1994
“Wow! Look at this!” Jan grins at her friend, “Anna, it’s sooo you.”
She turns back to the computer screen, where the results of the personality test the two friends have spent a bored, rainy winter evening completing for Anna were still displayed, and reads aloud:
“Healer idealists represent just one per cent of the population and are abstract in thought and speech, co-operative in striving for their ends and informative and introverted in their interpersonal relationships.”
She looks intently at Anna over the top of her reading glasses. Anna refuses to react.
“They care deeply – indeed passionately – about a few special persons or a favourite cause and their fervent aim is to bring peace and integrity to their loved ones and the world.
“To understand them we must understand their idealism as almost boundless and selfless, inspiring them to make extraordinary sacrifices for someone or something they believe in. At times their idealism leaves them feeling even more isolated from the rest of humanity.
“They are the prince or princess in the fairytale, the King’s champion or defender of the faith, like Sir Galahad or Joan of Arc.
“They are likely to have a sense of inner division threaded through their lives, which comes from their often-unhappy childhood. While other types usually shrug off parental expectations that do not fit them, healer-idealists do not. Wishing to please their parents but not knowing quite how to they try to hide their differences, believing they are bad to be so fanciful. “
Again she looks meaningfully at Anna, who schools her face to neutrality.
“Others seldom detect this inner turmoil, however, for the struggle between good and evil is within the healer, who does not feel compelled to make the issue public.”
Losing patience, Anna shrugs: “You can’t take those things seriously; they’re just a bit of fun and diversion.”
She can’t express, even to her closest friend and confidante, how or why their seemingly harmless diversion has managed to bring into focus all the hitherto vague feelings of dissatisfaction with where she finds herself as she approached middle age.
“Hmmm, I’m not so sure,” says Jan
“Oh sod it,” Anna gets up from the screen, trying to ignore the thumping pulse beating through every vein in her body prompted by the words on the screen. “Come on, let’s have some tea.”
2004
Meena rubs her aching back as she straightens, lifting the heavy steel pot full of water to set it on her head for the long walk back to the village.
She is in her fifth month of her fifth pregnancy and she does a puja to her favourite deity, Lakshmi, each day, pleading that this time it will be a boy. It’s going to be difficult enough to raise the dowry to get their four daughters decently married and will probably see them in debt for the rest of their lives.
Maybe this time she’ll be lucky. This pregnancy is not like the others. Her belly has swollen much more quickly. Her back aches and the village midwife said this was a sure sign it would be a boy. Meanwhile in the depths of a cold, foggy, north Indian winter, she’s finding it hard to keep going with the daily round of chores that are her duty in the small village in Madhya Pradesh where the family lives.
In the distance, Rajiv is making his way slowly back from his plot of land, where he has been hoeing weeds from between the neat rows of sugar cane. He spots his young wife struggling with the large metal loti at the village pump and hurries across the stony, dry ground towards her. She looks so weary.
He smiles as he joins her, gesturing to take the heavy pot from her.
“Ji nahi, piara,” she says. “Mai thick, I am all right, I can manage. It’s woman’s work.” But he insists on taking the heavy vessel and ignores the amused stares of their neighbours as they make their way back to the small, brick, two-roomed hut with its roof of thatched straw.
Meena smiles secretly to herself and pats the little package hidden in her choli. The midwife had given it to her and told her to put a pinch of the powder it contained into Rajiv’s food daily. It seems to be working as the woman had said it would. He has not beaten her for weeks now and he’s kinder to the children.
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In the grubby, shabby council flat that is their Poplar home in London, Gloria waits apprehensively for Jo’s return after his night at the Dog and Duck.
It will be worse than usual on New Year’s Eve and she wonders whether she’ll lose the few remaining teeth he has not already knocked out of her mouth, or worse, and will be spending the night in Casualty again.
She is too used to it to be able to believe yet that the powders her friend Evie has given her, telling her to put a little in Joe’s meal each day, are having the effect Evie promised.
Gradually, slowly, in mean streets and poor village and in the more comfortable middle-class homes women are beginning to see changes in their lives as the little powders work their magic on otherwise cold and brutal men.
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