I changed into scrubs, smiled. I let others exhort her to push... push. I could wait.
I waited for the scene of horror to pass. I am still waiting. Was the husband forever diminished in her eyes? Did she notice the woman in the white coat who made no move to help her? Did she go home and continue—prepare a meal, tend to her children, go to work? Did she start to fear a recalcitrant houseboy? Did her mind make preparations to leave the country, probably of her birth?
I see a little peep of scalp. Push, oh, push, that timeless chant. Jor karo...sindika...empuja. Words for the universally useful ‘push’ in many languages.
More dark hair asserted itself even between contractions. Mrs. Patel and family needed to know the exact time when the widest diameter of the head was delivered. The child’s horoscope would be based on star relationships at that time. It is not the birth of the heart or gut but the brain that is crucial to this little one’s future. A responsibility not taught in obstetric textbooks, noting the time of crowning of the head. Well, here it was. A dark wet head crowned by a halo of stretched maternal tissue. Crowned by its mother.
The baby girl slithered out. Pink and reactive. The family outside were silent when informed. Too well bred to be openly sad for yet another girl.
One said consolingly, ‘Laxmi’—‘Wealth’.
There were tears in the new mother’s eyes but she gathered her wiped baby to her breast and closed her eyes.
I changed back to street clothes, donned my white coat and reentered a changed world.
As things wind down for me, I look back on all the stories I was privileged to be part of. Some of the passport one gets when there is an M.D. tacked onto your name whether in New York or Uganda. Stories worth telling.
My story starts at the end of my Obstetrics and Gynecology registrarship in Bombay, India, where I lived, went to medical school and married and covers the eleven years we lived in Uganda, East Africa, and our first year in the U.S. I included this last year because at the end of it, Idi Amin, who ‘reigned’ in Uganda after a military coup, had a dream in which he was commanded to banish the Asian population of Uganda. This dream and order was announced on August 9th, 1972, with a deadline for leaving three months later on November 9th. In October and the first week of November 1972, our extended family arrived in bits and pieces on the shores of North America, to be welcomed by us who had arrived here by chance, whim and luck the year before.
ONE
Amir
To understand my life I have to tell you about him. In brief, in short, in staccato. Our beginnings could not have been more different. His father was an impoverished teacher at the Aga Khan School in tiny one-street Sultanhamood in Kenya.
Decades later Amir and I visited this outpost and tears clouded his eyes. His memory of a grand and spacious living had been magnified and beautified by time. They lived in a small section of the mosque area, and the schoolhouse was in an adjoining room. This time around he stared with disbelief at the small living area and the corrugated tin roof that thundered in the rain. A gracious Swahili lady took us around and said she remembered Amir’s father. When we looked at her disbelievingly, she proved it by telling us of something that she could only have known from that time. His father officiated as the elder in the mosque, and all cash collections were hidden under a loose stone flag in the room that served as school and mosque. Both Amir and she laughed at the memory and together pried open the stone to reveal the secret place beneath. Quite empty and no cash there today.
Many were the stories of their poverty. No shoes till the age of seven or eight. And even then they were bought several sizes too large so as to serve long years of growth. Shorts only—no long trousers. Butter once a week, which had to be fetched from the next village miles away. An expedition taken on by foot or bicycle. Breaking an article of crockery would be met with fierce reprisals from his mother because of the difficulty of replacing it.
And yet his family life was dear and utterly happy. A world away I was being reared by my loveless grandmother after my mother died in that ‘maximum city,’ Bombay. Middle-class and westernized, but cold and remote. Passion was unseemly and never displayed, except in the form of a constantly angry grandmother. She had no stomach for child-rearing and let me and my two sisters know.
And then there was his religious life. He was born an Ismaili, a Shiite sect, followers of a living Imam, the Aga Khan. As a young boy the Ismaili-ness of his life entered into daily doings. The mosque was a place of worship, a social spot. And life revolved around it. We often laughed at the seriousness with which he had taken his youthful mosque duties—later he was to become as derelict as I. His first disenchantment came when he applied for a scholarship to go to college and medical school in Bombay and was refused it in spite of his academic achievements. The scholarship was awarded to a relative of the presiding official. When Amir went to make his case, he was told to tag along and be a doormat to the official and maybe his case would be reopened. He refused and obtained a more general Uganda government scholarship. That was the beginning of his religious unraveling. In another part of the world, the superficialities and rituals of the Parsi Zoroastrian religion surrounded me and I, from a very young age, refused its protection.
The family moved to Singida, a tiny township in Tanganyika. Amir’s father gave up teaching to start a business so as to provide for his fast-growing family. He opened a general store in Singida that sold everything from socks to grain and yards and yards of ‘maricani’ (from America), a khaki poplin fabric that was stitched into pants by a resident tailor working a Singer foot-peddled sewing machine on the verandah.
Time came when Amir had to leave home to go to high school, the Aga Khan School in Dar-es-Salaam. As he later watched his grandchildren not need to tie shoelaces because of the velcro revolution, he remembered how he left for school with his first pair of shoes, unable to tie his laces. He excelled in spite of the oft-applied rod, inedible food and many cruelties. Once when they were being taught about the Taj Mahal—Indian history and geography in Africa—his most favorite and beloved teacher told of its romance and read odes to it and to love in general. This teacher was soon removed because of his romantic real life. The replacement who met the approval of the higher-ups, when describing the Taj Mahal, made the children memorize its dimensions, the number of archways and other cold realisms.
A major event in the erstwhile boys school was the admission of girls. It seemed to me that the initial group of ‘trail-blazer’ girls were largely ornamental and were constantly being asked to sing popular Indian songs for the boys. None passed the qualifying exams. One caught Amir’s eye and her golden voice filled his ears. One song, a sentimental but haunting one, telling of how she would live and die unseen in his street, he remembered, and often sang under his breath. Where did his thoughts fly when he remembered that old song?
He made his first Indian Ocean crossing in 1949 at the age of sixteen. This was to be the first of many such journeys from the east coast of Africa to Bombay. He traveled in the cheapest part of the liners that ploughed these seas several levels below the deck. While all around him were in miseries with mal-de-mer, he stocked up on his ever-favorite Kit-Kat chocolates and made them last the seven days crossing. He said he had to consume them ‘to prevent them from melting’ in the furnace heat of the underbelly of the ship. At different times during these crossings, the ships stopped at Seychelles, Madagascar or Mauritius, all of which he roamed. One of the Seychelles Islands is Amirante, no doubt named for him. Lorenço Marques, now Maputo in Mozambique, was another name that he evoked in romantic memory of those ocean journeys.
In Bombay he started studies at the then-elite Elphinstone College. A few miles away I was attending the much inferior Jai Hind College. I had not found my star yet, and organic chemistry left me in disarray. Two years later we both were admitted