Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [37]
During her brief vacation, Hema had the house painted and ceiling fans installed. Sathyamurthy, the father of her old childhood nemesis, Velu, peered over the fence as workmen carried in a Western-style commode to be cemented over the footpads of the Indian toilet. He sniggered and shook his head. “It's not for me, you old coot,” Hema said in English. “My mother's hips are bad.” And Sathyamurthy answered in the only English phrase he knew, “Goddamn China, kiss me Eisenhower!” He smiled and waved, and she waved back.
THE SOMALI ACROSS FROM HER wore a shiny blue polyester shirt and a gold watch that swung on his stick wrist. His toes, protruding from sandals, glowed like polished ebony. He looked familiar to Hema. Now, he bowed, grinned, and displayed his fingers as if bidding at an auction as he said, “Three kids, two shots, one night!”
She remembered. His name was Adid. “I say, are you still doing double duty these days?”
His ivory teeth lit up the plane's dim interior. He said something to his friends. They smiled and nodded sagely. Such strong teeth they have, Hemlatha thought. She admired his blackness, a color so pure that there was a purple tinge to it. The headmistress at her school, Mrs. Hood, had been porcelain white, and the schoolgirls believed that if they touched her, their fingers would come away white; with Adid, she imagined they would come away black. Adid's regal manner, the slow play of expressions on his face, each thought matched by a lip-eyebrow combo, gave Hema the bizarre idea that she'd like to suck his index finger.
She'd last seen Adid in a headdress and flowing robes in the casualty room at Missing, unflappable, even though his pregnant wife was convulsing. When Hemlatha unwrapped the shrouds of cotton she found a young, pale, anemic girl. Her blood pressure was sky-high. This was eclampsia. While Hemlatha was in Theater 3 delivering this wife of her firstborn by Cesarean section, Adid disappeared and returned with an older wife, also in labor, who proceeded to deliver in the horse-drawn gharry beside the outpatient steps. Hemlatha ran out in time to cut the cord. She pushed on the wife's belly, but instead of the afterbirth, a twin popped out. Adid's smile when he saw the second child, the third total, reached from ear to ear. Hema suggested he wear a banner across his chest that said ONE NIGHT, TWO SHOTS, THREE KIDS. Adid had laughed like a man whod never heard the word “worry.”
“Yes, yes,” he said now, raising his voice to be heard over the drone of the engines. He had the clipped, French-accented diction of a Djibou-tian. “A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world, Doctor?”
Hema, who'd been thinking along similar lines just minutes before, decided she was a pauper by that yardstick. She said, “Amen. You must be a millionaire many times over then.”
An impish expression stole across his face, and with waggling brows and using just his eyes he pointed down the bench to a woman veiled and swathed in red-and-orange cotton robes. A very pale, henna-painted foot showed. Hemlatha guessed her to be a Yemeni. Or else a Muslim from Pakistan or India.
“And she is … ?” Hema said, hoping it would not be impolite to ask about her nationality.
Adid nodded vigorously. “Three more months at least. And one more expecting at home!”
“I tell you what,” Hema said, looking pointedly at Adid's groin, “I'll ask Dr. Ghosh to give you a special rate on a vasectomy, two for one. It will be cheaper than doing a tubal ligation on all the begums.”
The Gujarati couple across from her looked up scowling at Adid's thigh-slapping laughter.
“Why don't you bring the wives to the antenatal clinic?” Hema asked. “A smart man like you shouldn't wait till they get into trouble. You don't want them to suffer.”
“It's not my choice. You know how these women are. They won't come until they are unconscious,” he said simply.
True enough, Hemlatha thought. Years before, an Arab woman in the Merkato