Vishal Sharma
A myna sat on a tree gripping an insect in its beak. Its black brown eyes surrounded by an array of silver spots scanned the surroundings. A light wind blew through the tree, gently stirring its leaves and branches. As the wind speed increased, myna became anxious. Its head bobbed back and forth; and it took a bit of flight, but returned to perch on the same branch, same spot; only this time it faced the opposite direction.
Underneath the tree, a few small children were playing. When they saw the myna with a prey in its beak sitting on the tree, they made a wager on who would strike the bird with a stone. A few tried their luck, but failed. Although the myna had a few stones flung in its direction, it did not fly away in fear. It only jumped from one branch to another to avoid being hit. It was Rekha’s turn now. She picked up a stone, took an aim and then flung it with full force at the bird. The strike was forceful and fatal. As the bird fell on the ground, it did not yelp in pain; nor writhed or squirmed one bit. It was dead as it hit the ground. Rekha rushed to pick it. In her hands, it felt warm. She cupped it and made for home.
At home, she showed the dead bird to her mother. Her mother freaked out. ” What is it in your hands? Let it go.”
” It can’t fly any more. It is dead.”
” What?”
” One hit is all it took and bang, it hit the ground with a deathly thud.”
” Oh, What have you done, you wretched girl? You never ever kill mynas. Never ever.”
“Why are not mynas not killed? What happens if one does?”
” Oh you unfortunate ! Radha, a girl, who lives not far from here, once killed one such myna and throughout her life she suffered from one ailment or the other. So much so, she could never ever bear a baby. The wise say that if one kills mynas, one is cursed for life. A religious guru once told me those women who kill birds, especially mynas, are cursed to bear babies with deformities.” The mother wrenched the bird from Rekha’s hand and strode towards a nearby pond. On the edge of the pond, she said a prayer and then tossed the bird into the pond. She then returned to meet Rekha in the front yard of the house. Before Rekha could say a word, she gave her a stinging slap.
The force of the slap woke Rekha up. She sat up in the bed and touched her face. There were beads of sweat on her face and she felt as though she was a bit feverish. She scanned the room trying to suss out where she was. She turned her gaze towards her right on the bed and saw a man sleeping with his back to her. As she slowly began regaining her orientation, she realized that she had had a nightmare. She tried to recall the sequence of events as they had unfolded in her nightmare. However hard she tried, she could remember only a snippet of it. But the bit in relation to deformed babies loomed prominently in the dark corners of her regained consciousness. It was the part she remembered more vividly than the others. It was the one that gave her the creeps.
She was now fully back to being normal. She reached for her mobile phone on the bedside table and looked at it. It read 3.30 AM. She laid her hand on her husband’s shoulder and shook it.
” Wake up, Ramesh. Wake up.” Ramesh had turned in late in the night as he hadn’t been home early last evening like he would normally be. Therefore, he did not respond at first to Rekha’s calls. But as she pushed harder, he woke up, albeit reluctantly.
” What happened in the dead of night? Why are you not sleeping? ”
” I had a nightmare. It was horrible.”
” We all have nightmares. That is no reason to remain awake through the night. Of all the people, you should avoid being distressed by mid night disruptions as you are in an advanced stage of pregnancy.”
” I can’t take it out of my mind. It was about the baby.” Rekha then recounted whatever she could recall of her nightmare to him. When she was done, Ramesh placed his hand on her head and then brought it down ever so gently to stroke her cheeks before giving her a pinch on the right cheek.
” Look, I understand what you feel. But that’s a different world; an apocryphal world. This is the real world. You and me talking to each other; feeling each other. You have had a horrible thought, but it’s come and gone. Go back to sleep. In the morning, say a prayer to Gods and everything will be fine.”
Ramesh patted her cheeks, and then pulled the sheet over his head and was soon asleep. Rekha, on the other hand, found it difficult to sleep, howsoever hard she tried. She was in the last month of pregnancy and the bit about deformed baby in her nightmare continued to prick her. She muttered a prayer to cast off demons that she felt had surrounded her, but to no avail. After a while she lay on her back with her hands folded on her chest, making no effort to close her eyes and sleep as she feared that she might have the same nightmare all over again.
A week later the couple were at the doctor’s clinic. The doctor was a short man with a bulbous nose and a receding hairline. The man was quite a character and was given to cracking jokes and winking in rich profusion. Rekha had once jocularly told her husband that his mannerisms reminded her of great Bollywood comedian, Mukri.
“You are next in queue, darling. We must ask him about the date of delivery today.”
Rekha did not say anything. She simply smiled at Ramesh even as she adjusted her duppatta, which had fallen off in her lap.
” Two weeks from now, that is, 15th. What’s the day on that date?” the doctor asked himself, as he looked sideways at the wall calendar.
” Sunday. What a coincidence!” he shouted like a kid, who had got two doughnuts for the price of one.
“Well, the day is fine. For me!” he flirtatiously winked at Rekha, embarrassing her. “It’s an off day. It should be fine for you too,” he continued, as he now turned his attention towards Ramesh.
****
15th December came along rather quickly. It was a depressing, overcast December morning. Rekha and Ramesh reached the nursing home at 6 AM and were allotted room no. 19, the only vacant room at the time in the nursing home. The operation was fixed for 10 AM in the morning. As the hour of the operation neared, it began to rain. “Skies have opened. Even Gods are happy,” Ramesh whispered into Rekha’s ears, as she was wheeled into the operation theatre. Inside the operation theatre, she was primed up for the surgery. Outside, the rain fury increased and the road outside the nursing home was waterlogged in no time with side drains overflowing and pouring water back onto the road. Ramesh gingerly picked his way through stagnant water in the premises of the nursing home to reach the gate. At the gate, he saw that even the main roads, which were at a distance of around fifty feet from either side of the nursing home, had been flooded with rain water. He stood there unsheltered from rain for a while and then returned to the waiting lounge, soaked to the bone.
