Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  Litwin chose an Indian restaurant far too expensive for Ruit to frequent. And while they talked, between bites of their samosas and curries, Litwin became even more fascinated by his lunch companion. “It was obvious from the moment I met him that Sanduk was fearless, that he had a vision for changing health care in his country,” says Litwin, now a member of the HCP’s advisory board. “Well, maybe not completely fearless, because he was pretty anxious about our tab. He let me buy lunch, but he insisted on paying for our taxi back to the hospital. I was very impressed by that, and by him, so whenever I returned to Kathamandu, I always looked in on Sanduk and left him supplies.”

  The domestic arrivals area at Tribhuvan consisted of a chain-link fence, which flexed and buckled as it held back the scrum of touts, taxi drivers, baggage wallahs, and guesthouse booking agents, all competing to be the first to lay a proprietary hand on the passengers debarking from small Royal Nepal prop planes and trying to squeeze through a narrow gate.

  Ruit jogged over to two tall Caucasian men in suits and ties who were wrestling with baggage wallahs, trying to regain control of their suitcases. “Dr. Hollows?” he asked.

  “Over here, mate!” shouted a short, sturdily built man in a rumpled bush coat, clutching a pipe between his teeth and carrying a battered leather shoulder bag. He smiled warmly, under an untrimmed hedge of gray hair and eyebrows so shaggy it was a wonder he could see past them well enough to perform surgery, and held out his hand.

  “From the first minute I met Fred I felt we were brothers,” Ruit says. “Some foreign VIPs would treat Nepalese like we were just there to carry their baggage. And here was one of the most famous doctors in the world with no air about him at all.”

  Fred Hollows tended to provoke strong reactions wherever he went. He had become infamous throughout Australia by publicizing the inferior quality of health care available to the nation’s aboriginal population. After conducting a series of research trips to the outback in the 1970s, Hollows concluded that, in terms of health care, Australians lived in two separate countries. The cities of coastal Australia provided first-class, first-world care to their residents; but in the largely aboriginal interior, third-world care was the best citizens could expect to receive, if any medical facilities existed at all. Once he had the data to back up his charges, he went public. Loudly. And Hollows used the press to call out politicians who resisted changing the status quo, shaming them into addressing the crisis in aboriginal health care.

  “Fred had a soft corner for communism,” Ruit says. “He really believed all humans deserved equal care. And if the high and mighty told him to be quiet, he’d just curse at them louder.”

  When Ruit picked him up at the airport, Hollows had just returned from surveying eye care in Nepal’s rural western districts for the World Health Organization. He concluded, and Ruit agreed, that rates of preventable blindness in rural Nepal were among the highest in the world. On their trip into Kathmandu, the two men discovered that they were both driven by the same passion: taking action to transform conditions they considered morally unacceptable.

  At the Nepal Eye Hospital, after Hollows observed Ruit operating, he knew he’d met not just a talented peer but “a soul-mate,” as Hollows wrote in his autobiography. “Sandook,” Hollows said, mispronouncing Ruit’s name as he always would thereafter, “we’ve got to organize getting you over to Oz and trained up in all the latest tricks of modern cataract surgery.”

  “If I’m ever free, of course I’d like to come,” Ruit said, wondering when his scheduled hours at the hospital, unscheduled attempts to win Nanda’s heart, and the years he faced of trying to transform his country’s eye-care system would ever allow him the time required to take such a trip.

  In the village of Gurmu, in the mid-hills to the northwest of Kathmandu, Kamisya Tamang sat in the doorway of her small stone hut. Since her eyes had begun to fail her, the boundary of her daily life had contracted, year after year. At first, she had still been able to join the others at the village loom, until her vision became too unreliable for her to thread the shuttle through the strands of yarn and the other women scolded her for ruining the shawls they hoped to sell. For nearly a year after that she was able to step carefully down the steep, rocky path to the village water tap, if she felt her way with the flat bottoms of her bare feet, which had become more reliable at sensing the contours of the ground than her eyes.

