‘Chandu… Chandu,’ she whispered as she pulled him on top of her with everything she had. Shobha’s lust enveloped Chandrakant’s mind, body, breath, eyes, skin. And her body, her scent, her weight, and the two of them. Chandrakant was breathing heavily but that was just the start of an otherworldly, magical, exceptional female game.
In that tiny half flat in Jahangirpuri bylane number seven, atop a magic carpet, the two of them rolled around, scorched by unseen flames of a fire that burned of itself in wordless play and that paradoxically also extinguished itself.
Suri lay an arm’s length away, his little lips making little smiles that appeared and then disappeared, perhaps dreaming something in his carefree sleep.
Just over a half an hour later, when the millions-of-years-old sun began rising above the walls of the Galgotia English Public School in front of their house and the Shangra-La Hotel under construction behind it, and when the traffic began to grow thick on the National Highway, Chandrakant and Shobha, on top of the magic carpet, which wasn’t really a carpet, just a cheap rug they had bought on the sidewalk bazaar at Vijaynagar, went limp and collapsed. A HEAD THAT WON’T STOP GROWING
‘Take this child to AIIMS,’ said Dr. Anil Kumar Matta, the pediatric infectious disease specialist at Kalpana Health and Diagnostic Centre. ‘They’ll do a CT scan or an MRI. We could do it here, too, but since it’s a private clinic, you’ll have to pay out of your own pocket in a imaging facility in the market, and you don’t have that kind of money.’
‘Can you tell what the problem is, doctor?’ Chandrakant asked, anxious.
‘I don’t know. His head is getting bigger and heavier. It’s still in proportion to the rest of his body, but there’s some abnormality, some imbalance. Don’t wait, take him there as soon as you can, his life is in danger.’
Shobha and Chandrakant were distraught. Sometimes she snapped awake in the middle of the night to find Suri awake, too, in an odd silence, trying to press his palms against his heavy, hurting head. His innocent little face was crisscrossed with wrinkles of anguish. Every breath was a struggle, and she thought with each one, this is it: his delicate, immature lungs won’t be able to draw in air next time. Meanwhile, Suri tried with all his might, his body twisting and turning. The baby’s whistling, wheezing sound that had rent Chandrakant and Shobha’s sleep, piercing them to their core, was Suri’s will to live made manifest. But what if he gets tired trying? They couldn’t bear the thought. What are we supposed to do? Where are we going to get that kind of money?
Shobha, anxious and feeling vulnerable, lifted Suri up, clasped his heavy head, and placed him in her lap. There was no doubt about it: his head was growing bigger and heavier every second of every day. She felt that a hot bag of lead and sand and iron were resting on her thighs, not a baby’s head. She was getting sore, but there was nothing else for her to do but guide his mouth to her breast, and gently stroke his forehead. Chandrakant woke intermittently and helplessly watched the two of them, Shobha choking back her tears.
Chandrakant made enough money from working at Gulshan Arora’s shop to scrape by each month. He was just able to pay for rent, bus fares, essentials, the electric bill. Shobha make a few rupees helping out with neighbours’ wedding preparations, or making chutney, pickle, papadum. After Suri was born, their expenses went up, but she was no longer able to go out. I gave Chandrakant some money, and Gulshan Arora helped as well, adding that if he needed more he should just ask — after all, he had worked there for so long — and worry about paying it back later.
AIIMS — All India Institute of Medical Science — was a considerable distance from Jahangirpuri. And because it was government-run, treatment depended on who you knew and what connections you had. It was the ministers, high-ranking government officers, or the rich and powerful who had access to treatment at AIIMS. Chandrakant and Shobha stood hours waiting in the OPD with Suri in their lap. Either the number they had taken was never called, or perhaps it had been — but, amid the crowd, the doctor had seen Suryakant, looked at him indifferently, and told them to come back another day. After a huge runaround that lasted months, the doctor finally referred them for an MRI — only to discover that the ‘machine wasn’t working’ at the hospital, and they would have to get it done privately. By then Chandrakant had understood: the doctors and staff were in cahoots and received a kickback for every patient sent to a private clinic. But it didn’t matter. In the end, Shobha gathered all the jewellery from her mother, plus what she had taken from the contractor and inspector at Ramakant’s, sold it all, and had the tests done.
By then, Suri was more than a year old, and his head had grown to a substantial size. It was true that his neck was stronger than before, and he could now use it to lift up his head. Either it would wobble for a bit before plopping back down, or he would slide on his knees and try to crawl. But pretty soon he tired and began fighting for breath. Whatever energy he had left over was spent trying to catch his breath, and he soon grew listless and collapsed in a heap wherever he happened to be.
But Chandrakant and Shobha had also recently begun to sense that it wasn’t just his head that was growing, but that his mind, too, was developing more quickly than babies the same age.
Every day he seemed less and less like a baby.
Then I wasn’t able to see Chandrakant for a few months. He did call once, and was at his wit’s end. The doctors had more or less made their pronouncement. According to them, Suri would live at most one-and-a-half or two years. His disease was incurable. Of course, if they had two, two-and-a-half million rupees, something might be done. But to say that this was a sum beyond Shobha and Chandrakant’s wildest dreams would be a gross understatement.
According to him, the doctors said that Suryakant was an abnormal baby and that the cells in his head were reproducing more quickly than the rest of his body, and that this was due to some unknown reason: a neurological disorder was possible, viral or bio-genetic factors could not be ruled out, a poisonous effect of strong environmental pollution could have played a part. Whatever the cause, if this disproportionate development wasn’t stopped, in two-and-a-half-years max, Suri would surely meet his end.
But more than one year has already passed! Only six months left…?
I felt deep sympathy for Shobha and Chandrakant. They’d had a child together on the cusp of old age. But the child had a head like a time bomb sitting atop its own body. Tick, tick, tick, stuck in a countdown that would end its life with an explosion, always busy with plotting not its own life, but its death.
I couldn’t bear looking at Suryakant. He began to recognise me, and when I arrived he smiled and tried to crawl over. I wondered how they did it, spending every second of the day with him. How they managed putting him to bed and waking him up, knowing that each new day brought his life one day closer to the end. What went through Shobha’s mind when she breastfed him? Was the milk nourishing his life or was it fueling the flames of his impending death?
Shobha often wondered if the problem might lie with her, and she cast doubts on herself. Thirty years ago, she was gang-raped by the contractor, inspector, and Ramakant, her betrothed, as the men drank and drank, ate and ate, and watched porn. Her rectum had been shredded by the bottle inserted while on their savage spree. Maybe this had caused permanent strictures in her uterus? Could this be the cause of the seven deaths of her seven children? She couldn’t talk openly with Chandrakant about these suspicions. It was only after her third child had died that she asked a nurse whether something in her womb might be spoiled?