Mistress by Anita Nair Page B

place in the health department. I had to do a health inspector’s course, then a year of training, and by the time I was eighteen, I was actually earning.’
    How could Sethu tell anyone of everything else that those years had been made of? Like the ‘o’ in Colombo, they existed even if he never spoke of them …Until Saadiya, that is. Saadiya. Saadiya Meherunnisa. Good Girl. Peerless among women. Light of the skies. Saadiya, who lit a beacon and demanded that he trail it through his past. But that was to be many years later.
    First, Sethu had to cling to the new name that was his lifeline and be born again. Sethu knew that for a while, at least, he would have to be Seth and let the good book lead him to light and a place in Dr Samuel’s kingdom.
    A high wall ran around Dr Samuel’s house. Instead of a gate, there was a door painted green. A door with a padlock and chain. Within those walls Sethu felt safe.
    When Sethu was well enough to leave the hospital, Dr Samuel
offered him a job. ‘I need someone like you’ was all he said.
    Sethu looked at the doctor’s face, trying to read the meaning of his words. ‘But I am not trained to do this sort of work,’ he said, suddenly afraid.
    Dr Samuel merely smiled. ‘You’ll learn as you go along. As thy days, so shall thy strength be. Deuteronomy 33.25. Think about it.’
    Sethu sat outside the doctor’s room. He sat with the patients who were waiting to see the doctor. He looked around him. This was a small town, significant for the fact that a missionary organization had chosen to build a hospital here. The town saw many strangers: people who came in from the surrounding villages and the nearby districts. Births. Deaths. The town saw people come and go, and no one asked questions. Sethu stared at the floor. He thought of a line that he had chanced upon in the Bible: I have been a stranger in a strange land.
    Perhaps it contained a message for him. He would be a stranger in a strange land. Once again, life was throwing him a line. Don’t fight it. Let it be, he told himself. He would go with the tide.
    Dr Samuel gave him a room off the enclosed veranda that ran along the front of his house. It was a huge house with many rooms and much furniture. Dr Samuel barely used a couple. ‘There is enough space for the two of us here.’ The doctor laughed almost apologetically.
    Sethu wondered if the doctor was lonely. And what about a wife and children? Sethu bit back the words. He would ask the doctor no questions and hopefully the doctor would ask him none. He looked around him and said, ‘Thanks.’
    He thought he saw gratitude in the doctor’s eyes. The doctor was lonely, he decided.
    So Sethu found a home to house his new life. There, in the garden filled with mango and tamarind, papaya and coconut trees, he discovered a cork tree and saw that it thrived, a foreigner amidst the natives. He took comfort in the lesson. That behind the high wall with the door, there was a place for him, as there was for Hope, Charity and Faith, Dr Samuel’s acolytes. Sethu belonged, just as they did.
    As the days merged with the weeks, Sethu worried less and less that he would be discovered. Dr Samuel found him things to do. He
was part secretary, part compounder of medicines, part dispenser of prescriptions, part odd-job man, part record keeper, part errand boy; his day had so many parts that he didn’t know where it sped. There, in Nazareth, enfolded in the all embracing arms of St Paul’s Hospital, Sethu knew content.
    When the days grew hotter and drinking water became scarce, Dr Samuel gave Sethu one more part to his day. Every morning, the women who lived in the houses around the doctor’s, stood in a line by the door in the wall and Sethu would draw a pot of water for each of them. ‘They will have to walk miles to get the brackish water for everything else. As long as our well has enough water, we will give them a pot each. That will suffice for drinking and cooking. But you