The Night Nurse

One hot, humid night in southern India many years ago, a night nurse lifted the mosquito netting around my bed and stepped inside, letting the net fall back into place behind her. She whispered, “Are you awake?”

I said yes. Her dark brown face was inches from mine. At first, all I could see were the whites of her eyes and teeth. I felt her breath falling softly against my skin, which was feverish and wet. She felt like a fresh breeze in the heavy tropical night.

As my eyes adjusted to the faint light in the room, I gradually became aware that she was patiently and systematically capturing the mosquitos flying around inside my netting one by one. This was a laborious process; often she would miss the insect on her first try but would persist until she succeeded. Whenever she caught one, she would carefully lift the net and allow it to fly off free into the night.

I thought I might be dreaming or hallucinating — both of which occurred at that time in that place — but this was real. She kept at it until every last insect had been freed from threatening me, a pale six-foot-tall young man whose weight had plummeted down to 97 pounds as I was battling a combination of typhoid fever and salmonella.

During the weeks of our nightly meetings under the mosquito netting, I grew to depend on her visits. I also was slowly recovering my strength until I could be released from the hospital. As I got to know the day nurses who had brought me back from the near-dead, I discovered the reason why the night nurse was assigned to that shift.

She had suffered from a disfiguring case of smallpox as a child, resulting in a bad scarring of her face.

By my last night in the hospital, I was no longer sweating my fluids away, so when she came to check on me her breath felt warm. “You will be going,” she whispered. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, and thank you,” I whispered back. “I think you are the most beautiful nurse of all.”

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