by NISHA SUSAN
In February 2011, bodies of anti-Gaddafi protesters piled up in Tripoli hospital mortuaries, then spilt out in heaps into the corridors, onto empty table tops. A few days later came the stories of Libyan soldiers invading hospitals and ripping off patients’ oxygen masks, the wires connected to their monitors,their drips, their tubes, and taking them away.
Of the 18,000 Indians in Libya at the time, news reports say the majority were young Malayali nurses bandaging and swabbing the civil war. When the Indian government began evacuation of its citizens from Libya, many of these nurses were surprisingly reluctant to leave. Repatriated and living temporarily in Delhi, they roamed around Kerala House like ghosts wondering whether they’d had made a mistake. They talked about the loans they had taken for their courses, the fact that even big city hospitals in India think nothing of making a nurse work 65 hour weeks for Rs 3000 per month, their parents in rural Kerala. Who’d argue with them? By now, many of them are back in Libya.
You can put the Malayali nurse in the old teashop-on-the-moon comic scenario and the joke would still work. She is everywhere. She is rattling in a second-hand Japanese car, driving 150 km from Jebel Akdhar to Muscat to do her weekly shopping. She is all five of the thin, young women hovering behind and managing the mercurial, bejewelled Sardar doctor who looks outraged that he’s stuck in this dreary Bombay clinic. She is speaking German fluently in Cologne and struggling with English as she begins the process of emigration to the US. She is standing in INA market in Delhi with her friend, under a big sign proclaiming in Malayalam ‘Saudi nurse uniform thaiyar’. She is throwing on a hijab as she leaves her Jeddah home. She is the nurse in Delhi who was fired for speaking Malayalam in the lift when she asked her off-duty pal, “Pallil ponno?” She is also the nursing superintendent who fired her. She is the one who made everyone laugh at the idea of a nurse not speaking Malayalam.
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