The Blue Notebook Read online

  The great Master smiled. “No. It did not end like that.” The Master enjoyed a little silence before continuing. “After the giant fell, Puneet immediately grabbed the gigantic sword from the giant’s dead hand and thrust it straight through the neck of the queen.

  “You see, my students, a queen who sells the death of her subjects for sport is not a queen. Her death was married to the death of the fallen soldier.”

  Another student asked, “But what of Puneet’s family … what of the starving village, dear Master?”

  The great Master looked into nothingness and answered, “After watching the queen die, Puneet closed his eyes and listened to the screams of his father and his mother and his brothers and his sisters and of the villagers crying for food. He could hear the cries of agony that are special for those dying of starvation. Puneet pushed his mind deeper, pushed aside his heart, and willed their deaths.”

  There was a gasp from the students. One asked, “But how can that be, oh great Master?”

  The Master waited for his students to settle their inner commotion so that they could listen. He waited with them for two days before answering. Eventually he said “What village loses three years of crops and does not either find new water or relocate to the valley? What father sends forth his son to save him? Puneet rose to the upper air and willed them all to die, for they had willed death upon themselves.”

  The oldest of the students sat in the front row. He loved and was beloved of his Master. He asked, “Beloved Master. What is it that you will of us?” The Master, who was the greatest of the great teachers and who was once a boy who had felled a giant with a single gold coin, answered, “To have no will at all.”

  The end. Love, Batuk.

  I learned to read and write at the missionary’s medical clinic, where I was sent when I was seven. The illness that landed me there was entirely my mother’s fault, at least according to Grandma.

  As a little girl, I would find any excuse to go to the river, whether to fish with Grandpa, or play, or even wash clothes. I could always be found on the riverbank. It was strange because unlike my friends I hated to get wet! I liked to be next to the river, though. I was entranced by the music of the water and the dance that light played on it. I liked the sense of loneliness without being alone, for the water connected me to all life. I appreciate many years later that the Common Street is a river too; back and forth people flow, and containers, cars, and small buses. The flow never ceases to connect the world to me, to take me to it.

  On the day in question—the air was wet and yet the sky a cloudless blue—I returned from the river in the early evening. As soon as I walked through the hut’s entrance and coughed, Grandma said to Mother, “I tell you not to let her sit by the river all the time. Now look at her, she’s sick.”

  Grandma had the extraordinary gift of making even a simple phrase sound like a tirade of disapproval directed toward my mother. For example, Grandma could say, “Pass the cake,” to which Mother would immediately respond, “What’s wrong with it?” Even if Grandma said, “Oh, nothing,” her words conveyed that Mother’s cake was no better than a mound of rotting flesh covered in icing. Grandma was very gifted in this regard. And so when Grandma directly accused Mother of deliberately trying to make me ill, Mother took the bait (as she always did). She spun round and snapped to Grandma, “I told Batuk not to sit by the river all day, but you know what she’s like, watching the lizards and talking to the grass. She is a fool, that one.” I coughed again but this time a little harder (I said that I have a taste for drama). “There, I told you!” Grandma said. “She isn’t a fool. She’s just simple. I would keep her on a rope.” I almost spoke back but let Grandma continue as I knew there was more fun to come. I was right. Grandma now turned up the volume and the shrillness of her voice box. “You are the idiot!” Grandma squealed at Mother. “You let her sit out all day—now look at her. Tell me, did I ever try to kill you? If I had treated you like you treat that little Batukee”—her pet name for me, which I loathed—“my mother would have beaten me with a stick.”

  This was terrific sport, so I threw in a coughing fit that lasted a full minute (the drama of the sick). Grandma threw me a momentary glance of pity (or was it applause?) and angled the edges of her mouth downward in preparation for the kill. “If she dies,” spat Grandma, “you will rot in prison on your fat behind and guess who will have to take care of the rest of those dear children … and that poor spastic Navaj?” Grandma often claimed that Navaj was handicapped because Mother had refused to drink Grandma’s special pregnancy tea. I thought I had better cough some more (curtain rises on the second act). Grandma, with venom seeping from her skin, continued, “I have already raised my family. Do you really think me strong enough to raise your family too? … Mind you … at least the children would survive through high school.” I then let rip the harshest cough a seven-year-old could muster. Grandma turned toward me with a mixture of pity and sheer delight in her eyes; I think she would only have been happier if I had dropped dead then and there. I watched the pity melt off her like butter in midday heat. She whipped her ever-intensifying glare back on Mother, took in a breath, and proclaimed, “She needs the doctor” (cough), “NOW!” (cough, cough). The odd thing was, I was actually extremely ill.

