Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [25]
There, several young girls trained by Sister Felicity busied themselves with the children, helping them move, walk or play. Parallel bars, rubber balls, swivel boards and small pedal-cars took the place of physiotherapy equipment. Here life was stronger than any misfortune. Many of the patients needed special care. They had to be dressed, fed, taken to the toilet, washed. Above all, their intelligence had to be awakened, a task that demanded endless patience and love. Sister Felicity shared her bedroom with a mentally retarded twelve-year-old. Suffering from spina bifida, a paralysis of the spinal column, Nadia was as dependent as a baby. But her smile proclaimed her will to live and her gratitude. Although she refuted the idea, Sister Felicity was to Bhopal what Mother Teresa was to Calcutta.
Mukkadam led the nun through the labyrinth of alleyways.
“This is a really wretched place,” he apologized.
“I’m used to it,” his visitor reassured him, greeting those who gathered along her way with a cheerful namaste.*
She went into several huts and examined some of the children. Rickets, alopecia, intestinal infections … Orya Bustee had the full collection of diseases found in poverty-stricken neighborhoods. The nun was on familiar ground, and no stranger to the slums. She was always willing to enter people’s homes, or sit down with them, regardless of their caste or creed. She had learned to receive the confidences of the dying, to watch over the dead, to pray with their families, wash corpses and accompany the deceased on their last journey to the cemetery or the funeral pyre. Above all, with the assistance of her large, black, simulated-leather bag full of medicines and small surgical instruments, she had treated people, comforted and cured them.
“I’ll come every Monday morning,” she announced in Hindi. “I’ll need some families to take turns at letting me use their huts.”
The suggestion gave rise to an immediate commotion. All the mothers were prepared to offer the white didi, or “big sister,” the use of their lodgings so that she could care for the occupants of the bustee.
“And then I’ll need a volunteer to help me,” she added, casting a discerning eye around the faces crowded about her.
“Me, me, didi!”
Felicity turned to see a little girl with slanting eyes.
“What’s your name?”
“Padmini.”
“All right, Padmini, I’ll take you on trial as my assistant in our small clinic.”
On the following Monday an expectant line had formed in the alleyway in front of Padmini’s hut, well before Sister Felicity arrived. Padmini had tried to sort out the most serious cases in order to take them first. More often than not, these were rickety babies with swollen stomachs whom their mothers held out to the nun with a look of entreaty.
“In all my years of working in Africa, Ceylon and India, I had never seen such cases of deficiency diseases. The fontanels had not even closed up in many of the children. The bone of their skulls had become deformed for lack of calcium and their dolichocephalic features made them look a bit like Egyptian mummies,” Sister Felicity recounted.
Tuberculosis might be the number one killer in Orya Bustee and its neighboring slums, but typhoid, tetanus, malaria, polio, gastrointestinal infections and skin diseases caused damage that was often irreversible. Confronted with all these poor people looking to her for miracles, the nun felt all the strength go out of her. Sensing her fatigue, Padmini gently mopped the large beads of sweat coursing down her forehead, threatening to impede her vision. Rising above the nauseating smells and horrific sights, the young Indian girl supported her big sister with her unfailing smile. The little girl’s expression, it too born of suffering and poverty, revived the nun’s courage whenever