The pharmacist rose, helped her husband up. The surgeon looked away, tried not to eavesdrop as they murmured to each other. Nothing he could say would accomplish more than the sight of the dead themselves.
‘If you think this has to be done,’ said the pharmacist’s husband, his lips a dull white, ‘we trust you.’
‘If you want to leave, go now.’
‘You have done more for us, for the villagers, than anyone else, Saheb. We are in your debt.’
‘If you want to go, I understand,’ repeated the surgeon, perversely hoping they would take the opportunity to fly. ‘Really, I understand.’
‘We can’t leave you here. We’ll do whatever you tell us. The rest is in god’s hands.’
The surgeon nodded. It was the most he could manage by way of gratitude. His face felt permanently carved in a grave expression of foreboding. He turned and made for the clinic.
The teacher came up to him at the steps. ‘I was wondering, Saheb, if you think it’s wise to involve more people in this. The fewer who know, the better, don’t you think?’
‘There won’t be any more,’ said the surgeon. ‘And without these two to help me, you might as well prepare for your second death.’
Responsible now for both the living and the dead, he dragged himself up into the corridor. The teacher appeared to have more to say, but the surgeon was in no mood to hear it.
Six
‘KEEP WATCH HERE,’ the surgeon said to the pharmacist’s husband. ‘If you see anything, call out for me and hide the others.’
‘Yes, Saheb.’
‘I might have more work for you later, but first I need to find out what these surgeries will involve.’
‘As you say.’
‘Do you think, Saheb,’ the teacher asked, ‘that someone might be suspicious if the clinic lights stay on all night?’
‘I sometimes sit here through the night if I can’t sleep. The villagers are used to it. But yes, it’s possible the light might attract someone. We’ll just have to risk that. So, who’s first?’
The teacher patted his son’s shoulders. ‘Operate on him, Saheb, then my wife. Treat me only after you’re done with both.’
His wife looked away. From her demeanour, it was clear that this matter had already been decided, that the two had argued over it while the surgeon was away.
The surgeon led the boy to the operating room. The child had appeared quite calm through the evening, but now he hesitated, pulled back at the door. The tiled room seemed to frighten even him, he who had travelled distances that the surgeon couldn’t even begin to imagine.
‘Go in, my baby,’ his mother said. ‘It will be done soon. So soon, you won’t even realize it.’
The teacher clasped his son’s hand. ‘I’ll be with you. Don’t worry.’
The stone slab was covered with a single thin drape, and the surgeon had the boy strip and climb onto it. Over his thin, supine body, his abdomen now rose like a dome, as if he too bore another life within him. His wound still seemed like an elaborate disguise, and the surgeon was tempted to peel back the fake skin and reveal the real one underneath. He hoped that the teacher was right – that the dead couldn’t feel any pain. With gloved fingers, he examined the wound and the skin around it, squeezed the sides and pinched the skin, gently at first, and then quite hard between his nails. As promised, the boy felt nothing.
The surgeon adjusted the anglepoise lamps to illuminate the boy’s abdomen as best as he could, and with the help of the pharmacist he cleaned the skin and wound with iodine. He then masked and scrubbed and gowned as was customary, swabbed the wound with alcohol, made it sterile, draped it. He took every precaution he would have taken with any other patient. The bodies of the dead might well be immune to infection now, but that would change at dawn. He also took care to arrange the drapes so that the boy wouldn’t be able to see his own bowels. Surely there were sights that all humans, alive or dead, were better off not seeing.
With his scalpel in hand, he paused to plan his first incision, and now couldn’t help wondering if the dead were just soulless contraptions. Divine puppets, perhaps. Was this a fiendish test, meant to force him to pluck at his core and emerge with god alone knew what? An outrageous test, if so, by a deity who would stoop this low to wring belief from his subjects. What if he were to turn to the stars and cry out, ‘I was wrong, I was wrong’? Would the visitors vanish and the three worlds open before him?
He lengthened the wound with his blade, and found himself both fascinated and repulsed by the quality of the boy’s flesh. It resembled nothing so much as the flesh of a corpse – not yet mottled or putrid, but dead enough that the blood had coagulated in the vessels and no longer oozed out as he sliced through the skin. It reminded him of his work in the office of the city coroner. Of course, those corpses never climbed up on tables themselves.
The teacher was seated on a low stool next to his son. He whispered and cooed to the boy, ran his fingers through his hair. The boy’s eyes were half closed, his hands by his side under the drapes. They remained that way until the surgeon said, ‘Maybe this is a good time for you to explain what’s going on. Explain how you got here.’
The teacher’s eyes, when he raised them, first fell on his son’s abdomen, which was in the process of being opened. He immediately jerked them away.
‘Are you sure, Saheb?’
‘Don’t you think I have the right to ask?’ replied the surgeon.
‘Yes, of course. I didn’t mean that. But maybe—maybe you might not want to know.’
‘And why would that be?’
‘Only the dead know about the afterlife. It’s not something the living are supposed to learn.’
