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?"
"No, not there. A little bit here."
With that pantomime, and through the invisible hands of her niece, I finally established that the elderly woman had two painful lumps in her breast. I also learned that she experienced some pain with deep breaths, and when lifting heavy objects. I wrote a note for Doctor Hamid, detailing my second-hand observations and my conclusions. I'd just finished explaining to the girl that she should take her aunt to Doctor Hamid's surgery at once, and give him my note, when a voice spoke behind me.
"You know, poverty looks good on you. If you ever got really down and out, you might be irresistible." I turned in surprise to see Karla leaning in the doorway with her arms folded. An ironic half-smile turned up the corners of her mouth. She was dressed in green-loose silk trousers and a long sleeved top, with a shawl of darker green. Her black hair was free, and burnished with copper tints by the sun. The green of warm, shallow water in a dreamed lagoon blazed in her eyes. She was almost too beautiful: as beautiful as a blush of summer sunset on a sky-wide stream of cloud.
"How long have you been there?" I asked, laughing.
"Long enough to see this weird faith-healing system of yours in operation. Are you curing people by telepathy now?"
"Indian women are very obstinate when it comes to having their breasts handled by strangers," I replied when the patient and her relatives had filed past Karla, and left the hut.
"Nobody's perfect, as Didier would say," she drawled, with a smirk that fluttered just short of a smile. "He misses you, by the way. He asked me to say hello to you. In fact, they all miss you. We haven't seen much of you at Leopold's, since you started this Red Cross routine."
