Night Theatre

by Vikram Paralkar

  ‘You understand why I’m recommending this, don’t you?’

  They nodded.

  ‘You understand that we don’t know how things will go in the morning. If I have to do an emergency delivery then, it could be dangerous for both mother and child. It’s better to do it now, in a controlled setting. You understand that, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ They looked defeated, more dead now, so close to the morning, than they’d looked all night.

  The surgeon replaced his glasses on the bridge of his nose. ‘Do you believe that the official who sent you here is wise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you believe that he’s benevolent?’

  The teacher glanced at his wife, blinked at the floor a few times. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then have faith in his wisdom and benevolence. Trust that he took every life, even the smallest one, into account when he arranged to send you here. Let’s go ahead with the plan, but I should warn you, the child might not show any signs of life right now. It may be difficult for you to bear, but you’ll have no choice but to wait until dawn.’

  The teacher helped undress his wife and laid her flat on the operating table, supporting her head so the tube in her throat wouldn’t be disturbed. He sat on a stool while the surgeon examined her.

  Long striae ran across her stretched skin, testifying to the months she had spent on earth carrying a creature that, one flesh with her while she lived, had perished with her final breath. It was the only member of the family to return from the afterlife without wounds to its own body. If granted life, it could well survive without any medications or surgeries. After all, its battles with death would be those of every ordinary infant that had ever left a womb.

  The surgeon felt the woman’s uterus. The head was in the expected position – pointed down towards the pelvis. In the left part of the uterus, he could feel small irregular lumps – the cluster of hands, feet, knees – and on the right, there was the neat, firm curve of the spine. Everything was in its proper place. He picked the razor and shaved away the upper part of the woman’s pubic hair. He then prepared the skin and draped it, pressed a roll of cloth against either flank.

  He tried to recall what little he could about caesarean sections. The principles were simple enough, but he hadn’t actually performed one in decades. He started with a neat horizontal incision, about six inches long, low on the abdomen, and cut through the skin, the connective tissue, the fat. He then cut through the fascia covering the vertical muscle in the midline, and pulled the two strips of muscle away to either side. Another few nicks with his scalpel, and he could peel the bladder and the fold of abdominal lining away from the lower segment of the uterus.

  ‘Put on a pair of gloves. And take that fresh drape in your hands. Careful not to touch anything else, it’s all sterile.’

  When the teacher was ready, the surgeon put his scalpel to the uterus. It sank into the spongy muscle without difficulty, leaving a clean, bloodless gash. He had now grown accustomed to the absence of flowing blood. What a mercy it was not to have to constantly swab and suction, not to have vessels to clamp at every turn.

  The firm globe of the child’s skull, covered with soft, wet hair, was under his fingertips. He stretched the edges of the incision in the uterus, just as in those old textbook illustrations. ‘It’s time,’ he said, more to himself than to anyone else, and with his right hand he reached into the womb, grasped the globe, and pulled.

  The head emerged in a gush of amniotic fluid, within which it had remained suspended even in this unearthly state. The woman on the table gave a cry, though it wasn’t one of pain, her eyes told him that. He held the head in both hands and pulled with his fingers looped around the neck. Nothing budged. The baby appeared locked in that position. He pulled, first with a gentle tug and then harder, but his grip was weak, so very weak, and he was afraid of damaging the slender neck with the strain. But what if he wasn’t able to get it out? What if it remained stuck there, and dawn jumped up behind him that very instant? Mother and child would both start screaming, one head above, another below – a two-headed howling monster washed with fountains of blood. His tired hands just kept slithering around, and he adjusted the grip of his fingers, crooked an elbow. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘come on, don’t be so stubborn.’ Just when he felt he couldn’t summon any more strength, there was a sudden give, the shoulders slithered through the incision, and the rest of the foetus poured out in such a slippery rush that he almost stumbled back with it. The remainder of the fluid in which it had floated drenched the drapes, splashed on his gown, and the strong odour of the womb and its fluid filled the room. He clamped and cut the umbilical cord, from the ends of which, predictably, there dripped no blood.

