Milli Enjoys a Dental Lesson before Surgery
Friday, June 14 and Saturday, June 15th—Sightseeing:
Since there was
nothing we could do for 2 days but wait to see if Milli—note the new and preferred spelling of “Milli.” I was showing her the different ways her name
could be spelled and she made it quite clear that I had been misspelling her
name: Her name, she insists, ends with
an “i” and so it shall be—would be
surgery-ready, we decided to see some of Assam.
I would say that they we were going to do “the tourist thing,” but there
are no tourists in Assam to “thing.” If
you look at Assam on the map, you will see that geographically it shouldn’t be
a part of India, and one senses that politically its hold to India and India’s
hold to it is tenuous. The slightest
mass of land, separating Tibet and Bhutan from Bangladesh, joins Assam to the
rest of India. The capital, Guwahati,
Wikipedia tells me, has a population of 1.5 million. I would have guessed between 200 and 300
thousand. As Baba said, “It doesn’t be like
a city,” and it doesn’t. It reminds me
of one of those Atlantic coast towns in South America that are inhabited by the
descendants of slaves rather than of the Spanish. Once when I told a Costa Rican acquaintance
that I was going to visit one of these towns in her country, Limon, she said
“feo,” ugly. Ugly and conveniently
forgotten they are without the infrastructure their sister cities have as is
Guwahati. The sidewalks of the town look
like they are waiting for repair after an earthquake. You can literally look under the sidewalk
where the slabs of concrete are to meet but don’t because one is elevated above
the other, producing a gaping aperture that holds an underworld of trash that
mirrors the debris above. The lights go
out several times a day and there are no amenities that tourism brings, e.g.,
something to do. I have yet to see
anyone, other than those of us in the Milli entourage, that I thought might be
a tourist. One of the doctors said to me
something that I’d already noticed, “The only White people in town are with the
hospital.”
Operation Smile Staff Celebrates 9000 Surgeries
I’ve asked why
the Operation Smile facility ended up in such an isolated location. The services this organization provides are
so needed, why hide them, as it were, under a basket in remote Assam. I’ve gotten 2 explanations for “Why
Assam?” One doctor told me that the
hospital was placed in Assam because the incidence of cleft palates was higher
in this region than anywhere outside mainland China. Another person
questioned this static and said that there were political reasons for placing
the hospital in Assam: The government
wanted to give “them” something, and what a gift it is. Operation Smile apparently has 2 other
permanent facilities. I believe that one
is in China and the other in South America (I wasn’t taking notes during the
conversation that produced this information, so I can’t swear that I’ve
remembered what I was told correctly, and as I write I have no access to the
Internet). Since all the Operation
Smile services are free, including the medicine, I would have thought that
people in need would be coming from all over India, but apparently this is not
the case. Indeed, one of the strangest
things about our little group is that we had come from so far—for Milli and her family almost a 50-hour
train ride. We were told that we had
come farther than anyone had ever come for surgery.
Now back to the
sightseeing. There is a scraggily zoo—the Bronx it is not—the main attraction being the Indian
one-horned rhino. We were told that
across the road was an African rhino. I
wanted to see it for the sake of comparison, but the across-the-road enclosure
seemed empty. When I asked a guard where
the African rhino was, he said, “Somewhere in there but we’re not sure
where.” How do you lose a rhino?
Ramakuiyan and Haman in the Cage Line
The other
sightseeing opportunity was Hindu temples.
One, Hayagriva Madhave, had some historical interest in that my
Eyewitness guidebook says “that the Buddha died here.” The priest/guide said nothing about this as
he led us around intoning chants we were
to repeat. When I asked him about the
Buddha, he said something like “Oh yeah, he did his last meditation here.” The most mythologically interesting temple is
the main one in Assam, Kamakhya Temple. The Hindu Trinity is composed of
Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Preserver/Redeemer; and Shiva, the
Destroyer. As I understand it from Baba
and a little reading, Shiva and Sati fell in love and were about to be married,
but Sati’s father, as is the case with most fathers, thought that no man (and
in this case, god) was good enough for his daughter. (The father didn’t know Shiva was
Shiva.) A family argument ensued (What
wedding would be complete without one?), and Sati ended up killing herself by
jumping into fire. Shiva was so upset
that he went around the world with Sati’s corpse and where parts of it fell
there are now major temples. Supposedly
Kamakhya Temple in Assam marks the spot her vagina fell.