An hour or so later, the doctor emerged from the operation theatre with a big frown on his face.
“Boy, but.”
“What but?”
“The baby is healthy, but his right hand does not have proper, normal fingers. There are stumps in place of fingers.” The doctor’s words hit Ramesh and his mother like poisoned arrows. For a while, they did not know how to respond. But then Ramesh gathered himself up; he looked around in the waiting lounge to see if someone was within earshot. He wanted to ask the doctor why the child had been born with such a deformity, but held himself back, thinking that he should see the child first.
“When can I see my wife?”
” She will be wheeled into her room shortly.”
Back in the room, Rekha lay unconscious on the bed with a pale sickly face. He held her hand in his one hand and stroked it with the other. Her hands were cold. He placed his hand on her forehead and it felt cold too. He began lovingly rubbing it. He did not know what he would tell her when she regained her consciousness. He soon realized that he was beginning to lose courage and confidence to tell her about the baby’s bad hand. “I would rather let someone else tell her,” he thought to himself. It was then he was snapped out of his reverie by the noise of the nurse entering the room. She had brought the new born to place him in the bassinet located next to Rekha’s bed. Almost instantly, Ramesh left Rekha to be with the new born, who was comfortably ensconced in clothes and his tiny head was covered with a loose woollen cap. A closer look at his face told him that he took after his mother. It was then his eyes slid towards his arms and he saw that his right hand was wrapped in cotton wool. A part of him told him to remove the cotton wool and see what his hand looked like. But he resisted the temptation and persuaded himself to do so only under nurse’s supervision.
A little while later, he stood watching as the nurse removed the cotton wool from the newborn’s right hand. ” Oh God ! what have you done?” Ramesh lamented when he saw the newborn’s hand without fingers and thumb. He stooped to have a closer look at the bad hand and saw that there were stumps in place of fingers and thumb. Disappointed, he regained his normal posture to meet the eyes of the nurse. ” God has been extremely cruel to us.” The teary eyed nurse nodded and left without saying anything. Word had already spread that a deformed baby had been born to the woman in the room no. 19 and, therefore, the ward boy, the sweeper, the attendant and the nurse did not approach the family for gratuity unlike they would normally do whenever the birth of a male child was announced in the nursing home.
When Rekha opened her eyes after a couple of hours, she found Ramesh sitting by her side and holding her hands. Turning her gaze towards him, she asked, “Boy or girl?”
” Boy?”
” Oh great ! But you don’t seem happy.”
” No. Nothing. Everything is fine.”
” I would like to see the baby.” Ramesh lifted the baby from the bassinet and held it up for her to see. She looked at the baby and felt happy. “Dear, once you have fully recovered, he will be with you all the time,” said Ramesh, as he moved to replace the baby in the bassinet. But cotton wool on the baby’s right hand caught Rekha’s eyes and she asked, “What’s that thing on his right hand? Cotton wool?” Before Ramesh could respond, the ward boy entered the room to clean the washroom. In the ensuing stir, he chose not to tell her that cotton wool covered the baby’s bad hand.
Rekha and Ramesh were back at home after a couple of days at the nursing home. Rekha had not held the baby in her arms very much during these two days partly because she was considerably weak and, thus, recovering and partly because Ramesh had been taking extra caution to ensure that she was spared the bad news till at least she was home. But after sometime, she felt that despite her making known her intention to one and all to hold the baby in her arms, cuddle it and shower affection on him, her husband and in laws had been reluctant to let her have the baby often enough. One day, She called to her maid and said, ” Bring me the baby. I will feed him the milk.”
” He has had a bottleful, and he is sleeping.”
” Never mind. Bring him to me anyway.” Rekha’s tone betrayed the anger at the maid’s acerbic retort.
” You will go and fetch her rightway.”
The maid brought the baby to Rekha in the bed. Rekha sat up in the bed, held him up and looked at him as though she were in a pleasant trance. She then brought him down ever so gently in her lap and, as she did that she began to nuzzle him. She had never been as happier in her recent memory. When she tenderly pulled his arms together to form a cross on his chest, the cotton wool on his right hand came off revealing his bad hand. The sight of stumps on the hand freaked her out. Rekha could not believe what she had seen. She shouted the name of maid in utter desperation; commanding her to come immediately.
” Madam, what happened?”
” Take him away.” The baby was taken away. Rekha could utter only three words before she seemed to pass out and collapse on the bed.
***
Months later, Rekha sat in the verandah of the house thinking about the myna’s curse that she had been under when she heard the knock on the gate. She walked up to the gate to answer the knock where she met a man and a woman in their mid thirties.
” We are members of an NGO- ‘PRAMAN’-, and are doing a survey in the area regarding the number of new born babies carrying either physical or mental deformities. Is there any such baby in your family?”
” Why are you gathering this information? What purpose will it serve?”
“There are reports of increased incidence of deformed babies in this neighbourhood. Three out of ten new born babies in this neighbourhood have had some kind of deformity at the time of birth, which is a very high percentage.”
” It really is very high. What’s the reason for higher incidence of such cases in this area?”
“Our initial investigation has tentatively revealed that this could be due to unusually large number of pesticide and insecticide units around this neighbourhood. Most of these units have not put in place robust effluent treatment systems and, consequently, highly toxic waste from these units has routinely seeped into soil and water bodies contaminating the whole ecosystem of the area.”
” Is this toxic waste responsible for the abnormal babies?”
“There is a very high probability that it could well be.”
“So this may not be after all due to myna’s curse.” Rekha slammed the gate in their face and walked back to resume her place in the verandah.
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