Chapter 22

The melancholy clank of a goat bell, buffeting the new curtain of her bedroom window, woke Fareeha from a fitful night’s sleep. She leapt up and bounded across reed mats that covered the uneven floor. Saving the front door seemed more important than the splinters of pain that had begun to shoot out from her groin. But having lifted the new flour sack and seeing only a lone black animal nosing at something on the far side of the street, she dropped her hand to the trouble spot. Her sleepy face cracked as she sucked the sharp morning air quickly in through her clenched teeth. She stepped more carefully back to the bed and tried to sit; twice she attempted to lower herself onto the hard surface before giving up. She swore, grabbed her shawl and headscarf, and trudged out to the living room.

*

It was far too early for Fareeha to be walking into town: the artillery had started up in the mountains, but the sun had barely lifted itself off the distant horizon, and her stomach growled at her to wait and give it some breakfast. But after no more than half a glass of cloudy, bitter well water, she covered her ragged hair under a dull-coloured square of cotton and stuck her head through the flapping linoleum. ‘Get this over with,’ she muttered to herself.

Her determination, however, was soon boiled off by the rising sun; and the closer she got to the hospital, the more she perspired and thought about the white foreigner. Rather him than one of the local doctors, she thought as she crossed the road to avoid the reflective glass window of the barber’s shop. Butchers, Mrs Sharwalla had called them. Anyway, the butchers only treated the war injured—they’d never believe that she was hurt in battle and would force her to pay. But what would she say to Phipps, what might he think of her, and worse what might he do? Each question jabbed out its own splinter of pain.

A hundred yards from the hospital, she stopped walking, turned around, and took a few steps towards home. Almost at once, the stinging began to subside. She stopped again and raised her right hand to the scar on her forehead, muttering something to herself. She then raised her eyes to the hazy firmament, took a deep breath, and rotated back towards the hospital. She tightened the knot of her headscarf and made it to the corner of the building in just a few minutes. It’s only a medical problem, she told herself, and he’s a doctor,

Constructed by Europeans, Sa’ An’s municipal hospital was one of the last surviving colonial buildings in the city. The others had been bombed, looted, and abandoned long ago and were now no more than piles of rubble, heaped under the skeletons of those once-majestic structures. It was a miracle that the hospital had survived for so long. Miracles, however, began and ended with the building, and there had been no reports of the patients inside making extraordinary recoveries for a very long time. The crippled never rose up and walked out through the doors. They lay back and waited for the butcher’s saw or waited for the stinking putrid flesh in their legs to spread and take the rest of them. The fevered never wiped their brows and returned home to the family. They sweated until the last drop of life was squeezed out through their pores. The blind never saw again the ones who had once loved them. With blasted sockets, they stared out through their patches at the death around them.

Approaching the entrance, Fareeha pulled her headscarf over her mouth and began to glance around, making sure nobody was near. The face-covering would serve another purpose inside, but out here it was to hide her identity. If an acquaintance saw her enter, she would think Fareeha had gone mad: citizens of Sa’ An didn’t voluntarily offer themselves up at the gates of the hospital as patients—those inside had to be dragged there unconscious by their terrified comrades.

*

The smell hit quickly and without warning: no sooner had Fareeha pulled her long dress through the battered door than she buckled under its attack. The thin cotton of her headscarf was inadequate and even the palm of her hand, which instinctively rose to her flaring nostrils, could do little to stop the onslaught. She pulled up just inside and waited for the chemical fog and airborne putrefaction to settle. It didn’t; and after a minute of short breaths and wretches from her stomach, she forced herself to press on.

Fareeha leaned over the first counter she came to and spoke softly through the cotton. ‘Where can I find the new doctor, please?’ she said; but by the end of the sentence she had focussed on what was sitting there and she now gasped and reared back to safety.

Squashed into the ill-fitting and tatty clothes of a nurse was a blunt-faced hag of a woman, who in a different uniform could have been a fearless warrior, ready to kill at the frontline. Noisily, she pushed her chair away with the backs of her knees and stood up. Her toothy snarl tore into Fareeha like a bayonet, and she stabbed out with several sharp words. The attack, however, contained nothing intelligible and Fareeha quickly retreated.

She turned a corner and at once almost disappeared into the voluminous black robes of a very large woman. Bouncing away from a plump body, Fei saw the scowling face of a war widow, clutched tiffin pots flailing at the ends of her arms.

‘Careful!’ she said in a menacing voice. ‘That’s my son’s lunch.’

Fareeha apologised and was going to ask her about the new doctor when she caught sight of a white-coated figure walking along the corridor towards her. Her heart thumped and she quickly moved aside and let the widow shuffle away. But as the man ambled closer, she saw that he was not the upright, gangly Englishman but a squat, overweight local, whose coat was not exactly white and starchy but dull and blotched with dark stains. Flies buzzed around what was in his hand: a silver, kidney-shaped tray, on which lay several bloodied implements and a lump of something that could have come from the meat stall in the market. Fareeha turned away.

‘Madam, are you lost?’

Fareeha didn’t turn immediately and only when the gruff voice repeated its question did she bite her lip and slowly swing her shoulders. Without looking at the tray she opened her mouth. ‘I . . .’ But her eyes got lost in the stubbly undergrowth of the man’s expansive face—pock-marked cheeks, drooping jowls, and a cascading series of chins—and she choked off the sentence. A bushy grey moustache hid his top lip, but the thin bottom one drooped, revealing a row of stained teeth. When he opened his mouth to prompt her for more words, his foul breath knocked her away. ‘I’m looking for the new doctor,’ she said at last, through the headscarf and her hand, with her back against the wall. She watched his black eyes narrow and the grey skin of his forehead crease into a mosaic of confusion.

‘I’m the only doctor here,’ he said, ‘and I’m not new.’

‘The Englishman?’

‘Oh him.’ The man rolled his eyes and huffed, managing to clank the implements on the silver tray; something ran over its edge and dripped to the floor. ‘Not here.’

Fareeha stepped along the wall to avoid the splash. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I . . .’ But the man had already turned and began to slouch away from her, leaving a trail of red spots on the tiled floor. ‘Try the Department of Water Resources,’ he called over his shoulder before rounding a corner.