  The infant’s skin had a bluish hue, but unlike its parents it had nothing to mark it as an unnatural visitor to this world. Its arms and legs tapered into slender fingers and toes, and its face was perfectly formed, carved by some skilled hand made masterful in its craft through countless iterations. But, as the surgeon had feared, the infant did not move. It lay in his hands, its limbs flaccid, its eyes and brow still, its mouth in an unmoving yawn, fluid pooled at the back of its throat that it made no attempt to cough out. On any other night, this could have meant only one thing, for the laws of the earth did not allow the dead to return to life. But this night was different, when death could perhaps be the precursor of life, the herald of breath and blood. Who could know for certain? Despite the resolve with which he had prepared himself for this moment, the surgeon’s eyes welled up at the sight of this stillborn infant. Lacking any device with which to suction its throat, he held it upside down by its ankles and patted it until all that could drip out of its mouth had dripped out. After wiping it dry, he handed it over to its father.

  The teacher received the limp body in the coarse green cloth draped over his cupped hands, and lowered it until it was level with his wife’s head. ‘It’s a girl,’ he said. Both of them seemed overcome, as though for them the very appearance of death were still as potent as death itself. Perhaps justifiably so, for now the surgeon knew that neither in the land of the living nor the dead were miracles ever guaranteed, and that, except in the rarest of cases, death did not display its colours without good reason. The dead held and kissed the blue infant and seemed to be praying, though whether to a wise and benevolent God or to His wise and benevolent official, there was no way to tell.

  The surgeon himself couldn’t recall the last time he’d prayed. It wasn’t something one could summon up after a lifetime of disuse. So he just voiced under his breath a hope that the child be not dead but only unborn, and that at dawn its blood might flow again and its lungs draw in the morning air and it would let out its first cry. The teacher held his weightless infant in one hand, while with the other he caressed his wife’s cheek, and who could say whether he ached more for one than for the other?

  The surgeon turned his eyes from them and allowed them to pray and lament in peace. Returning to his surgical field, he stripped the bloodless placenta from the interior of the womb, and with careful sutures he restored everything he’d divided with his knife.

  Thirteen

  THE SURGEON RETURNED to the corridor to find the pharmacist and her husband emptying five large bags and stacking their contents on a bench. The man had managed to bring everything – antibiotics, pain medications, sedatives, rolls of cotton and gauze, cases of gloves, syringes, needles, suturing thread, catheters, tubing for intravenous fluids, and more bags of saline than the surgeon had dared list.

  ‘I brought the blood too, Saheb.’ The pharmacist’s husband opened the icebox, displayed six red packets glistening with frost.

  The man’s shirt was drenched. His hair, his face, were covered with dust. The pharmacist, with an embarrassed look, was trying to make him more presentable by wiping the sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief.

  ‘I was afraid something had happened,’ the surgeon said. ‘I was beginning to wish I hadn’t asked you to go.�
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  ‘No, no, Saheb. Look, I’m back in one piece. No trouble along the way. Oh, before I forget, here’s the rest of your money.’

  He dug in his pocket and held out some notes. He was much shorter than the surgeon, barely taller than his own wife. In that moment, he looked like a schoolboy returning small change.

  ‘Keep it.’

  The man looked at his palm. ‘I can’t accept this. You’re very kind to us. Too kind.’

  Too kind? The man had travelled to the city and back, on bicycle and by rail, at a time of night when the honest world slept and only people of ill repute roamed the streets. He had carried in his pocket a sum large enough to invite an ambush, and then lugged back these heavy supplies without a soul to help him. Now, bathed in sweat, he stood declining a reward. The surgeon felt words rise to his throat, but he couldn’t force them out. Why was it so difficult for him to express true gratitude, to speak freely, perhaps even let his eyes water at this earnestness?

