The India Spy Page 12

  “Priya, your mother has been taken ill,” he said quietly. “You must come quickly. We have been trying to contact you all afternoon.”

  “What’s the matter with her?” Priyanka asked anxiously. The whole tone of the conversation had shifted.

  “She’s had a stroke.”

  “Mummy?” Priyanka said, bewildered.

  “A minor one but she’s not well.”

  “Can I be of any help?” I asked. “I’m a doctor in Britain.”

  “We’re not short of good doctors in Kerala,” he said, opening the door of a white Maruti for Priyanka. She climbed in without looking at me, trying to hide the tears that were welling.

  “Ring me at the Casino if there’s anything I can do,” I said as she pulled the door closed. A moment later and they had gone, leaving me alone on the jetty.

  I looked out across the water and watched the dredger, which was turning around slowly in the harbour mouth. The Chinese fishing nets, still now and silhouetted in its arc lights, were like petrified limbs, clawing at the night sky. Fatman row-row was standing next to his boat, fiddling unnecessarily with the bow rope. I went over to him and gave him a tip, fifty rupees, which he slipped into the top of his lunghi with the deftness of a street magician.

  “I tell nobody,” he said, grinning in the direction of the car, which was far away now, turning onto the main road, its headlights sweeping briefly across the water.

  *

  I wished I had someone to tell as I tried in vain to go to sleep in my hotel room. Instead I decided to look at the internet, see what was on the Cardamom Café’s website. It took a few minutes to unplug the phone and wire up the computer to the exchange, but I was soon scrolling down the café’s home page – “a small corner of India that is for ever England.”

  The site appeared to be a forum where people could air trenchant views on the British Empire that was, and speculate why India was worse off fifty years after Independence than it had been fifty years before. Vintage Macaulay. His name didn’t appear anywhere on the site, but the tone was unmistakably his.

  One section, “The Arrogance of Hindutva”, began: “India has always operated best when she is in partnership with others, whether it’s the Mughals or the British. To strike out these chapters of India’s history with a saffron pen is to miss the point about India, which is ultimately too hospitable, too welcoming to stand on her own. The British did not subjugate her, rather they allowed her to blossom, much like the support a rubber tree gives to the twisting pepper vine that grows in its shadow.”

  Another link, called “Bombast and the Bomb”, started: “Imagine a country where girls as young as five work in firework factories and women are encouraged to throw themselves onto their husband’s funeral pyres. If this is how they treat their own people in times of peace, what cruelties can we expect them to mete out to other nations in the full madness of nuclear war?”

  After skimming through these and a number of other tracts, I was not surprised that Macaulay, if he was the author, remained unpublished as a historian. The only passage that read well was called “An Indian Writes – a short extract from The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, complete with its dedication to “the memory of the British Empire in India… because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule”, an acknowledgment which someone explained in a footnote had been removed “in suspicious circumstances” from a recent British edition.

  Of more surprise was that Macaulay had an audience, let alone one over which he had any influence. The site had registered 312 hits, which was hardly a cyber scramble.

  It was only when I clicked on “Cardamom News”, a small link at the bottom of the site, that I began to understand, for the first time, why Sir Ian might have reason to be worried about Macaulay’s activities in India.

  I was denied access to the link, which provided a “comprehensive news wire service”, but a pop-up window explained that for a small fee, payable by foreign credit card only, I could receive twice daily bulletins, via email, on India’s most “exotic” stories, the contents of which may be used “in their entirety without acknowledgment”. It appeared to be a lot more professional than the amateur email service Macaulay had described to Priyanka. A banner along the top of the window said: “Join over two hundred other foreign media organisations and subscribe today for the stories the world wants to read about India.”

  “Exotic” could have meant anything, but the animated logo that pulsated in the corner of the window was of a cobra emerging from a wicker basket. I considered signing up there and then but decided to wait, in case members were screened. It would only have aroused Macaulay’s suspicion.

  As I clicked back to the previous page, there was a knock on the door. I stood up to open it, expecting to find room service. Instead a man I recognised from reception was standing there with a note in his hand.

  “Sir, we have been trying to connect a call to your room for the past one hour,” he said.

  I took the note from his outstretched hand. It read, “Please call Priyanka on 66822”. The man was looking over my shoulder at the computer on my bed. I glanced back at the tangle of wires connecting it to the phone line.

  “I’ve been on-line,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I closed the door and rushed over to the bed, disconnected the modem from the wall and reconnected the telephone. I tried to slow myself down as I dialled, but I pressed a wrong digit and had to start again.

  “Tripunithura hospital,” a lady’s voice answered.

  “Can I speak to Priyanka Pillai, daughter of Mrs Pillai, a patient of yours,” I said.

  There was a long, crackly pause and then Priyanka was on the line.

  “Raj, I’ve been trying to ring you,” she said.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, pleased to hear her voice again, even though it was freighted with anxiety.

  “She’s not well,” Priyanka said.

  “Do you want me to come over?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea. She just looks so… changed. I hardly recognise her.”

  “What treatment are they giving her?”

  “Ayurveda.”

