England and Other Stories

SAVING GRACE

DR SHAH HAD never ceased to tell the story. ‘I’m as British as you are,’ he might begin. ‘I was born in Battersea.’ Or, more challengingly: ‘My mother is as white as you. You don’t believe me?’

In his early days in medicine, even though by then the National Health had become awash (it was his own word) with black and brown faces, it was not uncommon for patients to cut up rough at being treated by an Asian, or an Asian-looking, doctor. Such a thing could still happen, but now his seniority, his reputation as a top consultant and his winning smile usually banished any trouble. But the story was still there, the chapter and verse of it, or just his satisfaction at relating it once again.

He tended to tell it these days, since it really required time and leisure, during follow-up sessions when the patient might be well on the mend, and in the half-hour slot there’d be little else to discuss. He’d even come to regard it as simply his way of bidding patients farewell. A final prescription. Though it had nothing to do in any clinical sense with cardiology.

‘No, I’ve never been to India. Perhaps I never shall. But my father was born in India. .’

It had lost none of its force, especially now his father was dead and he and his mother were sharing their mourning. Less than a year ago he’d embraced his father, so far as that was possible given his pitiful condition, for the last time. He’d held him close and had the fleeting bizarre thought that he was also holding India. He’d said to his mother, ‘They’re making him comfortable, making him ready, he won’t feel any pain.’

His father wasn’t his patient, but of course Dr Shah knew about such things. For a moment he’d quite forgotten that his mother (it was very much part of the story) had once long ago been a nurse.

As a medical man he should have been protected against grief, but he wasn’t surprised by how much now it overtook him, by how much he still felt, even after several months, the non-medical mystery of his father’s absence.

‘My father was born in India,’ he’d say, ‘in Poona, in 1925. All this will seem like ancient history, I’m sure. In those days of course the British ruled. We ruled.’ Dr Shah would smile his smile. ‘He was born into one of those families who revered the British. He had an education that was better than that of many boys born at the same time in Birmingham or Bradford. Or Battersea. And spoke better English too.’

The smile would only widen.

‘Yes, I know, there were many Indians who didn’t revere the British. Quite the opposite. But when the war broke out in 1939 there was no question that my father, when he came of age, would sign up with the Indian Army to fight for the British in their war. There were many Indians who felt differently. There were many Indians who wanted to fight against the British. But of course I had no say in these things, I wasn’t even around. My father’s name was Ranjit. As you know, that’s my name too.

‘So one day he found himself on a troopship bound for Italy, which was where most of the Indian soldiers who came to Europe went. The fact is I might have been Italian, I might be telling you this in Naples or Rome. Think of that.

‘But because of some mishap of war — they had to switch ships — my father’s unit ended up in England, in the spring of 1944, and it was decided that instead of shipping them all the way back to Italy they should be trained up for the invasion of France.’

Dr Shah would seem to wait a moment, as if to let his story catch up with him.

‘England. A camp in Dorset to be precise, not far from Sturminster Newton. The truth is my father couldn’t believe his luck. He’d grown up worshipping everything English. He spoke English, good English, not Italian. And there he was in the English countryside, in spring — thatched cottages, primroses, bluebells, everything he’d only read about in books. He even got himself a bicycle and whizzed round the lanes.’

Dr Shah would give a sympathetic shrug.

‘No, I don’t quite fully believe it either. I don’t believe it can have been all fun for a bunch of Indian soldiers in Dorset in 1944. Just think about it. But I’m only telling you what my father told me. He called it luck.

‘It wasn’t the only piece of luck either, though you might think this next piece of luck wasn’t any kind of luck at all. He took part in D-Day. He was one of very few Indian soldiers who did so. He served the British in their war. To the utmost, you might say. He was on that big fleet of ships. But he was very soon on a ship coming back, and very soon after that he was in a ward in a hospital here in London, commandeered by the Army, where all the patients had serious wounds to the leg, or legs.

