Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [24]
HEMA TRIED TO IMAGINE Ghosh telling his family about her. She's twenty-nine. Yes, we were classmates at Madras Medical School, but she's a few years younger. I don't know why she never married. I didn't get to know her well till we were interns in the septic ward. She's an obstetrician. A Brahmin. Yes, from Madras. An expatriate, living and working in Ethiopia these eight years. Those were the labels that defined Hema, and yet they revealed little, explained nothing. The past recedes from a traveler, she thought.
Sitting in the plane, Hema closed her eyes and pictured her schoolgirl self with the twin ponytails, the long white skirt, and white blouse under the purple half sari. All Mrs. Hood Secondary School girls in Mylapore had to wear that half sari, really nothing more than a rectangle of cloth to coil around the skirt once and pin on the shoulder. Shed hated it, because one was neither child nor adult but half woman. Her teachers wore full saris while the venerable headmistress, Mrs. Hood, wore a skirt. Hema's protests triggered a lecture by her father: Do you not know how fortunate you are to be in a school with a British headmistress? Do you not know how many hundreds have tried to get in there, offered ten times the money, but were turned down by Miz-Iz-Ood. She goes by merit only. Would you prefer the Madras corporation school? And so, each day she put on the hated uniform, feeling half dressed, and feeling as if she were selling a piece of her soul.
Velu, the neighbor's son whod once been her best friend, but who had turned insufferable at ten, liked to perch on the dividing wall and tease her:
The girls who come from Miz-Iz-Ood, parlez-vous?
The girls who come from Miz-Iz-Ood, parlez-vous?
The girls who come from Miz-Iz-Ood,
Haven't grown their womanhood,
Inky Pinky parlez-vous!
She ignored him. Velu, who was as dark-skinned as she was light, said, “So proud you are of being fair. Monkeys will nibble your sweet flesh thinking it is jackfruit on a jackfruit tree, mind you me!” There she was, eleven years old, setting off for school, dwarfed by her Raleigh bicycle, trading barbs with Velu. Her books were in a tasseled sanji slung over her shoulder, the strap running between her breasts. Already in her posture and in her steady pedal strokes there were signs of a certain immutability.
The bicycle, once so tall and perilous, soon shrunk beneath her. Her breasts thrust out on either side of that sanji strap, and hair sprouted between her legs. (If that was what Velu had meant about not growing her womanhood, she had proved him wrong.) She was a good student, a captain in net ball, a senior prefect, and showing promise in Bharat-natyam, finding in herself a talent for recapitulating a most intricate dance sequence after being shown it just once.
She felt neither an obligation to join the herd nor any urge to try to stand out from it. When a close friend told her she always looked cross, she was surprised and a little thrilled that she could pull off such mis direction. In medical school (in full sari and now riding the bus) this quality grew stronger—not crossness, but independence and misdirection. Some classmates considered her arrogant. She drew others to her like aco lytes only for them to discover she wasn't recruiting. The men needed pliancy in their women friends, and she couldn't bring herself to act coy or silly for their sakes. The couples who huddled in the library behind oversize anatomy atlases and whispered themselves into the notions of love amused her.
I had no time for such silliness. But she did have time for trashy novels set in castles