Outlaw in India Read Online Free Page B

without
     actually touching him. I thought that was strange. I wondered if it was because
     the boy’s feet were bare. “I’ll be right out,” I said to him, and I probably
     said it too loudly.
    I changed my money from dollars to rupees and walked out with a fat handful of
     funny-looking money. Some of the bills were large and some small. I stuffed them
     into my pocket, let Hollie out of the tool bag and asked the boy to show me
     where the hospital was. He pointed up the road so I turned and started that way,
     but he lagged behind. When I turned around to see why, he came running up to me
     with something in his hand. I looked. It was one of the large bills. I counted
     the rest of the money and realized that I had dropped it, and he had found it.
     We stared at each other for a moment. He could have just kept it and I would
     never have known.
    “Thank you,” I said. He smiled and his eyes sparkled. I
     remembered once finding a twenty-dollar bill when I was little and giving it to
     my neighbour who had lost it, and she gave me a dollar as a reward. So, I took
     one of the smaller bills and gave it to the boy. “Thank you for your honesty,”
     I said. He took it in his hands and stared at it as if he had never seen money
     before. And as we continued up the road, he never took his eyes away from
     it.
    The hospital was just a small clinic. But they wouldn’t let the boy in. He
     stood at the door with a deeply guilty look on his face, as if he had done
     something wrong. This time I asked why he wasn’t allowed inside. A lady in a
     white uniform tried to explain it to me by writing a word down on a piece of
     paper. She wrote, “Dalit.” “What does it mean?” I asked. She looked at me and
     frowned. She wrote another word underneath the first one. “Untouchable.” Oh.
     That meant he was in the lowest class of India, or even lower than the lowest
     class. I wondered how she knew that. Could she tell just by looking at him? Was
     it because he was barefoot? Because his clothes were shabby? Was it the guilty
     look on his face? That went away when it was just him and me and Hollie.
    So I asked the boy to wait for me again. He agreed. He pulled the bill out of
     his pocket and turned around to examine it again. I followed the lady to an
     examination room where she had me fill out a form asking for my name, age,
     address, passport number and what was wrong with me. I was waiting for her to
     tell me to take Hollie out too once she realizedI was
     carrying a dog on my back, but she didn’t. She clicked her tongue and smiled at
     him through the mesh.
    When the doctor came in, he read the form I had filled out and he clapped his
     hands but I didn’t hear anything. He looked surprised. He opened a drawer,
     pulled out a bag and took a little hammer and tuning fork from it. He put the
     tuning fork close to my ear and hit it with the hammer. I did hear something. “I
     heard that,” I said. “Just a little.” He went to the other side and did it
     again. I thought I heard it but wasn’t sure. He picked up a tool with a light on
     the end of it and stuck it into my ear and looked through it like a periscope.
     He moved it around. That hurt. I could feel his breath on my neck. He went
     around to the other side and did the same thing. Then he wrote down on a sheet
     of paper and showed it to me. “You heard a very loud noise?”
    I said yes, but wasn’t about to tell him that I had been chased by the Indian
     navy and that they had attacked my submarine with depth charges. He wrote
     something else and tore a little sheet off a pad. Then he wrote on the other
     sheet again. “Prescription for steroid drops. Ears are damaged but will heal.
     Put drops in twice a day until gone.”
    “Thank you,” I said. “How long will it take to get better?”
    He raised two fingers, then three, and tossed his head to one side.
    “Two or three days?”
    He shook his head.
    “Weeks?”
    He nodded. Shoot.
    I