“You could say that.” He examines Baby Mol’s hands. “I expect she has a swelling, a hernia by her belly button, am I right?” He lifts Baby Mol’s shirt, and it’s as he says, a bulge that Big Ammachi thought nothing of, since it never troubled her little girl. Baby Mol giggles. The doctor has her walk for him, put out her tongue.
He rests his huge forearms on the desk and leans forward. “What Baby Mol has is a well-known affliction. It’s called ‘cretinism’—but the name is not important.” It means nothing to Big Ammachi in any case. “There’s a gland here in the neck. The thyroid. You’ve seen it swell into a goiter in some people?” She has. “That gland produces a vital substance for the body to grow and the brain to develop. Sometimes at birth the gland doesn’t work. Then children develop like Baby Mol. The tongue. The broad face. The hoarse voice. The thickened skin. She’s a smart child, but she’s slow to learn what others her age know.” He’s listed all the things about her daughter that she resisted seeing.
“You can tell all this by looking at her?” Big Ammachi asks, still doubtful.
He steps to his bookshelf and without hesitation picks out a volume. He rifles through pages just as her father could with his Bible, familiar with chapter and verse. He turns the big book around to display a photograph. It’s true: Baby Mol resembles this child more than she resembles her blood relatives. Baby Mol puts her broad finger on the page and giggles in recognition.
“Is there medicine to cure this?”
He sighs and shakes his large head. “Yes and no. There’s an extract of the thyroid, but it isn’t available in India. Even if it were, it would have to be administered from birth. At this point, no amount of that extract will reverse what you see.”
Big Ammachi looks at this man whose hair and beard are like spun gold, and whose eyes are the color of the ocean. Many Malayalis have light-colored eyes, the influence of the Arab and Persian visitors of old, but nothing like this doctor’s eyes. More than the color, it’s the kindness in them that is so striking; it only makes his words more painful for her to hear. The door into her daughter’s future has been pushed open. The view is crushing. She wants to argue. He reads her mind. “She’ll always be a child. That’s what I have to tell you. She’ll never grow up, I’m sorry to say.” He smiles at Baby Mol. “But what a happy child! A child of God. A blessed child. I wish I had some other news for you. I wish I did,” he says, his face grave, those kind eyes now full of sorrow.
Her mother looks on, her eyes wet, a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Baby Mol is her happy self, too absorbed with the doctor and his beard and the instruments on the table to be affected by the discussion.
“Bless you,” Big Ammachi says, her voice choking. She has just thanked this man who gave her this terrible news, habit being so strong.
“Please understand. This happened before her birth. She was born this way. Nothing you or anyone else did caused it. Understand? This isn’t your fault. In Jeremiah, doesn’t God say, ‘Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee’?”
“He does!” she says, shocked to hear a Bible verse from this worldly man.
He opens his hands as if to say, God’s work is a mystery to us.
She can’t help her tears. He puts his hand on hers and she clutches it, bending her head. Nothing can absolve me, she wants to say. After a while she looks up. “But what about the Condition, the drowning I told you about? If I have more children. Will they have it? Will they be like Baby Mol?”
Rune says, “The drownings . . . I really don’t know. That is clearly something passed from generation to generation. It’s just that I can’t think what it is. But what happened to Baby Mol will not happen to the next child. I promise you that.”
They’re at the door when the doctor says, “A moment, Kochamma.”
It’s not Baby Mol but the child’s grandmother who has his attention. She’d sat in the room with them, abstracted though not indifferent. “May I?” He places his fingers on her neck and probes thoughtfully. When he removes his hand, Big Ammachi sees the knot that he spotted on her mother. Is there no limit to the bad news in this room? He says, “Her eyes are a bit yellow.”
“She’s been weak for months,” Big Ammachi says. “It’s hard for her to lift her arms, and once she sits down, hard to rise.”
He guides her mother to the examining table. He feels her belly. Big Ammachi notices it looks swollen, despite her weight loss. Her mother looks befuddled but doesn’t protest. The doctor is noticeably subdued. “Kochamma,” he says, addressing her mother. “I have some medicine for you. Would you take Baby Mol out to look at the garden while I get it ready? I’ll give it to your daughter.”
As their boat approaches the jetty, Big Ammachi sees a familiar silhouette perched high up in a coconut palm. By the time the red earth of home touches her feet, her husband is there waiting. Baby Mol regales her father with the wonders she has seen: the ocean, the electric lights, the doctor with skin painted white—a tale she will repeat for the rest of her life.
When husband and wife are alone in his room, seated on the edge of his bed, she tells him all. “Baby Mol’s mind and body are fixed in time. She’ll always be just as she was last year. And the year before.”
The big chest heaves. He sighs, hangs his head. After a long, long while he speaks, his voice hoarse. “If you’re saying she’ll always be Baby Mol, a child, a happy child . . . that’s not such a bad thing.”
“No,” she says through tears. “Not such a bad thing. An angel forever.”
He puts his arm around her, pulling her close.
“There’s more,” she says, sobbing. She tells him of the jaundice the sa’ippu doctor noticed in her mother’s eyes, the rock-hard lump he felt in her neck and also in her belly, her enlarged liver—it explained her lassitude. Privately, the doctor told Big Ammachi that a cancer in the stomach had spread to the liver and the glands in the neck. It was too far gone for surgery. There was no treatment other than to make her comfortable. “I felt as if the same mule that kicked me ten minutes before kicked me again,” she says.
“Does she feel pain?”
“No. But he says she will. We must buy opium pills to keep her from suffering toward the end. He said, ‘Some Christians think that pain confers dignity, that there’s Christian redemption in pain. But I don’t.’ That doctor is a saint.”
That night in her prayers, she says, “You knew all these things, Lord. What is there for me to tell You? Before my mother was born and before Baby Mol was born You knew what was written on their foreheads.” She knows she must thank God for the few good years she’s had with her mother. But not tonight. It wouldn’t be heartfelt. “I pray You keep her from suffering. She has had enough of that in this life already.”
She prays too for the kind doctor. How gifted he is to know in an instant what ailed Baby Mol, and then to see that something was very wrong with her mother. Yet, despite being able to name these disorders, he could offer no treatment. In that sense, the annoying vaidyan, with his one tonic for every malady, could argue that he was no worse. But the vaidyan knows nothing. “Lord, that doctor knew everything . . . but he didn’t know about the Condition. I beseech You once more: If You won’t heal the Condition, please send us someone who can.”
CHAPTER 24
A Change of Heart
1922, Cochin