The wound was beginning to knit well enough, but it was an angry red, with some flares of yellowish-white. Khaderbhai’s lepers had supplied me with a ten-litre container of surgical disinfectant. I used it to wash my hands and then cleansed the wound, roughly scraping at it until there was no trace of the white infection. It must’ve been tender, but Naresh endured the pain expressionlessly. When it was dry, I squeezed antibiotic powder into the crease of the cut and applied a fresh gauze dressing and bandage.
‘Prabaker tells me you had a narrow escape from the police the other night, Naresh,’ I said as I worked, stumbling along in my broken Marathi.
‘Prabaker has a disappointing habit of telling everybody the truth,’ Naresh frowned.
‘You’re telling me,’ I answered quickly, and we both laughed.
Like most of the Maharashtrians, Naresh was happy that I tried to learn his language, and like most of them he spoke slowly and very precisely, encouraging me to understand. There were no parallels between Marathi and English, it seemed to me: none of the similarities and familiar words that were shared by English and German, for example, or English and Italian. Yet Marathi was an easy language to learn because the people of Maharashtra were thrilled that I wanted to learn it, and they were very eager to teach.
‘If you keep stealing with Aseef and his gang,’ I said, more seriously, ‘you’re going to get caught.’
‘I know that, but I hope not. I hope the Enlightened One is on my side. It’s for my sister. I pray that no harm will come to me, you see, because I am not stealing for myself, but for my sister. She will be married soon, and there is not enough to pay the promised dowry. It is my responsibility. I am the oldest son.’
Naresh was brave, intelligent, hard working, and kind with the young children. His hut wasn’t much bigger than my own, but he shared it with his parents, and six brothers and sisters. He slept outside on the rough ground to leave more space for the younger ones inside. I’d visited his hut several times, and I knew that everything he owned in the world was contained in one plastic shopping bag: a change of rough clothes, one pair of good trousers and a shirt for formal occasions and for visiting the temple, a book of Buddhist verses, several photographs, and a few toiletries. He owned nothing else. He gave every rupee that he earned from his job or made from petty thefts to his mother, asking her for small change in return as he required it. He didn’t drink or smoke or gamble. As a poor man with no immediate prospects, he had no girlfriend and only a slender chance of winning one. The one entertainment he allowed himself was a trip to the cheapest cinema, with his workmates, once a week. Yet he was a cheerful, optimistic young man. Sometimes, when I came home through the slum late at night, I saw him curled up on the path, outside the family hut, his thin young face slackened in sleep’s exhausted smile.
‘And you, Naresh?’ I asked, fastening the bandage with a safety pin. ‘When will you get married?’
He stood, flexing his slender arm to loosen the tight bandage.
‘After Poonam is married, there are two other sisters who must be married,’ he explained, smiling and wagging his head from side to side. ‘They must be first. In this, our Bombay, the poor man must look for husbands before he looks for a wife. Crazy, isn’t it?
He went out without thanking me, as was usual with the people I treated at my hut. I knew that he would invite me to dinner at his house one day soon, or bring me a gift of fruit or special incense. The people showed thanks, rather than saying it, and I’d come to accept that.
When Naresh emerged from my hut with a clean bandage, several people who saw him approached me for treatment. I attended to them one by one-rat bites, fever, infected rashes, ringworm-chatting with each, and catching up on the gossip that constantly swirled through the lanes and gullies like the ubiquitous dust-devils.
The last of those patients was an elderly woman accompanied by her niece. She complained of pains in her chest, on the left side, but the extremes of Indian modesty made examination a complex procedure. I asked the girl to summon others to help. Two of the niece’s young friends joined her in my hut. The friends held a sheet of thick cloth up between the elderly woman and myself, completely obscuring her from my view. The girl was standing beside her aunt in a position where she could look over the blanket and see me sitting on the other side. Then, as I touched my own chest here and there, the young niece imitated me by touching her aunt’s breast.
‘Does it hurt here?’ I asked, probing my own chest above the nipple.
Behind the screen, the niece probed at her aunt’s breast, asking my question.
‘No.’
‘How about here?’
‘No, not there.’
‘What about here?’
‘Yes. There it is hurting,’ she answered.
‘And here? Or here?’
