Monsoon Summer by Julia Gregson Page B

added. He liked her already, her big friendly teeth, her air of purpose.
    â€œMiss Barker.” He sat down, keeping his coat on. “I hope I’m not here under false pretenses: my circumstances mean that my Malayalam might be rusty.”
    She stopped moving papers and gazed at him sympathetically. “What a rotten thing, being caught out by the war like that.”
    â€œI was one of the luckier ones.” He had fought against the role of poor Indian boy for years, particularly at school where chinks in your armor were ruthlessly exposed. “But my main goal now is to finish my thesis before I go home.”
    â€œMay I ask what it’s on?”
    â€œThe human African trypanosomiasis. Sleeping sickness,” he added helpfully. “Have you heard of the particularly bad epidemic in the ’twenties?”
    â€œI have, and it was appalling. How very worthwhile.” She peered at him in frank admiration. “I vaguely remember a number of foreign powers tried to combine aid, and it led to the usual complications.”
    â€œI’d be happy to show it to you.” He felt a tug of eagerness; it was rare now for people to even know about the disease.
    â€œAnd when you finish it, you’ll be a double doctor. What an achievement! Tell me, are you very swotty or just naturally clever?”
    â€œIs there a good answer to that?” he asked with a quizzical smile.
    â€œThat doesn’t make you sound like a fascinating big head?” They smiled at each other. “You’re probably both, but anyway, onwards.Here’s the plan: weeks. If you can spare an hour or two for translation in the afternoon, you’re free to do your own work in the morning. Does that suit?”
    â€œPerfectly,” he said. “My passage is booked for November, so good practice for me to speak my own language again.”
    He spoke lightly of the thing most dreaded: forgetting his mother tongue. A few months ago he’d woken in a sweat after a vivid nightmare in which he stood, dazzled, excited, on the quay at Fort Cochin. His mother had run towards him: soft white clothes, soft brown skin, the thick gold hoops in her ears glinting, but when he tried to speak to her, he found his mouth stitched up in crude cross stitches and woke sweating and afraid.
    Inside the barn, three battered desks were arranged in a semicircle around the fire. A poster of a gruesomely naked woman was propped against the wall. Not the kind of naked woman sniggered at after lights out at school or the kind of anatomical drawings seen at Barts, but the inside of a woman, with all her pipework, her veins, her arteries, her secret caves shockingly exposed.
    â€œThose are a work in progress. Do you find them a bit lurid? Do be honest.”
    â€œFrom whose point of view? Don’t forget I’m a doctor.”
    â€œWell . . .” He sensed her struggling not to patronize him. “Yes, of course, I don’t mean you, but this is part of our dilemma. Some of the Indian midwives we’ll be instructing may be very experienced, very technically skilled, but will have absolutely no idea of what a woman looks like inside.”
    â€œMiss Barker,” he said after a desperate pause, “I am at sea here. I left India when I was sixteen.” Deliver me from evil, from temptation, from embarrassment ran in a silly conga line through his head.
    â€œSo any instruction about childbirth at all?”
    â€œRemarkably little,” he said. The truth was the war had disrupted and reduced quite a bit of their training: at one point Barts had become a casualty receiving center. Later they’d been moved toCambridge, where accompanied by much raucous laughter, they’d raced through reproduction and birth in a week.
    â€œBefore I start,” she said, “would you be kind enough to call me Daisy? ‘Miss Barker’ makes me feel like a maiden aunt. Kit, who occupies that