‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘We’ll take you to Ceylon and I’ll find you a job there.’
Sethu swallowed his fear of crossing the ocean with the countless questions that danced at the tip of his tongue. But all he would ask for now was why. His uncle’s voice wouldn’t let it rest: How could you trust a total stranger so?
So Sethu cleared his throat and asked in his most polite voice, ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you helping me?’
The man smiled. He looked down at his fingers and said, ‘I don’t know. I am not an impulsive man. But something about you makes me want to be impulsive. To help you find a place where you can stand on your feet. I am not questioning my impulse; perhaps, neither should you.’
So Sethu rode the train and crossed the waters, buoyed by an impulse. And there in Colomb—for he too swallowed the ‘o’ to erase the thought of the swirling waters—he found it was possible to make a life. Despite the unruly numbers. Despite the unforgiving waters.
Later in his life, when and if Sethu ever referred to those years, he would say cryptically, ‘Maash was a good man.’
He called the man in the train Maash. Master. Mentor. ‘Maash and his wife looked after me very well. I never needed for anything in their home,’ he would say if anyone probed further. ‘Maash found me a place in the health department. I had to do a health inspector’s course, then a year of training, and by the time I was eighteen, I was actually earning.’
How could Sethu tell anyone of everything else that those years had been made of? Like the ‘o’ in Colombo, they existed even if he never spoke of them …Until Saadiya, that is. Saadiya. Saadiya Meherunnisa. Good Girl. Peerless among women. Light of the skies. Saadiya, who lit a beacon and demanded that he trail it through his past. But that was to be many years later.
First, Sethu had to cling to the new name that was his lifeline and be born again. Sethu knew that for a while, at least, he would have to be Seth and let the good book lead him to light and a place in Dr Samuel’s kingdom.
A high wall ran around Dr Samuel’s house. Instead of a gate, there was a door painted green. A door with a padlock and chain. Within those walls Sethu felt safe.
When Sethu was well enough to leave the hospital, Dr Samuel
offered him a job. ‘I need someone like you’ was all he said.
Sethu looked at the doctor’s face, trying to read the meaning of his words. ‘But I am not trained to do this sort of work,’ he said, suddenly afraid.
Dr Samuel merely smiled. ‘You’ll learn as you go along. As thy days, so shall thy strength be. Deuteronomy 33.25. Think about it.’
Sethu sat outside the doctor’s room. He sat with the patients who were waiting to see the doctor. He looked around him. This was a small town, significant for the fact that a missionary organization had chosen to build a hospital here. The town saw many strangers: people who came in from the surrounding villages and the nearby districts. Births. Deaths. The town saw people come and go, and no one asked questions. Sethu stared at the floor. He thought of a line that he had chanced upon in the Bible: I have been a stranger in a strange land.
Perhaps it contained a message for him. He would be a stranger in a strange land. Once again, life was throwing him a line. Don’t fight it. Let it be, he told himself. He would go with the tide.
Dr Samuel gave him a room off the enclosed veranda that ran along the front of his house. It was a huge house with many rooms and much furniture. Dr Samuel barely used a couple. ‘There is enough space for the two of us here.’ The doctor laughed almost apologetically.
Sethu wondered if the doctor was lonely. And what about a wife and children? Sethu bit back the words. He would ask the doctor no questions and hopefully the doctor would ask him none. He looked around him and said, ‘Thanks.’
He thought he saw gratitude in the doctor’s eyes. The doctor was lonely, he decided.
So Sethu found a home to house his new life. There, in the garden filled with mango and tamarind, papaya and coconut trees, he discovered a cork tree and saw that it thrived, a foreigner amidst the natives. He took comfort in the lesson. That behind the high wall with the door, there was a place for him, as there was for Hope, Charity and Faith, Dr Samuel’s acolytes. Sethu belonged, just as they did.
As the days merged with the weeks, Sethu worried less and less that he would be discovered. Dr Samuel found him things to do. He
was part secretary, part compounder of medicines, part dispenser of prescriptions, part odd-job man, part record keeper, part errand boy; his day had so many parts that he didn’t know where it sped. There, in Nazareth, enfolded in the all embracing arms of St Paul’s Hospital, Sethu knew content.
