On the bed opposite Judith lay a woman with terrible breathing problems. The woman’s eyes stretched wide, permanently alarmed. Oxygen came to her through a mask covering her nose and mouth, while her chest heaved with difficulty. Judith wished her suffering wasn’t within her line of sight. As much as possible, she averted her eyes.
Pulmonary fibrosis. That’s what the poor woman had. Judith overheard the nurses speaking about it on the night the woman was admitted. And thanks to the medical students this morning, the rest of Judith’s day had been filled with dread, the words pulmonary fibrosis entangling her thoughts, and dejecting her spirit.
Dr Soo Ping Chow and her students stood around Judith’s bed earlier, talking about systemic lupus erythematosus - ‘lupus’ for short. An eager medical student, who’d spent an hour chatting with Judith the day before, retold Judith’s medical history with barely a glance at her notebook. Judith listened for corrections but found none. On such ward rounds Judith’s suffering transcended her life. She became live teaching material, a textbook case to be vividly imprinted on students’ imaginations for years to come. It gave her suffering some useful purpose.
When the consultant stepped away to take a phone call at the nurse’s station, a young man, adopting a posture of being in-charge, began to quiz the other students on the causes of pulmonary fibrosis. He spoke with a quiet authority, and as if the matter was abstract and of no immediate concern to the patients around him. After some confident responses and as many feeble ones, the young man tilted his head knowingly, indicating his peers had forgotten an obvious cause. His peers glanced at each other. The eyes of a few wandered to Judith without meeting her eyes. The student standing closest to her searched her face for understanding, before shooting a glare at his colleague.
Judith looked at her uncovered feet, protruding at the end of the hospital bed sheet.
Dr Soo Ping Chow returned, interrupting an awkward silence.
‘Have you been speaking with the patient while I was gone?’ she said, cheerily. ‘Remember not all patients will be as generous and willing to speak with you as Mrs Samad.’ She smiled at Judith.
A petite student with a tentative voice ventured a question, ‘Mrs Samad, have you ever had any breathing problems?’
Judith wanted to escape. She shook her head.
‘Mrs Samad has had enough of us, I think. Any questions for us before we go, Mrs Samad?’
Judith didn’t ask about the risk of becoming the woman with the breathing problems. She shook her head, unable to recompose herself into the engaging patient she had been fifteen minutes earlier. She wanted the students around her to disappear.
Dr Soo Ping Chow and the students thanked her and, as they retreated, she heard the doctor instruct the students to acquaint themselves with the lung conditions associated with systemic lupus erythematosus.
Judith decided to entertain no more medical students for what was left of her stay.
Tracey’s voice interrupted her gloom. Judith’s spirit lifted. You always heard Tracey before you saw her. She was back from the ultrasound department. Outside of visiting hours, Tracey was the one person she had meaningful human contact with.
Tracey wore a thin, pink nightie and she was bra-less as usual. She stood hovering over her food trolley, inspecting her hospital lunch.
‘Nurse!’ called out Tracey, ‘Take the food back! I don’t want it.’
Judith smiled at her friend. The vegetables were overcooked, the fish underseasoned and the coo-coo too slimy. It took determination and courage to face hospital food three times a day. Tracey sat on her hospital bed, swinging her dangling legs, knowing her demands didn’t warrant an immediate response from the staff – and she wasn’t going to get one.
She turned her attention to Judith. ‘How you do, sweetheart?’
Tracey slipped off her perch to join Judith’s bedside, sitting on the padded chair Judith’s visitors occupied at visiting hours.
Across from them, a passing nurse drew curtains along white metal railings to attend to the woman with the pulmonary fibrosis. Judith was grateful.
Tracey told Judith her news. She was to be discharged that day, with a letter to return to the clinic for her ultrasound results. ‘What about you Miss Judy? When you going home to that nice, loving, sexy husband of yours?’
‘Today, insha’Allah. Majeed is coming to collect me today.’
