Page 20 of The Henna Artist

Her eyes slid upward, coyly, to meet mine, her lips curving. “Twentieth thing?”

I’d always been a light sleeper, so when I heard the rattle of the doorknob, I was immediately awake and off the cot. It was still dark outside. Radha was fast asleep. Samir burst through the door, and my first thought was that he’d had too much to drink at his club and lost his head—until I noticed the woman in his arms. She was bundled in a quilt. Eyes closed, moaning softly. Samir’s friend, Dr. Kumar, stood beside him. As I sprang out of bed, I glanced at the wall clock. It was two in the morning. I ushered them inside the room before Mrs. Iyengar woke up.

When I flipped the light switch, Samir’s expression was grim.

“Something’s wrong with Mrs. Harris,” Samir whispered. “Kumar has some questions for you.” Then his eyes darted around the room until he spotted my cot, where Radha was propped on one elbow, rubbing her eyes.

I rushed to her. “Radha, please get up.”

She scampered off, her eyes growing wider, as Samir laid his charge carefully on the cot, on the sheet where she and I slept. As he did, the quilt fell open and I saw the congealed blood shining in the weak light of the ceiling bulb. Joyce Harris’s eyelids, flushed and blue-veined, fluttered, and her knees rose toward her chest. She was clutching her stomach. Her teeth were chattering so loudly I was surprised Mrs. Iyengar wasn’t already pounding at my door, telling me to be quiet.

“Why are you bringing her—”

“No time. Kumar will explain.”

I noticed the doctor’s black medicine bag. He pulled a stethoscope from it.

Samir grasped my hands. “Thank you, Lakshmi. Please do as Dr. Kumar says,” he begged. Then he was gone, pulling the door closed quietly behind him. The whole exchange had taken less than a minute. The air in the room was close, thick with the Englishwoman’s moans.

Dr. Kumar, whose eyes hadn’t yet found a place to rest, kept his voice low. “She’s taken something. I need to know what she took and how much.”

“I don’t understand—”

“What’s to understand?” He frowned. “She’s taken a dangerous herb to kill her baby, and she’ll die unless I know what she took.”

“But I only—” I felt my face flush. “Hasn’t Samir explained to you what I—”

“Do you know how risky it is to abort a baby at five months?” His gray eyes flashed.

“Five months?” My mouth hung open.

Kumar nodded and placed his stethoscope on Mrs. Harris’s abdomen. She let out a cry. “I’m picking up the baby’s heartbeat, so it’s eighteen weeks at least. But the heartbeat is faint. The woman has lost a lot of blood. She needs a transfusion. Samir is calling in favors to get her to a private hospital.” As he talked, his eyes wandered from Joyce Harris to me. “I don’t think the baby will survive.” He glanced at my hands, which were clasped in front of my sari.

Finally, he removed the stethoscope. “What did you give her?” His words were measured, as if he were trying to contain his anger.

I tore my eyes from the woman writhing on the cot. “I gave her cotton root bark in the form of a tea. If she had followed my directions, she would have boiled one tea sachet in a quart of hot water. She was supposed to sip it every hour until she had finished the quart. Then repeat the process. That’s usually all it takes to expel fully. But I left an extra sachet with her just in case.”

Dr. Kumar put two fingers on the woman’s wrist and checked his watch. “Her pulse is very faint. She may have taken all three doses at once or mixed less water to make it more potent.”

“But she swore she was no more thanfourmonths along. I asked her twice and told her it was dangerous if she were any further along. I had no reason not to believe her.”

He stared at me. Did he think I was lying?

“I’ve never given this herb to any woman who is more than four months pregnant. Either Mrs. Harris didn’t know, or she was desperate and lied to me.”

I watched him saturate a cotton ball in alcohol and rub the crook of her arm with it.

“How did you and Samir...find her?”

He removed a vial and syringe from his bag. “A friend of hers phoned Samir at the club where we were having dinner. He said she needed help.” He tapped the Englishwoman’s arm to raise a vein and plunged the needle into it. Joyce Harris flinched. “We picked her up. Her husband and mother-in-law left for Jodhpur today so no one was at home. Hold this here, will you?”

I pressed a ball of cotton firmly on the woman’s arm. Dr. Kumar capped the syringe and put his implements back in his bag. Then he picked up the woman’s wrist and looked at his watch for a long moment. His fingers were long, his nails immaculate. He laid her wrist back on the quilt.

“I’ve given her a tiny bit of morphine for the pain—but I need her conscious. The morphine shouldn’t interfere with what you gave her. But we’ll need antibiotics to fight the infection.” Dr. Kumar’s cautious eyes explored my hands, my face, my hair. I noticed threads of silver in his dark curls, a freckle above his upper lip. “Do you really think, Mrs. Shastri, that you can cure a woman’s...problems...withherbs?”

“When a woman has no other options, yes.”

“This woman would have had options.”

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