The Walls of Delhi (19 page)

And the next morning, he was absolutely fine, drinking milk hungrily from Shobha's breasts until sated. Placing a finger beneath his lips caused him to burst into laughter, and he flashed his toothless gums. He began to recognise both mother and father, and Chandrakant's mind eased a bit. He said to Shobha, ‘He probably had some mucus caught in his throat last night, and that's why he sounded like he had a whistle stuck in there. It's also been a lot colder lately, but I don't think it's something we need to worry about, it was probably just a mild cold. I'll mix a little bit of brandy in with his milk.' The hospital had given them a bottle full of brandy.

Shobha organised a small coal stove that would keep the baby warm from the damp chill outside. She hung a couple of old sheets and a rug from the top of the outside door frame to keep drafts out. Chandrakant sprinkled DDT powder and poured kerosene into the drainage ditch in front of their house in order to make sure mosquitoes and bacteria wouldn't breed. The two of them did everything that they could think of in order to be conscientious.

They named the boy Suryakant, and affectionately called him Suri.

This continued for a couple of weeks, until one night Shobha woke with a start to find Suri whimpering. Once again, his forehead bore the traces of intense pain, little wrinkles that ebbed and flowed as he silently struggled against deep discomfort, enduring the hurt, all alone. Any other child would have cried its eyes out.

She noticed that Suri kept trying to grab hold of his head.

Was his head in pain? She touched her palm to his forehead and it was like placing it over hot coals. He had a high fever and was burning up. Shobha shivered.
Not again! Not the eighth!

She got up and turned on the light. The bulb was directly in front of the door and the light shone right into her eyes. Chandrakant woke up; he had been out late drinking with Gulshan Arora at his house.

Three months passed: Suri didn't utter a peep, let alone cry. His languishing face grew crimson, clay-coloured, expressionless, lost in pain. He wheezed like a whistle with each breath, and continually tried to grab hold of his head with his tiny hands.

In the light, Chandrakant and Shobha noticed that despite the severe chill, Suri kept kicking the blanket off his body, and drops of sweat glistened on his forehead.

Suri suddenly gave Chandrakant a look that gave him a start. The three-month-old boy who was quietly struggling with his suffering, looked at his father with a gaze that held both heartbreak and dignity – fathomless pain, but not begging for help. His own boy wore a face that told the story of a solitary struggle with hurt, a tiny, innocent face suggesting exhaustion at having lost a battle, or being stuck in a worry.
So this one too?
He nearly broke down.

‘He's burning up,' Shobha said, taking Suri into her lap to try and soothe the boy. She froze. The boy's head dangled down as if his neck were lifeless, as if his head and torso were independent parts with no stable connection. Frightened, she placed her hand behind his head to steady it, unbuttoned her top, and placed his mouth flush to her breast. She was flustered and the only thing she could think of at the moment was to nurse
him – it seemed like the most important thing in the world, and she hiccupped, on the verge of tears.

The baby's head on her chest felt like a pot out of the kiln. She nervously pressed her nipple into his mouth – it seemed he was hungry, or had at least found relief from his misery in her breast. Charged with great urgency, he alternately sucked on each breast in a nervous frenzy. Shobha was flush with a riot of maternal feeling for her boy, a sharp sensation that caused her nipples to swell and the blood in her body to rush in an urgent biochemical manufacture of milk to get it to the place where three-month-old Suri – in spite of his mysterious fever, inescapable pain and hunger – drank quietly and without crying. That night the sound of his gulping down his mother's milk could be heard echoing through the half flat. Shobha felt every vessel in her body had transformed into countless rivers of milk that served her swollen breasts. Her body quivered with a faint thrill. A primal, otherworldly, inscrutable music shot through the millions of cells and vessels in her body that transformed blood into baby's milk. Here in this world, only women can sense this music and understands its meaning.

A bit later Shobha was taken aback when she again put her hand on the forehead of Suryakant, still engrossed in nursing.

‘Chandu ... Chandu!' she called, her expression fixed between smile and surprise.

