A-Okay

It’s a small garage turned into a clinic. The walls were once white but are now gray and water stained. Nothing on the doctor’s desk except a Panadol promotional calendar, a desk lamp, and a gray rotary phone. The bed’s spokes rise up from the chip tiled floor like hands clawing through a grave. The sheets smell musty. Above the bed, a clock. Tick tock. Tick tock. The long black seconds hand racing along like an adder. Maliha and her friend sit on the two lawn chairs serving as a waiting room.

The doctor shows up an hour late. No apology. Her hair, henna orange, is badly permed. She waves her hands at them, long nailed hands, the red nail polish chipped, beckoning them in front of her desk where she is now seated queen of her realm.

“Are you married?” asks the doctor.
“Huh? Oh yes.” Maliha thrusts forward a hand with a too tight wedding ring.
“How long have you been married?”
“Two years.”
“Where’s your husband?”
“At work.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
“Yes.”
“Is this your sister in law with you?”
“Umm, No.”
“Why not?”
“Umm, because I don’t have one.”
“Mother in law. I presume you have one of those. Where is she?”
“I don’t-”
“Dead,” interrupts Maliha’s friend, “she’s dead.”
“You have to pay me up front, you know,” says the Doctor.
“I know.”
“How long will it take?” Maliha asks.
“Five minutes.”

Maliha thinks: I can stand this for five minutes.

The procedure begins. Maliha’s legs are stirruped. The dai stands by her head and hands the doctor stained instruments. Maliha’s friend holds her hand. Later Maliha will see red welts where she dug in her fingernails, but her friend has never, to this day, complained.

There is no anesthesia. The clamp rips Maliha apart. The suction gauges out her insides. She thinks of childhood. Iodine on fresh knee scrapes. She has become a scrape suspended in searing, stinging solution.

Maliha stares at the clock. Five minutes have long since passed. She says ‘sorry’ a million times a minute to a creature supposedly still only a fingertip long. The doctor pinches her if she screams. Slaps her legs at a whimper.

“Shut up,” the Doctor says, staring down at Maliha from between her legs. “Shut up.”

It takes forty-five minutes. Maliha will go home worried about infection and bleeding to death and, in case of either, how to hide it from her parents, good folk who wouldn’t deserve the scandal at all. When it is over Maliha returns the wedding ring to her friend.

Flash forward ten years. Maliha’s sister. Happily married. Seven kids. The number her sister always wanted but now pregnant again. Definitely doesn’t want an eighth. Sister’s operation is scheduled. Maliha and Mother drive her down to a clinic, gleaming white marble behind a lush green lawn. They watch Sister settle down on an adjustable bed in her VIP room.
The doctor sweeps in. Lovely hair up in a bun.

“Good morning,” Doctor says, “And how’s the patient today?”

“Fine,” says Sister, her diamond studded wedding band contesting the very shimmer of the sun.

“Eager,” says Mother who is tenderly holding Sister’s hand, “to get it over with.”

It’s over within fifteen minutes. Under general anesthesia. Sister emerges groggy, but smelling like a rose.

Unmarried mothers are maligned but a married mother using abortion as birth control society deems A-okay.