Saying the words out loud brought Judith a burst of happiness that took her by surprise.
Happiness didn’t belong on this miserable hospital ward and neither did she. She could speak and eat now without difficulty, alhamdulillah. She remembered the terror, struggling with words that wouldn’t come out right and heavy limbs that wouldn’t move. The invisible weights that impaired her left leg was lightening now and, insha’Allah, she hoped to make a full recovery.
Tracey clapped her hands. ‘Oh gosh Miss Judy, I so happy for you, eh. Just do dem exercises the physiotherapist give you and you will get strong again, in Jesus name! I will remember you in my prayers.’ Tracey’s eyes shone.
Judith nodded. ‘Ameen. And I will pray for you too.’ The doctors didn’t know what had been wrong with Tracey, who’d declared her readiness to go home days ago. She’d only stayed on because her ultrasound had been delayed - and her doctors suspected she’d never turn up for it later if they discharged her without it.
Tracey grinned. ‘You sure? Don’t forget me, you know.’
A nursing assistant came to remove Tracey’s rejected meal. ‘Anybody could forget you Miss Tracey? Your mouth so big, in everybody business.’
At the nursing station there was a snicker and someone began to cough. It was true. Once Tracey’s fever had subsided and her energy returned, she moved from one bedside to the next, chatting with any woman on the ward well enough to hold a conversation.
‘Who was talking to her?’ Tracey asked Judith, gazing at the nursing assistant incredulously. ‘Talk about pot calling kettle black!’
Judith asked Tracey to locate a wine-coloured photo album from her bedside locker. In it were the wedding anniversary photographs her son-in-law Abbie took a few months ago.
Judith stroked the album cover, absent-mindedly.
‘I want you to see my family,’ Judith said, meeting Tracey’s eyes and opening the album.
Tracey shifted her chair slightly and leaned in for a better view. The first photograph was a picture of Judith and Majeed, embracing like a new couple. ‘Look at Mr and Mrs Samad on the loveseat!’ she squealed with syrupy admiration.
‘Twenty-eight years of marriage,’ said Judith.
Abbie had insisted everyone at the celebration pose with the couple for photographs. By then Judith was exhausted, so she and Majeed sat together on their saffron-coloured thick cushioned loveseat, while their family and friends took turns positioning themselves around them for Abbie’s camera.
Tracey did a wiggly dance on her chair at Majeed leaning over to plant a tender kiss on Judith’s scarred cheek. ‘That is love!’ she declared.
Judith smiled and turned the page.
Tracey continued her running commentary. ‘Your daughters so pretty. One fat and short, and the other one slim like you. But they both good-looking like their parents.’
Judith didn’t think of herself as slim.
She shook her head. ‘The lupus has me dry like this, Tracey.’ She flipped the album pages forward to show Tracey her sisters. ‘See how they have some flesh on them? If it wasn’t for this lupus…’
‘Your husband love you. That’s the important thing.’ Tracey gave her a stern look, which rested comically on her face, as if it didn’t belong there. ‘When you say your prayers Miss Judy, pray for me to get a nice husband like yours.’
On Judith’s bedside locker stood a cluster of Get Well cards. Majeed removed a wilting bouquet of flowers the same day Tracey was admitted to the ward. Tracey had observed Judith’s collection of get well cards growing all week. But nobody had brought her cards or flowers. Nobody came to see her at all.
‘Who’s these two? Your husband parents?’ asked Tracey.
Judith nodded.
Tracey studied the picture. ‘How you does go down with them? Good?’
Judith knew what she was asking.
There was a time when Majeed’s parents didn’t speak with her, refused to visit their son’s home and didn’t welcome her into theirs. But things had improved over the years. Now, she was tolerated, and Daadee, in her twisted way, undoubtedly loved Asiyah, Bilqis and her great-grandchildren. Mr Samad senior had softened too – but he rarely reprimanded Daadee when she dropped provocative, racist remarks as casually as what drops out of a goat’s backside. Both Majeed and her father-in-law ignored Daadee’s racism.
