The nurse looked Panjabi. She was plump, middle-aged, and clearly had an eye for making money. She gave Shobha a sharp look.
‘I’m guessing you had an abortion before you got married? How many? You had your fun in bed. But now the bed’s been made. You’ll have to lie in it! Get an ultrasound done of your empty womb. Come see me tomorrow, I’ll get it done for you. It’ll cost seven fifty. Don’t tell your husband. Otherwise forget it.’
But in those days Shobha had no way to scrape together seven hundred and fifty rupees. A LIVING PUPPET OF STONE, STEEL, CLOTH, AND MUD
She breastfed little Suri. She tickled his chin and his underarms — coochie coochie coo! She clapped her hands merrily and snapped her fingers, and made little bird whistles or cat sounds. But Suri remained unmoved and showed almost no signs of life. She felt that death’s shadow was gaining ground on the two of them, creeping up step by step. She saw in her mind’s eye little Suri wheezing in her lap uncontrollably, then seizing up, going cold, his oversized head plopping down on her lap, lifeless.
She had a dream one night that while trying to lift Suri’s head, it suddenly slipped from her hands, fell on the floor, and burst open. But instead of blood emptying from the head was every colour imaginable, flooding the floor and soaking the carpet — the one that was no ordinary rug, but the one they had called a magic carpet for thirty years, where she and Chandrakant had played their hot, primal games.
The still puzzling thing was that unlike other babies, Suri didn’t cry at all. When he was hungry or needed something, he crawled over to Shobha. Whenever he fell down or got hurt, instead of bursting into tears he closed his eyes and pursed his lips as the pain disappeared inside. Then he touched the place on his body where he had been hurt, and then the thing he had bumped into. And once he got hurt and absorbed the shock, he wouldn’t make the same mistake again. He learned from his experiences very quickly — so quickly that Shobha and Chandrakant couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t just the size of his head that kept getting bigger, but his brain was growing at a rate much faster than babies his age. It looked as if he was constantly thinking, absorbed in his silence, alone inside a secret darkness.
Suri not only didn’t cry anymore, but he also stopped laughing. His expressionless face was like a marionette made of wood, cloth, stone, rusty iron. A weak, misshapen animated little puppet. It had to be a something out of the ordinary to make him laugh. Like one day when Shobha was looking for the knife to cut the veggies. Just a little while before she had taken the knife and placed it in the thali with the potatoes. But now the knife was no longer there; she searched high and low. Suri was in the corner, sitting up against the wall, silently observing her. Shobha, giving up finding the knife anywhere nearby, stood still. When she saw the knife along with a half-peeled potato hidden right where Suri was sitting, he was instantly filled with glee. At first she wasn’t sure what to think, but then joined him in laughter.
One morning he crawled out onto the balcony and stared for a long time out at the houses around and the street below, all the while steadying his heavy head on his shoulders. It was exactly the time when all the kids were on their way to school, and the old folks were out buying bread and milk. Eighteen-month-old Suri seemed to be watching the hustle and bustle with great focus. A schoolboy of eight or nine came running carrying his knapsack, waiting on the side of the road for his school bus. He suddenly remembered something and ran off back where he had come from; the hustle and bustle of the street continued in the five or so minutes the boy was gone. Then the boy appeared again carrying a kids’ water thermos. Suri thought this was hysterical. The boy looked up to see Suri laughing, and realised he was laughing at him because he knew he had forgotten his water bottle at home. The boy looked over to Shobha and shouted, ‘Hey auntie! Your little boy is sooo cute. What’s his name?’
‘Suri!’ she replied, smiling.
‘Suri,’ he repeated, waving and smiling as he walked toward the boy. But he stopped short when he saw the huge misshapen head. Shobha looked and saw Suri barely managing to wave with one hand, his face twitching, losing strength as he struggled. His lips formed the faint outline of a smile, but it was the strange expression of someone losing control.
Shobha was sure that Suri listened attentively whenever she and Chandrakant talked to each other. He stared at them, never blinking, as if he could understand each and every word.
That day, doctor Parvathi Nambiar of the Neurology Department at Jaipur Golden Hospital called Chandrakant and Shobha in private and told them with visible distress that Suri’s continued survival had been a miracle of miracles, but that he could go at any moment, there was no telling. As far as she was concerned, his time was already up. Somehow, to them, this was the final word from a medical perspective about Suri.
The two were devastated. They avoided looking at one another, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to endure the pain on the other’s face. A kind of inner weeping inside them both kept them on edge. That night, the two of them sat at home in the half flat and spoke in such hushed whispers that it would have been nearly impossible for someone to listen in. Suddenly something in the corner of the room caught Shobha’s eye. They had already turned off the light, and the room was dark except for a faint light from outside that cast diffuse light in the corner. She saw little Suri, sitting quietly leaning against the wall, watching them with stony, worried eyes that twinkled and flamed like little red marbles in the dark.
Shobha and Chandrakant believed that little Suri had both heard and understood everything they said.
His eyes peered at them from that dim corner of the room as if he had just been run over by a truck on the road, watching the living passersby as he lay dying: a last, lonely look. At that moment their son Suri’s eyes had the cold, blank, hard stare of a corpse that had emerged from a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean, and was suddenly standing on the beach, in the sun, gazing at the living.
Once I asked a doctor I knew if he had heard of this mysterious ‘mangosil’ disease. He said he’d never heard of it. Yes, there was a disease called ‘meningocele,’ but that had more to do with the spinal cord and lower back. It can cause hydrocephalus where the head can’t drain the spinal fluid, and some swelling can occur. But there’s a cure, and it’s not fatal. The doctor continued, ‘I can’t find a disease with the symptoms you’re describing in any of the medical literature. If a disease like that had been detected, it definitely would have been described in the literature — like when AIDS was first found in humans.’ A DEATH DEFERRED, LIFE IN THE HALF FLAT
Three years passed and more. Suri continued to live, putting paid to the predictions and prognostications of the doctors. Not only that, he grew more intelligent, focused, remarkable, and healthier than before. He even began to speak, with a lisp, and picked things up very quickly. He asked his mother about the letters he saw printed in books or on newspapers, and then tried copying them down with whatever paper was at hand. He tried to sketch whatever caught his eye: a bike, Shobha, a cat, dog, radio, fan, bus, cars, motorcycle, TV, tree, house — anything and everything.
Another development occurred during this time in the form of a twenty-one inch black and white Beltek TV that sat on a wooden board fastened with nails to the front wall. It had a remote, which, for the most part, remained in the hands of none other than the misshapen three-and-a-half year old with the big head and little body. Chandrakant’s boss, Gulshan Arora, had given him the TV set for free after he had bought himself a colour Onida in the meantime. Chandrakant got a cable hookup for the cheap price of sixty rupees, and then the TV had loads of channels.