Still Counting the Dead by Frances Harrison

Author:Frances Harrison [Frances Harrison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781770893054
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Dead cattle, their feet sticking up from swollen bodies, dotted the landscape; the stink lingered in the air. The road was empty, abandoned vehicles left untouched. Everyone else preferred the muddy interior lanes, even though they’d become swamps after the continuous downpour. ‘If you’re game, let’s go on the main road,’ said Bhavan. ‘If we drive at seventy kilometres an hour, we can get there in eight minutes.’ They loaded the two bikes with their belongings. Uma drove alone, following Bhavan with their nephew perched on the back of the larger bike. Shells were falling in front and behind and Uma struggled to keep up. ‘Aunt, hurry, come!’ her nephew called back to her desperately. ‘My husband said, “If you’re not wounded, just pull on the accelerator and go!” You couldn’t see where the next shell would fall. But if something blows up in front of you, your instinct is to stop. I did that and he would shout, “Come on!”’

They made it through and stayed with a cousin, in a place so small, Uma says, you can’t even describe it as a village. The army was only two kilometres away and there was gunfire from all directions. Nowhere was safe in those days, but it was better than their own home. Then, on 15 February, Bhavan was hit by a stray bullet. It pierced the upper thigh of his amputated leg, passing right through the stump. Uma quickly tore a clean sarong into strips and used it to tie two sanitary towels on the wound as a dressing. With the help of her nephew she lifted her wounded husband on to the back of his more powerful motorbike. She doesn’t know how she did it, but somehow she drove him to the overflowing hospital, through those roads clogged with desperate people moving in all directions. All the time she feared the worst.

‘I didn’t know if the bone was affected or not. They couldn’t remove any more. I would lose him; they couldn’t amputate any more. So you can understand what I felt. I can’t tell you how much time it took to get him to hospital. I had to rush, but I couldn’t. He was feeling faint and I would put one hand behind and say, “We are nearly there.” You see, I used to lean on him a lot, but now it was my turn to stand firm.’

Luckily it was just a flesh wound. Uma refused to allow the doctors to admit Bhavan: she knew hospitals were being targeted so she insisted on taking him home, with dressings, medicines and instructions about what to expect. The staff knew him from his work as an ambulance driver, and Uma was very lucky to get the precious antibiotics. ‘I begged them. There was a shortage but somehow I managed to get them. I don’t think at that stage many people would have been able to persuade them to give the drugs, but I literally begged them. He had already lost a leg.

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