Читать книгу I Hear a Song In My Head: A Memoir In Stories of Love, Fear, Doctoring, and Flight - Nergesh Boone's Tejani - Страница 5

The date was December 19th, 1969. Late one velvet African night we returned home after an evening with friends at the Leopard’s Lair—a Western-style nightclub with local spirit. The friends we had been with called later that night, telling us that Prime Minister Obote had been shot and injured. He was attending a political rally close to our home and someone, suspected to be a dispossessed Muganda, had tried to assassinate him. The bullet had gone through his jaw, and he had been taken to Mulago Hospital.

Next morning, I got a call from the small hospital where I worked. Mrs. Patel was in labor. She had regular contractions, reassuring fetal heart tones and was five centimeters dilated. I’m coming…I’m coming.

Got my six-year-old Rushna ready for school, took my three-year-old Cena across the road to nursery school and fed my one-year-old Sharyn. Combining work with being a mother was now natural and smooth.

I donned my white doctor’s coat and took off in my sportsy Triumph, forgetting the events of the night before. The road to the hospital went past Mulago Hospital. I was stopped at a road block near the hospital by a clattering army presence. ‘Out of your cars and open the trunk,’ was the bark. Out of the car was fine, but I knew the trunk of my car did not open. A smallish knot formed in my upper abdomen.

An Indian couple climbed out of the van in front of me —a man and his diminutive wife, I assumed. Approaching them, bayonet poised, was an oversized human in polished boots and starched khakis.

‘We were searched before,’ whispered the woman in Swahili.

The man in the boots turned on her. She was no higher than his armpit. The handle of his bayonet cracked across her head and she lay quietly across the road. Her husband raised both his arms in a sign of surrender. A frozen scene before me—a raised lethal weapon, a tiny woman on the ground and her protector, pale and speechless.

I turned away. There was no question of helping. Also, ‘boots’ was walking toward me. I had a sickening remembrance of the unopenable trunk.

He took in my white coat.

‘Good morning, doctor,’ he said in Sandhurst inflections. ‘I won’t hold you up. Have a nice day.’

With a mechanical smile on my face, I fumbled into the car. I glanced at the savaged couple. The man was carrying his wife into the van.

Again I turned away. My powerful white coat could not help this hurt.

I arrived at my hospital. Was I the same person as before? To witness violence has to cause some shift in humors. To witness violence and not react—that must increase choler. To witness violence, rely on the protection of the white coat, the healer’s symbol, and not react—a cult of barbarism.

I walked into Mrs. Patel’s room. She was fully dilated and pushing. Relentless labor cares nothing for politics. Cares nothing for the wounded prime minister at Mulago Hospital shot by those he had excluded from power. Cares nothing for a slight woman felled in savagery.

I changed into scrubs, smiled. I let others exhort her to push... push. I could wait.

I waited for the scene of horror to pass. I am still waiting. Was the husband forever diminished in her eyes? Did she notice the woman in the white coat who made no move to help her? Did she go home and continue—prepare a meal, tend to her children, go to work? Did she start to fear a recalcitrant houseboy? Did her mind make preparations to leave the country, probably of her birth?

I see a little peep of scalp. Push, oh, push, that timeless chant. Jor karo...sindika...empuja. Words for the universally useful ‘push’ in many languages.

More dark hair asserted itself even between contractions. Mrs. Patel and family needed to know the exact time when the widest diameter of the head was delivered. The child’s horoscope would be based on star relationships at that time. It is not the birth of the heart or gut but the brain that is crucial to this little one’s future. A responsibility not taught in obstetric textbooks, noting the time of crowning of the head. Well, here it was. A dark wet head crowned by a halo of stretched maternal tissue. Crowned by its mother.

The baby girl slithered out. Pink and reactive. The family outside were silent when informed. Too well bred to be openly sad for yet another girl.

One said consolingly, ‘Laxmi’—‘Wealth’.

There were tears in the new mother’s eyes but she gathered her wiped baby to her breast and closed her eyes.

I changed back to street clothes, donned my white coat and reentered a changed world.

As things wind down for me, I look back on all the stories I was privileged to be part of. Some of the passport one gets when there is an M.D. tacked onto your name whether in New York or Uganda. Stories worth telling.

My story starts at the end of my Obstetrics and Gynecology registrarship in Bombay, India, where I lived, went to medical school and married and covers the eleven years we lived in Uganda, East Africa, and our first year in the U.S. I included this last year because at the end of it, Idi Amin, who ‘reigned’ in Uganda after a military coup, had a dream in which he was commanded to banish the Asian population of Uganda. This dream and order was announced on August 9th, 1972, with a deadline for leaving three months later on November 9th. In October and the first week of November 1972, our extended family arrived in bits and pieces on the shores of North America, to be welcomed by us who had arrived here by chance, whim and luck the year before.