Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [87]
Sylvia had had a happy pregnancy, and she was at her happiest when I’d arrive home with takeout from the Hare Krishna Restaurant. It had become extreme, this fixation with food from the Hare Krishnas, and I feared that our son might be destined for the airports. Now and then, of course, we’d come across someone determined to dent our optimism. “I can’t believe you’re having your child in Fiji,” wagged an American nurse at the Fourth of July party at the U.S. Embassy. Well, Naomi Wolf didn’t make having a baby in the U.S. sound so peachy either, I thought. In the U.S., as I understood, a pregnant woman was subject to a barrage of tests, many with a high likelihood of false positives or ambiguous results. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to know that your child had a 19 percent chance of developing Down syndrome, a 22 percent chance of spina bifida, and a high likelihood of developing male-pattern baldness and a hairy back. What is it that doctors expect women to do with such information, except go into angst overload? Fortunately for us, this wasn’t a problem in Fiji, because there was no high-tech testing done in Fiji.
As the due date neared, Sylvia’s checkups were upped to once a week. Her doctor was the indefatigable Dr. Brown, a Fijian doctor from the Lau Islands, one of the handful of doctors who had remained in Fiji after the coup, when many of the Indian doctors took their cue and emigrated. Her office was spare and perpetually teeming with patients. The doctors may have left, but the babies kept coming. It was like being in a Benetton ad. The women were Fijian, Asian, and Indian. One woman was even shrouded in a black burka.
We had long ago learned to ignore the can of roach spray Dr. Brown kept in her office. This was the tropics, after all. At the final checkup, Dr. Brown informed us that the baby was breech.
“Maybe he will turn,” she said. “They sometimes do. But if he doesn’t, I think we should do a C-section. If you were a large Fijian woman with wide hips, I would say maybe we could try to do it naturally, but you are a skinny kaivalangi, and breech births can be very dangerous.”
She flashed us a significant look. She knew about kaivalangis and their books, all of which seemed to state that a natural, drug-free delivery was a beautiful experience and that a woman will never truly be a woman until she pushes through a baby unaided by painkillers and preferably, doctors, accompanied only by fragrant candles, new age music, a bathtub, and someone who calls herself a doula.
“Don’t be a hero, darling,” I said.
Sylvia laughed. The only aspect of delivering a child that had appealed to her was the prospect of taking a heavy hit of morphine. She more or less sighed in relief at the idea of a C-section.
We took note of the baby’s position, calculated when he would be fully cooked, and scheduled the operation for a Monday at 1 P.M., a very civilized hour for having a baby. I was hoping to avoid a midnight dash to the hospital.
As we found ourselves far away from the wisdom of grandmothers, we thought it prudent to ask for help, for the baby’s sake as much as ours. Anna was a kindly woman who lived in the village of Wailoko, outside Suva. Like Anna, most of the residents of Wailoko were descendants of Solomon Islanders who had been brought to Fiji by the British to help build the roads. No wonder the Fijians looked so fondly upon the British. They brought in Indians to cultivate the land and Solomon Islanders to build the infrastructure, while the Fijians themselves were encouraged to do nothing more than collect the rents. Anna had four grown children of her own, and for many years she had worked as a nanny for expatriate families. She knew babies.
“Uuuueee, Sylvia,” she said one afternoon, with her customary glimmer. “You are having a baby tonight.”
What’s this?
“Anna,” I said. “If this baby has my genes, then there’s no way he’s going to be early for anything.” I myself had been born two weeks