  “Ayurveda? Priyanka, she needs proper medicine, immediate anti-platelet therapy, a scan, maybe even some cortizoids. She can have a herbal massage later.”

  “The doctors know what they are doing here, we’ve come before. They saved my father last year.”

  “I’m sure they did.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Perhaps you should come over. Only, my father, he asked me in the car all about you. He wasn’t angry, but—”

  “—What did you tell him?” I asked, interrupting her. “That we’d only met once in Delhi?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll say the same. Nothing more. I promise.”

  *

  The hospital was five miles outside Cochin and I decided to take a hotel taxi. Although it was late, the roads were still busy, the Ernakulam waterfront ablaze with boulevard lights and bustling with young lovers, beggars and nutsellers rattling their metal roasting pans to intricate rhythms. Perhaps it was the heat and humidity, but night-time in India was not reserved for sleeping. There was nothing sacred about it, no culture of do not disturb. If I hadn’t made my preferences known to the hotel, I would have been interrupted throughout the night with polite knocks on the door and offers of bed sweets, drinking water, clean towels.

  According to the sign at the main gates, the hospital was also an ayurvedic college, which did little to restore my confidence. I told the taxi driver to wait and I walked inside, carrying my medical bag. I had put together a few things before I left, including some aspirin, an effective and practical anti-platelet drug in cases of minor strokes. A bleary-eyed receptionist sitting at a wooden table looked up at me as I approached her and then glanced to her right. Priyanka appeared from the shadows. She looked wan and pale.


  “Where is she?” I asked, relieved that we were exempted, at least for a while, from confronting what had happened earlier that evening on the boat.

  “I’ll show you to her,” Priyanka said. I followed her down a dimly lit corridor, conscious that my black medical briefcase was being scrutinised by the receptionist. There was a thin smell in the warm air, like camomile.

  Priyanka’s mother was sitting up in bed in a room on her own, her hand held by a younger woman whom I took to be Priyanka’s sister. She was less attractive than Priyanka, her hair tied back tightly, her features more severe. Mr Pillai was sitting on a bedside chair with his head in his hands. He smoothed back his hair when I walked in and stood up to greet me, politely rather than warmly.

  “Thank you for coming,” Mr Pillai said.

  “I came as quickly as I could,” I replied, glancing at his wife. My first impression was that she was not as ill as Priyanka had suggested: a minor stroke, ischaemic rather than haemorrhagic.

  “She’s improved a lot in the past hour,” Mr Pillai said. “I’ve discussed it with my daughters and I don’t want anything else done to her, not yet.”

  “But accha,” Priyanka said, protesting quietly.

  I glanced at Priyanka for an explanation but she turned away and walked over to her sister. I looked at Mrs Pillai again and at some dark brown bottles of medicine on the table next to her.

  “A stroke can be very serious,” I said. “Even if it’s only a mild one. It’s important to reduce the risk of a more dangerous recurrence. Is she on any medication? You should at least be giving her aspirin.”

  Mr Pillai held up his hands, as if to say “stop”.

  “My life was saved here last year,” he said, pausing longer than I expected. “If she doesn’t improve, I’ll ask you to do all you can to help her.”

  As he finished, a man, presumably the doctor, breezed into the room looking at some notes. He glanced up, taking in the number of people now assembled. He was young, barely thirty, and had a lean, smooth face, with high cheekbones and calming eyes.

  “This is Dr Gopalakrishnan,” said Mr Pillai. “Our family doctor. He came in specially when I rang him.”

  I shook his hand and he smiled briefly, knowingly, at me. His complexion was pure and his head barely moved as he talked.

  I smiled back at him, shaking his hand. “Raj Nair.”

  He acknowledged the name, and then walked straight over to Priyanka’s mother.

  “He’s a doctor in Britain,” Mr Pillai said, following him over to the bed.

  Dr Gopalakrishnan was too busy to reply. I watched him as he spoke quietly to Mrs Pillai, appearing to find her pulse at several points on her wrist and then administering some medicine from one of the bottles on the bedside table. I was beginning to feel surplus to requirements and wondered why I had come. The whole family was listening to the doctor, who was explaining something to them in Malayalam.

  After a few moments he turned and came over to me.

  “You may talk to her now if you wish,” he said. “She’s had what you call a transient ischaemic attack. She should make a full recovery. I’m giving her an internal detoxification, panchakarma therapy, to clear any obstructions in the nerve pathways.”

  “What she needs is a full neurological assessment and a brain scan,” I said bullishly. “And she should be checked for dysphagia.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her swallowing,” he replied, still smiling benignly. “We always check before embarking on panchakarma.”

  “At least some anti-platelet therapy,” I said, less hostile, disarmed by his uncombative manner.

  “We’re not against Western medicine here, Mr Nair,” he said. “We like to work with it. But in the case of strokes, it’s far from clear that all drugs are safe. Some thrombolytic treatments can cause catastrophic haemorrhaging.”

  There was a pause as he let the words gently rest his case. He was referring to what American doctors called “clot-busting drugs”, recent therapies such as Tissue Plasminogen Activator or TPA, which were used to treat severe strokes. We both knew that I had no similar knowledge of ayurveda.