Suri's fever had gone down with astonishing speed – his forehead was growing cooler as if a painkiller had quickly taken effect.

Soon Suri's eyes were closed as he wandered peacefully through a dreamy sleep. Even in sleep his mouth again searched around for his mother's breasts.

And so he slept; it was four-thirty in the morning, with daybreak an hour or two away. Little licks of dawn fluttered in the air. Chandrakant had been watching the two for a long time without saying a word. Shobha came and lay next to Chandrakant, gently stroking Suri in her lap, who was deeply sleeping.

‘I don't know why, but I feel a little scared,' she said, top still undone, weak voice filled with apprehension. She laid his hand across her chest, perhaps hoping for support from him.

‘Let's take Suri to the doctor today no matter what kind of shape he's in,' Chandrakant said resolutely to comfort his wife. His hand found her breasts and touched them lovingly, excitedly, in deep gratitude. Sleep was now out of the question.

The first time he noticed her breasts was in Sarani, in the contractor's car, many years ago, when twenty-year-old Shobha, crying, had clutched his shirtsleeves, and in some frenzy had exposed her breasts to the nineteen-year-old Chandrakant, who had been looking at them with the bloodthirsty stare of a fanged, vicious beast.

And then that other day, that afternoon: they had only been in Delhi and in this neighbourhood for a little over a week when Shobha had been bathing on the balcony, under the tap, showering herself with the red plastic mug, covering herself not with water, but with a flowing screen of colour, and he saw her breasts. Chandrakant was drawn to her as if in the clutches of a magic magnet, simultaneously holding himself back while being drawn toward her.

And today! He still couldn't get over what he saw just a few moments ago: that otherworldly magic of hers. He still couldn't fathom what had happened. In the blink of an
eye, these full, beautiful breasts had bestowed deep, carefree, blissful sleep on the three-month-old boy, now snatched away from the jaws of death, who had moments earlier writhed with high fever and endless torment, who had struggled with each breath. Goodness, what was in them? A healing potion? Nectar? Blessed offerings from Vithoba? A safe refuge for man or child, impoverished and alone, overpowered and helpless, worn down to the point of defeat in the struggle of life. He placed his lips there, reached up and began running his fingers through Shobha's tangled hair with warmth and affection.

And what happened then, again, was still a kind of magic. The blood in her countless veins and vessels that until a moment ago had transformed into milk and ran like a river into the mouth of little baby Suryakant now flowed like a hot, mad torrent. Mind and body were submerged into an irresistible music of primal excitement and irresistible titillation. The same blood was running like a river, this time where Chandrakant had placed his mouth.

‘Chandu ... Chandu,' she whispered as she pulled him on top of her with everything she had. Shobha's lust enveloped Chandrakant's mind, body, breath, eyes, skin. And her body, her scent, her weight, and the two of them. Chandrakant was breathing heavily but that was just the start of an otherworldly, magical, exceptional female game.

In that tiny half flat in Jahangirpuri bylane number seven, atop a magic carpet, the two of them rolled around, scorched by unseen flames of a fire that burned of itself in wordless play and that paradoxically also extinguished itself.

Suri lay an arm's length away, his little lips making little
smiles that appeared and then disappeared, perhaps dreaming something in his carefree sleep.

Just over a half an hour later, when the millions-of-years-old sun began rising above the walls of the Galgotia English Public School in front of their house and the Shangra-La Hotel under construction behind it, and when the traffic began to grow thick on the National Highway, Chandrakant and Shobha, on top of the magic carpet, which wasn't really a carpet, just a cheap rug they had bought on the sidewalk bazaar at Vijaynagar, went limp and collapsed.

‘Take this child to AIIMS,' said Dr. Anil Kumar Matta, the pediatric infectious disease specialist at Kalpana Health and Diagnostic Centre. ‘They'll do a CT scan or an MRI. We could do it here, too, but since it's a private clinic, you'll have to pay out of your own pocket in a imaging facility in the market, and you don't have that kind of money.'

‘Can you tell what the problem is, doctor?' Chandrakant asked, anxious.

