Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

The Frenchman, his eyeballs sinking in their sockets, nodded mutely. France had colonized Djibouti and parts of Somalia, and they had even jockeyed with the English in India before settling for a foothold in Pon di cherry But on this steamy afternoon, one brown soul who would never be the same again, and who had Malayalis, Armenians, Greeks, and Yemenis backing her, showed she was free.

“Well, how can one be sane in hot weather?” Hemlatha said to no one in particular, letting go and making for the outside to wash her hands, stifling her laughter.

HEMA FIXED HER EYES on the ground below, watching for the transition of brown scrub and desert into steep escarpment announcing the lush, mountainous plateau of Ethiopia. Yes, she thought. This is my home now. My Abyssinia, which sounded to her so much more romantic than “Ethiopia.”

The country was in essence a mountain massif that rose from the three deserts of Somaliland, Danakil, and Sudan. Even now Hema felt a bit like a David Livingstone or an Evelyn Waugh exploring this ancient civilization, this stronghold of Christianity which, until Mussolini's invasion in ‘35, was the only African nation never to be colonized. Waugh, in his dispatches to the London Times and in his book, referred to His Majesty Haile Selassie the First as “Highly Salacious,” seeing cowardice in the Emperor's leaving the country in the face of Mussolini's advance. Hema's reading of Waugh was that he couldn't accept the notion of African royalty. He couldn't accept that the bloodlines of Emperor Haile Selassie, extending back as they did to the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, made the Windsors or the Romanovs look like carpetbaggers. She didn't think much of Waugh or his book.

The new passengers who climbed aboard at Djibouti were Somalis or Djiboutians (and really, she thought, what difference was there between the two, other than a line drawn on a map by some Western cartographer). They chewed khat and smoked 555s and despite their doleful, muddy eyes they were happy. Crammed into the plane, which by now was altogether too familiar to Hema, was khat, great bales of it being hauled back to Addis Ababa. It was all very strange, since khat usually traveled in the opposite direction: grown in Ethiopia, around Harrar, and exported by rail to Djibouti and then by air to Aden. That lucrative khat trade route was responsible for the birth of Ethiopian Airlines. She overheard that some problem with the railway and road transport, as well as the urgent need for large quantities of khat for a wedding, prompted this reverse export and the unscheduled stop. Khat had to be chewed within a day or so of its harvest, or else it lost its potency Hema pictured the Somali, Yemeni, and Sudanese merchants in the tiny souks that anchored every street and byway, and the owners of the bigger shops of the Merkato in Addis Ababa, eyeing their Tissot watches, snapping at their shop boys as they waited for this shipment. She pictured the wedding guests with mouths too parched to spit, but spitting and cursing all the same, telling one another that the bride was uglier than they remembered, and the big mole on her neck must mean shed also inherited the miserliness of her father.

Hema imagined telling her mother about the pilot business. It made Hema laugh, which made the Somali sitting opposite her, one of the newcomers, smile.

Madras had been hot and humid for the three weeks that Hema was there, but it was heaven compared with Aden. Her parents’ three-room house in the neighborhood of Mylapore, very near the temple, had seemed spacious to her as a girl, but on this visit if felt claustrophobic. Though she regularly sent her parents bank drafts, shed been dismayed to find no improvements in the house since her last visit. The interior paint had peeled to form abstract patterns while the kitchen, blackened with smoke, resembled a darkroom. The narrow street outside which rarely saw a car was now a noisy thoroughfare, and the compound wall showed no trace of whitewash but instead was the color of the earth on which it stood. Only the garden had benefited from the passage of time with the bougainvillea hiding the house from the street. The two mango trees had become huge and heavy with fruit. One was an Alphonso and the other a hybrid with flesh that felt rubbery at first bite but then melted in the mouth like ice cream.

The sole decoration in the living room was, as it had always been, the Glaxo powdered-milk calendar hanging on a nail. The overfed blue-eyed Caucasian baby had never grown up. The caption read “Glaxo Builds Bonny Babies.” It was enough to make any breast-feeding mother feel guilty that she was starving her infant. As a child Hema had barely registered the Glaxo baby. Now the calendar drew her eye and her ire. What an insidious presence that brat had been in her life. An interloper with a false message. Hema took down the calendar, but the pale rectangle on the wall called attention to itself in a way the baby never had. No doubt once Hema left, another Glaxo baby would find its way back there.

During her brief vacation, Hema had the house painted and ceiling fans installed. Sathyamurthy, the father of her old childhood nemesis, Velu, peered over the fence as workmen carried in a Western-style commode to be cemented over the footpads of the Indian toilet. He sniggered and shook his head. “It's not for me, you old coot,” Hema said in English. “My mother's hips are bad.” And Sathyamurthy answered in the only English phrase he knew, “Goddamn China, kiss me Eisenhower!” He smiled and waved, and she waved back.

THE SOMALI ACROSS FROM HER wore a shiny blue polyester shirt and a gold watch that swung on his stick wrist. His toes, protruding from sandals, glowed like polished ebony. He looked familiar to Hema. Now, he bowed, grinned, and displayed his fingers as if bidding at an auction as he said, “Three kids, two shots, one night!”

She remembered. His name was Adid. “I say, are you still doing double duty these days?”

His ivory teeth lit up the plane's dim interior. He said something to his friends. They smiled and nodded sagely. Such strong teeth they have, Hemlatha thought. She admired his blackness, a color so pure that there was a purple tinge to it. The headmistress at her school, Mrs. Hood, had been porcelain white, and the schoolgirls believed that if they touched her, their fingers would come away white; with Adid, she imagined they would come away black. Adid's regal manner, the slow play of expressions on his face, each thought matched by a lip-eyebrow combo, gave Hema the bizarre idea that she'd like to suck his index finger.

She'd last seen Adid in a headdress and flowing robes in the casualty room at Missing, unflappable, even though his pregnant wife was convulsing. When Hemlatha unwrapped the shrouds of cotton she found a young, pale, anemic girl. Her blood pressure was sky-high. This was eclampsia. While Hemlatha was in Theater 3 delivering this wife of her firstborn by Cesarean section, Adid disappeared and returned with an older wife, also in labor, who proceeded to deliver in the horse-drawn gharry beside the outpatient steps. Hemlatha ran out in time to cut the cord. She pushed on the wife's belly, but instead of the afterbirth, a twin popped out. Adid's smile when he saw the second child, the third total, reached from ear to ear. Hema suggested he wear a banner across his chest that said ONE NIGHT, TWO SHOTS, THREE KIDS. Adid had laughed like a man whod never heard the word “worry.”

“Yes, yes,” he said now, raising his voice to be heard over the drone of the engines. He had the clipped, French-accented diction of a Djiboutian. “A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world, Doctor?”