  “If it was a more serious stroke I would have admitted her to the main hospital at once,” he added quietly, without any smugness.

  “Three hundred grammes of aspirin a day – that’s all I’m saying,” I continued, almost talking to myself. “Studies in Scotland have shown it can reduce further attacks by up to a quarter.”

  “She’s responding well to our herbal preparations,” he replied. “Please, she is happy for you to see her.”

  I walked over to the bed, Priyanka and her sister parting to let me through. Mrs Pillai looked much older up close, more frightened. I listened to her breathing and took her pulse, and then asked a few questions about what she could and couldn’t feel. Her eyes were kind, just like Priyanka’s. There was no paralysis and it was hard to disagree with Dr Gopalakrishnan’s overall diagnosis. I was not going to win my argument about aspirin and decided to let the matter drop.

  “I think she’s okay,” I said to Priyanka. “She’s not in bad hands.”

  “Thanks for coming,” she said, standing next to her watchful sister. Her voice was betraying nothing of our earlier encounter. Neither of us knew when we would see each other again but the formal circumstances had drained us of all emotion. If we met again, this empty moment wouldn’t matter; if this was it, the last few days would seem even more unreal than they already did.

  Mr Pillai showed me out of the nursing home, walking down the corridor with me in silence until we reached the outside, where he slowed down, seemingly less eager to get rid of me. He had the introspective air of a reconciled thinker, his measured conversation paced with lengthy intervals.

  “Priyanka’s friends in Delhi, Frank and Susie, spoke very highly of you as a doctor,” he said, after a particularly long pause. “They said you worked wonders with Kashmir when he was sick.”

  I was taken aback by the sound of Frank and Susie’s names but glad to hear them again, happy for the excuse to talk about them.

  “Do you know them?” I asked.

  “I’ve met them a couple of times when we’ve been staying with Priyanka,” he said. “They’ve been very good to her.”

  We were standing by my taxi now, but he appeared to be in no hurry to get back to his family.

  “I think she’ll be okay,” I said, nodding towards the building.

  He didn’t speak, letting the silence determine the direction of our conversation. Perhaps he was going to say something about Priyanka, her marriage. I couldn’t bear the silence any longer.

  “Has Priyanka mentioned my father to you?” I asked.

  “No. Should she have done?”

  “I just wondered if you ever came across each other. He grew up here, studied medicine before leaving for Britain.”

  “What was his name?” he asked.

  “Ramachandran Nair,” I said. “He lived in Perunna. Ram Nair.”

  He paused as he searched back over the long years, running through the memories like fingers across files. I could only begin to guess at what images he was pulling out: his childhood, perhaps, playing on the leafy rubber plantations I had seen in photos of Kerala, or his days at school in Cochin, clinging to the outside of a bus with ten others on the morning run, a scene I had witnessed yesterday near the fishing nets. They must have been so different from my own memories and yet they could have been so similar if the man whose face he was now searching for had remained in Kerala.

  “I knew someone by that name,” he said, neutrally, “but then it’s very common here. Did he study at the Medical College in Thiruvananthapuram?”

  “Yes,” I said, guessing he meant Trivandrum. I was impressed by the agility of his mind. “He was a mature student.”

  “Organised a big Quit India student rally, shortly before Independence,” he said, his voice growing more confident with the recollection. “Was he involved in the Keezhariyur bomb ca
se? I think he might have been.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said, closing my eyes, my heart sinking.

  “If I’ve got the right man, he had the world at his feet. Passed his IAS, fêted by Congress leaders in Delhi, then decided to drop it ail and study medicine. I’m sure it’s him because I never heard anything else, which is strange. If he settled in Britain, that would explain it.”

  I told him I would keep in touch and then stepped slowly into the waiting taxi. My limbs felt weak and I was grateful to be driven.

  14

  The next morning I was up early, determined to see more of Fort Cochin before I was sapped by the debilitating heat. I also wanted to ring Frank. I was leaving in the afternoon for Madras and I had to administer some formal treatment to Macaulay before I went, if only to maintain my cover. There was nothing very much wrong with his physical health but I would present him with a shiny bottle of big white Western pills with a good seal on it. I had thought about telling him his doshas were out of balance but he would probably have hit me.

  I took a motorboat across the harbour rather than one of the rowing boats. It would have been too painful a reminder of our return trip from Macaulay’s island. Several times since I had caught the scent of coconut oil in the warm wind and felt my mouth drying.

  Fort Cochin was a different place in the cool before breakfast, bustling with activity that would have been inconceivable a few hours later. Around the corner from the nets, in the dunes behind an untidy stretch of sand known as Mahatma Gandhi beach, a hundred people or more were stretching, doing their morning exercises, playing badminton, practising gymnastics. I watched as a group of boys took it in turns to somersault in the air, landing in giggling heaps on the soft sand. Behind them a man was throwing his arms in all directions and rolling his neck at the same time. For a moment I thought he was having a seizure but it was just a bit of energetic limb-loosening.