First day in the obstetrics wards. It’s both sunnier and smellier than you’d expect. The smell never fails to disturb me. It’s a smell compounded of that of the lochia, the secretion from the uterus of a woman who has just given birth, and the clean, new baby smell. It’s fishy and metallic, blunt and sharp, female but not feminine.

There’s a girl from Switzerland with us, doing part of her internship in our hospital. She’s doing the class with us. We have a case, Mrs. Ratna Something or the other. They insist that we say the ‘Mrs.’ She’s got thin arms, a small oval face and a startlingly big abdomen.
Nobody wanted to take the history, so I started. She just turned twenty. I’m surprised. Shaky, and A and S and I all look years younger than her, and we’re at least two-three years older. Next to her is a battered cell phone. It beeps, flashing ‘Low battery.’ She doesn’t react. She probably can’t read it.
But she’s done everything right. Smart girl. Went to the Health centre at twelve weeks, and after that went every month. She’s had all the medicines she was given. She doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink. Has no complication. This is her first pregnancy, she’s 9 months pregnant.
The professor comes. She is a small woman with hunched shoulders. She looks like the most civil vulture you’re ever likely to see. She is the kind who talks a lot about the idyllic village life. “Have you ever seen a newborn calf?’ she asked us once. I felt like saying I’ve seen newborn elephants, newborn alligators and newborn spiders on National Geographic. That’s life plus, man, there’s no dung, no mud, no frightened mother, no amniotic fluid.
Mrs. Ratna was referred to our hospital when the doctor from the primary health centre thought her baby was too small. She says they told her that her water dried up, and her baby’s too small.
The professor asks, “What is that?”
I say, “Oligohydramnios, with Intra-uterine Growth Retardation.”
“No.” She says. “You?” she asks Shaky.
“Oligohydramnios, with Intra Uterine Growth Restriction.”
“That’s right,” she says. “That’s the new term,” she says to me. “It was changed.”
“I didn’t get the memo,” I feel like saying.
All this time, we’re grouped at the head of the bed, and Mrs. Ratna sits in the middle, with her back arched forward, like she’s protecting her abdomen from us. Silly girl. As if she could.
“She has been having iron, and calcium, but she hasn’t had any folate,” The professor tells us. “And what could that cause, Sarah?” Sarah from Switzerland doesn’t know. Neither does Basabi from Budge-budge, or Sourav from Some Suburb of Calcutta.
“Neural tube defects like anencephaly and spina bifida, with associated polyhydramnios.” I say, when she asks me.
“Right. But there is also a statistical association with oligohydramnios, and obviously, Intra-uterine Growth restriction and fetal death.”
And she starts in on the etiology of oligohydramnios. I doodle on my pad and look at the top of Mrs. Ratna’s head, and hum.
At the end she says, “It’s strange that the doctor from the PHC prescribed Iron and Calcium, but not the folic acid. He must have forgotten.”
The phone beeps again in counterpoint to her voice. ‘Low Battery’ it says.
Mrs. Ratna is crying when we leave. Her husband was supposed to come in the morning, but he still isn’t here. I hope he hasn’t forgotten.