Jennifer climbed from the black Mercedes sedan that the Queen Victoria Hospital had sent to fetch her from the Amal Palace Hotel. The outdoor temperature was warm but not hot. The anemic morning sun was working hard to penetrate the haze, and it reflected only weakly off the hospital’s mirror-like facade. Jennifer didn’t even need to shelter her eyes as she examined the building. It was five stories tall, and although it was cold and ultramodern, its pleasing combination of copper-colored glass and complementary-colored marble made her admire it to an extent. What made it stand out so sharply was the neighborhood. The ostensibly expensive structure was wedged cheek- to-jowl against the most run-down, white but heavily stained, nondescript concrete commercial block, housing an assortment of small stores selling everything from Pepsi to crude washtubs. The street itself was a mess, potholed and filled with trash of all sorts, along with several cows that were oblivious to the crush of traffic and beeping horns. As Jennifer had expected, the traffic was even worse than it had been the night before. Although there seemed to be fewer of the gaudily painted, beat-up trucks, there were significantly more packed-to-overflowing buses, cycle rickshaws, regular cyclists, pedestrians, and what Jennifer found particularly disturbing, packs of young shoeless children dressed in soiled rags, some deformed, others sick and malnourished, all of whom were dangerously darting between the slow-moving vehicles while begging for coins. As if that wasn’t enough, a few doors down from the hospital on the other side of the street was an empty lot filled with broken pieces of concrete, dirt, rocks, all kinds of rubbish, and even true garbage. Even so, the space was the home of multiple families, their hovels formed by pieces of corrugated metal, cardboard boxes, and scraps of cloth. Adding to the ambience were a number of stray dogs and even a rat.
“I will wait for you here,” said the driver, who’d come around to open the car door for Jennifer. “Do you know how long you will be?”
“I haven’t a clue,” Jennifer responded.
“If I’m not sitting here, please call me on my mobile when you are ready to leave.”
Jennifer agreed to do so, although her attention was focused on the hospital. She didn’t know what to expect and realized her emotions were raw. In place of feeling merely sad about her grandmother’s passing, she was progressively irritated now that she was finally here. Having heard of a second similar death occurring in so many days, she couldn’t help but think the death could have been prevented or at least avoided. She knew it wasn’t a completely rational thought and maybe was more because of her general state of mind, but she felt it anyway. The main problem was that Jennifer was exhausted and more jet-lagged than she had expected she would be. She’d slept poorly if at all.
Then, to make matters worse, her driver had been late, something she was going to learn was an Indian tradition, forcing her to cool her heels in the hotel’s lobby. Fearful that sitting down would cause her to fall asleep, she used the time to inquire about Mrs. Benfatti and whether the woman was staying at the same hotel, which it turned out she was. Jennifer hadn’t necessarily decided to call the woman but wanted to know just the same in case she decided to do so.
Jennifer found the two towering, traditionally costumed, turbaned doormen as imperturbable as the hospital building itself. Each offered a traditional palms-pressed Indian-style greeting before pulling open his respective door, neither spoke nor changed his neutral expression.
The interior of the hospital was markedly over-air-conditioned, as if trying to proclaim the hospital’s luxuriousness by itself, and as modern and rich-looking as the outside. The floors were marble, the walls a highly finished light-colored hardwood, and the furniture a combination of sleek stainless steel and velvet. To the left was a smart coffee shop that could have been in a five-star Western-style hotel.
Unsure of what exactly to do, Jennifer approached the information counter, which looked more like the front desk of a Ritz-Carlton or a Four Seasons than a hospital, especially with the attractive young women dressed in impressive saris, not pink volunteer smocks. One of them had noticed Jennifer’s entrance and, as Jennifer approached, graciously asked if she could be of assistance. Knowing how the harried employees and volunteers of American hospitals acted, Jennifer was already impressed with the institution’s consumer orientation.
The second Jennifer said her name, the receptionist told her that Mrs. Kashmira Varini was expecting her, and that she would let the case manager know that Jennifer had arrived. While the receptionist made the call, Jennifer took in more of the lobby. There was even a cute bookstore and gift shop.
