Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

Missing had felt familiar when she first arrived there, not unlike the Government General Hospital in India, but on a much smaller scale: people waiting in line, the families camping out under trees, waiting with the infinite patience of those who have little choice but to wait. Shed been kept busy from her first day. If the truth be known, she secretly relished the emergencies, the situations where her heart was in her mouth, where the seconds ticked off, where a mother's life hung in the balance, or a baby in the womb, deprived of oxygen, needed a heroic rescue. In those moments she did not have existential doubts. Life became sharply focused, meaningful just when she wasn't thinking of meaning. A mother, a wife, a daughter, was suddenly none of these things, boiled down to a human being in great danger. Hema herself was reduced to the instrument required to treat them.

But of late she felt the huge remove between her practice in Africa and the frontiers of scientific medicine epitomized by England and America. C. Walton Lillehei in Minneapolis had just that year begun an era of heart surgery by finding a way to pump blood while the heart was stopped. A vaccine for polio had been developed, though it had yet to make its way to Africa. At Harvard in Massachusetts, a Dr. Joseph Murray had performed the first successful human kidney transplant from one sibling to another. The picture of him in Time showed an ordinary-looking chap, unpretentious. The portrait had surprised Hema, made her imagine that such discoveries were within every doctor's reach, within her reach.

She'd always loved the story of Pasteur's discovery of microbes, or Lister's experiments with antisepsis. Every Indian schoolchild dreamed of being like Sir C. V. Raman, whose simple experiments with light led to a Nobel Prize. But now she lived in a country that few people could find on the map. (“The Horn of Africa, on the upper half, on the eastern coast—the part that looks like a rhino's head and points at India,” she'd explain.) And fewer still knew of Emperor Haile Selassie, or if they remembered him for being Time magazine's Man of the Year in 1935, they didn't remember the country whose cause he pleaded at the League of Nations.

If asked, Hema would have said, Yes, I'm doing what I intended to do; I'm satisfied. But what else could one say? When she read her Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics (each month's volume arriving by sea mail weeks after publication, bruised and stained in its brown wrapping), the innovations read like fiction. It was exciting yet deflating, because it was already old news. She told herself that her work, her yeoman contribution in Africa, was somehow connected to the advances described in SG&O. But in her heart she knew that it wasn't.

A NEW SOUND REGISTERED. It was the scrape and rattle of wood on metal. The tail of the plane was packed with two giant wooden crates and stacks of smaller square tea chests, banded with tin strips stamped LONGLEITH ESTATES, S. INDIA. Netting hooked to skeletal struts restrained the cargo from falling on the passengers, but not from sliding around. Her feet and those of her fellow passengers rested on bulging jute sacks. Fading military logos were stenciled on the floor and on the silver fuselage. American troops in North Africa once sat here and contemplated their fate. Patton himself perhaps sat on this plane. Or perhaps this was a relic from the French colonies in Somalia and Djibouti. The carrying of passengers felt like an afterthought for this new airline with its hand-me-down planes and ancient pilots. She could see the pilot arguing into the microphone, gesticulating, pausing to listen to the reply, then barking again. The passengers who were close to the cockpit frowned.

Once again Hema craned her neck to see if her crate with the Grundig was visible, but it wasn't. Every time she thought about her extravagant purchase she felt a pang of guilt. But buying the radio-cum–record player had made the night she spent in Aden almost tolerable. A city built on top of a dormant volcanic crater, hell on earth, that was Aden, but at least it was duty-free. Oh yes, and Rimbaud had once lived there—and never wrote another line of poetry.

Shed picked out the spot for the Grundig in her living room. Most definitely it would have to be under the framed black-and-white print of Gandhi spinning cotton. Shed have to hunt for a quieter location for the Mahatma.

She imagined Ghosh nursing his brandy, and Matron, Thomas Stone, and Sister Mary Joseph Praise drinking sherry or coffee. She pictured Ghosh leaping to his feet as the dazzling opening chords of “Take the ‘A’ Train” poured from the Grundig. Then came the cheeky melody—the last tune in the world that youd have predicted to follow. Those opening chords, though … how they stayed with her. And how she resisted them! She resented the chauvinism of Indians who could only admire things foreign. And yet, she heard those chords in her sleep, found herself humming them during her ablutions. She heard them now in the plane. Strange dissonant notes thrown together, wanting resolution, and somehow they captured America and Science and all that was bold and brash and daring and exciting about America (or at least the way she imagined America to be). Notes pouring out of the skull of a black man whose name was Billy Strayhorn. Stray … horn!

Ghosh had introduced her to jazz and to “Take the ‘A’ Train.” “Wait … watch! See?” he said, the first time she heard the melody after the chords. “You have to smile. You can't help it!” And he was right, the tune was so catchy and upbeat—how fortunate she was that her first introduction to serious Western music should be that tune. Still, shed come to think of it as her song, her invention, and it annoyed her that hed been the one to bring her to it. She laughed at the strangeness of liking Ghosh so much, when she wanted so much to dislike him.

BUT JUST AT THE MOMENT she was thinking these thoughts, anticipating her arrival in Addis Ababa … she found herself suddenly invoking Lord Shiva's name: the plane, the DC-3, the trustworthy camel of the frontier sky, was shuddering as if mortally wounded.

She looked out. The propeller on her side fluttered to a stop, and a puff of smoke came out of the beefy engine cowling.

The plane pitched to starboard and she found herself plastered against the window. All around her passengers screamed, and a thermos flask bounced on the cabin wall, spilling tea as it clattered away. She clutched around for a handhold, but then the plane righted itself and seemed to stop in midair, before beginning a steep descent. No, not a descent, her stomach corrected her—this was a fall. Gravity reached its tentacles out and grabbed the silver cylinder with its cantilevered wings. Gravity promised a water landing. Or, since the plane had wheels, not floats, a water smashing. The pilot was shouting, not in panic, but in anger, and she had no time to think how strange this was.

When, years later, shed look back at this moment of change, look at it clinically (“Milk the history! Exactly when and exactly how did it start? Onset is everything! In the anamnesis is the diagnosis!” as her professor would say), she would see that her transformation actually took place over many months. However, it was only as she was falling out of the sky over the Bab al-Mandab that she understood that change had come.

A LITTLE INDIAN BOY fell on her bosom. He was the son of the only Malayali couple on board—teachers in Ethiopia, no doubt; she could tell that in a single glance. This knock-kneed fellow, five, maybe six, years old in oversize shorts, had clutched a wooden plane in his hand from the moment he came on board, protecting it as if it were made of gold. His foot had become wedged between two jute sacks, and when the plane righted itself, he fell onto Hema.