Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

“You” or “Your” never meant one of us. When we replied to a question, no one cared which of us had spoken; an answer from one was an answer for The Twins.

Perhaps the adults believed that Shiva, my busy, industrious brother, was naturally parsimonious with his words. If the sound of the anklet which he insisted on wearing counted as speech, then Shiva was a terrible chatterbox, only silent when he muffled the tiny bells under his sock for school. Perhaps the adults believed I never gave Shiva much of a chance to speak (which was true), but no one wanted to tell me to shut up. In any case, in the hullabaloo of our bungalow, where the bridge crowd congregated twice a week, where a 78 rpm spun on the Grundig, and where Ghosh's lumbering tread rattled the dishes as he struggled to learn the rumba and the cha-cha-cha, two years went by before the adults fully registered that Shiva had stopped speaking.

WHEN WE WERE INFANTS, Shiva was considered the more delicate: it was his skull that Stone attempted to crush before Hema saved us. But then Shiva hit all his developmental milestones on time, lifting his head when I did and crawling when it was time to crawl. He said “Amma” and “Ghosh” on cue, and we both decided to walk when we were a month shy of one year of age. Hema and Ghosh were reassured. According to Hema, we forgot how to walk within a few days of taking our first steps, because we had discovered how to run. Shiva spoke as much as he needed to well into his fourth year, but about that time he began to quietly hoard his words.

I hasten to say, Shiva laughed or cried at the appropriate times; he often acted as if he were about to say something just when I piped in; he punctuated my words with exclamations from his anklet and he sang la-la-la lustily with me in the bath. But when it came to actual words— he had no need for them. He read fluently, but refused to do so aloud. He could add and subtract big numbers at a glance, scribbling out the answer while I was still carrying the one over and counting fingers. He was constantly jotting notes to himself, or to others, leaving these around like droppings. He drew beautifully, but in the oddest places, like on cardboard cartons or the back of paper bags. What he loved to draw best at that stage was Veronica. We had an issue of Archie comics in the house—I bought it from Papadakis's bookstore; the three frames on page sixteen had to do with Veronica and Betty. Shiva could reproduce that page, complete with balloons, lettering, and crosshatch shading. It was as if he had a photograph stored in his head and could spill it onto paper whenever he wanted. He left nothing out, not even the page number, or the stain of the fly that had met its death on the margin of the original. I noticed that he always accentuated the curved line under Veronica's breast, particularly when compared with Betty's. I checked the source, and sure enough, the line was there, but Shiva's was thicker, darker. Sometimes he improvised and departed from the original image, rendering the breasts as pointed missiles about to launch, or else as pendulous balloons that hovered over the kneecaps.

Genet and I covered for Shiva's silence. I did it unconsciously; if I was talkative to excess, it was because I saw this as the necessary output for ShivaMarion. Of course, I had no problem communicating with Shiva. In the early morning, the shake of his anklet— ching-ding —said, Marion, are you awake? Dish-ching was Time to get up. Rubbing his skull on mine said, Rise and shine, sleepyhead. All one of us had to do was think of an action and the odds were the other would rise to carry it out.

It was Mrs. Garretty at school who made the discovery about Shiva's having given up speech. The Loomis Town & Country School catered to the merchants, diplomats, military advisers, doctors, teachers, representatives of the Economic Commission for Africa, WHO, UNESCO, Red Cross, UNICEF, and especially the newly forming OAU—the Organization of African Unity. The Emperor had offered the gift of Africa Hall, a stunning building, to the fledging OAU, a cunning move that would bring the organization's headquarters to Addis Ababa and already was boosting business for everyone from the bar girls to the Fiat, Peugeot, and Mercedes importers. The OAU kids could have gone to the Lycée Gebremariam, an imposing building that loomed over the steepest part of Churchill Road. But the envoys from the Francophone countries—Mali, Guinea, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mauritius, and Madagascar— had an eye to the future, and so the cars with the Corps Diplomatiques plates carried les enfants past the lycée to Loomis Town & Country. For completeness, I must mention St. Joseph's, where, according to Matron, the Jesuits, those foot soldiers of Christ, believed in God and the Rod. But St. Joseph's was boys only, which ruled it out for us because of Genet.

Why not the rough-and-tumble of the government schools? If we'd gone there we might have been the only non-native children, and we would have been in a minority of kids with more than one pair of shoes and a home with running water and indoor plumbing. Hema and Ghosh felt their only choice was to send us to Loomis Town & Country, which was run by British expats.

Our teachers at LT&C had their A levels and the odd teaching certificate. It is astonishing how a black crepe robe worn over a coat or a blouse gives a Cockney punter or a Covent Garden flower girl the gravitas of an Oxford don. Accent be damned in Africa, as long as it's foreign and you have the right skin color.

Ritual. That was the balm to soothe the parents’ disquiet about what they were getting for their money at LT&C. Gymkhana, Track and Field Day, the School Carnival, the Christmas Pageant, the School Play, Guy Fawkes Night, Founder's Day, and Graduation—we carried so many mimeographed notices home that they made Hema's head spin. We were assigned to Monday House, or Tuesday House, or Wednesday House, each with its colors, teams, and house masters. On Track and Field Day we competed for the glory of our house and for the Loomis Cup. Every morning in Assembly Hall, Mr. Loomis led us in Assembly Prayer, then a reading from the Revised Standard Version, and then we belted out the hymn from the blue hymnal while one teacher or another banged out the chords on the assembly piano.

I am convinced that one can buy in Harrods of London a kit that allows an enterprising Englishman to create a British school anywhere in the third world. It comes with black robes, preprinted report cards for Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter terms, as well as hymnals, Prefect Badges, and a syllabus. Assembly required.

Unfortunately, the LT&C students’ pass rates for the General Certificate of Education O levels were terrible when compared with the free government schools. There the Indian teachers were all degree holders whom the Emperor hired from the Christian state of Kerala, the place Sister Mary Joseph Praise hailed from. Ask an Ethiopian abroad if perchance they learned mathematics or physics from a teacher named Kurien, Koshy Thomas, George, Varugese, Ninan, Mathews, Jacob, Judas, Chandy Eapen, Pathros, or Paulos, and the odds are their eyes will light up. These teachers were brought up in the Orthodox ritual which St. Thomas carried to south India. But in their professional roles, the only ritual they cared about was engraving the multiplication and periodic tables as well as Newton's laws into the brains of their Ethio pian pupils, who were uniformly smart and who had a great aptitude for arithmetic.

My class teacher, Mrs. Garretty called Hema and Ghosh at the end of a day when I stayed home from school with a fever. She knew us as the adorable Stone twins, those darling, dark-haired, light-eyed boys who dressed alike, who happily sang, ran, drew, jumped, clapped, and chattered to excess in her class. The day I stayed home, Shiva ran, drew, jumped, and clapped but never uttered a word and, when called on, would not or could not.