Judith could see Tracey wanted her to say more, to honour her curiosity.
Judith sighed. ‘Majeed’s Pa and Ma are good people. They raised a good man in Majeed. They have one son, no daughters. And in 1965 when Majeed and I married, for black people and Indian people to marry it wasn’t easy, especially down here in the Southland.’
Tracey narrowed her eyes. ‘But you not even black. You like me – mix-up.’ She added, ‘My two grandmothers was Carib and my great-grandfather was a Portuguese.’
Judith spoke softly. ‘To Indian people you either pure Indian or you’re not. And if you have any black in you, unless it don’t show, to them you black.’ Tracey knew this as well as she did.
Bilqis’ husband Abbie was a Nigerian doctor who had settled in Trinidad. On Bilqis and Abbie’s wedding day, Abbie came face-to-face with Daadee’s festering resentments. Daadee looked from Abbie to Bilqis before saying to her granddaughter, ‘All the black men in Trinidad it have to choose from – both African and Indian, you gone quite Africa to get yours! Look at my troubles.’ She turned to an embarrassed Mr Samad senior. ‘We descendants getting blacker and blacker. Soon we wouldn’t be able to see them when night fall.’ She couldn’t bring herself to say, ‘Congratulations.’ Bilqis refused to speak to her grandmother for years after.
But Abbie, forewarned by Bilqis, had taken it with good humour. ‘You will get along well with my mother, Mrs Samad,’ he said to the older woman. ‘When you’re ready to visit Nigeria, I will take you myself.’
Abbie’s Nigerian mother had rejected the opportunity to fly in for her son’s wedding, She was beside herself with fury that her son had left his good Catholic faith to become a Muslim on a little island nobody had ever heard of and nobody could get to. ‘Eji,’ – she never called him by his adopted Muslim name – ‘We have plenty good Igbo women waiting for a good man like yourself but you choose to shame me and the family name instead. I will come to your wedding when you are ready to marry someone worthy of my time.’
Bilqis often complained that Abbie’s mother expected him to call every month, and speak for as long as it pleased her, never mind the overseas bill.
Both Judith and Tracey looked towards the window, though there was nothing to be seen but passing clouds. When their eyes met again Tracey said, ‘It get harder to be a black Muslim after the coup, ent?’
Judith shrugged. ‘Yes, for my daughter up in Tacarigua, yes. She was wearing the hijab before the coup, before 1990 – but since the coup, she only wears it at work.’
Tracey looked confused.
‘She’s working at a Muslim school. She’s a teacher.’
The very last photographs were of Majeed and Judith slow dancing to some Al Green tune after her sisters insisted on at least one dance. The music had lightened Judith’s legs, rolling back the years for a few minutes. Tracey was captivated. A smile spread over her face, her eyes lit. ‘You give me so much hope eh Miss Judy. Love is real.’
Judith closed her eyes, smiling too. ‘You’ve tired me out Tracey. Let me rest now.’
Tracey placed the photo album back in the locker for Judith and looked around for another patient to keep company.
to be continued
Love is real but it can also be damn hard, as Judith well knows after more than twenty-five years of marriage to Majeed. Thankfully, Tracey will be spared the smashing of the idyllic relationship she pictures when she thinks of Judith and her husband. But Judith won’t be so lucky.
And don’t be shy. You can go back a little and meet Nadira too, even before Judith does, starting with Between Us, below.
Note: For readers following these stories as I release them, I’m releasing them between Friday nights/ Saturday mornings, giving you the whole glorious weekend to savour them.
For more about my fiction, reader reviews and my upcoming novel Reputation, please visit my website.
Read more from Call It Anything But Love here on Substack.
Read all of Call It Anything But Love for free by downloading it from BookFunnel.
Allah grant Judith strength when she finds out what her husband been up to.
It amazes me how quickly I have become so invested in your characters.