‘I don’t know the details. It was somewhere in Normandy, not far from the beaches. I’m not sure he knew himself. All he’d say was, “I was blown up.” Once he said, “I was blown up and I thought I was dead.” And he went a little further still. “I thought I’d been blown to pieces,” he said, “and had come back together again as somebody else.” That’s not physiologically possible, of course. I can’t comment on that as a medical man. But then — we transplant hearts.’

Dr Shah would smile.

‘He was in the leg unit, or more plainly the amputation unit, though no one, I suppose, would have called it that. The only saving grace was that it might have been better to have a leg removed there than back in the thick of things in France. Though sometimes, I believe, it’s important to amputate a leg fast. But the crucial fact is that he was the only Indian man, the only brown man, occupying any of the beds. Not a saving grace you might think, but wait.

‘I’ve never amputated a leg. It’s not my field, as you know. But anyone knows it’s an extreme procedure, if sometimes the only way of saving life. And I’m talking about over sixty years ago and about patients who might have had other complicated injuries too. In short, not every amputee would have survived and every man on that ward would have known the risks.

‘My father once showed me a photograph when I was a boy. It was of three men in pyjamas, in wheelchairs, all of them missing a leg. But all of them smiling, as if they were pleased with their stumps. It was a rather scary photograph to show a small boy, but my father wanted me to see it. He told me the men were some of his “old pals”. Then he told me that if ever I should feel disadvantaged in life I should remember his old pals. “Disadvantaged”. That was his actual word. It was a big word for a small boy, but I remember it clearly.’

Dr Shah’s smile would broaden again and his listener might think — as he or she was perhaps meant to think — that ‘disadvantaged’ sat strangely on the lips of a senior consultant in an expensive pinstriped suit.

‘I used to think that the smiles on the faces of those amputees were a bit like my father saying he’d had the time of his life in Dorset. Anyway there was another photograph of him and his bicycle, and he’s smiling in that. You need two legs to ride a bicycle.

‘Working on the leg unit there were of course doctors, surgeons, nurses. One of the nurses was called Nurse Watts, but my father would get to know her as Rosie. And I would get to know her as my mother. One day, apparently, my father asked her if her family had kept a newspaper announcing the news of D-Day. Many families kept such a thing. Could she bring it in to show him? He wanted proof that he’d been part of history. But it was the start of something else.

‘Working on the leg unit too was a doctor, a doctor and assistant surgeon — only a junior, not the top man at all — who discreetly let it be known to a few of the men that if they let him “do” them he could save their leg. Also of course, by implication, their life.

‘Quite an offer, you might think. But so far not a single patient had signed up to it. It wasn’t that he was only a junior. The simple reason was that the man’s name was Chaudhry and he was a brown-skinned doctor. From Bombay. From Mumbai. He too had come from India to serve the British, in a medical capacity. And they — the other patients, I mean — didn’t want his brown fingers meddling with them. In fact there was even a sort of soldiers’ pact among them that the brown doctor’s offer should be refused.

‘Silly fools.’

Dr Shah would leave a well-rehearsed pause at this point.

‘But you can imagine that the position and response of my father was rather different.’

There’d be another pause, almost as if he had come to the end.

‘I hardly need to tell you, do I? The others underwent their amputations, successfully or not, but my father’s leg was saved. After a while he was even able to walk again, almost as easily as he’d always done. He had a very slight limp and — or so he liked to say — perhaps a few tiny grains of metal still inside him, courtesy of Krupp’s. But that’s not all. His relations with Nurse Watts — with Rosie, my mother — had meanwhile reached a point where they both clearly wanted to take things further. Against all the odds. To take them further, in fact, for the rest of their lives.

‘You can imagine it, can’t you? All those men with their stumps. It wasn’t just their legs they’d lost, was it? They’d lost out on something else. And there were Ranjit and Rosie, like two turtle doves. As my father put it, he got his leg and he got the girl too. Now do you see why he talked about his luck?’

