Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

“I’ve always related well to kids,” Tabin says. “Maybe that’s why I tend to spend more time socially with climbers than with doctors, who tend to be pretty serious. Climbers retain that sick, twisted, immature sense of humor, like children who’ve never grown up. I always figured I’d have children someday, but that day hadn’t come and I was beginning to feel a little concerned that the twisting path I’d taken in life meant it might never happen for me.”

  “Fourteen–seven, Geoff, isn’t it?”

  “If you say so,” Tabin said, hands on his knees, laboring to draw a full breath.

  This pre-breakfast match was played, mercifully, without spectators, except for the wall of stuffed and mounted animal heads the British had hung when this had been a colonial social club. Tabin was still losing badly, but he knew that his badminton, like his surgical technique, was steadily improving. He’d moved Ruit around the court enough this time that a small patch of sweat darkened the center of his sky-blue polo shirt.

  Like most of the colonial relics in the hill stations, the club building sagged somewhat, under the weight of moisture, overgrown vegetation, and time. Its stuffy rooms were hung with fading framed black-and-white group portraits of British officers in tennis whites, but the clay courts outside had reverted to mud, and the furnishings stank of mold.

  “Have you thought about what I told to you, about finding a suitable woman?”

  “I’m trying not to think about anything right now,” Tabin said, “except beating you at this ridiculous game.”

  “Never!” Ruit said, giggling happily as he served a final ace for match point. As they zipped their racquets back into their cases and set out toward a day of surgeries, a silent gallery of dusty glass eyes—of musk deer, ibex, mountain goats, and Marco Polo sheep—looked on, without apparent judgment.

  During most of his days in Kalimpong, Tabin was too busy to ruminate about his romantic life. At Tenzeng Dorjee’s invitation, they were holding one of the few cataract camps the area had ever seen. Tea plantation workers, exposed to the sun all day, had extraordinarily high rates of cataract disease. So did the Lepcha people, who lived in the forest between the hill stations and worked as woodcutters and stone breakers, providing basic heating and building materials for the more affluent residents of Darjeeling and Kalimpong. Nuns of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, wearing the traditional white saris bordered with blue, scoured the valleys between the hill towns ahead of Ruit and Tabin’s arrival, urging Lepcha families to bring their blind up to Kalimpong.

  Thinlay Ngodup, a lay Buddhist with a scraggly goatee, windblown hair, and a wild cackling laugh, whom Dorjee had chosen to direct the Jamgon Kongtrul the Third Memorial Home, says finding patients for the dozens of eye camps the HCP has since held in Kalimpong has rarely been a problem. “For years, we could throw out a net from our perch on top of this hill and catch two or three hundred blind people,” he told me.

  Ruit and Tabin operated for a week in a school where the orphans ordinarily studied; formerly a storehouse for Tibetan trade goods owned by the Third Jamgon Kongtrul’s father, it was a half-hour walk uphill from the memorial home. Dorjee, well aware of the thousands more in the surrounding hills who needed surgery, suggested to Ruit over dinner one evening that the Jamgon Kongtrul’s trust fund the construction of an eye hospital in Kalimpong, based on the Tilganga model. “My Rinpoche may not have lived to see it,” Ruit says. “Still, I was happy that those, like Dorjee, charged with grasping the baton and continuing what he started were committed to carrying out his vision.”

  Ngodup, full of tireless good humor, seemed to be everywhere at once, helping to screen patients, feed and shelter their families, or translate. Tabin could see why he’d been chosen to run a facility with such wide-ranging responsibilities. One morning Tabin operated on a Lepcha man with a single cataract. His healthy eye had enabled him to keep his job, breaking rocks on the road to Siliguri. His wife had worked hammering them into smaller stones alongside him, until she’d lost her sight completely. Tabin was sure the surgery he’d performed on both of them the previous day had gone well and that the couple could expect good results. But when their bandages came off, they began behaving strangely. Though Tabin couldn’t understand their language, they appeared to be arguing, and the woman, wearing a freshly laundered crimson sari, poked her husband in the chest and twisted the fabric of his faded dress shirt. It had been scrubbed and washed against river rocks so many times that its original color was a mystery, and all that remained was a faint paisley pattern.

  Tabin called Ngodup over. “What are they saying?” he asked. “Is there a problem with their eyes?”

