Read Online The Narrow Road to Palem by Sharath Komarraju - Free Book Online Page B

of the day. It was only understandable that they met young men from the village now and then, sometimes during the day, sometimes after the day was gone. As long as they took enough ‘care’ not to get ‘physical complications’ from one of their nightly visits, Sister Agnes did not care. She had once even pretended not to notice one of her wards paying a covert visit to the big hospital in Dhavaleshwaram with a hundred-rupee note tucked under her blouse.
    The figure had come closer now, into sharper view. Once or twice she stopped and turned around to glance at the tar road that came out of Palem. The women’s wellness centre stood on a dry plot of land behind two paddy fields in which Sister Agnes had never seen sign of crop, and which were now being taken over by rather large tufts of greenish yellow bushes. Between the two fields a path wove its way from the centre’s entrance, connecting it to the Palem main road. It was on the fag end of this path that the woman stopped and hesitated.
    Sister Agnes cleaned her glasses with the edge of her tunic and slid them on. Now she saw that the approaching woman was not really a woman but an overgrown girl. While her chest and hips looked like those of a woman nearing twenty, the freckles on the cheeks, the frazzled hair, the pimples on the forehead, and the callous disproportion of her nose with respect to other parts of her face – all hinted at a girl of thirteen. A sudden wave of tenderness washed over Sister Agnes. Yes, she thought, she could guess what a girl like this would have gone through in a village like Palem. It was for women such as this that the church of Dhavaleshwaram had set up the wellness centre. Father Abraham had once said to her that Palem ‘needed cleansing’. Sister Agnes had not had the need to ask what he meant by that.
    It was not an easy place to live, even for nuns. The centre was set up in an old barnyard bought off a farmer whose fields nearby had stopped yielding. The asbestos roof made Palem’s already dry and hot weather unbearable, and when it rained water seeped in through the termite-infested wood and made the interior a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The window panes were half-broken. Food, water and habitation were at least two kilometers away whichever direction one looked. This was why Father Abraham had asked the nuns at his church to rotate shifts at the centre so that no one person needed to stay there for longer than a month. This was Sister Agnes’s third week.
    For a fleeting moment she tasted the cool, pure water of the church-tap at Dhavaleshwaram, and felt it slide down her throat. She thought of the fragrance-sprayed pulpit where she said her daily prayers, the finely made bed on which she would sleep in a week, the steaming hot Idli-sambaar the hotel boy opposite brought for her every morning; she missed even Father Abraham’s disapproving frown, the kind he wore whenever he saw one of the new girls giggling at mass.
    She suppressed a smile, then quietly chided herself. She knew that the church was actively trying to get a foothold within the boundaries of the village, and this rotation business was only temporary – until Father Abraham negotiated the terms with the village elders to set up a permanent centre there. Maybe then the church could take some proactive steps; try and get at the disease rather than limply offering shelter to the victims. Palem certainly needed cleansing; Father Abraham was right. The last time she had gone back to the church he had given her a bundle of papers to read when she was in Palem. He had said reading it would give her a ‘better understanding of the Palem affair’. She crinkled her nose; with all the experience she’d had with the girls, did she need any more understanding? 
    She craned her neck. The girl had come to the door and pushed it open. Sister Agnes had expected to see a timid face peering out from behind the door, but the girl stood with her legs apart, her