Entrance to Temple of the Nine Planets
It is, therefore,
a very sacred temple and the devotees are so fervent that they have to be controlled
by cage-like structures to keep people from trampling each other to get into
the temple. Oh course, to the
non-believer all this seems crazy, but then I remember that I am a member of a
tradition that believes in the Virgin Birth; I belong to an intellectual milieu
that would be loath to disavow that we came from apes; and almost everyone I
know thinks it makes sense to pay $300 or more an hour to talk to someone about
problems s/he may or may not have. I guess
faith is not reasonable, it’s faith.
Milli’s Family at the hospital
Sunday was a day
of waiting and anxiety: Was Milli
cold-free enough to pass the surgery hurdle?
We waited at the hospital and finally were called up to see the
pediatrician who listened intently to her heart and chest, asked Baba a few
questions in Hindi, and then gave his OK.
Next we had to see the anesthesiologist, but he was in surgery. After waiting for 30 minutes, we were told to
go to lunch and return at 2:30. He would
be out of surgery by then. We went to
lunch at a near-by restaurant and I found it to be typical of the Assam
culinary scene: The menu was extensive,
but they were pretty much out of everything you ordered except chicken and
vegetables. We asked for mineral water, but the waiter opened the bottle before
he brought it to the table, so I sent it back (like an inferior wine). In India there is a distinction made between
bottled and mineral water. The former is
local water poured into plastic bottles so it can be refrigerated. Mineral water is purified water that comes
from a factory in a bottle. Getting the
right type of water is close to a life and death matter, so I insist on having
the water opened in front of me. What
was unique about this situation was that the restaurant had only one bottle of
what was being passed off as mineral water—The
the bottle I had refused. I’d never been
in a restaurant that didn’t have mineral water, but the Assam restaurants
always seem to be out of something: Soft drinks, other menu items, and, in this
case, mineral water.
When we returned
to the hospital, the anesthesiologist was indeed out of surgery and found Milli
to be surgery-ready. Her weight and
temperature were taken; she passed a hearing test, gave a blood sample, and we
were told at 3 PM that Milli would be operated on the next day and would be
admitted at 5 PM. We returned to our
apartment complex. What were we going to
do at the hospital for 2 hours?
We were to leave
for the hospital at 4:45, and Baba said that everyone was ready to go, but Baba
always says the family is ready to go, but they never are. Just as I thought we were leaving, Haman had
to have his diaper changed. We got back
to the hospital around 5:20, just as the 30 or so people to be admitted for
surgery the next day were walking down the steps on their way to the pre-op
ward. Milli joined her colleagues; Baba,
Krishna, and I went back to the same restaurant, that still had no mineral
water, for “take away” that we brought back to the hospital where the family
ate dinner.
Ramkuiyan, as did the other
mothers/women, stayed the night, while Baba, Krishna, and I, as did most of the
other men, went home or somewhere else.
When Ramkuiyan had expressed earlier in the day that she was afraid to
stay alone at the hospital, I suggested to Baba that we could stay with her and
Milli. He said, “Don’t they put you to
sleep when they do surgery?” I responded
in the affirmative. He reasoned then
that Milli wouldn’t know whether we were there or not, so if Ramkuiyan didn’t
want to stay at the hospital, she could come back with us, but he was not
spending the night at the hospital. I
guess it’s the difference between mothers and fathers. And, indeed, when Ramkuiyan saw that she was
in a ward with other mothers and children, she seemed quite comfortable. I think she thought that she would be in a
room by herself with Milli, and this would indeed be a unique and unnerving
experience for her.
It’d been very
interesting to see Ramkuiyan on this trip.
She’s never been anywhere before except her village, where she lived
before she was married at 16, and Baba’s village, Khajuraho, where she’s spent
the last 11 years. She seldom leaves the
house except to go into the forest to gather firewood or to their caste’s well
for water. I had a long talk with Baba
about this trip, explaining that Ramakuiyan could not cover her face with the
veil of her saree as she does in Khajuraho.
He told me he explained this to her and she’s seems quite comfortable
being “uncovered” because the men she sees she doesn’t know. When we were at Bablu’s house for dinner in
Delhi, she covered because Bablu is 6 months older than Baba, so the wife of
the younger man, in this case, Baba, is expected to show respect by covering
when in the presence of the older male relative. It’s literally another world.
Not surprisingly,
Ramkuiyan is child-like in many ways (what chance did she have for a childhood
of her own?). She’s very interested in
the games I play with the children and she very much enjoys the cartoons I brought. We’ve been to a couple of parks and she loves
the swings and see-saws. It’s been nice
to see her literally and figuratively come out of the shadows of that dark room
Milli’s family calls home. What makes no
sense to her is how much we pay for food at the restaurants (5 of us eat for
between $15 and $20). She explains that
for what we pay she could buy tons of vegetables and make a lot of
chapatis. True, but they don’t do cleft
palate surgery in Khajuraho.
