We are Small People

"I’ll leave the door on the latch
If you ever come back, if you ever come back

There will be a light in the hall and the key under the mat

If you ever come back

There will be a smile on my face and the kettle on

And it will be just like you were never gone

There will be a light in the hall and the key under the mat

If you ever come back, if you ever come back now

If you ever come back, if you ever come back now"

If You Ever Come Back (2010) by The Script

She was a waifish and anaemic creature, and she carried a freakishly distended abdomen which looks like it doesn't belong on her body at all. She is what we refer to as an "unbooked" mother; someone who have not submitted herself for regular checkups during the entire course of her pregnancy and had only turned up when her unborn child insisted on coming out at an inopportune moment in time. I was struck by the impression that to this particular impending mother, no time at all is opportune.

"Unmarried," the nurse informed me in a conspiratorial whisper as I walked into the labour theatre, and what a theatre it was. A show was playing and it's one of life's little tragedies. She was attended to by midwives and their apprentices, and they were suppose to give her encouragement to push. I said "suppose" because what they were doing were not at all encouraging no matter how hard one stretches the definition of the word. They slapped and pinched her when she was slow to comply with their instructions, and sometimes when she wasn't. When they re-position her limbs, the did it with a malicious forcefulness that made me flinch. One midwife in particular was practically punching her in the belly, trying to force the baby out from above. Their words were as sharp and hard as table corners, if table corners could spit demeaning insults into your face. I could tell that they absolutely despise her. I could tell that they think they are better than her, and that she is not deserving of their service. I scanned the floor, searching, because I was certain that I would find the carcass of professionalism lying in a corner somewhere in an advanced stage of decomposition.

Boris Pasternak said, "At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she was abandoned, alone." Those words were hauntingly true in that room that night. Here is a girl weeping in pain and also probably because of many other things. In my mind, I imagined a wide-eyed, trusting romantic who have yet to outgrow fairy stories and happily-ever-afters; a girl who loved without reserve, daring to hold nothing back. I imagined a sociopathic older man who used her and then left her with his bastard growing in her womb. I imagined a pair of parents who are ashamed of their wayward daughter, while frequently and openly showing her just how much. In her immediate community and circle of friends, she had ceased to be human being but is now a cautionary tale and a buttery slice of gossip that goes down well with tea and biscuits.

Now, a roomful of caregivers whose very job is to give her care decided that they rather be her judges, jury and executioners while she's hurting more than she ever hurt from the birthing of an unforgettable reminder of her first real mistake. The human condition has many nadirs, and surely she was in one of them. Utterly abandoned. Utterly alone.

Her accoucheuse conveniently neglected to anaesthetise her sore and torn vagina when she was sewing her up but yet oddlly enough, she felt justified in scolding the girl whenever she yelped and whined in pain with every bite of the needle. Empathy and prejudice has an inverse relationship. The nurse had forgotten that the girl she was attending to is as much a human being as she is - or as recent events suggested; probably even more so. The nurse had forgotten that someday, each and everyone of us will find ourselves in our very own metaphorical labour theatres, utterly abandoned and alone.

She is just seventeen, a child, and already a casualty of circumstances. In our traditional, puritanical Asian country, she is a pariah and a leper; a disgrace to the unearned good name of her family. This is why I have never given a fuck about the mores of society because they have always felt wrongheaded to me. If you ask me, it's the behaviour of the self-righteous, prejudicial bullies who mistreated her which we should repudiate and lapidate instead. Not the victim. Not her.

The girl was later referred to me for a postnatal review and the first thing I did was to apologise to her for how she was treated during one of the most difficult moments of her life. I did it because I felt I owed her that. Then, I asked her if she would like something to drink.

"Yes," she said timorously, and so I went to the pantry to make her a mug of Milo. There are many medicines in the hospital's pharmacopoeia but none is quite as restorative, wholesome or beloved as a hot chocolate drink. That's something they didn't teach us in med school, and I thought that that's a pity. She thanked me for it, and for the first time in her long, cold and cruel night, she smiled.

You know what? That smile made me want to change the world.



Trying to be the difference,
k0k s3n w4i