The Lamp Carrier

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Drönma, Thando, their patients and their ambulance station are invented. Cape Town, its lighthouse and its unfinished bridge are real, and what is said about them, about ambulance work and about the prayer comes from the sources listed below.

Nine shifts

Thando Mlambo had been on the ambulances for nine shifts, and he had counted every one. He was twenty-three, newly qualified, and his boots were so new they squeaked on the station floor.

His partner was Drönma Tsering, twelve years on the ambulances. She was small and quick, with one grey streak in her black plait and a torch that lived in her top pocket. She had grown up in one of the Tibetan settlements around Pokhara, in Nepal, come to Cape Town at nineteen to study emergency care, and stayed.

“Nervous?” she asked, checking the oxygen.

“No,” said Thando.

“Good,” said Drönma. “I am. Every time. It keeps you awake.”

Twenty seconds

The first call came at half past eight. Thando had his hand on the key when he saw that Drönma had closed her eyes.

Her lips were moving: a murmur under the crackle of the radio, low and even, with a small lift near the end. It took about twenty seconds. Then she opened her eyes, said “Okay,” and they went.

He thought it might be a one-off. But she did it before the second call, and the third: the same murmur, the same twenty seconds, the same “Okay.” He did not ask. You don't, in your second week.

Sea Point

The first patient was Mr Isaacs, eighty-six, a retired Kalk Bay fisherman who had slipped in his bathroom and sat on the cold tiles for two hours, too proud to press the alarm round his neck. He was cross and shivering, and, as far as Drönma could find, not hurt.

They lifted him together, the way Thando had practised on dummies, and it was nothing like the dummies. Mr Isaacs was light and shaky and smelled of soap. He held on to Thando's arm all the way to his chair, and then would not let go of it. Thando let him keep it.

Drönma checked him over carefully. Then she crouched by his chair, asked about the little blue fishing boat in the painting on the wall, and listened as if she had nowhere else to be.

“You listened to him for ages,” said Thando in the cab.

“Three minutes,” said Drönma. “It only feels like ages to the one being listened to. That's the point.”

Woodstock

Before the next call, the murmur again. Twenty seconds. “Okay.”

The house was a narrow Victorian terrace in Woodstock, under the dark shoulder of Devil's Peak. The patient was Amira, who was seven and sitting bolt upright on the kitchen table, shoulders up round her ears, working hard for every breath. Asthma. Her mother had given her the inhaler twice, and it had not been enough.

Within a minute Drönma had a mask on her, with medicine misting into it. Thando's job was to kneel at eye level and keep Amira looking at him instead of at her mother's frightened face. So he told her the mask made her look like an astronaut, and that astronauts breathe slowly on purpose, because there isn't much air in space. She said that wasn't true. He said it was a bit true.

Slowly her shoulders came down. By the time they carried her out to the ambulance she was arguing about astronauts in whole sentences, which Drönma said was the best sign there is. At the hospital they left her pink, cross and breathing.

Gugulethu

At ten to two they were sent to a small house in Gugulethu, a township on the Cape Flats whose name, in isiXhosa, means “our pride”. Mama Nosisa was ninety-one and had been ill for a long time. Her doctor had written down that she wished to stay at home, with nothing done to hold her back at the end. Tonight her breathing had changed, and her frightened daughter had phoned.

Drönma said the prayer in the cab, as always. Inside, she knelt by the bed and took the old woman's hand. She read the doctor's letter twice and spoke quietly with the daughter. Then she said to Thando, “Take the boy outside. Check the ambulance is locked.”

It was already locked. Thando understood a moment later, and took the grandson, Lwazi, who was twelve, out to the front step.

The wind had dropped. Lwazi asked whether Thando had ever seen anyone die. Thando said, truthfully, not yet. “Me neither,” said Lwazi, and they sat with that. Then they talked about football in isiXhosa, which is what you talk about when you are twelve and twenty-three and frightened.

When the daughter came to the door, they knew. Inside, Mama Nosisa lay very still, her daughter's hand around hers. Drönma was kneeling where she had been, her head a little bowed. Nobody had hurried anything. After a while the family sang a hymn softly, one Thando's grandmother used to sing. Drönma stood by the wall, hands folded, until they finished.

They stayed while the calls that have to be made were made. Then they left.

In the cab Thando's hands were shaking. Drönma passed him a bottle of water and said nothing for a while, which helped more than anything she could have said.

Then the radio went again. She closed her eyes, and he heard the murmur, and understood that she said it this time too: after a death, before a stranger, the same twenty seconds. “Okay,” she said.

The bridge

The last call of the night was on the Foreshore, under the unfinished freeway bridge, whose two great concrete decks have stopped in mid-air since 1977 and never met. A security guard, Mr Petersen, sat on the kerb by his hut with a hand on his chest, sure it was his heart.

Drönma checked it properly, with the monitor, and it was steady. “I think,” she said gently, “your body got frightened before you did.”

Thando sat down on the kerb beside him. Before exams, he said, his chest used to do exactly this. He showed him the count he had taught himself: in for four, out for six. They breathed together under the bridge until Mr Petersen's shoulders came down, as Amira's had. They took him in to be checked anyway, because chest pain is not something you guess about.

Mouille Point

At half past five, handovers done, Drönma bought two coffees and told Thando to drive to Mouille Point. They parked by the Green Point lighthouse, a square tower in red and white diagonal bands, first lit in 1824 and the oldest working lighthouse in the country.

Every ten seconds its white flash went out over the water. Behind them the southeaster was pulling its white tablecloth of cloud over Table Mountain.

“You want to know what I'm saying,” said Drönma. “Before the calls.”

Thando said he hadn't wanted to ask.

It was a prayer, she said: the Seven-Line Prayer to Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century teacher also called Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born, whom Tibetans remember for helping the Buddha's teaching take root in their country. Her grandmother had taught it to her in Pokhara. Seven short lines: where he came from, his birth in a lotus, what he attained, his name, the great company of dakinis around him (female figures of wisdom), the wish to follow in his footsteps. “And the last line asks him to come.”

“All night,” she said, “people ask us to come. So before I go, I ask too. That's all.”

Thando was thinking of Mama Nosisa. “Does it help them?”

Drönma shook her head. “Not like that. It doesn't save anybody. Mama Nosisa died at home, holding her daughter's hand, the way she wanted. The prayer didn't do that. Her family did.”

“Then what's it for?”

She watched the lighthouse for a while. “For me. Twenty seconds to stop. To remember that whoever is behind the door is a person, not a job, and to be kind, even at four in the morning, even when they shout. In Tibetan we say nyingjé: kindness, warmth and compassion in one word. For me Guru Rinpoche is someone who never forgot it. So I ask him to come, and then I go in and try not to forget it either.”

Thando asked what her name meant. She laughed. “Drönma? Lamp. Or torch.” She tapped the one in her pocket. “My grandmother said torch. Better for this job.”

The sun came up over the city, and the lighthouse went dark. “It doesn't steer the ships,” said Drönma. “It just stays lit, so they can find their own way in.”

The second night

Thando did not take up the prayer. He had his grandmother's hymns, and Drönma told him to keep them.

But the next evening, when the first call came, he put his hand on the key and waited. Drönma looked at him.

“Go on,” he said.

So she closed her eyes, and he counted his own breath, in for four, out for six. The twenty seconds passed between them, about two flashes of a lighthouse long. “Okay,” she said, and they went.