  To her credit, Mother had learned well over the years. She simply deflected this shower of abuse at Father. Up until now Father had been silent, as he had been enjoying every second of the show. Mother screamed at him, “You heard her, you good-for-nothing drunk, get her to the doctor.”

  There were three ways to get medical attention. One way was to send a message to the neighboring town for the doctor to come to us, but we could never afford this. Another way was to have Father gather whatever money he could, load me onto a cart pulled by the field ox, and off we would head to the town a few hours away where the doctor resided. When we eventually arrived there, we would trek to the doctor’s house and wait an eternity before I was seen. The doctor’s consultation would last for moments before he pushed up his glasses and scribbled like an imbecile on a pad of paper. He would give his little drawing to the nurse, who subsequently would give Father a powder wrapped in a light, shiny brown paper sachet. The visit would conclude in a shouting match in which Father would explain that he had no more money “than this” and the nurse would insist that he’d better find some.

  The third way to receive a medical cure was to head to the neighboring town just as I described but not actually go to the doctor. Father would take me out for a sherbet and then leave me on the ox-drawn cart at the market square for an hour while he visited his cousin. Once he returned, with his cousin’s lavender perfume on his shirt, we would head home, both of us happy. The sherbet must have contained some potent ingredients because I generally got better.

  This occasion fell in the third category. I had a bright red sherbet and Father had tea. He tied the ox and cart up in the market square and left me there while he went to see his cousin. An hour later we started home, but now I really was coughing hard and by the time we got home I had a fever. Mother asked what the doctor said and Father lied that he had promised I would soon be well; we just had to ride out the fever with cool soaks. Mother asked Father if I had been given medicine and he explained that I had been and that I had already taken it. He then inserted an elegant detail to add authenticity to his lie by explaining that the powder was a white-brown mixture that smelled awful. I was too sick by then to confirm or deny his fiction.

  I remained with a high fever for days and coughed up platefuls of yellow-and-brown slime that was sometimes bloodstained. The fevers climbed higher still and I stopped eating; the cough was unrelenting. I cried whenever I had the strength. People from the village came by to offer best wishes, diagnoses, and cures. The only thing that they all agreed upon was that the doctor we had gone to was a quack and a charlatan. I heard at least three people say he wasn’t even a doctor. Father looked ashen.

  After five days of ever-mounting feve
rs and a worsening cough, it was decided to take me to the missionary’s medical clinic, which was a full day’s ride away in Bhopal. I was bundled up and Father and I headed off before the sun had risen. We rode in the covered wagon pulled by the ox, and I was hacking all the way. When we arrived at the clinic, which was located on the outskirts of the city, the nurse listened to my father’s story and saw me cough up what looked like berry-stained ghee. Much to my bemusement she collected a sample of this gunk as if it were a prize. When she returned a few hours later, she told Father that I had TB and needed to be admitted to “the ward.” The ward was actually a large converted chicken hutch that now housed the sick. It smelled of its previous inhabitants, overlaid with the smell of iodine and illness. Along one wall of the ward were the women’s beds and along the other, the men’s. I was allocated a gray mattress and a steel bed about halfway down the women’s wall. When Father left I was too sick to cry.

  Despite my initial fear, I felt at ease, although I was the youngest patient by far. During the day, there was a constant stream of sound: wheels rolling; people groaning, vomiting, and dying; and the buzz buzz of flies and the whir of heat. At night, silence rested like a blanket over the snores and rustling of the forty-three patients and one nurse. I must have become numbed to the smell because I often saw visitors enter the ward and immediately rush out holding their mouths in disgust before choking and sometimes vomiting.

