Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [36]
The new passengers who climbed aboard at Djibouti were Somalis or Djiboutians (and really, she thought, what difference was there between the two, other than a line drawn on a map by some Western cartographer). They chewed khat and smoked 555s and despite their doleful, muddy eyes they were happy. Crammed into the plane, which by now was altogether too familiar to Hema, was khat, great bales of it being hauled back to Addis Ababa. It was all very strange, since khat usually traveled in the opposite direction: grown in Ethiopia, around Harrar, and exported by rail to Djibouti and then by air to Aden. That lucrative khat trade route was responsible for the birth of Ethiopian Airlines. She overheard that some problem with the railway and road transport, as well as the urgent need for large quantities of khat for a wedding, prompted this reverse export and the unscheduled stop. Khat had to be chewed within a day or so of its harvest, or else it lost its potency Hema pictured the Somali, Yemeni, and Sudanese merchants in the tiny souks that anchored every street and byway, and the owners of the bigger shops of the Merkato in Addis Ababa, eyeing their Tissot watches, snapping at their shop boys as they waited for this shipment. She pictured the wedding guests with mouths too parched to spit, but spitting and cursing all the same, telling one another that the bride was uglier than they remembered, and the big mole on her neck must mean shed also inherited the miserliness of her father.
Hema imagined telling her mother about the pilot business. It made Hema laugh, which made the Somali sitting opposite her, one of the newcomers, smile.
Madras had been hot and humid for the three weeks that Hema was there, but it was heaven compared with Aden. Her parents’ three-room house in the neighborhood of Mylapore, very near the temple, had seemed spacious to her as a girl, but on this visit if felt claustrophobic. Though she regularly sent her parents bank drafts, shed been dismayed to find no improvements in the house since her last visit. The interior paint had peeled to form abstract patterns while the kitchen, blackened with smoke, resembled a darkroom. The narrow street outside which rarely saw a car was now a noisy thoroughfare, and the compound wall showed no trace of whitewash but instead was the color of the earth on which it stood. Only the garden had benefited from the passage of time with the bougainvillea hiding the house from the street. The two mango trees had become huge and heavy with fruit. One was an Alphonso and the other a hybrid with flesh that felt rubbery at first bite but then melted in the mouth like ice cream.
The sole decoration in the living room was, as it had always been, the Glaxo powdered-milk calendar hanging on a nail. The overfed blue-eyed Caucasian baby had never grown up. The caption read “Glaxo Builds Bonny Babies.” It was enough to make any breast-feeding mother feel guilty that she was starving her infant. As a child Hema had barely registered the Glaxo baby. Now the calendar drew her eye and her ire. What an insidious presence that brat had been in her life. An interloper with a false message. Hema took down the calendar, but the pale rectangle on the wall called attention to itself in a way the baby never had. No doubt once