Mary said that in the morning the gardener, Chinnaraj, had gone to a doctor for an injection for body pain. It is a common belief here that any injection is better than any pill. He'd spent Rs. 80 on the medicine but the needle had broken, so the medicine was wasted and he had the additional pain of the broken needle. Lakshmi and Mary both laughed over this story. They were cooking up these leaves to see if they would make him feel better.
When we returned from Bangalore, Mary told me that Chinnaraj was in the hospital. I usually get bad news this way, the action occurs offstage. The messenger speaks only Tamil, so that we go through a slow process of question and answer, to make sure that I have understood everything. It's probably fortunate for my peace of mind, but the result is that events tend to become stories from the beginning. Simplified, one step removed.
Chinnaraj fell down on the road. Someone saw him and told his family. He was taken to the ESI Hospital (a government hospital, free for him because his daughter is a factory worker) in Ainavaram. His arm is like this, hanging, he can't lift it.
That was the first day's story. On the second day Chinnaraj's wife's sister came to sweep and water the garden, and told Mary, who told me, that the doctors weren't giving him any treatment, but they had ordered a scan, which he must pay for. And they told him that he should lift weights with the dead arm, and do exercise. I said, He does exercise every day, his work is exercise. And how can he lift weights if he can't lift his own arm? Mary laughed, which wasn't what I had intended. I gave the sister money for the scan.
This morning Chinnaraj appeared at the gate. He's tallish for a Tamil, and thin, an old man with his thin wife beside him. I went out to the steps with Lakshmi and called him in. As he entered his left arm scraped against the gate; he stopped and looked at it, then pulled it inside. I asked him how he was. He pointed to his arm and said, It won't move. Lakshmi reached forward and held it up, as a visual aid.
His wife smiled at me and said, I told him not to worry -- Amma (that's me) will take care of us. She was putting on record our obligation toward them. She wanted to give me a plastic bag full of bits of paper: notes from the doctor, the receipt for the scan, a few medicines twisted up in a piece of newspaper. The scan report hasn't come yet. I told her to wait until the report came, and then show everything to Ayya - Ramesh, who knows more about medicine than most of the doctors who treat the poor.
Chinnaraj's wife will sweep and water for the time being. Chinnaraj will sit, or do light errands, I suppose. I'm wondering what we will do now. We will certainly help him, but how much? He has six children. The oldest son, who could have brought money into the household, ran away. He is kanom, unseen, lost. The oldest daughter works in a shoe factory, earning Rs. 900 a month - less than half of Chinnaraj's salary (the scan cost Rs. 500). She's engaged to be married, which will be a big exense, and then will take her earnings to her husband's house. The rest of the children are small.
Chinnaraj came to work in our house because he was too old to go on as a headload worker. Headload workers are day labourers on construction sites. They twist a cloth into a doughnut shape and put it on their heads. On top of that they place a shallow bowl-shaped container. Into that go stacks of bricks, or sand, or cement. They walk back and forth all day, filling and emptying the containers. Many headload workers are women. They make more money than servants or gardeners, but they are not guaranteed steady work. And they age quickly.
I don't know much about him, aside from these bare facts. When I hand him his salary he first takes off his shoes, and approaches me barefooted. I assume that this is an old-fashioned village custom -- certainly none of the other servants do it. (A friend who comes from a family of landowners in neighbouring Kerala told me that when his grandfather went into the fields, the farm labourers had to remove their upper cloths -- men and women both -- and approach him bare-chested. Perhaps this is a remnant of that long-dead custom.)
As I was writing this Lakshmi came in. She's the most intelligent of the four people who work for us. She has a sense of humour, and gives me advice which I often follow. She's frightened, because she sometimes has headaches. Her husband was a drunkard and died of TB when her three children were very young. Her two brothers have both had paralytic strokes from drinking illicit liquour. One son is working as an apprentice welder, but he's not earning much. The other two children are still in school. Seeing Chinnaraj, she's afraid that she will fall ill or die, and there will be no one to care for her or her children. I tried to reassure her, but how much can I really say? Life is so hard.
an old man, photo by Ramesh Gandhi