandmother shifted across the seat, her eyes wet, as her granddaughter was placed down. I turned to leave and Preethi’s grandmother gripped my wrist and asked me a question in Hindi. All I could manage was, ‘
sab theek hai’
, twinned with a thumbs-up gesture. Tears rolled into her wrinkles and she fanned herself with her sari, laughing with relief. As I left the train that evening, one thought filled my mind: God bless our British National Health Service (NHS).

That night I sat on Ben’s balcony finishing some work when he brought out a cup of tea for me. I had grown so used to angry silence and learnt to wade through hostile waters that he seemed an unusually calming person to be with. So calming, that I asked him about it.

‘Nothing really winds you up does it?’

‘I just try not to react to stuff. And I meditate every morning … at least I’m trying to.’

‘Every morning?’

‘I’ve come straight from a Vipassana course in Nashik and I want to keep it up, especially now that I’m here.’ He leant back and rubbed his stomach. ‘This place is pretty intense.’

I nodded slowly and he grinned.

‘Have you done Vipassana?’ he asked.

‘No, but I have friends who have and I’ve wanted to for a while.’

Now, more so than ever. If 10 days in silence could teach me not to react to agitation, it would be time well-spent.

On the third morning a familiar scene was unfolding. Queues were growing, babies were bounced, tears were shed and the colonel was, once again, an unhappy man. This time, the anaesthetists had gone to the sanctuary and had not yet arrived. The colonel swivelled around in his chair and shook his head.

‘This is typical. Nobody is saying, “don’t go to the tiger sanctuary”, but first do the job you came here to do, and then go.’ He allowed himself a weary smile.

‘I know what will happen.
Aaram se
, they will take a long bath and have their breakfast and then turn up at midday. It kills everyone’s enthusiasm.’

Once surgery was over, the children were sent to the district hospital to recuperate in one ward. Walking in felt like visiting family. Ben and I had stopped by the local English-medium school to find bilingual students who could help us interact with the patients, and with us now were two 17-year-old girls. Mine had a gentle bedside manner, while Ben’s bellowed at the children startling them with accusatory enquiries into their well-being.

Chattering, cuddling families and empty tiffin carriers filled the ward. Jiten lay on his side with his plastered leg on a cushion. He grinned with his tongue hanging out, one hand pressed firmly between his legs, which his mother kept pulling away. Yogesh gurgled in his mother’s lap as she rocked him. His plaster—no longer than my middle finger—bobbed up and down over her knee. Preethi was back in her party dress and had dal and rice spread around her mouth as her mother tried to feed her from home-packed tupperware. Roshni saluted and patted the bed so I could sit with her. She took my phone number—ringing me every month after I left—and explained in Hinglish that she would now find a husband quite easily. Her plan was to finish school, go to university to study music and then when the time was right, she would get married. She wiggled her crimson toes at me and tapped her plaster. ‘No problem now,’ she said, snapping her fingers. Marriage had also been a worry for Preethi’s parents. Even though she was only three they knew that without surgery she would be doomed to a life of spinsterhood and ridicule.

The room fizzed with energy, but at the same time there was only so much the magic train could do. There were still millions of children who needed help. According to a BBC report, India spends £36bn a year on defence and £750m a year on its space programme, yet has more people in poverty than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, to whom it even donates money. The Indian government had a lot to answer for.

After dinner one night, Dr Agarwal rubbed his hand across his face and looked at his fingers while the team ate in silence.

‘It’s the brain drain that is the problem.’

I glanced up. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We train good doctors and then they leave and want to work in the United States or in the UK.’

‘Is it just because of better salaries?’

‘No. The problem is that they just don’t want to work in the rural areas. If they come here, where are the schools for their children? Where is the electricity and water supply for their homes? There is nothing incentivising them. The village and the city need to move closer together.’

Just above Dr Agarwal hung the photo of Gandhi. His determination to keep the village as the fulcrum of Indian life, seemed now well and truly outdated. Over the last few weeks I had learnt in my train doorways that fewer and fewer villagers wanted to stay put. They would rather live in squalor on the edges of cities where water ran and lights lit up, earning more in a month than a year of pulling ploughs and sowing seeds.

‘The big mistake Nehru made was to inject money into the middle classes instead of at the lowest level.’ Dr Agarwal continued. ‘He built universities rather than primary schools. So the middle classes steamed ahead, leaving the poor far behind and creating a gap that can’t easily be filled.’ He gestured out of the window. ‘These people don’t need shopping malls, they need schools and vaccinations.’

One week flew by and there were three weeks remaining of the project, but train connections from Umaria were few and far between and we needed to leave. As I packed on the last night, I found Sandeep’s copy of the Gita and smiled. Ben was watching my television and Gaurav poked his head around the door every five minutes.

‘Stay, Mrs Monisha,’ he urged, tempting me with his half-drunk bottle of Mirinda.

‘Knock on the door, man!’ Ben shouted.

A large part of me wanted to stay to meet the cleft-lip patients and to follow up the progress of Roshni, Preethi and Mona. This was a happy place with good people and it felt, as yet, unexplored. Ben and I had also become quite content in each other’s company. He was now watching me fold my things reluctantly.

‘Why don’t you just stay if you want to?’

‘I can’t. There are just 20 trains left.’

‘Don’t do something you don’t want to do.’

‘But I do want to. Just …’

‘… not with him. You don’t have to go with him. Finish the project here and I’ll come with you up to Jammu and Assam and do the rest of the journeys.’

‘I can’t. I started it with him so I should finish it with him.’

Sighing, I shoved my clothes to one side and lay down next to Ben on my bed while the air conditioner spat droplets of water on my head. For our last supper, Rajdeo had made a thick, peppery, chicken curry, which had found itself a cosy spot in my stomach. I soon began to doze. In the darkness
Batman Returns
was flickering on television and The Penguin was firing shots from his umbrella, shouting in badly dubbed Hindi. Ben looked over.

‘Do you want me to stay tonight?’ he asked.

I nodded and curled wordlessly into the curve of his body, sleeping soundly for the first night since I had arrived, stirring briefly as he kissed my forehead.