  On the bed next to me lay a near-naked old woman who looked as though she were having a baby. She was far older than Grandma and so thin that her baby looked almost bigger than she did. One of her hands hung from the side of the bed; when her fingers moved I could see the sinews writhing through her skin, which was as thin and delicate as cigarette paper. Sometimes I would watch the gentle undulation of her pulse as she slept just to see if it ever stopped, and a few days later it did. Within an hour she was rolled on a tarpaulin and disappeared.

  Lying on the bed on the other side of me was a woman about Mother’s age who was twice as round as Mother. Her left foot was heavily bandaged and the nurses came by every day to change the dressings. Her foot had been cut off because it had gotten infected from sugar sickness. Oddly, she did not seem at all distraught that her foot lay in a waste bin somewhere. She seemed, in fact, to revel in the attention she received, as she was nearly always surrounded by people saying, “You poor thing,” “Tttt, it’s a terrible disease,” “You look wonderful” (albeit footless), and bringing her containers of the most fantastic food. The woman took pity on me from time to time and gave me some of the leftovers she had not scarfed down. But her acts of generosity were rare and she nearly always licked the containers of food clean. She left the clinic about two weeks after her operation, in a wooden box on wheels pushed by her rancid husband, who was always smoking. I bet she would have happily sacrificed the other foot for a few more weeks of pity and delicious food.

  During the day, the ward was staffed by three nurses and a doctor. There were also two orderlies, who carried, mopped, cleaned, and when necessary removed those who died. There was also a priest. Every day, Father Matthew, a young, stringy white man, would talk to us for about half an hour and then give us each a piece of bread and fruit juice. He had a soft, lolling voice and a gentle manner that he tried to disguise when he addressed us each day. He would stand on the table in the middle of the ward by the entrance. As he talked, he gesticulated, shouted, and jumped up and down like a lunatic. This excessive exertion was unnecessary as none of us understood him and none of us were able to leave even if we wanted to. It was worth watching him, though, for the entertainment as well as for the bread and fruit juice. We were his forty-three-strong army of devotees, although all of us would later leave him, one way or another. Once or twice a day, he would walk along the two rows of beds and would always stop at mine, as I was the youngest. He would smile at me and I would smile at him. He carried his book and his cross, which I knew were important to him. I could tell that he often spoke to the nurses about me because I watched his eyes.

  I did not have any visitors, which I was thankful for because I was learning to read.

  After a week on the ward, I was feeling better but I was not allowed out of bed. The doctor, who led the daily parade of the medical staff, listened each day to my back with his rubber ears. Every day was the same; he would nod his head, mutter to the head nurse, write something on the board at the end of my bed, and move on—all without saying a word to me. The most junior of the nurses was called Hita. It was Hita who gave me reading.

  Hita looked exactly like a girl from our village: she was healthy and round and had the loveliest smile (although she was missing several teeth). She would sit on my bed in her stiff white uniform and talk to me from time to time. One day, I asked her what the doctor was writing about me and she took the chart and read aloud, “August seventh, making progress, keep on bed rest. Lung bases collapsed; consolidation in right mid zone. Allow food. No exercise.” “He wrote all that on one line?” I asked. The scratches across the page fascinated me. She nodded. She bustled off and returned with a book, the cover of which showed a rabbit and a wheelbarrow, both of which were smiling. I opened the book and saw the patterns that the words made on the page. The shapes of the letters and the spaces that separated the words made the page look like a drawing. Nurse Hita showed me the first word and I repeated it. “Rabbit.”∗ She left abruptly seconds later because a man on the other side of the room had inconveniently dislodged his pee tube and the liquid was pulsing onto the floor like beer from a toppled bottle. I stared at this word and repeated it over and over again, like a mantra.

  Each day Hita, and in due course the other nurses, would teach me a word or two or three; I would spend the entire day reading my new words and practicing the ones I already knew. After a week I could read a paragraph. Hita was delighted with me. I explained to her that I wanted to read my book to the white man because he was always carrying a book with him and so I thought he must love to read too.

