IndiaPost.com - In our hands: helping India's mothers

My second day at the women's health clinic in Khavda, and I settle into a dusty lawn chair beside the nurse's desk as she cycles through patients. She seems to work with an urgency that suggests if she slows her pace so too will the world pause in revolution.

I listen intently as they share their stories of acidity, fever, and stomach cramps, even though I glean few details from their Kutchi-to me more like the steady but deliberate raindrops thumping against dry earth. It's almost like watching a time-lapse video and my mind shifts into a lower gear. Eventually the hustle and bustle of the clinic begins to slip away with the sun.

Quieter now, I'm sitting in the office alone in the dimming light. I pull out a booklet I brought with me from Ahmedabad. It is about female fertility, sex education, and the reproductive cycle-especially geared toward rural women.

"This will teach me the things I need to know before I can make change here," I thought to myself. What an efficient way to use this down time to prepare for my project. In the very next moment, Parmaben, the head midwife, appears and gestures me into one of the bedrooms.

I walk in behind her rainbowy billows and find Assinaben lying limply on one of the ragged mattresses, an IV invading her thin skin. The gentle bump under her kajari the only hint of the source of her feeble condition.

Her sister, Saraben, stands by the head of the bed beating her dupatta to provide some breeze for Assinaben's sallow face. I stand by the door, wanting more to be a fly on the wall than an object of question. Assinaben tilts her head to the side and dry-heaves, the meager muscles in her neck straining for some relief from the nausea.

I can see the condensation forming on Saraben's forehead as she pumps her arms up and down, Assinaben's wisps of hair awakening and settling rhythmically. Ten minutes pass. Saraben is called away, and so I grab the first thing in my bag-the book I had just been reading-and quietly approach the head of the bed.

As I fan her weakened features, her head moves so subtly to acknowledge my action. We carry on in silence, for minutes, every so often her half-lidded eyes settling on my unfamiliar face. "Is it helping?" I ask her in my rough Kutchi. "Yes, it is helping."

My muscles burn, I but I don't feel tired. I feel useful. Then in one simple flash, I notice the book in my hands, coming in and out of view with each burst of air: Fertility… Sexuality… Rural…Women… Surreal. I was sitting alone, back to the door, reading about women's health and fertility.

Now I'm face-to-face with a woman eight months pregnant, severely dehydrated, anemic, and about to have her seventh child-her life literally being sucked from her loins. And I realize: this is health, fertility, women. Not in the pages of a book.

In the burning, beating of my arms. In the violent waves of nausea. In the slyly smiling women standing on the other side of the room. In the wrinkled brow of the midwife as she adjusts Assinaben's IV.

At the flakes of ceiling paint fluttering down onto yellowing tile. I look down once more to see the three large words printed on the cover of my book: In Our Hands.