  The money would have to suffice for now. With his left hand, he folded the man’s fingers and pressed them back over the notes in his palm. His right hand he gently placed on the pharmacist’s head. The young couple stood like newlyweds, heads bowed, solemn, as though before a priest sanctioning their union in a sacred place. The surgeon willed with every thread of his being that they be guarded from evil, that they be spared all torments, that they never have to know suffering. He granted them health, peace, prosperity. He knew he had no power over anything, but he still blessed them with all that was his to give, and all that wasn’t.

  ‘You must be tired. You should go home.’

  ‘No, Saheb. It’s almost morning,’ said the pharmacist. ‘We can stay awake for a few more hours.’

  And indeed the night had almost passed. In the east there was a darkness that wasn’t entirely dark. The first sparks of day were glowing against the night’s edge. The birds had already awakened, and were twittering and cawing in the trees. Cowbells sounded in the village.

  ‘I’ve made you some tea, Saheb. Extra strong.’

  He tried to smile, but the weight of what was yet to come was too great.

  ‘Pour me a cup. I’ll drink it soon.’

  The boy flung down his scissors and ran to his parents the moment they stepped out of the operating room. His mother was cradling a bundle in her arms. The boy peered into the small opening in the swaddling. She adjusted the drape and showed him the round face circled by green folds.

  ‘This is your sister.’

  The boy studied the still face for a long time, then darted out his finger and tapped the little nose. ‘Why doesn’t she move? Why doesn’t she open her eyes?’

  ‘She’s sleeping.’

  ‘When will she wake up?’

  ‘Soon. She’ll wake up soon.’

  ‘What will we name her?’

  The teacher and his wife looked at each other. The woman spoke a name. The boy whispered it to the baby. ‘Wake up,’ he said, ‘wake up,’ shaking it as though, now armed with a name, he might be able to cajole it to life. But the baby did not move. Its cheeks remained blue.

  ‘Gentle, gentle.’ His mother folded a corner of the drape over the infant.

  ‘I think it’s time,’ said the surgeon.

  In a sombre and wordless procession, they followed him into the back room. He flicked on a light and saw that an extra mattress and sheet had been laid out on the floor. There was also a sturdy box padded with cloth to look like a crib. He hadn’t had to ask the pharmacist for any of this; she’d done it all on her own. The teacher and his wife each sat on a bed while the son lay on the mattress on the floor. The surgeon could see the exquisite care they now took of the bandages and tubes sticking from their bodies. Maybe they too could feel how close it was, the moment when every stitch would be tested. The pharmacist and her husband waited in the doorway, and that left the surgeon at the centre of the circle formed by them all.

  ‘I’m doing something I’ve never done before. After all my years of preparing the living for their deaths, I now have the task of preparing the dead for life. Sunrise isn’t far, and neither you nor I really know what will happen then. The angel promised you life and blood, and I don’t have any reason to doubt him, but how much blood and how much life he will give you, I can’t say. I only hope it’ll be sufficient.

  ‘For our part, we’ve done everything we could. But look at the cracks in the walls, look at the rusted bed frames. Look at where you are. You can’t leave this village, so your fates are tied to this clinic. I’ll do everything I can, but there’s no other doctor to relieve me. And I’m not a young man. I will stay awake as long as my body allows, but at some point I’ll have to stop and rest.

  ‘I’m not saying any of this to worry you. I’m saying this so that the three of you – yes, even you, my boy – should fully understand, or at least take some time to think about, the obstacles in front of us. If dawn brings life, it will also bring everything that comes with it – pain and infection and suffering. Your wounds will try to bleed, and though I’ve stitched them up as well as I could, I can’t promise you that every knot I’ve tied will hold.

  ‘Place the baby in the crib, lie down flat on your backs, and don’t try to get up. I can’t afford to have you faint and fall and suffer new injuries. As soon as your blood starts flowing, I will insert cannulas into your veins, and we’ll give you fluids and antibiotics. Thanks to this man – he travelled all night for you – we now have some medications to help control your pain, and sedatives to make you drowsy if needed. But beyond that I don’t have much more to offer. I don’t have the skills or supplies to make you unconscious. Some of you might find that you have trouble breathing. I have two oxygen tanks here, both half full, but no life-support machines to stabilize you if things get really bad. So I must ask you to endure what is beyond my ability to control. And finally, I know you’re very aware of it, but I’m still going to remind you: I don’t have any skills beyond those of a simple doctor. If your lives slip from my hands, they’re gone. I won’t be able to reach into the other world and pull you back.

