Monsoon Summer Read Free Page A

had led to some of the best and frankest talks of my life. Not now.
    â€œSo much better, Daisy,” I said. “It’s so good to be here.” The vague idea I had had about confiding in Daisy already felt like self-indulgence. Sharing the house with dispossessed strangers was no piece of cake either, and I thought she looked tired and had lost weight since I’d last seen her a year or so ago.
    â€œI wonder if it was a mistake,” she offered, “for you to plungeso soon after the war into the midwife course. What does Glory think?”
    â€œNot thrilled,” I said. The truth was my mother hadn’t spoken to me for a week after I told her. Her plans for me ran along the lines of something sanitary and secretarial, maybe a doctor’s receptionist, in a place where you wore nice clothes and met men and flirted discreetly with them.
    â€œHm, I didn’t think she would be.” Daisy sucked in her lips.
    â€œBut I was enjoying the training.” I faltered, “I really was,” furious that my mouth was wobbling. “I want to finish it. It’s not that. I got tired, I think,” I added lamely. “And this awful winter . . . you know . . . normal things.” I closed my eyes tight to blank out the memory that followed me everywhere: the girl. Her screaming mouth.
    â€œWell, we don’t have to do any of this today if you don’t want to. And don’t let me bombard you.” The expression in her eyes was so kind, I had to take a deep breath.
    â€œHonestly, Daisy,” I stood up. “My brain’s going to turn to dust if I don’t work again soon, so spill the beans.”
    She laughed as if I’d made a splendid joke, opened the desk drawer, and said, “Let’s get cracking.”
    * * *
    In the next hour Daisy, intent and serious, sketched out what seemed to me a dangerous plan. “Do you remember me telling you about the orphanage I ran in Bombay in the late ’twenties?” she began.
    â€œOf course!” I’d enjoyed her stories about Tamarind Street.
    â€œWell, it was a marvelous time. I set it up with a group of egghead women I’d met at Oxford, and we ran it with Indian volunteers. We all got on splendidly, and I was very happy there, and although it was a drop in the ocean, we did at least do something. Not nearly enough.” Daisy, who never blew her own trumpet, looked sad at this.
    â€œIn August, after Indian Independence, I think we thought we would be kicked out, or worse—but something’s cropped up.” Her eyes flashed. “Something very exciting. I’ve been asked by my very good South Indian friend, Neeta Chacko, to continue to help a mother and baby clinic at a small hospital in Fort Cochin. The plan is to work alongside their Indian staff and develop a short course to share Western knowledge with the local village midwives, the vayattattis. So we’re on the hunt for English midwives to go back to India. The right kind.”
    â€œThe right kind?” I asked cautiously. “Meaning . . . ?”
    â€œWell, not pigheaded know-it-alls. We can learn a lot from the local women.”
    â€œBut who would go?” I asked. In the last few months, the papers had been full of lurid accounts of the mayhem that had followed Independence: the three hundred thousand Muslims hacked to death, the slaughtering of innocent passengers in burning trains, neighbor killing neighbor, and so on. “Don’t Indians loathe us now?”
    â€œWell, you see, that’s rot,” Daisy said. “Some do, with some justification, but the others, we worked with them for years, they were our friends, and besides they need all the help they can get.”
    â€œDon’t they want to cut the apron strings?” That’s what my mother had told me, a bitter note in her voice.
    â€œNot entirely.” Daisy put a kettle on top of the range.