In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,60

I rush out to the restaurant and come back with two litres of warm, salty water, which we pour into Anna, pinching her nose closed to force her to swallow. Then Caroline goes outside and returns with a long reed she’s broken off somewhere. While I hold Anna’s head back, her mouth open, Caroline forces the reed down her throat. They are working as a team now, two midwives trying to coax a birth, but though the reed goes all the way down, so deep that it comes up with blood on the tip, nothing happens. Their patient is passive, neither helping nor hindering them, but her passivity is like a sort of defiance, from beyond which she watches with amusement. Look at all your striving, too late, too late.

By now it’s clear that the doctor isn’t coming. Somebody calls a taxi and they half-help, half-carry her down the stairs. A crowd has gathered at a respectful distance, watching the drama. We get into the car, all three of us on the back seat, Anna in the middle with a bucket between her knees. As we drive to Margao, with the car repeatedly stalling and struggling to start again, a bizarre conversation unfolds. Why did you do this. Because I want to die. What reason do you have to die. What reason do I have to live. You are a very selfish girl, Caroline announces firmly.

By now Anna has almost lost consciousness, she is swaying and slurring. We discuss where to take her, there is a private doctor nearby, but we decide to go to the government hospital, perhaps their facilities will be better. We have to carry her in when we arrive and load her onto a trolley like a sack of meat. While we are explaining to the doctor what she’s done, the taxi driver appears, plucking at my sleeve. Seven hundred rupees, he insists, about five times the going rate, but I hurl the money at him, this is no time for argument. Anna is signalling weakly to me and when I bend over her she whispers something inaudible. What are you saying, I can’t hear you. She forms the words again and this time I do hear. Tell them what I’ve taken. I have told them, I say, just as she slips away into unconsciousness.

I’ve brought the prescription for the medicine with me to show the doctor and he shakes his head over it. She took all of this. All of it, yes. He must do a stomach pump, he says, and he explains the hospital policy to me. It is extraordinary, he has to repeat it before I fully understand. The treatment, the hospital, are free, though the equipment and drugs are not. But it’s not possible simply to pay for them, they must also physically be bought. So the doctor writes his requirements on a slip of paper, which I must then carry down the corridor, across a courtyard, down another corridor to the pharmacy. A small mob of people jostles in front of the counter, each of them waving their slip of paper, each of them shouting to be heard. I plunge into the crowd, hacking a path with my elbows to the front. My friend is dying, I roar, please help me first.

Maybe the note in my voice reaches them, because they take my slip of paper promptly. There’s a short wait while the bored attendant wanders between the shelves, picking out what is required. A length of tube, a saline solution, some gauze. Then it’s all totalled up, my money is taken, the change is laboriously counted. A sense of unreality has thickened the air, like a dream in which you cannot move, and through this fog I run back up the corridor, across the courtyard, down the next corridor to the room. A surly nurse takes the equipment and pushes the tube down Anna’s throat. The saline solution is pumped in, then sucked back out again. I peer at it hopefully, expectantly, looking for the load of pills, but the fluid is clear.

Nothing, the nurse says. Her stomach is empty.

That isn’t possible.

Look, she says, and performs the operation again. The receptacle fills with its liquid. The nurse slouches off to do something else, leaving the tube in place. Caroline eyes it suspiciously.

I don’t think that’s in her stomach, she says.

What do you mean.

I think she’s put it into her lung. We both stare at the tube. After a moment, Caroline