  Ngodup squatted in front of the couple and cocked his head to listen for a moment, before laughing. “The wife is very angry at the husband,” he explained to Tabin. “She says to him, ‘The last time I saw you, three years ago, you were wearing that same ugly shirt. Are we so poor that you can’t afford another? Or have you stopped taking pride in your appearance altogether?’ ”

  More than six hundred patients had gathered at Kalimpong, taxing the small surgical team of Tabin, Ruit, and two local doctors who’d done only a few hundred microsurgeries between them. Ruit put the pedal down and drove through an enormous caseload each day, leaving Tabin in charge of training the two surgeons, who had come from Sikkim, twenty miles to the northwest.

  Sikkim had spent much of its history fending off foreign powers with designs on the strategic thumb-shaped land straddling the mountains between India and Tibet. In the late 1930s, eager to avoid being absorbed by British India, the chogyal, or king, of Sikkim signed an alliance with Nazi Germany. Nazi dignitaries visited on the verge of World War II and were greeted with all the ceremony that the small nation could muster. Banners decorated with the traditional Buddhist pinwheel signifying good luck—the svastika, as it’s known in Sanskrit—were displayed in honor of the regime that had appropriated it as a state symbol, and for years thereafter Sikkimese children were christened with unlikely Teutonic names. Following India’s independence, Sikkim was gradually absorbed by its neighbor to the south, first becoming an Indian protectorate, shielded from China’s military by India’s armed forces. Finally, in 1975, the Sikkimese, frightened by repeated border skirmishes with the Chinese and worried that they might suffer the same fate as Tibet, voted to officially become the twenty-second state of India.

  Which is how Tabin came to be training not only a Sikkimese surgeon named B. P. Dhakal but an ophthalmologist with the unforgettable name of Hitler Pradhan. “At first I got a big kick out of the idea that a Jew was teaching Hitler how to heal the blind of Sikkim,” Tabin says. “But training them was tough. B.P. had excellent academic credentials, but he was too cocky for someone who had hardly performed any surgery. B.P. would charge ahead, make mistakes, then come to me very obsequiously and ask for help. Hitler was an experienced surgeon, but he had rather heavy, clumsy hands. He would just bumble on and giggle when he wasn’t able to do some of the more delicate work.”

  Tabin took over cases when Dhakal or Pradhan ran into trouble. He tried not to bother Ruit, but he often had to ask for his partner’s help. Tabin sensed the goodwill and trust he’d been accumulating with Ruit starting to slip away, and with each interruption, his felt Ruit’s annoyance rise from a simmer to a boil.

  “What are you here for?” Ruit barked at Tabin, sliding off his stool to repair the damage after Dhakal’s blade had plunged too deep, rupturing a patient’s iris. “You have to be better, Geoff, you know?”

  “I tried to let the criticism slide,” Tabin says. “I’d had much more insulting things said to me by big-shot surgeons during my training in the States. But Ruit’s disapproval was really hard to take. He had a way of making everyone around him feel like they were failing if they weren’t always getting better.” Tabin experienced uncharacteristic doubts about whether he and Ruit had aimed too high. The goal they’d set for the HCP—“to eradicate preventable blindness across the entire Himalaya and beyond”—
was so overwhelming that at moments like this, Tabin felt the weight of the communities they’d yet to cure pressing down so hard he could barely breathe. He had to be better, Tabin told himself, not only at the operating table but by working to turn the HCP into an organization capable of keeping such an ambitious promise.

  Back amid the noise and bustle of Kathmandu, which seemed busier and dirtier every time Tabin returned to town, he pushed himself to the point of exhaustion at Tilganga. He operated when Ruit or Reeta were in the clinic, examining and diagnosing patients. He contacted Hugh Taylor and helped arrange a retinal fellowship in Melbourne for Govinda Paudyal, Tilganga’s most talented young surgeon. And he spoke with Reeta about the HCP funding a fellowship so she could work with him in Vermont, where she could hone her skills as a corneal specialist.

  During the evenings, he roamed the pubs and cafés of Thamel, the place where he had been happiest during his climbing days, hoping for temporary refuge from Ruit’s scrutiny. At the Rum Doodle bar—where, on a block of wood bolted to the wall, his signature was inscribed alongside those of such luminaries as Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay—he met a barefoot young Australian backpacker on her first trip to Asia. “I don’t remember her name,” Tabin says, “but I know that she’d shaved her head, and for some reason being bald made her unusually attractive to me.”

