The pharmacist hadn’t mentioned it to Saheb – he didn’t believe in this kind of thing – and even her own husband, normally a pious man, thought she was losing her mind, but she knew this was no ordinary baby. It was an incarnation of some goddess. Her husband and she were blessed to have been chosen for this task. It all made sense to her now – why it had happened to them, why the dead had come to this world. It was to deliver this child into their care. Difficult as things seemed now, wasn’t Krishna himself born in a prison cell on a night filled with bad omens – storms and a flooded river, and everything else? And look what greatness He was destined to achieve. If she did everything in her power to protect this child, raised her, devoted her life to her, who could say what miracles the child would perform, what evils and injustices she would drive from this world?
The pharmacist ladled the rice out into two plates. She wasn’t feeling very hungry herself. The cramp low in her belly nauseated her. It wasn’t her time of the month yet, so perhaps this was just from the scars left after the tuberculosis in her ovaries had closed off her tubes. Saheb was sure that all those months of antibiotics had been enough to cure the infection itself, and he always insisted that the scars, though they would probably never go away, shouldn’t cause her pain. But what could you do? You accepted what God decided for you without asking too many questions. After all, if He could make this world and everything in it, put in its place every star in the sky and pebble in the river, then He understood the path laid out for you, life after life, better than any human ever would.
She carried the plates out.
Though the pharmacist kept apologizing for the tastelessness of the food, the surgeon barely stopped to chew as he swallowed. The same was true of the pharmacist’s husband, who ate cross-legged on the floor. After the plates were cleared, the surgeon remembered the packets from the blood bank, and he transferred them from the icebox to the refrigerator. Perhaps another farmer with a lacerated forearm would walk in one of these days, and he’d have a chance to use them.
He waited in the corridor while the pharmacist laid out the makeshift beds. She had spread out two thin ones in the pharmacy, and now seemed to be arranging the one in his consultation room to be as comfortable as possible. They hadn’t had to discuss it, but it was obvious that none of them had any desire to sleep in the back room, on any of the beds or mattresses that the dead had occupied.
‘We’re like kites,’ said the surgeon.
‘Kites, Saheb?’ asked the pharmacist’s husband.
‘Yes. Kites with strings.’
To relieve a crick in his neck, the surgeon turned his face upward until he felt a pleasant squeeze in the flesh at the back of his scalp. He found, to his bemusement, the pharmacist’s husband mirroring the action, turning to the ceiling as if in search of kites.
‘You have to wonder,’ said the surgeon, ‘what a kite would think if it had a brain. Maybe it would think of its position in the sky as the only steady point in the universe, and worry about constantly holding the rest of the world in place. That, too, on a single string. A single string, at the end of which is balanced the entire earth, as if on the tip of a pin. The earth has so many dangerous things on it, trees with branches like claws, constantly trying to poke holes through the kite’s body, animals crawling all over, waiting to grab and tear it, and water, so much water everywhere – the kite has to make sure it never touches it, or it will be done for. The wind is strong, it makes the earth flap around the kite in every direction, but the kite holds on to its string, keeps the earth at a safe distance. There’s sin and death and evil on the earth, the kite thinks, but the sky is pure, and as long as it controls its own little patch, things are good.’
This seemed to perplex the pharmacist’s husband. The surgeon waved a hand, dismissing the train of thought.
‘Get some rest. Both of you. We’ll talk again after we’ve slept.’
The pharmacist brought the crib from the back room and positioned it beside her bedding in the pharmacy. The surgeon knelt at its side, examining the baby again to confirm that she was still in her placid, bloodless state. He caressed her cheek with the back of a finger.
‘If only this were a normal child, we could pretend that she was abandoned at our doorstep. Now, we’ll have to just hide her. After it’s dark, we can move her to my quarters, where no one will wander, and you can look after her there. Let’s see how long we can keep this secret.’
The surgeon dragged himself to the consultation room and closed the door. His eyes, of their own will, went to the side table, to the teacup that the official’s lips had touched. He gave it a long, quiet look, and thought of the teacher and his wife and son, of the place to which they had likely returned. He remembered what the dead woman had said, that the afterlife wasn’t as bad as her husband made it out. He hoped that those words, uttered though they were in a fit of rage, were true. Somehow the prospect of the afterlife seemed to cause the surgeon less distress than he felt it should. Perhaps if he were less drained, the ghastliness of it might have overwhelmed him. But now, in this little room, surrounded by the apparatus of this mortal world, one of which was a prepared bed, the afterlife seemed like a distant calamity, to be confronted at a later, mercifully unspecified, date.
He thought of his last conversation with the teacher, of how wretched the man had looked, kneeling on the floor. He recalled how harsh he’d been with him, how needlessly bitter and cruel their final moments together had been. What would he have done in the teacher’s place? Refused the possibility of life? Far greater men had sinned for far less. One thing the surgeon knew: the remorse he now felt would remain with him as long as he lived. And perhaps beyond.
He thought also of the bundle of money, a good portion of his savings, that he’d handed over to the official. At that last thought, he pulled an old handkerchief from a drawer, spread it out on his desk, placed the cup in its centre, and knotted the ends of the square to fold it into a bundle. He pinched the knots in his fingers, raised the bundle to the level of his eyes, and released it.
The smash was muffled, but apparently still loud enough to carry to the other rooms, for the pharmacist called out, ‘Saheb?’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I dropped something in the dark. I’ll take care of it.’
An irresistible drowsiness overcame him. He lay down on the sheets without bothering to throw the handkerchief and its enclosed shards into the wastebasket. He had wondered if he would be able to sleep under the weight of everything that had passed, but as soon as his head touched the pillow, his eyes were sealed as though with a kohl of wax. His chest rose and fell. That wasn’t a definite sign of life, of course. Only the few drops of sweat that pushed through his pores and trickled down his skin spoke of his persistence in this world.
The living slept as though death itself had scoured all thought from their minds. The clinic readied its bricks and mortar and settled into the silence of a tomb. In the corridor, a small green lizard, emboldened by the quiet, emerged from a crack in the ceiling and resumed its vigil beside the wall clock. Hours passed, marked by nothing more than the crawl of the clock’s hands and the occasional dart of the lizard’s flat tongue, until, in a box lined with cloth, by the side of a new mother deep in dreamless sleep, the slightest shade of pink crept into the cheeks of a newborn. Her fists balled, her face crinkled as she shut her eyelids tight, and her lips pulled back from her toothless gums while she drew in a breath, preparing to let out a cry.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my editors: Peter Gelfan for helping this story find its direction, and Miranda Ottewell for helping it find its voice. Thank you to Nick Sheerin and the team at Serpent’s Tail for bringing this work to life in the UK, and to my agents Neil Olson (Donadio & Olson) and Matthew Turner (Rogers, Coleridge & White) for their dedication and insight. My gratitude to Nate, Shruti, Shalaka, Christine, Chris, Adam, Dhruv, Tom, Thomas and Bruce for valuable conversations and comments, and to my parents for envelop
ing my childhood in books.
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