Lillian Carter by Hayter-Menzies Grant

Author:Hayter-Menzies, Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2014-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

I faced her treatment every week with dread

and loathing—of the chore, not the child.

As time passed, I was less afraid,

and managed not to turn my face away.

Her spirit bloomed as sores began to fade.

She’d raise her anxious, searching eyes to mine,

to show she trusted me. We’d smile and say

a few Marathi words, then touch and hold

each other’s hands. And then love grew between

us, so that when I kissed her lips,

I didn’t feel unclean.37

Her initial response to the leprosy case aside, Lillian, according to Dr. Bhatia, was completely lacking in fear. This fearlessness extended to what she was willing to do to care for her patients in acts which crossed the caste lines that few Indians were willing or able to breach. One of her associates and friends, a male nurse named Raja, was astonished to witness the extent to which Lillian would go to ease patients’ discomfort and ensure that they and the clinic were clean. He recalled the time when a patient was admitted with diarrhea so severe he had soiled his pants and the floor. Raja and Lillian removed the man’s pants and she asked the cleaner, the jamadar, to wash them. The jamadar was a sweeper but clearly this was not among the jobs he believed it was his to do, and he refused. Lillian rolled up her sleeves and, with the patient taken in hand by Raja, set to work to wash the dirty clothes and the floor herself. Ashamed at seeing this, the jamadar relented. “You see,” Raja said, “there was no work she considered degrading.”38

Fearlessness and kindness extended to the company Lillian kept. As in Plains, when she had spent what to many white residents of the town may have seemed too much time with black families, Lillian set tongues wagging in Vikhroli by openly consorting with people that nobody else wanted anything to do with. “There I was in the living room,” she wrote in a letter describing one of her “Untouchable” dinner parties at 13/6, “with a peon, a driver, a labor official, and two staff members. I hate to think what the folks downstairs thought was going on—people here don’t even speak to peons, drivers, or any lower caste if they can help it.” It’s clear she didn’t really care what the people downstairs thought, and word got out that 13/6 was a place you could go and be treated with the same respect as your alleged betters. Lillian was especially touched when a young driver came to visit her, albeit with the utmost secrecy: as a man of the servant class, he was never supposed to pay a social call on a person like Lillian. The young man’s wife had put him up to it, “so she could see the ‘American house,’” Lillian wrote. Lillian loved to oblige. It was like Plains all over again, when her black friends dared not come in the front door, but this time she could do as she pleased. Not only was she able

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