‘I don't know. His head is getting bigger and heavier. It's still in proportion to the rest of his body, but there's some abnormality, some imbalance. Don't wait, take him there as soon as you can, his life is in danger.'

Shobha and Chandrakant were distraught. Sometimes she snapped awake in the middle of the night to find Suri awake, too, in an odd silence, trying to press his palms against his heavy, hurting head. His innocent little face was crisscrossed
with wrinkles of anguish. Every breath was a struggle, and she thought with each one,
this is it:
his delicate, immature lungs won't be able to draw in air next time. Meanwhile, Suri tried with all his might, his body twisting and turning. The baby's whistling, wheezing sound that had rent Chandrakant and Shobha's sleep, piercing them to their core, was Suri's will to live made manifest.
But what if he gets tired trying?
They couldn't bear the thought.
What are we supposed to do? Where are we going to get that kind of money?

Shobha, anxious and feeling vulnerable, lifted Suri up, clasped his heavy head, and placed him in her lap. There was no doubt about it: his head was growing bigger and heavier every second of every day. She felt that a hot bag of lead and sand and iron were resting on her thighs, not a baby's head. She was getting sore, but there was nothing else for her to do but guide his mouth to her breast, and gently stroke his forehead. Chandrakant woke intermittently and helplessly watched the two of them, Shobha choking back her tears.

Chandrakant made enough money from working at Gulshan Arora's shop to scrape by each month. He was just able to pay for rent, bus fares, essentials, the electric bill. Shobha make a few rupees helping out with neighbours' wedding preparations, or making chutney, pickle, papadum. After Suri was born, their expenses went up, but she was no longer able to go out. I gave Chandrakant some money, and Gulshan Arora helped as well, adding that if he needed more he should just ask – after all, he had worked there for so long – and worry about paying it back later.

AIIMS – All India Institute of Medical Science – was a considerable distance from Jahangirpuri. And because it was
government-run, treatment depended on who you knew and what connections you had. It was the ministers, high-ranking government officers, or the rich and powerful who had access to treatment at AIIMS. Chandrakant and Shobha stood hours waiting in the OPD with Suri in their lap. Either the number they had taken was never called, or perhaps it had been – but, amid the crowd, the doctor had seen Suryakant, looked at him indifferently, and told them to come back another day. After a huge runaround that lasted months, the doctor finally referred them for an MRI – only to discover that the ‘machine wasn't working' at the hospital, and they would have to get it done privately. By then Chandrakant had understood: the doctors and staff were in cahoots and received a kickback for every patient sent to a private clinic. But it didn't matter. In the end, Shobha gathered all the jewellery from her mother, plus what she had taken from the contractor and inspector at Ramakant's, sold it all, and had the tests done.

By then, Suri was more than a year old, and his head had grown to a substantial size. It was true that his neck was stronger than before, and he could now use it to lift up his head. Either it would wobble for a bit before plopping back down, or he would slide on his knees and try to crawl. But pretty soon he tired and began fighting for breath. Whatever energy he had left over was spent trying to catch his breath, and he soon grew listless and collapsed in a heap wherever he happened to be.

But Chandrakant and Shobha had also recently begun to sense that it wasn't just his head that was growing, but that his mind, too, was developing more quickly than babies the same age.

Every day he seemed less and less like a baby.

Then I wasn't able to see Chandrakant for a few months. He did call once, and was at his wit's end. The doctors had more or less made their pronouncement. According to them, Suri would live at most one-and-a-half or two years. His disease was incurable. Of course, if they had two, two-and-a-half million rupees, something might be done. But to say that this was a sum beyond Shobha and Chandrakant's wildest dreams would be a gross understatement.

According to him, the doctors said that Suryakant was an abnormal baby and that the cells in his head were reproducing more quickly than the rest of his body, and that this was due to some unknown reason: a neurological disorder was possible, viral or bio-genetic factors could not be ruled out, a poisonous effect of strong environmental pollution could have played a part. Whatever the cause, if this disproportionate development wasn't stopped, in two-and-a-half-years max, Suri would surely meet his end.

But more than one year has already passed! Only six months left...?