This is Aquilus. See Aquilus sit. Sit, Aquilus, sit.

I’m standing next to Shaky in the Ob/Gyn Out Patient Department. The OPD is crowded, as always. There are pregnant women, women in pain, and women with cancer; sometimes all at once. I’m never happy to be in the gynae wards. It’s crowded, and loud, but you always feel on edge, like there is a breathless, expectant hush underneath all that noise. Too many people are desperately unhappy here.

Meet Aquilus, uneasy amidst disease.

A young girl comes in, she is fourteen. Not the nubile fourteen of Humbert Humbert’s dreams, she is a thin, sullen, sad fourteen. There is a distinct smell, an unwashed smell, which hovers on the verge of offensive. She is wearing some sort of caftan, in bright blue, of some sort of synthetic material. This is obviously her best dress, but there is blood on it around her crotch.

This is Aquilus, wrinkling his nose.

So we take the short history we’re supposed to. She started bleeding the day before yesterday. No, she hadn’t menstruated ever before. No, she doesn’t live at home, but on the Sealdah platform. Yes, her abba knows, she lives with her abba. She has two abbas, one in the village and one on the platform. Yes, she ran away from home, she didn’t like her stepmother.

Meet Aquilus, king of the two minute interview, monarch of talk show hosts everywhere.

The professor comes toward us. “Taken the history? What is your case?”

We’re all mystified. “Ma’am, she’s having her menarche,” Someone ventured.

The professor takes a quick look inside her vagina with a speculum. “Hm,” she says. “Did you ask if she is married?”

No one had. It wasn’t relevant, she was fourteen. “No, no, she isn’t,” someone mutters. We ask her if she is married as she sits up, almost jocularly. She doesn’t say anything. The professor cups her chin and lifts her face.

Tears spill from the angles of her eyes. Yes, she is married. She is married; her abba married her off a month ago. Her husband is a rickshaw-puller, like her abba.

“She has had a missed abortion. There is a product of conception hanging out of her uterus through the cervix. Do you notice the smell? The dead tissue is infected. This girl has conceived with her first ovulation.”

She is pregnant before she has had her first period.

Cut to Aquilus, sickened and appalled.

***

After the girl has left, we have a small lecture on missed abortions. The professor asks me to go and fetch the girl again so she can be admitted, and to see if her husband is here.

“Are we going to inform the police, ma’am?” I ask.

The professor makes a face.

“Statutory rape, ma’am,” I prompt. “The marriage, if indeed it exists, is illegal. We must inform the police.”

The professor looks at me. “Well,” she says. “See, if we scare her husband off, the girl is not going to be treated. So let’s just play along and admit her. After that, I’ll talk to the Head and see what he says, okay? Go fetch her, but don’t scare off her husband. Who knows if he is her husband or her pimp?”

I go to fetch her, and there is a middle aged man sitting next to her, grey in his hair, betel stained teeth, stringy and rawboned. I ask her to come back with me. The man looks at me. I am thinking, what should I do if he bolts? So I look back at him and smile. He sits back.

Here is Aquilus, smiling at a fourteen year old’s rapist.

***

The girl is shuffling out of the consulting room, her prescription and admission papers clutched in her hand, when the ayah calls to her, and hands her a ball of cotton soaked in antiseptic solution. She motions to the table. There’s a dark drop of blood glistening on the table. The ayah won’t wipe up the blood of a girl who lives on the Sealdah platform, she’s scared of HIV. The girl shuffles back to the table.

Fade out on Aquilus, stepping out of her way.