Sarah Das Gupta
Fortunately, or unfortunately, the children in our neighbourhood were all boys. That fatal summer afternoon we were hoisting an iron post up and down a tree on a rope. The purpose of this, I can’t quite recall. I was standing under the tree, a cherry in full bloom, when the rope broke and the iron post came crashing down on my head. Yes, it was the pointed end. Strangely it didn’t hurt. I was surprised when the boys panicked.
A few minutes later, I was rather worried when my blue and white check school dress turned crimson. By the time Peter’s dad had driven me to hospital, me, the dress and his dad’s car seat, were all very bloody indeed.
There was a loud chorus of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ as I went through A and E with a blood soaked towel on my head, looking like the Queen of Sheba in a horror movie. A skinny, unprepossessing nine-year-old, my one source of pride was my hair. It was braided into two long plaits. The nurse took a quick look at me and cut off one plait to get at the wound!
The pole had punctured a small blood vessel which explained the literal blood bath. The damage was minimal, though my father always muttered darkly of my being knocked on the head in childhood. For two weeks I refused to cut the rest of my hair until the teasing became unbearable.
***
It was a pleasant November afternoon in Kolkata, our daughter’s first birthday. She had a frilly, peach-coloured dress and had been walking and talking for a couple of months. Rather foolishly, looking back on it, we had bought a glass-topped coffee table chosen from an ancient, well-thumbed John Lewis catalogue. At that time, it was usual to choose designs from catalogues and local craftsmen would copy them perfectly.
Mistha came rushing across the black and white tiled floor with a bag of sweets in her hands. She slipped on the floor and bashed her forehead on the edge of the glass table. Considering the force of the collision, she stopped crying quite quickly and was busy telling the ayah that it was all her parents’ fault for buying a ’foreign’ table. The most enormous bump, the size of an ostrich egg, appeared on her forehead. We decided maybe she needed medical attention. We had a friend round the corner who was a well-known orthopaedic surgeon.
Krishna took her in a rickshaw to consult Dr Saha who said, quite understandably, it wasn’t his area of expertise. However, he was sure the bump would go down and applied cold compresses to Mistha’s head. She returned, proudly sitting up in the rickshaw with sweets from Mrs Saha. Apparently, she was telling the rickshaw wallah in Bengali, not to buy glass tables! I often wonder what he made of this advice.
***
When my daughters were young, we had an ayah who was a South Indian Christian. One day she developed malaria and by the afternoon had a very high temperature. In Kolkata most chemists or pharmacies have a doctor on duty, sitting in a consulting room behind the shop one of my friends owned a pharmacy in the centre of the city. She often popped in to check everything was running smoothly. I rang her to make an appointment for the ayah to see the doctor for a prescription to bring her temperature down.
While she was in the consulting room, I was sitting in the shop chatting to my friend. Suddenly the doctor rushed out, looking very hot and bothered but no sign of Rosie. We thought she must have fainted or her condition had worsened. Then I could see my friend was trying not to laugh as the doctor let off steam. Apparently, Rosie was hallucinating, as the result of her high temperature. She thought she had died and gone to heaven. She had thrown her arms round the Brahmin, Hindu doctor, believing the door to 55, Park Street to be the Pearly Gates and the doctor to be St Peter. When she recovered a few days later, she suggested she should go and apologise. My friend hastily dissuaded her. Better to let sleeping dogs lie, or open ‘wounds’ heal.
***
The minute I fell, I knew I had broken something, apart from the rather ugly vase, I grabbed as I went down. Ironically, I was staying in a convalescent home after having a knee replacement. I was on crutches and felt them sliding away from me, but failed to save myself. I was lying with my head stuck in the corner of the skirting board and my right leg obstinately refused to obey orders. After bashing the door with one of my crutches for nearly an hour, one of the assistants arrived. She took one look and rang for an ambulance. There were two people who arrived, a middle-aged man and a slightly built girl who looked no more than fourteen. The man then rang the fire brigade to help him lift me into the ambulance. Six handsome and sexy young firemen eventually arrived. This, I should point out, was the highlight of a rather grey day. The young men were nervous of lifting me because the ambulance guy thought I had injured my back.
I survived a rather perilous ride down a winding Victorian staircase to discover, on arrival in hospital, that I had broken my hip. After the hip had been set, I was wheeled to the geriatric ward. I suddenly thought it was raining as my head and shoulders felt wet. The attendant reassured me that it was only a cup of tea thrown by the lady in the first bed. Luckily the tea was always tepid. Thinking about the geriatric ward, sufficient to say that this was the beginning of my writing career. An attempt to preserve my sanity. But that’s another story—no pun intended!
Sarah Das Gupta is a writer from Cambridge whose work has been published in over 20 countries from Australia to Kazakhstan. She taught English for over 60 years in Kolkata, Tanzania and UK. She has recently been nominated for Best of the Net and a Dwarf Star. X Her ambition is to have a collection of poems published. X: @SarahDasGu42181
Featured photo by Vyacheslav Argenberg (Wikimedia Commons)
