Monsoon Summer Read Free Page B

“God, it’s cold in here. I’m going to make some tea. It’s partly our fault that India still has an appallingly high infant mortality rate. Tackling it wasn’t high on our government’s list of priorities when we were there, and sensibly, their government wants foreign midwives from America and from Britain, to fill in the gaps.”
    I must have looked skeptical. Handing me a mug of tea, she said, “The situation, frankly, darling, is dire. The riots and killings have placed a tremendous strain on local hospitals. Neeta has begged us to come back, to bring equipment, books, money, anything we can.”
    She got up and put a piece of rotten gate on the fire.
    â€œAre you going?” I felt my mouth grow dry.
    â€œI can’t.” She looked stricken. “I have to run the farm, else it will collapse, and anyway it’s important that the Moonstone have its own Indian administrator. It’s midwives they need. Have a flapjack.” Daisy’s flapjacks were good: moist and chewy with just enough golden syrup in them to make them sweet.
    â€œI’m not a proper midwife yet.” I took a flapjack from the tin. “I have two more supervised deliveries to do before I sit my part twos.” The rule was that pupil midwives who were qualified nurses had to take responsibility for twenty women during labor, ten of these in the patients’ own homes, so a total of thirty deliveries over a year. I’d taken part in twenty-eight, and then, because of what happened, I’d dropped out.
    â€œSo, almost there.” Daisy tucked the blanket around my knee. “I was trying to remember if you’d ever actually been to India with your mother,” she said innocently, while I was chewing.
    â€œDaisy,” I said warningly. I had an inkling where this was heading and had already decided to say no. “I was never there, or if I was, I was too young to remember.”
    My mother’s stories about India were so odd and variable, that I always felt, to use her own word, “eggshelly,” when the subject cropped up, not wanting to casually blurt out what she had carefully concealed.
    â€œI think Mummy went to school there.”
    â€œShe did,” Daisy said.
    â€œDid she work for some governor there or something? A good job.”
    â€œMaybe.” It was Daisy’s turn to look wary. “You’d better ask her.”
    A gust of wind made the barn door fly open. Three ducks waddled across the mud, the wind flattening their feathers. Daisy bolted the door shut, put another log on the grate.
    â€œSo, back to the Moonstone.” She stood up and wrapped a blanket mummy-fashion around herself. “What Neeta and I are working on is a simple training program that won’t mystify the localmidwives, some of whom are illiterate, and joy! I think we may have tracked down the proverbial needle in the haystack by finding a young doctor at Oxford who speaks Malayalam, the local language in Cochin. He’s going to help me with the translations. It is a bit of a minefield out there at the moment, and we must avoid any hint of English women bossing their women. We want to train their best and brightest, but you know, it can be terribly tricky: some high-caste Hindu women have to go through complicated cleansing rituals if they so much as touch the bodily fluids of another person.”
    â€œDaisy,” I said, “it sounds insanely difficult.”
    â€œThat’s what Tudor says.” She smiled sadly. “He’s completely mystified at my spending my time on this, and probably best we don’t discuss it at mealtime. It can be an explosive subject.”
    â€œI think my mother would say amen to that, but I’m not mystified, Daisy,” I said, looking at her: she was the best person I’d ever met, though she’d have hated me to say it.
    She looked at her watch. “I’ll get through this quickly—lunch