He shakes his head. “That came later. I was with my own mummy who had the cancer.” He clucks his tongue. “She was having her treatments, tip-top doctor, but it was in the lungs, so not much to be done. We were coming from the specialist one day, waiting for a taxi, but Amma, that’s my mummy, was quite weak and dizzy and she fell on the street. Your mummy happened to be nearby and she rushed up to ask if she could help. I explained to her about Amma’s condition—it was terminal,” he lowers his voice to a whisper. “But your mummy told me about different things that could help, not to cure her, but to make the dizziness and the weakness better. And she came, every week, to my home, with her needles and her massages and it helped so much. When my amma’s time came, her journey to the next life was so much more peaceful. Thanks to your mummy.”
I see what he’s doing. Mukesh is attempting to interpret my mother to me much in the way Bram used to do when he’d explain why Yael seemed so gruff or distant. He was the one to quietly tell me stories about Saba, who, after the death of Yael’s mother, Naomi, came undone by one tragedy too many. He turned overprotective, paranoid, or more overprotective and paranoid, Bram said, not allowing Yael to do the simplest things—swim in a public pool, have a friend over—and forcing her to keep disaster preparation checklists for any kind of emergency. “She promised she would do everything differently,” he said. “So it would be different for you. So it wouldn’t be oppressive.”
As if there’s only one kind of oppressive.
After the temples, we have lunch. I’m feeling bad about how I acted toward Mukesh, so when he tells me he has something extra special he wants to show me—something very few tourists ever see—I paste on my smile and act excited. As we bump across Mumbai, the streets becomes more dense: bicycles, rickshaws, cars, donkey-pulled carts, cows, women with bundles on their heads, all converge onto choked streets that don’t seem built for such traffic. The buildings themselves suffer from the same syndrome; the mix of high-rises and shacks are all overflowing with rivers of people, sleeping on mats, hanging laundry on lines, cooking on small fires outside.
We turn down a dank narrow alley, shrouded somehow from the bright sunlight. Mukesh points to the row of young girls in tattered saris, standing. “Prostitutes,” he says.
At the end of the alley we stop. I look back at the prostitutes. Some are younger than me, and their eyes look blank, and it all makes me feel ashamed somehow. Mukesh points to a squat cement building with a name written on it in both swirly Hindi and block English. “Here we are,” he says.
I read the sign. mitali. It’s vaguely familiar.
“What is this?” I ask.
“Why, Mummy’s clinic, of course,” he says.
“Yael’s clinic?” I ask in alarm.
“Yes, I thought we might pay her a visit.”
“But, but . . .” I sputter for excuses. “It’s Sunday,” I finish, as if the day of the week is the problem.
“Sickness does not take a Sabbath.” Mukesh points to a small teashop on the corner. “I will wait for you there.” And then he’s gone.
I stand in front of the clinic for a minute. One of the prostitutes—she looks no older than thirteen—starts to walk toward me and I can’t stand the thought that she thinks I’m a client, so I shove open the door to the clinic. The door swings open, right onto an old woman crouched just inside. There are people everywhere, with homemade bandages, and listless babies, napping on pallets on the floor. They’re camped all up the cement stairs and all around the waiting room, giving new meaning to the term.
“Are you Willem?” From behind the glass partition a no-nonsense Indian woman in a lab coat is looking at me. Two seconds later, she opens the door to the waiting room. I feel all the eyes turn to me. The woman says something in Hindi or Marathi and there is much silent nodding, giving new meaning to the term patient, too.
“I’m Doctor Gupta,” she says, her voice brisk, efficient but warm. “I work with your mother. Let me go find her. Would you like some tea?”
“No thank you.” I have the sickening feeling that everyone else is in on a joke but me.
“Good, good. Wait here.”
She leads me to a small windowless room with a ripped gurney, and a rush of memory overtakes me. The last time I was in a hospital: Paris. The time before that: Amsterdam. Yael had called me at my dorm, very early that morning, telling me to come. Bram was sick.
I couldn’t understand the urgency. I’d seen him not a week before. He’d been a little off his game, a sore throat, but Yael was tending to him with her usual teas and tinctures. I had an exam that day. I asked if I could come after.
“Come now,” she said.
At the hospital, Yael had stood in the corner while three doctors—the traditional kind, with stethoscopes and guarded expressions—surrounded me in a grim little circle and explained to me that Bram had contracted a rare strain of strep that had sent his body into septic shock. His kidneys had already failed and now his liver was going, too. They were doing everything they could, putting him on dialysis and pumping him full of the most powerful antibiotics, but so far, nothing had been effective. I should brace myself for the worst.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Neither did they, really. All they could say was, “It’s one of those one-in-a-million cases.” Such comforting odds, except when you were the one.
It was like finding out the world was made of gossamer and could be so easily ripped apart. To be so solely at the mercy of fate. Even with all Bram’s talk of accidents, it seemed inconceivable.
I looked to Yael, mighty Yael, to intervene, to swoop in, to take care of Bram like she always had. But she just shrank into that corner, not saying a word.
“Do something, goddammit!” I screamed at her. “You have to do something.”
But she didn’t. Couldn’t. And two days later, Bram was gone.
“Willem.”