BackCockroaches and comfort
Too often in medical settings, we have the extremes of sterile soullessness at one end and unsanitary humaneness at the other
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Before giving birth to the perfect baby, I had two miscarriages. Like most things in my life, they were divided across two continents. The second was in my second home, New York. It involved cold rooms and cool, efficient professionals. The first was rather different. It was in Mumbai, in Holy Family Hospital.
As a surgery patient going just for a day’s stay, it seemed sensible to dispense with the expensive private room and stay in the general women’s ward.
In the operating room, the anaesthesiologist, the nurses, and my doctor watched me carefully as they waited for the drugs to take effect. I stared back at them wide-eyed and was just about to announce that the injection clearly wasn’t working when I found myself, half an hour later, coming cloudily in and out of consciousness in the general ward. My mother had gone out to buy medicine and a white-haired, pink-shawled stranger was massaging my legs. It felt so nice that I shut my eyes again for a moment, then opened them again as the clouds momentarily cleared.
“Why are you pressing my legs?" I asked in Hindi. You assume that no one in general wards speaks English.
“Arre, you are all our daughters here," she said comfortably and kept massaging. I thought about this vaguely for a moment, took a brief nap, and came up with a new question.
“Why are there two of you?" She seemed to have an identical twin.
“Oh, you’re just high after your medicine. Don’t worry." So I didn’t.
Later, when I woke up properly, I saw that I was one of 10 women in the beds in that big room. It was a three-tier system, based on generation. We patients—mostly mothers of newborns, and a couple of failed attempts like me—were all on narrow iron cots, and above most of the beds was a tiny little cot with a baby in it. Under the beds, on the floor, were the mothers’ mothers, like the old lady who was massaging me. Men were clearly not part of this picture, and when a husband or two turned up during visiting hours they were clearly ill at ease. Every now and then a nurse would come in, speaking either English or Malayalam, which no one understood, and it was clear that the grandmothers on the floor were the ones who were really in charge.
The grandmothers discussed each patient in turn. I heard them inquiring about me from my pink-shawled, white-haired caretaker. “Thaili saaf kiya—she had her sack cleaned," she informed them. This is the local term for getting your uterus scraped, and they all nodded wisely and came over to tell me that this is very good, once your sack is nicely cleaned, you will definitely have a healthy baby very soon. By this time, awake and in pain and disoriented, I was a little weepy, so they shook their heads and said “no, no, yes, yes", which somehow seemed profoundly comforting.
On one side of me a tiny baby set up a massive howl, and the exhausted mother just lay there, too tired to do anything about it. One of the other new mothers got up from her bed, went over and picked up this stranger’s child, rocking it and swaddling it until it cooed contentedly. There were little baby bundles all around me.
In the US, this wouldn’t have happened—the miscarriages and the births would be kept far apart, in the name of sensitivity. In women’s clinics in the US, the abortion appointments and the pre-natal appointments are strictly separate. But in India we have no time or patience for such delicacy, and I was very glad of it. Being alone in a private room brooding would have been so very lonely. But in the women’s ward what happened to me just seemed part of the whole messy process of life, birth, not-birth, the sight of all these babies pulling me out of my loss. I gravitated between being almost glad that I didn’t have a yowling infant to deal with—yet—and feeling hopeful that of course it would happen, soon enough. And carefully watching the tiny cockroach that was marching busily along the foot of my bed.
I’m not implying that there’s anything remotely romantic about poverty and lack of privacy. The lack of basic hygiene and rudimentary awareness of safety protocols in general wards in Indian hospitals is appalling and unjustifiable. It’s just unfortunate that too often in medical settings, we have the extremes of sterile soullessness at one end and unsanitary humaneness at the other.
Privacy is great when things are good, but I’m an Indian to the core, and when things are bad, I want most to have people around me. The chattering grandmothers feeding me forbidden food, telling me all was as it should be, the hollow-eyed mothers, the new button-babies, the discussions of how they were going to divide the hospital bill among various in-laws, the exclamations over my mother’s knitting, even the bathroom that was a horror of bloody pads and spilled water—my poor little empty sack was just a tiny part of it all, and not such an important part, at that.
I lay there in the Holy Family, glared at the nurses along with everyone else, and listened from my cloud of drugs to the pink-shawled lady’s account of her daughter’s labour. She stopped in the middle of the story and fixed me with a benign glare.
“And how many am I now?"
“Now you’re one and a half!" I said and closed my eyes.
Sohaila Abdulali is a New York-based writer. She writes a fortnightly column on women in the 21st century.
Also Read Sohaila’s previous Lounge columns
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