Dr Shah would sometimes leave things there. It was the simple version and it was enough. He’d only add, ‘And that’s how I came to be born in Battersea, in 1948.’ He’d leave a pause and look closely but disclaimingly at his patient. ‘No, my field isn’t genetics either, and I can’t explain it, but it’s how I came out.’

But if he wished to tell the longer and fuller version, he’d go on.

‘Imagine it. London, Battersea. At the end of a war. Against all the odds. But my mother always said there were no two ways about it. Ranjit was the one. And if she could fall in love with a man with his body all smashed up and the possibility that he’d lose a leg, then wasn’t that a pretty good test of love? Setting aside the other matter that had nothing to do with the war.

‘Let me tell you something else. For nearly ten years my father was a hospital porter. You won’t catch me talking down to a hospital porter. Then he rose to the dizzy heights of hospital administration. I mean he was a clerk, lowest grade. With his education. Having fought at D-Day. And all of that because it was all he could get. And that only because of some string-pulling from his nurse wife — and no doubt from Dr Chaudhry too.

‘But he accepted it and stuck with it. Because, I have no doubt, he thought it was worth it, because he thought it was a small price. And for the same reason he began gradually to realise that he’d never go back to India. It was how it was. His home was in England now. His family, his mother and father in Poona — he’d probably never see them again.

‘He once told me that he looked at it like this: he might never have gone back anyway. He might have been killed in France. Or in Italy. And hadn’t he done a fine thing anyway, even in the eyes of his family? Married a British lady. Perhaps he was right. He’d been blown up and he’d become somebody else.

‘And this of course was the time — just before I was born — that India got home rule. Home rule and partition. We cleared out — the British cleared out. India was divided and terrible things happened, and all this while there was this other division my father had made between India and himself. It can’t have been easy. He got his leg and he got the girl, but he lost something else. They say that amputees never stop feeling the “ghosts” of their limbs.

‘But of all of this, too, you could say it was a pretty good test.

‘And do I have to tell you the rest? Do I have to tell you that the man who saved my father’s leg, Dr Chaudhry, became a sort of second father to my father? And like an uncle to me. He became a friend of the family. And do I have to tell you that it was because of Dr Chaudhry — his name was Sunil — and with his encouragement that I set my sights on taking up medicine too? I was born in 1948. I was born along with the National Health. I was fated to spend my days in hospitals.’

Dr Shah’s smile, now more like a triumphant beam, would indicate that his story was over. He’d look distinctly young, even though he was over sixty and was even mourning his father.

‘But you are free to go,’ he’d announce — if he were speaking to one of his recovered patients. He’d hold out his hand, his brown hand with its fine dexterous fingers.

‘At this point I always like to say I hope I never see you again. Please don’t take it the wrong way. Take it the right way. Remember my father and his leg.’

There were things he might have added, but didn’t, things only to be inferred. He didn’t say that, though he’d been born into the Welfare State, he’d certainly known, once upon a time in Battersea, the ‘disadvantages’ of which his father spoke. He didn’t enlarge on the fact that, though he’d been encouraged by Dr Chaudhry, he hadn’t gone into orthopaedics, but cardiology. And he didn’t say that in becoming a doctor himself, not to say eventually a senior consultant, he’d become, too, like a sort of second father to his own father and — there was really no other phrase for it — had gladdened his father’s heart.

Cardiology, back in his days at medical school, had certainly become the glamour field. Everyone wanted to be a heart surgeon, in spite of the fact that the heart is only an organ like any other. No one gets worked up about a liver or a lung or a lower intestine. Or even perhaps a leg.

He’d held his father very gently, but wanting to hold him as tightly and inseparably as possible. His father had become as puny and as nearly weightless as a boy. He’d seen for a moment that photo, the men with their stumps. And for a moment he’d seen too the map of India as it had once appeared in old school atlases, in the 1950s, blush-red and plumply dangling, not unlike some other familiar shape.