Tryst with New England

They contained misery and enchantment, those summer months of my childhood.

Our family townhouse was on the edge of the city, bounded on one side by a medieval castle in ruins, which had become the center of a Muslim shanty town over the centuries, and, on the other two, by a number of villages interspersed with farmlands as far as the eye could see. About half a mile away, in the direction of the farms, was Chandokhar (literally, the lake of the moon's reflection) mitigating the harshness of an infinitely drab landscape. It served the village folks as a facility for ablutions and laundry. But, during the rainy season, when disease swept the area, one of its farther banks became a totally disagreeable place. Personally for me, and I was about twelve then, the lake reflected death as I often sat watching the rain-clad scene from the second floor verandah. Whenever I saw a small procession of men clad in white (only men performed this task and wore white on such occasions), or a small collection of such men on the farther side of the lake, I knew that a baby was dead. And this happened almost everyday, sometimes many times a day, during the rainy season when epidemics hit the city and its suburbs. Procope (nature's fury, in Sanskrit) our elders called such events, and were generally loth to explain. Gautama Buddha had made an attempt, my grandmother would say, and hadn't come back with a satisfactory answer.

The recurring tragedy couldn't, however, be attributed entirely to the rainy season. When the winds rose from the western desert in the middle of May and set the Gangetic plains afire, the heat punished and destroyed. In a matter of days, all colors of the spring were singed light-brown in an act of nature's dramatic reversal; the ghostly spirals of wind and sand traversed in a dance of Shiva, uprooting young trees, brush and foliage, and rolled them out to eternity. The vapors rising from a parched and disfigured earth resolved the landscape into a crystal ball in which one could espy the desolation of mankind.

The heat was followed by monsoon rains unleashing the bacteria of disease, cultured for months in the hothouse of summer, and now carried by mosquitoes, flies and flood waters into the nook and corner of every home. My mother gave us drops of amritdhara (literally, nectar; a traditional medicine) as a prophylaxis. She never tired of telling her friends about the universal applications of this nostrum. But I knew that the chemistry of my mother's hands was largely responsible for the happiness it caused, or the unhappiness it fended off, in our house and the neighborhood.

Our neighborhood was replete with children whose parents were ignorant and poor, and nobody was quite as concerned about their health as my mother. She would send a servant or one of us, very often me, perhaps to keep me away from mischief, to inquire when a child was sick before sending an ayurvedic remedy or arranging for a doctor's visit, depending on how serious the illness was. I generally liked the experience, at least until that summer when I carried out a revision of sorts.

It started on the day the woman who milked our cows did not come for work because her baby had cholera. I went to her room and touched the baby's forehead, a technique employed by my mother in lieu of a thermometer, and noted other symptoms for my mother's information. But, though I had taken sufficient care to avoid direct infection, I came down with cholera within an hour, and had a most dreadful night. The distress, however, eased towards the morning when I slept for a while and dreamt of an old man healing me with a touch of his hand on my forehead.