When the days grew hotter and drinking water became scarce, Dr Samuel gave Sethu one more part to his day. Every morning, the women who lived in the houses around the doctor’s, stood in a line by the door in the wall and Sethu would draw a pot of water for each of them. ‘They will have to walk miles to get the brackish water for everything else. As long as our well has enough water, we will give them a pot each. That will suffice for drinking and cooking. But you will have to see that they get only a pot each, or it won’t last very long,’ Dr Samuel said.
Then the water level in the well began to recede too, and Sethu took the doctor to show him how much was left. ‘We have to stop providing water now,’ Sethu said.
Dr Samuel peered into the well with a worried expression. ‘This might sound silly, but if the water goes below that level, we are in for trouble. I thought we would be spared this year, but if it doesn’t rain soon …’
‘Drought?’ Sethu asked, realizing for the first time the implications of a dwindling water supply.
‘Drought, and cholera. Just last year, this district suffered a cholera epidemic.’
What next, Sethu wondered. What would a cholera epidemic be like?
He soon knew.
Where did they come from, these hordes with cracked heels and dry lips, oozing from their orifices, with cramps that gripped their bellies and bodies that craved for fluids and yet were unable to hold it in? Who were these people who emerged from a countryside that in all his viewings had seemed empty of life?
They kept coming. Old men, young children, able-bodied men and matrons with a touch of grey in their hair, bound by a bacteria. Kindred spirits in suffering, they were stalked by a nameless dread: would it be their turn next?
Then Sethu had no time to ponder. Dr Samuel drove them with his manic will. ‘We don’t have enough of anything—people, medicines or energy. But we must cope. We must manage somehow,’ he barked as he went about ministering hope and help.
The beds were full and even the corridors were lined with palm-leaf mats. Every inch of space in St Paul’s was covered with disease and despair. Sethu had never seen suffering on such a scale. For the rest of his life, the odour of phenyl and palm-leaf mats would bring back to him the stench of cholera, the coming of death.
‘What do we do now?’ Sethu asked, coming back from the storeroom. ‘We have almost entirely run out of medicines. We need a miracle now.’
Dr Samuel rose from his chair. ‘Come with me,’ he said. Through the deserted streets of Nazareth, Dr Samuel led him to a little church with a high steeple. Its inner walls and pillars glistened a curious white.
‘You have been living in Nazareth for some months now, but you never seemed to want to come here. And I let it be because I knew that when you were ready to seek God’s house, you would do so,’ the doctor said.
Sethu bit his lip. You brought me here, he wanted to say. But he let the words rest, as usual.
Sethu reached out to touch the wall. ‘They must have mixed at least a million egg whites into the lime for the plaster to be so smooth and pearly.’ His voice reflected the awe in his eyes.
Dr Samuel warded off a fly as if to dismiss Sethu’s comment. ‘I agree, the walls are quite amazing, but that isn’t why I brought you here.’
He paused. Once again, his hand flew in the air to brush the errant fly away.
Sethu suppressed a smile and the thought that sometimes the good doctor was a pompous prig. ‘Some years ago,’ the doctor began.
Sethu leaned against a wall. He knew by now the doctor’s predilection for telling a story. How every moment, every emotion, every expression, even everything unsaid, would be dwelt upon.
‘Some years ago,’ the doctor said, seating himself in a pew. His pew. There were only four lines of pews. The rest of the congregation sat on the floor. ‘Nazareth was afflicted by God’s curse. Why God
chose to curse Nazareth, I do not know. It has only as many sinners as any other town of this size does. Nazareth is not Sodom, and yet we had four cholera epidemics in one year and …’
The doctor stopped, overwhelmed by the horror of that memory.
‘And …’ Sethu prompted. For that, too, was one of the parts Sethu was expected to play: mesmerized audience and chief prompter.