‘That may be, but all kinds of things are happening tonight that aren’t supposed to happen. Besides, if I’m supposed to treat you, I need to understand exactly how the three of you ended up here.’
The teacher looked at his son’s face for a few moments, then at the floor.
‘The moment we died, all the pain stopped. Then, for who knows how long, we couldn’t move. There was no light, no sound, nothing. Slowly, we began to see and hear again. Our senses returned, but not the pain … thank god, not the pain. We were on this—this plain. It went on and on in all directions. There was no end to it. This was the afterlife, Doctor Saheb, where we all go when we die.
‘There were dead people there from every part of the world, all mixed together. They spoke so many different languages, but it was strange, we could understand all of them, and they could understand us. Many had died from old age, others from sickness or epidemics. Some, like us, had been murdered. Our deaths were unjust. Everyone must die some day, yes, but not like this. One person killing another, there’s nothing worse than that.
‘We met so many people, and each had his own story. Really interesting stories too, from times and places I’d never even heard about. I tried to look for kings or famous people from history but, as you can imagine, most of the dead there were as ordinary as us.’
While the teacher was speaking, the surgeon had deepened the incision in the boy’s abdomen through the thin layer of subcutaneous fat. Within the peritoneum, he could see glistening clots in copious volumes. If an injury to a major blood vessel had caused this bleeding, it would be disastrous, impossible to mend here. The question couldn’t be answered through the limited aperture of the wound. He would need to make a larger incision, inspect the contents of the entire abdomen through a long vertical cut.
‘Weren’t you attacked this evening, after sunset? And yet you were on this plain. How much time did you spend there?’
‘In the afterlife, there’s no way to keep time, Saheb. There’s no sun that rises, no days, no weeks. That’s not to say it’s dark, not at all, but there’s just this … this light that glows. It never becomes any dimmer or brighter. And there’s no need for sleep either. When we got there, the shock of everything was so great that we tried to hold on to the one thing that was as natural to our li
ves as breathing. We tried, we forced ourselves. We would close our eyes, lie down, try to imagine that it was night – even imagine we were dreaming, to see if that would help. In life one sleeps and then dreams – I thought in death maybe it would work the other way around. But that didn’t help either. Once you’re dead, you don’t need any rest, and so we’ve been awake ever since.
‘It’s very difficult to describe the way time works there. Here on earth we’re always reminded of it – ticking clocks, summer and monsoon, even little things like food on a stove. If you take it off the fire too soon, it’s raw, too late and it’s burnt – that’s a measure of time too. And even if you lock yourself in a room, turn off all the lights, sit in complete silence, you can still hear your heartbeat. There’s nothing like that there. Someone mentioned to me in the afterlife that the only point when any living being experiences this kind of time – this absence of time, rather – is inside the womb. But who can claim to have memories of that?
‘In any case, to answer your question, Doctor Saheb, after what might have been a week or two, I was completely disoriented. And the opportunity to return here came later, much later. After all that wandering, time is again the most important thing for us tonight. I have to remind myself that it’s ticking, that things are different now. Or the same again, depending on how you look at it.’
The surgeon turned to the pharmacist for a pair of forceps. Her masked face was turned away from the surgical field. But she was listening, he could see.
‘Then we met a celestial being, you could call him an angel, and we told him about the crime done to us. Not just the crime of being stabbed, Saheb, but the crime of being killed. Not everyone who is stabbed dies. Humans decide whom to stab, but someone up there decides who will live and who won’t. It shouldn’t have happened. We had never harmed anyone. My son deserved to live and grow and have a family that would care for him when he was old. The angel asked us what we wanted him to do.
‘“Send us back,” we said. “Let us live again.”
‘“There are laws even we can’t break,” the angel told us. “The valley between life and death can only be crossed from one side. Once you’re here, it doesn’t matter how it happened, how unjust the circumstances. It’s done.”
‘“But then what about rebirth?” we asked. “Our priests insisted it happens. Were they lying?”
‘“There is rebirth, yes,” the angel replied, ‘but not the kind they talk about in your land, where you can be reborn as an insect or a lion, something different each time. You can only be reborn as a human, through a woman’s womb. People are chosen for it based on their virtues, based on how they lived their lives. Have faith. You will have the opportunity, but it won’t happen right away.”’
The surgeon’s new incision laid the boy open from the tip of his breastbone to his navel. The surgeon cut through the skin and fat, and then through the fibrous strip running down the midline of the abdomen between the muscles on either side. Once the peritoneum was cut, the solidified blood spread before him like a russet sea. He reached in and started scooping out the clots. This part was more bewildering than anything else so far – the fact that the boy could lie there awake while his bloodstream piled up on a tray next to him. The pile grew larger as the peritoneum emptied out, and the contents of the abdomen became visible.
There was a large cut in the edge of the spleen. It just lay there now, dry and pink and feigning innocence, but one only had to imagine how a puncture that size might have bled in life. It took a good amount of time, but the surgeon scooped out every clump of blood that had collected under the liver, the omentum and in the folds around the intestines. He then carefully searched for other injuries.
When he was done, he placed his instruments on a tray and took a breath.
