Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [226]
“I don't believe you. My mother and I must have washed in from the sea together. We were one large fish. I was in her belly and came out,” the little boy said, walking away. The maali could coax roses out of the earth where their neighbors failed. But Hilda Stone would have fired him for telling such tales to her only child.
The little boy's home was just outside the rock walls of Fort St. George in Madras, India. The spire of St. Mary's poked up from behind the incomplete battlements. Its quaint, well-tended cemetery was his playground, a place where more than five generations of English men, women, and babies were buried, taken by typhoid, malaria, kala azar, and rarely old age.
Fort St. George was the first home of the East India Company. St. Mary's, built in 1680, was the first Anglican church in India (but by no means the first church, that being the one built in A.D. 54 by St. Thomas the Apostle, who landed on the Kerala coast). A plaque inside St. Mary's commemorated the marriage of Lord Clive, and another that of Governor Elihu Yale, who later founded a university in America. But the little boy saw no plaque to commemorate the marriage of Hilda Masters of Fife, tutor and governess, to Justifus Stone, civil servant in the British Raj and almost two decades her senior.
Thomas thought every child grew up as he did—in sight of the Indian Ocean, hearing the fearsome-sounding waves crashing around Fort St. George. And he assumed that all fathers were like his, crashing into furniture and making alarming sounds at night.
Justifus Kaye Stone's voice rumbled down from a height, and his bottle-brush mustache kept little boys at bay. District collectors in the Indian Civil Service were demigods, with secretaries and peons hovering around them like flies around overripe mangoes. Collectors went on tours for weeks at a time, holding court in each city. When Justifus Stone was home, despite his noisy presence, he was somehow not there. Thomas understood (in that way that children do, even though they lack words to express themselves) that Justifus was a self-centered man and neglectful of his wife. Perhaps this was why Hilda turned to religion. To imagine Christ's suffering allowed her to live with hers.
Blessed are the meek.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
Blessed the young governess who marries a DC hoping to clear his yellow-tinged skin of quinine and cure his taste for gin and native women, for hers is the kingdom of heaven.
Hilda's blessing came in the form of her blue-eyed, towheaded boy whose feet she hardly let touch the ground, even when he was old enough to walk.
The little boy's ayah, Sebestie, had nothing to do other than join in the play since it was Hilda who let him ride on her back pretending he was Jim Corbett, the big-game hunter, and she the elephant carrying him to the tiger blind. Hilda drew red-chalk wickets on the whitewashed walls and bowled to him with a tennis ball. She sang hymns to him, and fanned him when it was too humid to fall asleep. The bell-like clarity of her voice caused somnolent lizards on the wall to snap to attention. Her brown hair, parted in the center, fell from a steepled head. Regardless of how she restrained it, a frizzy halo framed her face.
In the middle of the night he reached for her and she was there. But on the nights Justifus Stone was home, the little boy slept poorly, fearful for his mother because those were the only times she left his bed. He kept vigil with his cricket bat outside the closed bedroom door, prepared to break in if the noises did not subside. They always did and only then would he retreat to his room. In the morning, when he opened his eyes, she would be back in his bed, awake and peering out through her fringe of hair.
Every child should have a mother of such even temperament, her rare displeasure evidenced so gently that the effect was lasting. Thomas lived to please his mother and he was earnest in his pleasing. It was as if they both knew, though they could not have known, that life was short, the moment fleeting.
HE WAS EIGHT when