  Now her world had shrunk to the dimensions of her hut of stacked stones, to an eight-by-ten-foot rectangle of packed dirt and, on days when it wasn’t raining, the stone slab outside her low doorway, where she could squat and listen to village life going on without her.

  Kamisya’s husband, Baajyo, worked as a porter, and he was gone for months at a time, walking barefoot with his heavy woven basket wherever loads needed to be carried. Kamisya had given birth to a daughter once, while she was still able to see. The vision of the child’s small red face, clenched like a fist, had filled Kamisya with hope, and relief that she’d no longer be alone when Baajyo was away. But the infant girl had developed a fever and died after only fifteen days, as so many of the newly born in Gurmu did, where only half of the children survived to see their first birthday. With the nearest clinic three hard days of walking away, what could be done?

  Kamisya’s father had died so long ago that the precise cause escaped her. Her mother’s second husband had died from an untreated pain in his stomach, and after that, Kamisya’s mother lived with her in-laws, more a maid, now that he was gone, than a member of the family. She visited Kamisya when she had time between her duties cleaning, cooking, and working in the family’s barley and potato fields. She brought Kamisya what little her household could spare: kindling and rice and dried lentils so her daughter could cook dal, and greens and potatoes when they were in season. She also tried to keep the five-gallon plastic gas can where Kamisya stored her water filled, but often her chores kept her away.

  “You can live without food for some time,” Kamisya says. “But when my water ran out, I was really in trouble. I would sit in the door of my house, calling out in fear for someone to take my container to the village tap.”

  Kamisya would squat on her stone slab, listening to the sound of other womens’ laughter from the loom, or the cries of children at play drifting up to her home, and weep. “All my eyes were good for was making water,” she says. “And life became very sour for me.”

  Finally, during a sleepless night, Kamisya considered how to kill herself. Cutting her wrists with the dull knives she used to prepare food would be slow, painful, and unlikely to do the job. She could set fire to her home, but only the straw mat where she slept and the wood beams would burn, and her courage might fail her when she sensed the flames approaching. So she decided to run off the edge of the ravine. There’d be no surviving the fall to the river rocks far below.

  Stealthily, as if the entire village could hear her thoughts, she clutched her walking stick and stepped outside of the home she hadn’t left for months. It had been years since she’d been able to see the river gorge, but the sound of the wind gusting through the ravine was unmistakable for ears that had become as sensitive as Kamisya’s.

  She quickened her step, putting one bare foot in front of the other, navigating toward the wind that would release her. She had always striven to be kind to others, had tried her best to raise a family. Kamisya felt sure that her next incarnation would be better—she would be freed from this darkness. She could sense she was nearing the ravine, could feel the roaring void in front of her and ran toward it, paying no mind to the thorny scrub that pierced her feet, just as something slammed into her from the side, knocking the breath from her lungs, holding her down and pinning her to this life.

  It was her mother, who’d come with cooked dal and a basket of greens for Kamisya’s breakfast. She had seen what her daughter planned to do, and old and weak as she was, the advantage of her eyesight had enabled her to catch Kamisya before she reached the edge. The two women lay on the gro
und, out of breath, holding on to each other. “Stay,” her mother said, “stay. We’ll think of something.”

  When Baajyo returned from a month’s work, carrying building materials along the mid-hill trails, he had a fistful of rupee notes tucked into his woolen vest, and, after hearing about his wife’s attempt at suicide, he developed a plan. He’d listened to a radio program one evening that had talked about a doctor in Kathmandu who was restoring sight to the blind. “We’ll take you to Kathmandu by bus,” he told Kamisya. “We’ll have him make your eyes.”

  Baajyo lowered his wife into the bamboo basket he hauled to earn his living. With her feet hanging out behind him and her head propped up against a board he’d placed to steady it, they set out, her weight supported by a thick woven strap he wore across his forehead. The journey to the road was a short trip by Baajyo’s standards, and a simple matter for him. His wife, who was small to begin with and had lost much of her weight since losing her sight, was far lighter than his usual loads of cement, cases of soft drinks, or corrugated tin roofing.

