explained how some Indian orphanages were terrifying places where children got severely beaten or the girls sold off to old men. “It’s taken us a long time to gain the trust of the local people. We always have to be very, very careful, don’t we, Clara?” but Clara had refused to smile. She’d given Viva a funny look as if to say, “You don’t fit in here,” and every time, in the days to come, that Viva was put on a shift with Clara she felt like an apprentice misfit and very self-conscious in the part.
What was she doing here? She wasn’t a nurse, she wasn’t a charity worker, she wasn’t even sure she liked children very much. What she mostly felt in those early days was a sense of being on the run, mainly from herself.
Things changed. On her second day, Clara took her to see the row of children waiting to be assessed by the visiting doctor. The children stood behind locked gates, barefoot and ragged, one or two of them had looked at her with a wild desperation in their eyes. They’d salaamed her, made small chewing gestures with their mouths, tried to touch her through the railings. Every single one of them seemed to be saying “Help me.”
One of the girls broke into a wild torrent of words to Clara. “Her mother died a few months ago,” Clara explained to Viva. “She’s walked here from a village seventy-five miles away. Her father is dead, too, and her relatives don’t want her.”
And Viva had felt a shaming, a husking of the soul—the task of helping seemed so overwhelming and she was trained for nothing.
They gave her easy things to do at first. Joan told her to sit at a table in the courtyard and when the children arrived she, with the help of a local woman who worked as an interpreter, recorded their names in a large leather ledger. She noted the date they came in, their address, if any, and who assessed them, what drugs they were to have and whether the doctor wanted them back. They hardly ever did.
There were never enough doctors to go around. Joan, Clara, and occasionally Daisy did what they could with limited medical supplies and referred really sick cases to the hospital.
On her first day at this job, halfway through the morning, the wonderfully reassuring Daisy Barker had bounced through the gates, completely at home here and followed by a line of chirping little girls who fought to bring her a glass of water. She sat down beside Viva. “Surviving?” she’d asked.
“I’m fine,” Viva had said, but she’d felt shaken to the core.
For that morning, a crowd of pleading children had become individuals. She’d met Rahim, an intense, angry-looking Muslim boy, pockmarked and lean, whose father had been doused in petrol and fatally burned in what Clara thought was a gangland dispute. Rahim had wanted to leave his six-year-old sister while he went away and tried to make some money. He could no longer feed her: she’d been ill with flu and he was frightened to keep her with him on the streets. When they parted, the boy had touched his sister gently on the arm; she’d watched his thin child’s body walk back down the street before it disappeared into the crowd.
“Couldn’t he have stayed, too?” she’d asked Joan.
“He was ashamed,” she had answered. “He wants to get her out as soon as he can.”
She’d met Sumati, aged twelve. After her mother had died of tuberculosis, she’d tried to support a family of four younger brothers and sisters by taking rags from a rubbish dump, but was now worn out.
Around lunchtime an explosion of noisy boys, naked except for loincloths, had run in on their tough bare feet—for the home also ran a lunchtime soup kitchen, mostly staffed by local women. Most of the boys slept rough, Daisy explained, in cardboard boxes near the railway line. They walked for miles each day to have this one small bowl of rice and dhal and piece of fruit, and to use the cold tap in the courtyard to clean their teeth with their fingers and wash themselves, which they did with great thoroughness and modesty. Daisy said they thought themselves the luckiest fellows alive to be allowed to do this.
“It makes you think, doesn’t it?” she said. It certainly did.
“You know, one day,” Daisy said before she left, “you might write more than their names in a book. You could write