Work Text:
She looks down at her hands, and the voices of the brothers rise from the corner, a sorrowful, wailing prayer, begging for mercy and salvation.
She begins.
***
She was one of the forty thousand women who grew up during the british occupation. She was part of the brief generation of sparkling, glorious intellect, the women who’d gone into higher education, for the first time in a generation, and had sat laughing, sipping lattes, in the universities that had not seen female faces for twenty years.
It had been a splendid five years, as all the hopes and dreams of women seemed about to be fulfilled, and even as she sat in the back of the classroom, modest, and quiet, as good sense dictated, even though to laugh and to speak and raise her eyes was no longer forbidden, and the more brilliant of her female peers were doing so without restraint or consequence, life seemed wondrous and promising, and full of hope. Still, it weighed heavily on her, the previous life of four walls, and, when she was lucky, a brother who might accompany her to taste outside air under the billows of black cloth, and to speak in the presence of men was unthinkable, and she was unable to shake of the shadow of her eighteen years, so she sat quietly and humbly, in modest colours, and desperately drank in the knowledge offered her, and quietly exulted, without ever showing it on her face.
In hindsight, they should have known.
When the British left, it was lucky indeed that she’d been so quiet, for no one remembered her, sat in the back like a quiet mouse, arriving and leaving the university with no fanfare or notice, for the more glorious of her sisters were most quickly and efficiently vanished. Not all to bad places – some of them were lucky enough to be vanished by the right people, right out of the country, and she still feels a jolting, illogical spike of vicious envy. It comes out of the blue, she has family here, she’s loved, and she’s never desired to leave her motherland, but still, the envy comes, sometimes.
It didn’t take very long at all, for everything to be swallowed up, leaving only memories of a dream. The light airy classrooms replaced with a familiar four walls, the electricity that never worked, and the gunshots that once again became something feared, weighing heavily on everyone’s minds. Fear returned. Good sense, too.
As the british pulled out, her country was once again ripped apart by civil war. Brothers took up arms, supporting one cause or another. Leaving their houses every morning, not all of them returning at night. She kept her eyes down and tried to ignore it, only the sickening ache of loss a constant reminder. What could she have done in any case? She didn’t have enough tears. She was just a woman.
It wasn’t until one night they came running in, carrying Ameer’s broken body, bloody arm dangling and burnt, and cursing the government hospital, who they dared not take him to lest someone turn him in, that they remembered their sister had studied at medical school (medical sciences not medicine!) and all eyes suddenly turned to her with sickening hope, and she wanted to laugh – you’re joking – but they weren’t, and after a nauseous moment in which she stared at them, her brothers, aghast, Ameer twitched, and she was moving, moving, moving.
Hot water! Someone cried out.
Bandages!
She wanted to shout, well if you know what you’re doing why bother with me at all, but before she could utter a word of protest, she was being ushered into the living room, Ameer laid out on the coffee table, and all the brothers watching her as she was pushed next to him, faced with his mangled arm and singed skin, and all silent and watching behind her.
Well you must start by washing your hands to prevent infection, she thought, resisting the urge to giggle uncontrollably, and dipped her hands into the hot water.
The arm turned out to be broken in two places, the burns were not just to the arm. Blood was still seeping from the long gash in his hair that had stained his clothes.
She dealt with the cut first, washing the wound, pouring in half a bottle of spirits with a hope and a prayer, and stitching it up with a needle and thread boiled over the stove.
The burns were next, she washed them, knew that infection was the greatest fear, slathered on the antiseptic cream someone had managed to find in a first aid kit that no one knew they’d had, and bandaged the whole raw, pink, mess. Water would be lost through the burns, she thought. How to prevent it? And finally cut open three plastic bags, dipped them in boiling water too, and wrapped them tightly over the bandages. The brothers goggled at her. She ignored them.
Then only the arm was left, twisted in a strange direction, and she stared at it, terrified. She had no idea where to start. Could name the bones and remember their correct relation to each other – she’d been a good student, but had never encountered bones in the wrong place, and had no idea how to begin, how to take the jumbled pieces of a puzzle, and reassemble them in the correct order.
The brothers were still watching her, silenced by the strange witchcraft of her attempts at medicine, and it seemed the whole world was waiting, waiting. Ameer was still unconscious. There were no doctors for him. If the arm was not fixed, he would be crippled. There was just her. Gritting her teeth, she began a gentle exploration of the arm, feeling for bones that had shifted and cracked, seeking for familiar anatomy, displaced.