  After a few turns down the twisting road, Kamisya vomited. Baajyo cleaned her up as well as he could and spoke to her gently, saying there was nothing to fear, that they should enjoy the ride and see how easily some people were able to travel, and they settled in for the trip to Kathmandu.

  In his examination room at the Nepal Eye Hospital, Ruit saw Kamisya arrive gripping Baajyo’s arm. Tenderly he took in her torn and weather-faded clothes. “The doctor sahib spoke to me so kindly,” Kamisya remembers, but she was afraid of what he was going to do to her. There were rumors. Many village people believed that doctors like Ruit plucked out their patients’ eyes before putting in new ones. But Ruit explained very clearly what Kamisya could expect and told her she wouldn’t have to pay for her surgery.

  “She was only forty years old, and had early onset of fully mature cataracts,” Ruit remembers. “A perfect candidate for the kind of surgery I could provide.”

  “Don’t worry, didi,” he told Kamisya. “It’s a simple procedure. I’m going to make two cuts in your eyes, take away the small pieces that are giving you problems, and put in something called intraocular lenses.”

  “What is that, Doctor dai?”

  “In fact, it’s an in-built spectacle,” Ruit told her. “A few days after the surgery, you should be able to see perfectly well.” Three days later, with two precious IOLs inserted where Kamisya’s diseased lenses had blocked the light, and her wounds sewn shut with sutures, Ruit gently removed the gauze swaddling Kamisya’s head and peeled off her bandages.

  Recounting her story, Kamisya pauses, searching for words able to convey the sense she felt of complete release from her captivity, of the difference between living in darkness and living in light. “The first thing I could see was the doctor’s face,” Kamisya says. “He didn’t look anything like the city person I imagined. He looked like he might have come from the hills above Gurmu. But I didn’t think about that for long. This man had made my eyes! I was too excited to find out what they could see to think about anything else. I looked out the window, and I was able to make out little birds flying by. Birds! Then he held up fingers for me to count, and I could see them as clearly as I can see your nose,” a sixty-year-old Kamisya told me, on a visit two decades later to Tilganga.

  She wore a cardigan sweater with a faded T-shirt underneath that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME. I doubted she had chosen it for the message in a language she couldn’t understand. It had probably come to her as flotsam, a first-world castoff, as did so many of the clothes worn by Nepal’s poor. But I couldn’t help feeling it was perfectly appropriate, that every day after not jumping to her death in Gurmu was a kind of birthday for Kamisya Tamang.

  Kamisya said she made a point of visiting Ruit and bringing him some small token of thanks—some fresh eggs or potatoes from her field—when she returned to Kathmandu to sell weavings and shop for necessities. “It’s not enough, I know,” she said. “I bring the doctor sahib only simple things. Yet he has given me back my life.”

  Preparing her instruments for surgery early one morning, Nanda was brisk and efficient, as usual. She laid out scalpels, clamps, and cotton balls in neat rows. She checked that bottles of IV fluids were full and snapped the necks off glass ampoules of sterile eye wash, lining them up on her stainless steel tray. Ruit studied her, admired her, and planned to wait, professionally, to broach the subject after their work was done. But he couldn’t help himself. “Damn it, Nanda,” he said. “I’ve had lot of time to think, and I need you to be my wife! I can’t live without you!”

  Nanda lowered her head, continued arranging the items on her tray.

  Ruit grabbed one of the glass ampoules. He raked its jagged spout across the palm of his left hand, the instrument that made his life’s work possible, drawing a deep gash that filled with blood.

  Nanda had been consumed for months by the difficulties they’d face, the break with tradition, the banishment from her family if she were to marry Ruit. “But when Sanduk sliced his hand,” she says, “I realized how much he loved me. And I knew we’d be all right.”

  “Do you think it will work?” she asked.

  “We’ll make it work,” Ruit said, grinning despite the pain, grinning even while his efficient scrub nurse blotted away his blood and poured antiseptic into his open wound, which foamed and burned with delicious vigor, like his plans for their future.

  They were married two days later, in a civil ceremony attended by eight of their friends. “I thought, ‘While the fire is hot, hit it,’ ” Ruit says. They hid the news from their families and celebrated at the Shangri-La Hotel’s restaurant, with the entire wedding party fitting comfortably around a single table, exchanging toasts, and returned to spend the night in their separate homes.

