Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies
Stories
By John Murray
Rebound by Sagebrush
Copyright © 2004
John Murray
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781417700950
Chapter One
The Hill Station
On the first morning of the training in Bombay, just minutes before
she collapsed, Elizabeth Dinakar stood in front of two hundred
people in the conference hall, pointed up at the cholera bacteria
magnified on the wall in front of her, and said "This is your
enemy." The room was long and stuffy, with peeling walls and
rattling air conditioners. People coughed and shuffled papers. The
bacteria were the size of cars. Elizabeth Dinakar was tall and thin
with thick black eyebrows. Her hair was pulled away from her face
and held in a bun at the back of her head. She wore a silk shirt and
khaki skirt, flat-soled shoes, and no makeup.
She talked slowly and illustrated everything she said with graphs
and photographs. "Every child has five to seven episodes of diarrhea
a year," she said, "and that is a great ocean of diarrhea. People
are floating on it." She spoke as if she were reading, had a
familiarity with the organisms that cause infectious diarrhea that
was precise and detailed. She saw a beauty in the microscopic world
that she knew others could not understand. She took it personally.
As she spoke she tapped a wooden pointer against the floor. Beads of
perspiration ran down her back. At the other end of the room, two
stainless-steel tea urns sat on tables covered with white
tablecloths. During breaks, the tea was poured into thick British
Civil Service cups on saucers, and that morning she had looked over
the rim of her teacup out into modern India, framed by the doors,
noisy and glaring in the sun.
Blood drained from Elizabeth Dinakar's face and she felt
light-headed. She had begun with a discussion of cholera, a disease
with its origins along the Bay of Bengal that had ravaged
white-limbed British soldiers in Calcutta. Cholera is one of India's
great legacies to the world, she said, something that has struck
fear into the hearts of men. She flashed a slide of a
nineteenth-century lithograph depicting the specter of cholera
hanging over New York City like the Grim Reaper. People at the back
of the room laughed a little at this image, and Elizabeth said that
it was astonishing how far they had come in just a few years; now
cholera could be pinned down in the laboratory with culture,
biochemistry, and antibodies. All the mystery has gone, she said,
and as she spoke her voice seemed to become fainter to her, muffled,
as if it were speaking from a distance. It is a conquest, she said,
a conquest orchestrated by microbiologists working systematically,
using solid bench science. She wondered if she sounded melodramatic,
although she believed that it was dramatic; the triumph over cholera
represented a triumph of the scientific method over chaos.
She stopped talking and let the pointer slip from her fingers. She
turned her back to the audience. It crossed her mind that she was
going to die. On the wall above her was a large Bakelite clock with
a round white face and huge hands that had the appearance of
sharpened harpoons. She stared up at the clock. As she lost
consciousness, she saw herself as a little girl watching her father
shoveling snow. She felt ice crystals on her cheeks, smelled
cigarette smoke, and for an instant heard her father speaking to
her. Then she fell to the floor.
A private American foundation was paying Elizabeth Dinakar to train
local doctors in the principles of microbiology. She was forty years
old. She had made a modest name for herself in the infectious
diarrheas, studying enteric organisms that ravaged the gut. At the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she had taken charge of
the enteric laboratory and now ran it as an international reference
center. On her fortieth birthday she wrote "Your shit is my bread
and butter" in large letters on a piece of computer paper and stuck
it to her door. Her birthday made her feel unaccountably optimistic
- as if she were weightless. Nothing seemed solid. Others saw her
as serious and rational, she knew. Forty years old and unmarried.
Cold. She felt so different from the way she appeared that it was
inexplicable to her.
A photograph of the Eschericia coli, many times life size, grainy
and oval shaped, transmitted in apple cider from New England and the
cause of many hundreds of cases of bloody diarrhea, sat above her
desk in a thin wooden frame. She did detailed work alone at cool
laboratory benches. The specimens came to her from all over the
world, although before this trip to Bombay, she had never been to
Asia or Africa. When she saw the cholera Vibrio, she imagined
herself on the island of Celebes in Indonesia, the origin of the
seventh pandemic, floating on a colorful reef, smelling sea salt and
green bananas. Her thesis, on the Shigella strains causing dysentery
in Africa, made her think of salty goat butter in tiny cups of acrid
Ethiopian coffee, the bottomless waters of Lakes Victoria and
Tanganyika, humming with Nile perch, and tall lean men walking in
low scrub with hardwood staves.
She opened her eyes and for a few seconds did not know where she
was. A group of men from the front row had her by the shoulders and
ankles and were carrying her out of the conference hall. The men
wore cotton suits and monogrammed ties, smelled like fruity
aftershave, and were all talking at once. They had shiny faces. They
carried her outside and laid her on a wooden bench under a row of
mango trees. It was cooler under the trees and dappled sunlight came
through the leaves. She blinked and tried to sit up, but they held
her by the shoulders.
Raj Singh, who worked for the NGO in Bombay that was organizing the
training, knelt on the ground beside her and put two fingers on her
wrist ...
Continues...
Excerpted from Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies
by John Murray
Copyright © 2004 by John Murray.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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