She found the radius, separated from its head at the wrist, shifting with a terrible grinding where the jagged ends of the bone still lay in proximity. The ulnar had shattered near the wrist too, creating a third joint in the arm where there should be none. She held Ameer’s wrist in one hand, forearm in the other. Didn’t know what to do. Had never touched a man in pain before, had never expected to encounter a patient, had only the faintest grasp of medicine, gleaned from flashes of memory of a summer spent reading about human biology, physiology, not medicine, not surgery. There’d been a book on the history of the biological sciences. Medicine had been mentioned. The ancient Islamic scholars had been great healers. She knew nothing. She had to do something.
Blindly, praying, she pulled at the two halves and tried to match bone against bone, piecing together two halves, separated. Ameer stirred. She cringed, expecting him to scream, kept pulling when he stopped moving, still unconscious, kept praying, beseeching the lord, the spirits, luck, anything.
With a jolt, she felt something twist right, and bone clove to bone, settling. Ameer’s arm was still swollen and burnt and feverish, but it was straight.
She burst into tears.
In the end they splinted Ameer’s arm without her, using two rulers and the handle of a ladle.
A few days later, her uncle came to visit, and left a pile of books on medicine. She could hardly bear to touch them. She forced herself to read each page slowly, then read it again.
That had been the start of things.
There had been more injuries that couldn’t be seen at the hospital, and she’d faced each one trembling, terrified, never having treated anything like it before. Her face remained steely calm throughout. Her hands were steady.
More patients lived than died.
She read some more.
Injuries started to become familiar. She started her own journal.
Someone found her a box of surgical scalpels. She stopped using the kitchen knife.
Her uncle dropped off a couple bottles of morphine. Grim faced, she threw out the poppy.
There were quiet whispers around the neighbourhood, and suddenly others were turning up too. The elderly professor crippled by arthritis, unwelcome at the government hospital because of his liberal views. The pregnant woman who’d miscarried three times, terrified this would be the fourth. The young girl who’d been raped and wouldn’t stop bleeding.
Someone’s cousin’s brother in law was a chemist. She would have kissed their feet, nearly kissed the brother’s feet just for bringing the good news, sang blessings and praises for a week, as for the first time, she was able to give her patients actual medicines.
She expanded her scope, and continued to read. Brothers watched her with newfound respect. She wanted to tell them it was unfounded. She was no doctor, it was all an act, but it wasn’t, she was the first one people called for when ill, a doctor if there ever was one, and she knew it and they knew it too.
Bitter, serious, modestly dressed as ever, she sat in her father’s front room, beneath the small window, reading, reading, and healed those brought before her.
She wondered how long this would last, before someone let slip to the wrong person, before the government turned up and she was vanished for daring to practice medicine, yet equally, she couldn’t stop, couldn’t turn away and ignore need when it was staring her in the face, haunted brown eyes wide with terror and pleading and pain, nails biting into her flesh, clutching at hope, begging for relief. Biting her tongue, she refused to meet their eyes and got on with her work, hoped that everything wouldn’t come crashing down around her ears, prayed five times a day that she might remain hidden and undisturbed and safe, that the worst wouldn’t come to pass.
Still, she was careful to ensure one of the brothers was in the room always, wearing gloves and apron, ready to claim to be the real doctor, signed all her journal entries with Ameer’s name, kept herself small, and humble and unobtrusive at all times except during the actual operations and consultations.
She still remembers, sometimes, the glorious five years of her youth, and wonders what it might have been like if they’d continued, if she’d had a chance to finish her degree (human sciences not medicine!) and what it would have been like to be working in the sciences, in a lab, with inert chemical and reagents and cells, not people, in pain and requiring her help. Perhaps she would have met a man, who smiled, and did not fear an educated woman, perhaps she would’ve had children, a girl, who wouldn’t have had anything to fear as she grew up.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
That time is gone and will never come back.
She’s aged, in yeas as well as spirit. It feels like she’s been patching up brothers for a lifetime, and by now it’s a familiar routine, to find her scrubbed up and a man laid out on the living room table, his brothers crowded into a corner of the room, praying for the intercession and mercy of the divine whilst she labours as best as she can within the bounds of human ability.
One day, she thinks, it will all end. Whether by the government, or misfortune, or simply the passing of time, there will come a time when she will no longer be able to do her work. She wonders if it will be such a great loss. The neighbourhood will mourn her, she thinks, but she will not have made any great impact in the greater scheme of things. She can count the number of lives she has saved – not many - and they are small ones. There are no great thinkers, or politicians, or generals here. They will not change the world, and she has not changed the world by saving them.
Yet her fate was set on that first night, when Ameer was carried in burnt and bleeding and broken. Or perhaps even earlier, when she was full of joy at studying within the beautiful hallways and classrooms of the university, or perhaps even earlier still, when she was born a girl. She will not turn someone away, and this is all she knows how to do. She will continue working this way until the end.
***
Her fingers pull the last knot tight.
The head brother turns to her, hopeful, and they finish the prayer.
It is done, the surgery is finished.