Chandrapur District, Central Provinces
November 1919
The sunlight spilled through the tent flap, illuminating the rows of shelters outside and the children playing on the dusty ground. Inside, two women were bent over a third, kneeling with a gathering pool of blood, trying to force her heart to keep beating and her lungs to breathe. One of them lifted her hands to make another chest compression, then listened again for a heartbeat and let them fall in despair.
“She’s dead. Gone.”
The other drew back and hung her head in agreement. “She was weak, Narsa-ji, and it was a hard birth. At least we saved the child.”
“Yes. At least that.” Across the tent, the baby, held by another woman and wrapped in dirty blankets, chimed in with a cry. “We’ll have to find a nursing mother for him.”
“Asha can nurse him. She has a little one, and she’s healthy.”
“Take her, then,” said the one called Narsa-ji. Unlike the others, she was an Englishwoman, and her name was Sarah Child. “I’ll clean up.” She bent wearily to pick up a rag and began doing so.
“I don’t think she’s got family,” she murmured, arranging the folds of the dead woman’s sari. “Have to organize a funeral. Another one.”
There had been so many. The food in the camp was bad and there wasn’t enough of it; that combined with close quarters meant disease, and the medical staff here consisted of anyone with training who’d been rounded up and thrown in. With the dengue season just past, it was a little better, but… there’d been eleven thousand people in this camp when Sarah had been brought there, and six thousand who’d come in the nine months since, and she’d counted twenty-one hundred funerals. Ten a day, fifteen, and that didn’t count the babies – of three children born here, one might live a year. They didn't
want to kill people here, but they mostly did damn-all to keep them from dying.
She straightened and rose to her feet, clutching the rag she’d used to clean the blood and birth-fluid. There would be a place outside to burn it. She walked through the flap and out onto the dusty street, filled with people slumped in front of their shelters and the steam rising from where the women cooked their meager rations. There was a smell of rice and dhal, fighting with the reek of the cesspits and open sewers.
A few people called to Sarah as she made her way toward the fires. They knew her here: as one Englishwoman among fifteen thousand Indians, she was a hard one to miss. She remembered the lieutenant’s outrage at finding a white woman running a Congress field hospital; she’d been quite prepared to tell him what a troublemaker she was in her own right, if that was what it took for her to go where her nurses went, but she hadn’t needed to at all.
She’d suffered for being British a time or two; there were plenty who felt as that lieutenant had. But she also had a strange sort of immunity: some of the soldiers had shame, and even to those who didn’t, she was still an Englishwoman. Sometimes she could arrange to get letters out, or medicines in… she did what she could, along with the other nurses and the camp women they’d trained. She was one of those annoying Abacar women now, and she had a standard to meet.
The central fire loomed in front of her, a place where those without fuel might come to cook or to sit and talk. She cast the rag into its depths; as she did, a warm breeze touched her cheek, and she felt curiously as if Usman were caressing it, or as if Richard were, long ago in Dorset. She damned herself for a silly old woman, but then stopped short: memories of love were important in such a place as this. That was why the people here still prayed and sang, and why they came to the fire to share stories.
“Narsa-ji!” It was Shalini, the woman who’d helped with the birth. “I gave the baby to Asha, and he’s nursing. Did you leave Rajashri alone?”
“Only for a minute. Come back with me, and we’ll wrap her.”
She turned back toward the hospital-tent. “They brought two villages in today,” Shalini said as she followed. “Asha saw them come in – from up by Nagpur.”
Sarah nodded. If she were a general, she could track the fighting by the villages that were rounded up – it was the districts where guerrilla fighters struck that got concentrated. Closer to the front, they’d lock up the men and drive the women and children across the lines – let the Congress figure out how to feed them. Here, where that wasn’t practical, they took everyone.
“She heard some of the soldiers talking too. Six hundred more people, but the food will be the same. They can’t spare any more.”
Of course not. Take the farmers off the fields, and you won’t have a bloody harvest. There were a hundred other camps like this one, maybe more, and most of the people in them had been taken off the land. And with the fighting going on, rice shipments didn't always get through, and there were other priorities for the ones that did.
She stopped for a moment, and looked south past the fences, toward the Hyderabad border thirty miles away. Once, forty years ago in the great famine, she’d stood before the Nizam’s throne and shamed the regent into feeding the hungry.
Maybe I can do it again.
“Sarah? Are you all right?”
She shook her head clear. “It’s nothing. I’m fine. But later, after we wrap Rajashri for the pyre, I’ll need your help.”
The camp was a prison, but people and things went in and out every day: guards, supplies, the people who volunteered for work crews to earn a few annas. Night-soil, too, and no one looked at a night-soil cart very carefully, not this far from the front and not with the soldiers so bored of routine. Shalini had done her work well, and nobody had seen Sarah crawl under the cart and brace herself as best she could among the struts. Her arms and legs burned with the effort of holding on, but she felt the cart stop by the gate, and heard the soldiers and the driver bantering in a way that was almost companionable, and then felt it move again. From the way the shadows played on the ground, she could see that the lights of the camp were receding, and finally the cart crested a hill and they were gone.
She could hold on no longer, and she dropped to the ground painfully, rolling aside just in time to avoid the wheels. The driver didn’t look back. Maybe Shalini had told him about the extra cargo he was carrying. Maybe he didn’t notice, or else he didn’t care. She waited anyway, ten minutes, twenty, until she was sure the cart was out of sight and the insects were the only thing she could hear. She found the north star, and went the opposite way.
Dawn saw her at the edge of a deserted village, having made five miles across broken ground. She was exhausted and she crawled into one of the huts, hoping she would be forgiven for the trespass. The walls closed around her and she slept.
She woke when the sun was high. It was hot, even in November, and the still air inside the house was a furnace. She was hungry and thirsty; she had the remains of yesterday’s bread, and she found an earthen pot to get water from the well. It was enough – barely, but enough.
She gathered herself and resumed the march south, putting one foot in front of the other as the village receded in the distance. Hours later she was shadowed in the setting sun, looking for all the world like a bent old woman of seventy-seven because that was what she was, still following the track to Hyderabad.