  ‘I’ve done everything I could. I just hope it will help you face what is to come.’

  He had closed his eyes while he spoke these last words, and when he finished, he found the teacher kneeling on the floor, shaking.

  ‘Doctor Saheb, you have shown us more mercy than I ever hoped I would find. You, all of you, you are our saviours. As long as we live, and even beyond that, we will sing your praises to anyone who will listen. How can we repay your kindness, Saheb? I’ll do whatever you want me to do, I’ll work for you day and night, you won’t need to pay me a single paisa. I’ll help you care for your villagers. I hope they realize how blessed they are to have a saint like you among them. I know you don’t like it when I say things like this, but that’s what you are – a saint. More than a saint. And I can do nothing but fall at your feet.’

  The man dived to the ground, and the surgeon jumped back. ‘No, no, what is this? Don’t do that.’ He waved the teacher back to his bed. To avoid any further ceremony, he turned without meeting the eyes of the dead.

  The pharmacist and her husband were at the door to the room. ‘Keep a close watch,’ he said to them. ‘Call me if something happens.’

  The cup of tea that the girl had poured for him was still steaming on the table of the consultation room. He picked it up and stepped outside the clinic. The glow in the east had deepened, but the sun had yet to cut through the horizon. He groaned at the stabs in his knees as he sat on the steps at the entrance.

  At the bottom of the hillock, the village was like a primitive engine cranking its pieces into motion. Even if, by some miracle, the dead were able to keep from screaming in pain once they came to life, the usual villagers would soon start hobbling up to the clinic. He could make the pharmacist and her husband swear to secrecy – he trusted they would hold their tongues – but how long could he keep the visitors hidden? The villagers would have questions, perfect
ly valid ones. Where did these people come from? Why these injuries? Someone might call the district police. There would be an inquiry.

  No matter how many explanations he turned over in his head, he couldn’t cook up a single one that even the stupidest of constables would find convincing. Here was how the newspapers would report this: Three corpses had been found in a village clinic. A young family. The autopsies revealed gruesome findings. All of them had tubes in their flesh, and the boy’s organs had been cut out. The woman’s neck had been shredded and then stitched together with row after row of sutures. Her uterus had been sliced open, her dead foetus removed and placed in a crib next to her. There was no evidence that any anaesthesia was used. No trail of blood was found outside the clinic. No one had witnessed any struggle. The victims were clearly alive and intact when they reached this place. A crime of precise, horrific madness, planned and executed within the walls of this house of healing. A surgeon had become a butcher, brainwashed his superstitious assistants with tales of rebirth, and turned his clinic into a slaughterhouse.

  He gulped short sips of tea. It was remarkable, the detachment with which he was able to think about this mess. It was almost as though he were contemplating the misfortunes of some poor fool who’d managed to lose himself in a deranged labyrinth. Deranged was really the only word for this. It was impossibly deranged, like some device of torture, full of traps and locks and monstrosities … dazzling, now that he stopped to think about it. And it was exhausting, yes, dear god, all this thinking, it drained the life from every inch of his body, made his skin drape like a lead sheet over his bones.

  He looked at his hands, so sore from the clamps and forceps and scalpels. There was life in them, precious little of it, but life nonetheless. The veil that separated the worlds of the living and the dead was now so thin that it might tear at the gentlest touch. Against this veil, he could feel his fingers pulse with a dull ache. And with blood – there was no separating the two, the blood and the ache, for, as he’d learnt from the dead, one couldn’t exist without the other. His hands, unused for so long, whose inertia had caused him so much misery, had just completed a task that no surgeon would ever face, no matter how profound his skills or resources. Everything might well be uncertain, but his accomplishment was true, and would persist even when there was no one to recall it.