She Was Always There

This is not the story of a superhero; nor is it a tale of valor and bravery. It is the story of a woman who wouldn't think twice about sucking snot out of a choking baby's nostrils with her mouth every though the child was not her own. Her name is Suganthi, and I was that baby.

The Day I Nearly Died

On September 2, 1975, I had congestion in my upper respiratory system. I was exactly two months old and already diagnosed with infantile asthma. Two days before, I had caught a cold and the phlegm was building up. My mother wanted to take me to the hospital but her neighbors brushed it off as “just a cold” and told her “it’ll go away.” It didn’t.

As the congestion worsened, my nostrils blocked up and I was struggling to breathe through my mouth. I was wheezing and coughing with the sheer effort of inhaling and exhaling. It was the middle of the night and there were no hospitals nearby. My mother was desperate. As my breathing became shallower, she watched helplessly.

That's when our housemaid, Suganthi, stepped in. She knew a little about home remedies and told my mother that the only way for me to get relief was to remove the coagulated mucus from my nasal passage. She said that her cousin went through the same thing in her village a few years ago, and the local healer had used some kind of home-made gadget with a hand pump and a rubber hose to clear the passage.

But how were they going to get something like that? We didn't have the necessary medical equipment and there was no doctor within miles of home. Neither we nor any of our neighbors had a car. The situation seemed impossible, and my mother was sure I would die that night.

Seeing the resigned look on my mother’s face, Suganthi swung into action. She cupped her mouth on my nostrils, made sure my mouth was open, and she sucked hard, spitting out the mucus as it came out. She repeated it several times until I could breathe normally again.

Through all this - although it was only a minute or two - my mother stood motionless, barely breathing. She herself would never have been able to bring herself to do it, a fact she admitted to me thirty years later when she told me about the day I nearly died.

This simple woman had done something that would have sent most of us into immediate emetic convulsions just thinking about it. Can you imagine sucking out mucus from someone’s nose with your mouth?

So, why did she do it?

A Soul in Servitude

Rewind twenty years. Suganthi, aged 7, lives in a shack along the National Highway near the South Indian city of Cuddalore. A cement truck loses control and rams into the shack one evening, killing her entire family. Suganthi was somehow meant to live, and I know why.

My grandparents were preachers in Cuddalore at that time, at the same church where Suganthi's family were members. They took her into their home and gave her food, clothing, and shelter. But I don't believe they did it out of compassion any more than out of a desire to please the parish. They constantly held it over her head. She was always treated as "the girl", a non-human entity meant to do housework and little else. She did everything around the house, eventually even taking over the cooking from my grandmother.

Naturally, my mother and her siblings, not knowing any better and not wanting to know any better, treated her just as their parents did - like a free laborer. She wasn't sent to the nice Christian schools that they went to; she didn't get the fancy clothes they got at Christmas; she didn't even sit at the same table. In fact, you could say that she was considered to be nothing more than a home appliance designed to be ordered about like a slave machine.

But you know something? In all the stories I've heard about her and from the little that I know of her myself, she NEVER EVER complained about being there for everyone. She sacrificed EVERYTHING for my family, the ungrateful family that never saw her has one of their own. She, on the other hand, was grateful every single day of her life that they had taken her in and given her a home. She was so grateful, in fact, that she didn't even think to realize that she was being treated like a servant. She just knew she wanted to serve.

And at that moment on September 2, 1975, she knew exactly what she had to do. Later, she told my mother that she wasn’t even thinking about what she did. She just knew what needed to be done so I would live through the night, live to become a man.

I am now approaching my 45th birthday. Suganthi still lives in Cuddalore. We rarely meet except for family gatherings and special occasions. She’s never spoken to me about what happened that day. Everything I know about the incident, I learned from my mother many years ago. I’ve never brought up the subject with Suganthi, but she knows that I know. And for her, that seems to be enough. Not once has she asked for a favor or money or anything else, even when her own children were in need. I would give her my last penny and my last breath if she ever asks for them. She never has and she never will.

I have never met anyone like her in my life and will probably never have the privilege to ever know someone like her again.

We all know people who'll do anything for you as long as you have something they want. Even those that seem charitable on the outside only do it because they can feel good about it. That was the big difference between her and, to be honest, anyone else I've known my entire life - the same life she saved on that fateful day in 1975. She didn’t do it because she would get something out of it. She simply did it because something inside her told her to do it - unquestioningly, and with zero expectations.

To Suganthi, I say this: You were there for me just as you were there for three generations of my family. You were always there. But we were never there for you. I'm deeply ashamed of it, and I am sorry.