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heart, your father will be really hale and hearty again. Menon is a great expert in heart-transplantation.'
'Yes. I have heard his name, I think. You never told me, Amma - how did you find your old nurse this
afternoon?'
'You did not ask me. Unhappily, she died during last night.'
'Oh! I'm so sorry!'
'Yes, it is hard for her family. Already they are much in debt to the moneylender.'
She left the room; shortly after, Jane also retired. But she could not sleep. After an hour or two of fitful
sleep, she got dressed again and went downstairs, obsessed with a mental pic-ture of the glass of fresh
lime-juice she had seen the doctor drinking. She could hear unseen people moving about in rooms she
had never entered. In the garden, too, flickering tongues of light moved. A heart-transplant was still a
strange event in Naipur Road, as it had once been in Europe and America; per-haps it would have even
more superstition attached to it here than it had there.
When a servant appeared, she made her request. After long delay, he brought the glass on a tray,
gripping it so that it would not slip, and lured her out on to the veranda with it. She sat in a wicker chair
and sipped it. A face appeared in the gar-den, a hand reached in supplication up to her.
'Please! Miss Lady!'
Startled, she recognized the man with the dying child to whom she had spoken the previous afternoon.
The next morning, Jane was roused by one of the doctor's servants. Dazed after too little sleep, she
dressed and went down to drink tea. She could find nothing to say; her brain had not woken yet. Amma
and her father talked continuously in English to each other.
The big family car was waiting outside. Pentecouth was gently loaded in, and the luggage piled round
him. It was still little more than dawn; as Jane, Amma, and Chandhari climbed in and the car rolled
forward, wraithlike figures were moving already. A cheerful little fire burned here and there inside a
house. A tractor rumbled towards the fields. People stood at the sides of the road, numb, to let the car
pass. The air was chilly; but, in the eastern sky, the banners of the day's warmth were already violently
flying.
They were almost at the railway station when Jane turned to Amma. 'That man with the child dying of
smallpox walked all the way to the house to speak to me. He said he came as soon as he heard of my
father's illness.'
'The servants had no business to let him through the gate. That is how diseases spread,' Amma said.
'He had something else to sell me last night. Not a vase. He wanted to sell his heart!'
Amma laughed. 'The vase would be a better bargain, Jane!'
'How can you laugh? He was so desperate to help his wife and family. He wanted fifty rupees. He would
take the money back to his wife and then he would come with us to the Cal-cutta Hospital to have his
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heart cut out!'
Putting her hand politely to her mouth, Amma laughed again.
'Why is it funny?' Jane asked desperately. 'He meant what he said. Everything was so black for him that
his life was worth only fifty rupees!'
'But his life is not worth so much, by far!' Amma said. 'He is just a village swindler. And the money
would not cure the child, in any case. The type of smallpox going about here is generally fatal, isn't it,
Pappa?'
Dr. Chandhari, who sat with a hand on his patient's fore-head, said, 'This man's idea is of course not
scientific. He is one of the scheduled classes - an Untouchable, as we used to say. He has never eaten
very much all during his life and so he will have only a little weak heart. It would never be a good heart in
yourfather's body, to circulate all his blood properly.' With a proud gesture, he thumped Robert
Pentecouth's chest. 'This is the body of the well-nourished man. In Calcutta, we shall find him a proper
big heart that will do the work effectively.'
They arrived at the railway station. The sun was above the horizon and climbing rapidly. Rays of gold
poured through the branches of the trees by the station on to the faces of people arriving to watch the
great event, the stopping of the great Madras-Calcutta express, and the loading aboard of a white man
going for a heart-transplant.
Furtively, Jane looked about the crowd, searching to see if her man happened to be there. But, of
course, he would be back in his village by now, with his wife and the children.
Intercepting the look, Amma said, 'Jane, you did not give that man baksheesh, did you?'
Jane dropped her gaze, not wishing to betray herself.
'He would have robbed you,' Amma insisted. 'His heart would be valueless. These people are never free
from hook-worms, you know - in the heart and the stomach. You should have bought the vase if you
wanted a souvenir of Naipur Road -not a heart, for goodness sake!'
The train was coming. The crowd stirred. Jane took Amma's hand. 'Say no more. I will always have
memories of Naipur Road.'
She busied herself about her father's stretcher as the great sleek train growled into the station.
Down the Up Escalation
Being alone in the house, not feeling too well, I kept the tele-vision burning for company. The volume
was low. Three men mouthed almost soundlessly about the Chinese role in the Viet-nam war. Getting my
head down, I turned to my aunt Laura's manuscript.
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She had a new hairstyle these days. She looked very good; she was seventy-three, my aunt, and you
were not intended to take her for anything less; but you could mistake her for ageless. Now she had
written her first book - 'a sort of autobiography', she told me when she handed the bundle over. Terrible
appre-hension gripped me. I had to rest my head in my hand. Another heart attack coming.
On the screen, figures scrambling over mountain. All unclear. Either my eyesight going or a captured
Chinese newsreel. Strings of animals - you couldn't see what, film slightly over-exposed. Could be
reindeer crossing snow, donkeys crossing sand. I could hear them now, knocking, knocking, very cold.
A helicopter crashing towards the ground? Manuscript com-ing very close, my legs, my lips, the noise I
was making.
There was a ship embedded in the ice. You'd hardly know there was a river. Snow had piled up over
the piled-up ice. Surrounding land was flat. There was music, distorted stuff from a radio, accordions,
and balalaikas. The music came from a wooden house. From its misty windows, they saw the ship, sunk
in the rotted light. A thing moved along the road, clearing away the day's load of ice, ugly in form and
movement. Four people sat in the room with the unpleasant music; two of them were girls in their late
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