  The late summer heat had let up and Father Matthew had become particularly expressive in his tabletop sermons. So much so that whenever he finished his incomprehensible ranting, which he always did with a dramatic flourish, those who had two hands applauded him while the handless cheered. I could see he was pleased with this reception. On one particularly cool evening, when Father Matthew arrived at my bed on his tour of the ward, Hita spoke to him in English. The Father then turned to me and gave me a nod and a welcoming smile. I had been rehearsing from sunrise and read the first two pages of my book to perfection. I even incorporated a little emotional expression into my reading, although I omitted gesticulations; the story was about a rabbit who helped cheer up his friend the wheelbarrow by helping him become more useful. When I finished reading, Father Matthew beamed and clapped his hands. After a moment’s pause, he said something to Hita in English. The following afternoon a teacher came: Mr. Chophra, my own reading teacher.

  Mr. Chophra came to teach me (and visit Hita) three times a week during the rest of my twelve-week stay on the ward. I was a fast study. Having walked across the desert with no water, I was thirsty and could not drink enough! Within three weeks I had rudimentary reading skills. Thereafter, Mr. Chophra brought books for me to read of advancing complexity. My thirst was not quenched, though, as I read the books almost as quickly as he brought them. I read from the great poets, stories of boys who went to the army and even translations of some English books. Every day, Father Matthew would come and listen to me read. I knew that he did not understand me but this did not seem to matter. I understood that he too could hear the patterns that words made without the need to understand them. Each day that I read to him he beamed at me and applauded. After I finished, he would sit at the end of my bed and read to me from his special black book. He would read for five to ten minutes and I would sit back and listen to the rhythm of the words coupled to the softness of his voice. It sounded like a song. When he finished he would mark the page with a gold thread
that was attached to the book’s back. In this fashion we read to each other almost every day. I got into the habit of falling asleep at night reading a book and would wake up to the faint smell of book print and moldy pages.

  I learned to write in concert with learning to read by hand-copying passages from the books Mr. Chophra gave me. It was obvious that Mr. Chophra was delighted to come and see me at every opportunity possible (even when I was fast asleep). It was not my thirst for reading that drew him to my bedside, however. It was Hita. On several occasions, I woke up from a nap and there Mr. Chophra was standing, gaily laughing with her. It was fun to watch them; he would blush and stumble and she would revel in his trepidation of her. After he left, she would often talk about him with the other nurses and they would collectively giggle as girls have a tendency to do. I once asked Hita if she liked Mr. Chophra. In response, she scolded me, and so I knew that she did. There was one occasion, when the ward was quiet, that Hita sat next to me throughout my entire lesson, staring like a hypnotized rabbit at her ever-smiling Chophra-barrow.

  Mr. Chophra’s ever-more-diverted attention never bothered me, for whenever he came, under whatever pretext, he brought me more to read. The trouble was that I became so engrossed in my reading I forgot to pretend to be sick, and before I knew it, the silent doctor with the rubber ear pieces had written “discharge” on the chart at the end of my bed.

  On the day I was to leave, I dressed early in the day. I said goodbye to all of my fellow inmates and the staff; even the ever-silent doctor said, “Goodbye and be well.” Mr. Chophra had come the evening before to give me a cardboard box full of books to read and keep. Just after the morning rounds, Father walked onto the ward. I was so excited to see him, I could not control myself. I sprinted across the ward, leaped into his arms, and hugged him. He grinned like a monkey, crying, “Girl, you look so well. What have they been feeding you?” After the initial pleasantries we were at a loss as to what to say to each other and so I took him by the hand and gave him a tour of the ward, although I bypassed the patients who would probably die in the next day or two. Father Matthew had been fetched and came running onto the ward with the tails of his long black coat flying behind him. He shook my father’s hand; the two giants were somewhat wary of each other but I willed their affection and it came to pass. Father Matthew gave me my own Bible (Mother would later throw it away) and held me close to him for as long as it had taken me to read the opening paragraph of my first book many weeks before. I gave Father Matthew a poem I had been writing for several days. I had decorated the paper with trees and leopards and sunshine.