  “Ever since I met Nanda, I knew I wanted to marry her,” Ruit says. “But she made me work so hard to wear her down I hadn’t thought much about what we would do if she said yes.” Ruit’s apartment was too small for the two of them, and Nanda still lived in her parents’ home in the Newari neighborhood of Patan. Their families would be furious when they learned the truth, and unlikely to help them find a place to live or contribute to the cost of assembling a household. It dawned on Ruit that marrying Nanda might make him a refugee once again, unable to care properly for his wife if they were both torn from the web of family connections and support they’d need to start a life together in Kathmandu.

  While he sought out a more permanent solution, Ruit arranged funding from a Dutch NGO for the two of them to travel to Amsterdam and study for two months with an old friend, the ophthalmologist Jan Kok. But Ruit knew he was just buying time. Nanda left for Holland without telling her family that she’d married. Frantically, her parents telephoned her friends and employers until they discovered the truth, which they found shocking enough to shun her.

  Kok helped Ruit tame the Dutch telephone system enough to put in a call to Australia. He heard Hollows’s raspy voice on the other end of the crackling line.

  “Fred,” he said. “It’s Sanduk, from Nepal. I got married.”

  “That’s great,” Hollows said. “Congratulations.”

  “What I mean,” Ruit said, conscious of the handfuls of Dutch guilders swirling down the drain every moment he lingered on the expensive international call, “is that now we have no place where we can live together. Were you serious about inviting me to Australia? There’d be two of us coming now.”

  “Well, shit,” Hollows said, as casually as if he were inviting them over for a beer. “Then I’d better send you two tickets.”

  The Eighth Summit

  Just as a white summer cloud, in harmony with heaven and earth, freely floats in the blue sky from horizon to horizon, following the breath of the atmosphere—in the same way the pilgrim abandons himself to the breath of the greater life that … leads him beyond the farthest horizons to an aim which is already present within him, though yet hidden from his sight.

  —Lama An
agarika Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds

  “How did I get back into Harvard? Begging, basically. I told them I’d been bad,” Tabin says, “and I promised to be better.”

  After his unsuccessful expedition, Tabin returned to find he was out of medical school. He met with Dr. Daniel D. Federman, the dean he’d sent the postcard to from San Francisco, to plead his case. “For some reason, the dean wasn’t as excited about Everest as I was,” Tabin says. Tabin tried to explain how rare the opportunity he had been offered was. It was the last unclimbed face of the world’s tallest mountain!

  “Yes, and some of our students like to visit the beach during their holidays,” Federman said. “But they return when it’s time to work.” Tabin promised that if he was allowed back in, he’d devote himself unstintingly to his studies. “If you pull anything like this again,” Federman said, relenting, “don’t count on coming back.”

  By his third year of medical school, Tabin had restricted his climbing to weekend trips in Vermont or New Hampshire; when he needed a quick fix, he’d scale the stone embankment next to his local train station, drawing amused comments from commuters who watched his progress until their trains arrived. Most important, Tabin was excelling academically, and he worked hard to regain the faculty’s faith that he was dedicated to a career in medicine.

  Until the phone call came from Death-Pact Dan.

  Dan Reid told Tabin that they’d obtained another permit to attempt the Kangshung Face in the fall. He said that National Geographic had signed on to be their principal sponsor and six climbers were already on board. “Let’s go get on top of that bastard!” he said.

  The language Tabin used when he went to meet with his faculty adviser, to ask for another leave of absence, was considerably more polite. As Tabin recalls, the response from Dr. Michael Wiedman, an ophthalmologist on Harvard’s faculty, was not. “You, young man, have to be the most mentally deficient student ever admitted to Harvard Medical School,” he said. “This august institution would never permit you to leave simply to climb a mountain. But, as I’m sure you’re aware, Harvard has a long and illustrious tradition of sending its students out in the world to do medical research. You’re planning on traveling to Tibet to conduct ‘field research,’ ” he said, winking at Tabin. “Right?”