Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

The bit players in Theater 3 regarded her as if she were mad, but she danced on even as they tidied the corpse, she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction.

Ridiculous, the thoughts that came to her as she danced: her new Grundig, Adid's lips and his long fingers, the thump of Matron falling over, the revolting feel of the Frenchman's balls but the satisfaction in seeing the color flee his face, Gebrew with chicken feathers stuck to him. What a journey … what a day … what madness, so much worse than tragic! What to do except dance, dance, only dance …

She was surprisingly graceful and light on her feet, the neck and head and shoulder gestures of Bharatnatyam automatic for her, eyebrows shooting up and down, eyeballs flitting to the edges of their sockets, feet moving, a rigid smile on her face, and all this while holding the babies in her arms.

Outside the hospital, as the light faded, the lions in the cages near the Sidist Kilo Monument, anticipating the slabs of meat the keeper would fling through the bars, roared with hunger and impatience; in the foothills of Entoto, the hyenas heard and paused as they neared the edge of the city three steps forward and one back, cowardly and opportunistic; the Emperor in his palace made plans for a state visit to Bulgaria and perhaps to Jamaica, where he had followers—Rastas—who took their name from his precoronation name of Ras Teferi and who thought he was God (an idea he didn't mind his own people believing, but when it came from so far away and for reasons that he didn't understand, made him wary).

THE LAST FORTY-EIGHT hours had irrevocably altered Hema's life. She had two infants squinting up at her from time to time as if to confirm their arrival, their good fortune.

Hema felt light-headed, giddy. I won the lottery without buying a ticket, she thought. These two babies plugged a hole in my heart that I didn't know I had until now.

But there was danger in the analogy: shed heard of a railway porter at Madras Central Station who won lakhs and lakhs of rupees, only to have his life fall apart so that he soon returned to the platform. When you win, you often lose, that's just a fact. There's no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart—she was thinking of Stone.

Stone had prayed for a miracle. The silly man didn't see that these newborns were miracles. They were obstetric miracles for surviving his assault. Hema decided to name the first twin to breathe Marion. Marion Sims, she would tell me later, was a simple practitioner in Alabama, USA, who had revolutionized women's surgery. He was considered the father of obstetrics and gynecology, the patron saint; in naming me for him, she was both honoring him and giving thanks.

“And Shiva, for Shiva,” she said, naming the child with the circular hole in his scalp, the last to breathe, the child she had labored over, a child all but dead until she had invoked Lord Shiva's name, at which point he took his first gasp.

“Yes, Marion and Shiva.”

She tacked on “Praise” to both names, after their mother.

And finally, reluctantly, almost as an afterthought, but because you cannot escape your destiny, and so that he wouldn't walk away scot-free, she added our surname, the name of the man who had left the room: Stone.

ON THE MORNING of the twins’ birth, Dr. Abhi Ghosh awoke in his quarters to the sound of pigeons cooing on the win-dowsill. The birds had figured in his waking dream in which he swung from the giant banyan tree outside his boyhood home in India. Hed been trying to peek at the wedding being conducted indoors, but even with the birds using their wings to wipe the windows, he couldn't see.

Now that Ghosh was awake, only the ancient banyan tree, which had stood in the shared courtyard, still felt vivid. Its branches were supported by pillarlike aerial roots which to a child appeared to have shot up from the ground instead of the other way around. Immovable through the Madras monsoons and through the dog days of summer, that tree had been his protector and guide. The cantonment near St. Thomas Mount, on the outskirts of Madras, teemed with railway and military brats; it suited a fatherless child, particularly one whose mother was too defeated by her husband's death to be of much use to her children. Anand Ghoshe, a Bengali from Calcutta, had been posted to Madras by the Indian Railways. He met his future wife, the Anglo-Indian daughter of the Perambur stationmaster, at a railway dance to which he had gone on a lark. Neither family approved of the marriage. They had two children, first a girl, then a boy. Little Abhi Ghoshe was a month old when his father died of hepatitis. He grew into a self-sufficient, fun-loving child who met the world head-on. When he came of age, he dropped the e at the end of his name, because he thought it redundant, like a skin tag. In his first year of medical school, his mother died. His sister and her husband pulled away, resentful that the cantonment house came to him. His sister made it clear that he ceased to exist for her, and in time he saw this was true.

THE MORNINGS were when Ghosh felt Hema's absence from Missing the most. Her bungalow, hidden by hedges, was a shout away from his, but it was locked up and silent. Whenever she went on holiday in India, his life became unbearable because he was terrified that shed return married.

At the airport before Hema left, hed been dying to blurt out, Hema, let's get married. But he knew she would have thrown her head back and laughed. He loved her laughter, but not at his expense; he had swallowed his marriage proposal.

“Fool!” she had said before boarding when he asked her yet again if she intended to see prospective bridegrooms. “How long have you known me? Why do you keep thinking I need a groom in my life? I'll find a bride for you, I tell you what! You're the one who is matrimonially obsessed.”

Hema saw his jealousy as their little joke: Ghosh played at wooing her (or so she believed), and she played her role by fending him off.

If she only knew how tormented he was by uninvited images: Hema in bridal sari weighed down with ten-sovereign gold necklace; Hema seated next to ugly groom, garlands piled around their necks like the yoke on water buffalo … “Go ahead! What do I care?” he said aloud, as if she were there in the room. “But ask yourself, can he love you the way I love you? What's the use of education if you let your father lead you like a cow to the Brahma bull?” That led him to picture a bovine penis; he groaned.

This time, when Hema's departure appeared inevitable, Ghosh did something different: he quietly mailed out applications for an internship in America. Granted, he was thirty-two years old, but it wasn't too late to start again. Mailing the envelope gave him a sense of controlling his destiny, more so when Cook County Hospital in Chicago cabled that they were sending a voucher for a plane ticket. When the letter and contract arrived, they didn't diminish his anxiety about Hema, but it did make him feel less helpless.

From the kitchen Ghosh heard the violent clang of Almaz extracting water from Mussolini. “For the sake of God, be gentle!” he called out as he did most days. The stove had three rings, but it was the bulging oven below, which resembled a certain fallen dictator's potbelly, that gave it its name. Set into its side was a metal cavity so that whenever the stove was lit, water was heated. Almaz grumbled about having to split wood, then stoke the fire in Mussolini—all for what? To make one cup of that vile powder coffee for the getta? (In the mornings Ghosh preferred instant to the semisolid Ethiopian brew.) But it wasn't the coffee he valued as much as the hot water for his bath.