Within moments, Mrs. Varini appeared at the door leading into one of several offices located behind the information counter. She was dressed in a particularly eye-catching sari of exceptional fabric. Jennifer sized her up as she approached. She was slim and somewhat shorter than Jennifer’s five-six-and-a-half, although not markedly so. Her hair and eyes were all significantly darker than Jennifer’s, and she wore her hair up and clasped tightly at the back of her head with a piece of silver jewelry. Although her facial features were generally pleasant, her lips were narrow and would have appeared hard had she not been sporting a beatific smile that Jennifer would later discover to be false. Reaching Jennifer, Kashmira used the typical Indian greeting. “Namaste,” she said.
Although Jennifer felt self-conscious, she returned the greeting.
Kashmira then embarked on the usual socially acceptable questions concerning the trip and how Jennifer liked her room and the hotel, and whether the transportation had been acceptable. Even after such a quick exchange, the smile had essentially disappeared except for a few short, subsequent de rigueur bursts at appropriate junctures.
At that point Kashmira became extremely serious as she conveyed the sympathies of herself, the doctors, and, indeed, the whole hospital staff for Jennifer’s grandmother’s passing. “It was a totally unexpected tragic event,” she added.
“That it was,” Jennifer said, eyeing the woman and experiencing a reburst of the anger she’d felt that morning about the whole affair, not only losing the person closest to her in all the world but also having been dragged away from possibly one of the most important rotations in her entire medical-school career. She knew her pain-in-the-ass father was probably as guilty as anyone for the current situation, but at the moment she leveled it all at Queen Victoria Hospital in general and Kashmira Varini in particular, especially since Jennifer’s immediate impression was that she was conveying less-than-sincere sympathy to boot.
“Tell me,” Kashmira said, totally unaware of Jennifer’s sleep-deprived state of mind, “where should we go to get the unpleasant arrangements business out of the way? We can either go into the coffee shop or into my private office. It’s totally your decision.”
Taking her time, Jennifer looked beyond the information counter at the open door where Kashmira had emerged and then, turning in the opposite direction, glanced into the glass-fronted coffee shop. What made the choice was concern that if she didn’t have another cup of coffee, she might fall asleep. When Jennifer communicated her verdict to Kashmira, the case manager acted quite pleased, which was the cause of one of her brief smiles, since it suggested Jennifer would prove easy to manipulate.
Jennifer did get coffee, though it failed to have much of an impact, and she soon decided it was imperative she get back to the hotel for a nap. As a further explanation of how bad she was feeling, a quick computation told her that had she still been in L.A., she would be soon settling in for the night.
“Mrs. Varini,” Jennifer said, interrupting her host, who was describing the hospital’s lack of mortuary facilities. “I’m very sorry, but I’m finding it hard to concentrate due to lack of sleep, and I’m certainly less capable than normal to make any significant decisions. I’m afraid I’m going to have to return to my room for a few hours of rest.”
“If it’s anyone’s fault, it is mine,” Kashmira said, not particularly convincingly. “I shouldn’t have scheduled things so tightly. But we can make this short. We really only need a simple decision from you, and we can do the rest. We just need to know if you intend to embalm or cremate. Just tell us! We’ll make it happen.”
Jennifer rubbed her eyes and audibly sighed. “I could have done that from L.A.”
“Yes, you could have,” Kashmira agreed.
Jennifer opened her eyes, blinking enough to get the foreign body sensation to disappear, then regarded the expectant Mrs. Varini. “Okay, I need to see my grandmother. That’s why I came.”
“Are you certain?”
“Of course I’m certain!” Jennifer snapped before she could control herself. She hadn’t meant to be quite so demonstrable. “She’s here, isn’t she?”
“She is here for sure. I just wasn’t certain you’d want to see her. It’s been since Monday evening.”
“She’s been in a cooler, hasn’t she?”
“Yes certainly. I just thought maybe a young girl like yourself would not want—”
“I’m twenty-six and a fourth-year medical student,” Jennifer interjected irritably. “I don’t think you have to