‘And when it seemed that nothing but divine intervention would help, the priest here, Father Howard, made an offering. He vowed that the entire parish would come to Confession every day. Spare us, we’ll confess our sins and do penance for our trespasses, he prayed. He fell on his knees and I am told he stayed there for a whole week, pleading and beseeching. And the epidemics ceased to be. Now cholera comes just once a year.’
‘I would have thought that God would have eradicated cholera for good, now that there are no sinners here,’ Sethu mumbled, unable to help himself.
Dr Samuel frowned. ‘Seth, I have been meaning to talk to you about this for some time now. I have noticed that you barely know your Bible. You show no inclination to pray. And worst of all, you tend to question God’s will. In fact, you don’t behave like a true Christian should. You might think it’s fashionable to question the existence of God. But it isn’t right, believe me. I have seen so much disease and despair, and yet I never ask God why. You see, God moves in mysterious ways.’
Sethu realized that they were treading dangerous territory, so he steered the discussion in another direction. ‘Doctor, I am worried. The epidemic scares me. What are we going to do?’
Dr Samuel got up and came towards Sethu. He squared his shoulders and cleared his throat. Then he put his arm around Sethu and said, ‘Stay here a while. Go on your knees and pray. Speak to God so that he may set your mind at rest. As for the epidemic, don’t worry. We’ll cope like we always do. Tomorrow we have to go into the peripheries. Reports have come in of entire villages that are stricken.’
‘What are we to do without any medicines?’ Sethu’s voice rose. But Dr Samuel was already walking away. How can he be so obtuse, Sethu fumed. How can he delude himself that we can cope? He is insane.
In the early hours, Hope and Charity came to Dr Samuel’s door, fear pounding their voices into thin shrills. ‘Doctor, it’s Faith,’ they cried.
Faith lay in her bed, limp with exhaustion. ‘The dysentery is severe. She hasn’t begun vomiting yet,’ Hope murmured.
‘Didn’t she have her inoculation?’ Dr Samuel asked, as he fixed a makeshift IV line.
‘No.’ The two women shook their heads. ‘She had a fever when the inoculations were being done. Besides, you know how she is. She said it would pass her by, that God would keep her safe.’
Sethu stared at them in shock. ‘You should have known better. Couldn’t you have persuaded her?’
Dr Samuel said nothing. Then he sighed and said, ‘Perhaps God meant her to serve him a little longer. You see, I kept enough medication for the five of us. With an epidemic on, I thought it wouldn’t help if one of us went down.’
Faith recovered, but it was three days before the doctor and Sethu could leave. The day before they left, a consignment of supplies and a team of five doctors arrived. ‘Now do you see what I mean?’ Dr Samuel told Sethu. ‘God has his reasons, his own ways.’
‘We’ll set up camp in one of the villages and work from there,’ Dr Samuel said to the three doctors who accompanied them in the ambulance to the village. Faith, Hope and Charity had been left behind to assist the two doctors in the hospital.
‘I wish we could have brought one of the sisters, but they are needed at the hospital,’ Dr Samuel said. ‘Besides,’ he said, dropping his voice, ‘it would harm their reputation if they spent the nights with us in the wilderness.
‘There is a woman in the village near the camp. Mary. She will help us. She is a very devout and hard-working woman. I have already sent word for her to report to the camp tomorrow morning.’
Mary didn’t. That was when Sethu realized that he would be expected to fill in for her.
In the first tenement, Dr Samuel introduced him to the synonym for cholera: rice-water stools. ‘See this.’ He pointed very matter-of-factly to a man who lay in his faeces. Despite the extent of suffering in the
hospital wards, Sethu had never seen anything like this before. ‘Clear fluid with bits of mucus. No odour. No blood. Just a gushing of bodily fluids. Classic cholera dysentery!’
Sethu rushed out of the hut to retch.
Dr Samuel pushed down his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘You’ll have to get used to this,’ he said. ‘Now pass me the IV line. The bacteria won’t kill him, but dehydration will. IV fluids with electrolytes to restore the balance and raise the blood volume, and medication to prevent further propagation of the bacteria. That’s all we can do. If God wills, he’ll survive.’