From This Day Forward by John Brunner

Author:John Brunner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1972-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE VITANULS

Before the soundproof, germproof double glass window of the delivery room the matron of the maternity hospital came to a halt. “And there,” she told the tall young American from the World Health Organisation, “is our patron saint.”

Barry Chance blinked at her. She was a brisk fortyish Kashmiri woman with an aura of efficiency, not at all the sort of person one would expect to make jokes about her life’s work. And indeed there had been no trace of jocularity in her tone. But in this teeming subcontinent of India a stranger could never be sure how seriously anybody took anything. After all, the universe was maya–illusory–according to the classical teaching.

He compromised. “I’m sorry” he lied. “I didn’t catch that …?”

Out of the corner of his eye he studied the man the matron had indicated. He was elderly and balding, what little hair remained to him had whitened into a sort of halo around his heavily lined face. Most Indians, the American had noticed, tended to grow fat with age, but this man had become scrawny, like Gandhi. Surely, though, an ascetic appearance and a halo of hair weren’t enough to establish a claim to sainthood?

“Our patron saint,” the matron repeated, sublimely unaware of her visitor’s bewilderment. “Dr. Ananda Kotiwala. You’re very fortunate to see him at work. It’s his last day here before he retires.”

Struggling to make sense of her remarks, Chance stared unashamedly at the old man. He felt his rudeness was excused by the fact that this corridor adjoining the delivery room was a kind of public gallery. On every side there were relatives and friends of the expectant mothers, down to and including very small children, who had to stand on tiptoe to peer in through the window. There was no such thing as privacy in India unless you were rich. In any overcrowded underdeveloped country a minute fraction of the people enjoyed that luxury he’d taken for granted since childhood.

The fact that toddlers could watch, fascinated, the arrival of their new brothers and sisters was accepted here as a part of growing up. Chance reminded himself sternly that he was a foreigner, and–what was more–a doctor himself, trained at one of the few colleges that still administered the Hippocratic oath in full form to its graduates. He forced his personal preconceptions to the back of his mind and concentrated on unravelling the curious comment the matron had made.

The scene before him offered no hints. All he could see was a typical Indian hospital delivery room, containing thirty-six mothers in labour, of whom two were suffering agonies and screaming–at least, to judge by their open mouths and contorted bodies; the soundproofing was extremely good.

He wondered briefly how the Indians really felt about their children entering the world under such circumstances. What it suggested to him was an assembly line, the mothers reduced to machines producing their quota of infants according to a pre-planned schedule. And all of it so dreadfully public!

Again, though, he was falling into the trap of thinking like a modern American, parochially.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.