Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [89]
“Hardly a controlled experiment, given the bias you introduced by paying for the corn,” Ghosh said.
Asrat tethered the animals behind the kitchen, the calf just out of reach of its mother's udders, while he delivered what milk remained to other homes. The cow and calf called to each other with such soothing and auspicious sounds. Hema remembered her mother saying, “A cow carries the universe in its body, Brahma in the horns, Agni in the brow, Indra in the head …”
The calf's call for its mother was nothing like the cry of her twins, but the emotion was identical. In her years as an obstetrician, Hema had never thought too much about a newborn's cry, never paused to consider the frequency that made a baby's tongue and lips quiver like a reed. It was such a helpless, urgent sound, but hitherto its importance lay in what it signaled: a successful labor, a live birth. Only when it was absent was it noteworthy. But now, when her newborns, her Shiva and Marion, cried, it was like no other earthly sound. It summoned her from sleep's catacombs and brought shushing noises to her throat as she rushed to the incubator. It was a personal call—her babies wanted her!
She remembered a phenomenon she'd experienced for years when she was about to fall asleep: a sense that someone was calling her name. Now she told herself it had been her unborn twins telling her they were coming.
There were other noises she became attuned to in her new-mother state. The thwack of wet cloth on the washing stone. The clothesline sagging with diapers (banners to fecundity) and raising a flapping alarm before a rain squall, sending Almaz and Rosina racing outside. The glass-harp notes of feeding bottles clinking together in the boiling water. Rosina's singing, her constant chatter. Almaz clanging pots and pans … these sounds were the chorale of Hema's contentment.
A Maharashtrian astrologer, on a tour of East Africa, came to the house over Ghosh's objections. Hema paid for him to read the children's fortunes. With his spectacles and fountain pens in his shirt pocket, he looked like a young railway clerk. After recording the exact time of the twins’ births, he wanted the parents’ birth dates. Hema gave hers and then volunteered Ghosh's, throwing Ghosh a warning look. The astrol oger consulted his tables and his calculations filled one side of a foolscap paper. At last he said, “Impossible.” He looked nervously at Hema, but avoided Ghosh's eyes. He capped his pen, put away his papers, and while an astonished Hema looked on, he made for the door. “Whatever is their destiny,” he said, “you can be sure it's linked to the father.”
Ghosh caught up with him at the gate. He declined Ghosh's offer of money. With a mournful expression he intoned, “Doctor saab, I'm afraid you cannot be the father.” Ghosh pretended to be deeply troubled by this news. Ghosh reported back to Hema, but she wasn't half as amused as he was. It left her fearful, as if the man had somehow predicted Thomas Stone's return.
The next day Ghosh found Hema squatting, cupping rice flour in her fist and drawing a rangoli—an elaborate decorative pattern—on the wooden floor just outside her bedroom, taking pains that the lines were uninterrupted, so the evil spirits could not pass. Above the door frame to the bedroom, Hema hung a mask of a bearded devil with bloodshot eyes, his tongue sticking out—a further deflection of the evil eye. It became part of her morning ritual along with the playing of “Suprabhatam” on the Grundig, a version sung by M. S. Subbulakshmi. The chant's hiccuping syncopation evoked for Ghosh the sound of women sweeping the front yard around the banyan tree in the early mornings in Madras and the dhobi ringing his bicycle bell. “Suprabhatam” was what radio stations used to begin their daily broadcast, and as a student, Ghosh had heard the words of “Suprabhatam” on the lips