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We happened to arrive during Pongal, the local harvest festival, and the roadway was a hair-raising high-speed celebration. At one point, thankfully, things slowed to a crawl as an ox-car race on the highway detoured us onto a stretch of dusty roads deep into the rice paddies and thatched-roof villages of the Tamil Nadu countryside. We paused to watch a circle of dancing women in bright saris singing underneath a tree. Temples rose like ancient magic out of the green fields and at Mahabalipuram stood carved out of granite outcroppings by the seashore, thronged by festive holiday celebrants in turbans, dhotis, and silk saris in endless hues.

Miraculously, Natchatthiraraj (which, he explained, means “Star King”) got us safely to Karaikal and our base camp at the Paris International Hotel by nightfall. Over the next few days we toured the town, including the Vinayaka Hospital, a vast medical teaching college by the beach where for weeks they’ve been bustling, shuffling patients to clear space and acid washing an acre of hospital to whole new sanitary standard. We chatted with the medical director, Dr. Susheela Rajendaran, and a host of staffers toiling to be sure that everything goes without a hitch.

Emile turns out to be a knowledgeable guide and one of the K-town’s best-known and respected citizens. An active member of the Catholic parish, along with his wife, he’s shown us a lot of this former French colony with its shabby, forlorn vestiges of what must have been stunning deco buildings, now overgrown with roots and vines, paint-peeling walls crumbling into yet another failed dream of empire. All that’s left are the red kepis worn by the local cops.

So now we set off in the Toyota with Star King at the wheel and Emile riding shotgun to visit the pending patients and their families. We meet a four-year old boy whose cleft lip underwent a first surgery at a Chennai hospital, but still had a half-dollar-sized hole in his palate. His dad runs a roadside snack business and the family lives by the side of a larger dwelling in a two-room cement-and-thatch afterthought on the outskirts of town. Mom is preparing balls of dough for puri, a deep-fried puff bread. Dad expresses his faith in the Rotaplast team because, he explains with touching innocence, they come from the West, so they must be good.

We meet a family with a four-month old girl who cries piteously when sucking at her mother’s breast because her cleft lip makes latching on a problem. Dad works at a textile mill nine kilometers away and has a brother with a cleft, so there’s something for the Rotaplast geneticist to look into. While the clan is posing for Wayne in the backyard with the family cow, I look around their three-bedroom house. A marble chip mosaic patio is testimony to the pride of house and Grandpa’s masonry skills. The TV in the corner is how they heard about the Rotaplast visit via Subhash’s cable channel.

And then in a house on the main road outside of town there is the shy girl. In her twenties, the girl’s deformed mouth squeezes her words into cartoon talk and the extruding teeth, we’re told, cause people to stare. What friends she has, have to come to see her; she never leaves her home. Her mother says she’s a hard worker around the house, but the contrast between the home’s stark interior and the girl’s intelligent eyes says that there’s a world outside she yearns for.

She dropped out of school at tenth grade, unwilling to bear the pain of people’s stares, and worse – people not looking at her at all. She hopes the upcoming operation performed by the Rotaplast people will allow her to go back to school again. She wants to be a teacher, to stand up facing a front of class of kids who see her as normal and deliver lessons in a normal voice.

She’s got a good chance, Wayne says, ever the optimist. I’m thinking those boxes better make it on the plane today.

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Rex Weiner
Wayne Schoenfeld

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