‘Is something wrong, Saheb?’
‘Nothing, nothing’s wrong. It’s just that I’ve discovered what killed your son.’
The man flinched at this, and the surgeon regretted his choice of words.
‘What was it?’
‘The knife cut into his spleen.’
‘Did it hit anything else?’
‘Doesn’t seem like it.’
‘Does that mean that if—if it had missed the spleen, he might have survived?’
‘Yes. Perhaps. Yes.’
The teacher turned away, his lips twisting, his face slowly contorting. He blinked, appeared almost to be in pain himself. Then, shielding his eyes from the surgeon and pharmacist, he buried his face in his son’s hair. He cried for the first time that night, at this unexpected moment, as if some barrel of emotion he’d been balancing had just been overturned.
The surgeon coughed – two short, blunt coughs – to master any emotion that threatened to spill from himself at the man’s display of anguish. It was a technique he’d perfected early in his training. Perhaps too well, for it’d been far too long since he’d felt any emotion worth mastering. Health itself appeared so bleak a state that sickness and death wrung little pity from him any more. Sometimes, when an invalid’s final breaths seemed no more than the last turns of a wheel, leaving behind an object to be removed, charred, turned to ash, and stirred into a riverbed, his indifference terrified even him.
‘In a sense, we’re lucky it’s the spleen,’ he said, hoping to clear the gloom. ‘If the knife had cut the liver or the intestines, or, god forbid, a big artery, we’d have had no chance at all.’
The teacher raised his head. Not a muscle moved on his face as he listened.
‘It won’t help if I just stitch the spleen shut. It will bleed again. But I can remove the whole thing – he can live without it. I can’t promise you we won’t discover new problems in the morning, but this might be all that’s needed.’
The man clasped his hands together so hard that his knuckles looked like rows of rounded bones. ‘You’re our saviour, Doctor Saheb, you’re a saint. There’s nothing I could possibly do in a thousand years to repay your mercy. Please save my son, Saheb. Please do whatever you think is best.’
He rained kisses on his son’s cheeks and forehead. ‘Saheb is going to fix you. He’s going to make you better.’ The boy, infected with his father’s enthusiasm, started to prop himself up on an elbow. ‘Shhh,’ the teacher said, caressing the boy’s brow, trying to calm his son though clearly unable to contain himself. ‘Don’t move, don’t move. Lie down.’
The surgeon let himself be lifted by an unfamiliar, buoyant sensation. The one thing that could have confounded this surgery – the tyranny of a relentless bloodstream – he wouldn’t have to face tonight. During the early years of his training, he’d once had to extract the spleen of a young man who was struck by a bus. The spleen, ruptured like an egg, had lain at the bottom of a red pool that constantly refilled itself no matter how much blood he suctioned out. By contrast, this was almost absurdly easy.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Yes. Where was I? Yes. The angel. We asked him to just send us back to our old lives, but he refused. So we begged him to let us be reborn, but he told us it wasn’t our turn yet, and disappeared. But we called him again.’
‘How do you call an angel?’
‘You have to think of him, imagine his face, ask for his help, and he appears.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Not exactly – sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’m sure angels have their own preferences, whose calls they will answer, whose they won’t. For whatever reason, our angel appeared more often to us than any of the other angels did to any of the dead.’
‘Why?’
‘I really don’t know, Saheb. I honestly don’t think there was anything special about us, but this angel was definitely different from all the others. In fact, he always had more questions for us than we did for him. He asked us about our families, our childhoods, our wedding, the birth of our son. He was interested in the customs of the living – our festivals and foods, the way we traded money for objects. Even small things – the way we kept our
houses, painted our walls, grew potted plants in the yard. He had watched these things from the afterlife, but he didn’t always understand what he was seeing.’
‘Didn’t understand? What do you mean? Wouldn’t angels be all-knowing?’
‘Well, those are two different things, Saheb: knowing and understanding. I’ll give you a simple example. The angel knew that the living like to fly kites, but never understood why it was such a popular thing, why it should deserve a special day of celebration, why people would drop everything and climb on rooftops for it. There are no kites in the afterlife. There’s no wind there, not even really a sky … there’s just that plain. I tried to explain to him the joy when something that’s nothing more than a square of paper stretched across two sticks catches the breeze and goes up, up … so high that sometimes you can’t even see it against the sun, so high even birds won’t get near it. I tried to explain it a few different ways, but none of them made any sense to the angel.
‘And so I told him that it felt like toying with death. It was like tying your life to a thread, sending it out to a place over which you had no power, working all day to keep it from being lost, and then, in the evening, if you were lucky, pulling it back unharmed, admiring its colours again, and storing it in a safe place for another time. That’s when the angel understood. That was his language, Doctor Saheb, the language of life and death.’
The teacher’s story was like a bizarre fable – something a priest might deliver in a religious ceremony. But there were no flowers here, no lamps or burning incense to make the unreality more palatable. The surgeon felt a constant tightness at the base of his throat. He had to loosen it occasionally by swallowing the spittle in his mouth.
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