  Tabin had a card the restaurant had issued him, as it did to all who summited Everest, entitling him to free meals for life. But the management of the Rum Doodle wisely made these climbers, notorious for their bottomless ability to consume alcohol, pay for their own drinks. Tabin bought himself and the woman a beer, and then another, and another, telling tales about his climbing days and the way his life had swerved and become more serious, maybe too serious for him to maintain, since he’d met Ruit.

  He woke up in her shabby guesthouse room the next morning, his head throbbing. By the light streaming through the room’s tie-dyed curtains, he watched the woman while she slept, taking in details he hadn’t paid much attention to the night before. Her arms were heavily covered in tribal tattoos. Metal studs pierced her eyebrows and upper lip. When she woke up, she reminded him that he’d promised to show her Tilganga. So after the Asian backpackers’ staple breakfast of banana pancakes, he brought her to the hospital.

  Tabin walked the woman, still barefoot, to Ruit’s table so she could observe him at surgery. Ruit’s face was covered by a mask, but when he looked up and took the measure of Tabin’s companion, his raised eyebrows told Tabin all he needed to know.

  “This was really too much,” Ruit remembers. “I mean, this person was a completely unsuitable presence. She had metals sticking out all over her face! And Geoff hadn’t thought twice before bringing this barefoot, tattooed girl to a place so respectable as Tilganga. I had some doubts about Geoff’s judgment before, but after seeing her, those doubts doubled.”

  A week later, when the bald backpacker left for Australia, Tabin had dinner at the Ruits’ cramped apartment over Archie’s Photo Shop. It was the evening before his own flight was due to depart for America, and before heading home, Tabin hoped to patch up the offense he’d obviously caused his partner. Nanda had done what she could with the modest space, covering the linoleum floor with a Tibetan carpet and hanging lace curtains over the narrow windows. There was no dining table and no kitchen, so she cooked upstairs in Sonam and Kasang’s apartment, and they ate the mutton curry and rice she brought downstairs seated on cushioned benches, holding the plates in their laps. The Ruit family had grown, despite the close quarters, and now, in addition to seven-year-old Sagar, they had two daughters, Serabla, five, and Satenla, two.

  Most of the meal passed in silence, with Tabin aware of the tension he’d caused, but unsure of how to defuse it, and Ruit trying not to raise the subject. Tabin admired the cozy domestic scene, compared it with the squalid guesthouse where he’d spent the last week, and wondered whether the advice his mother and Ruit felt free to give about his personal life mightn’t have some merit. With a faint twinge of jealousy, he watched the natural way Ruit and Nanda sat side by side, a hand or hip in constant contact, always finding an excuse to brush against each other. After dinner, the Ruits’ pretty, dark-haired daughters climbed down from the benches to lounge on the carpet against their father’s legs.

  “I tried to keep my mouth shut,” Ruit says. “And I made it through dinner, but knew I couldn’t last much longer.”

  He’d formed a partnership with Tabin, and beyond their professional ties, he enjoyed the American’s company. But Ruit still wondered if he could depend on him, if this man only a few years younger than himself was so immature that he was willing to risk everything they were trying to build for a pointless affair. “I mean,” Ruit explains, “taking up with a woman like her, he could get diseases. He could be disgraced. He could fall down very fast and very far. I’d come to care about Geoff, and I felt it was my duty to tell him so.”

  “Really, Geoff,” Ruit said, after Serabla and Satenla had gone to bed, unable to contain himself any longer, “don’t you think it might be time for you to grow up?”

  Tabin opened his mouth to speak, but words wouldn’t come. He settled for pressing his lips together and firmly nodding, once. The most infuriating thing about his partner, Tabin thought as he thanked Nanda for dinner, zipped up his fleece jacket, and patted his passport, was how often, and how indisputably, he was right.

  Sir Is Willing

  When waking a tiger, use a long stick.

  —Mao Tse-tung

  The war came to Kathmandu on February 13, 1996. The Maoists fired the first shots of their revolution, launching small, coordinated attacks across the countryside at police posts, landlords’ homes, and banks that extended loans to farmers at extortionate rates. They hurled Molotov cocktails at a Pepsi-Cola plant on the outskirts of Kathmandu, which they’d chosen as a symbol of capitalist oppression. The explosions left scorch marks on the exterior of the factory and burned a few outbuildings, but it failed to cut the supply of Pepsi products to the capital.

  Most of the other attacks were also symbolic, targeting the institutions that oppressed Nepal’s poor while carefully limiting human casualties. Prachanda, one of the movement’s most charismatic leaders, told the press that the rebels limited their assaults on the capital because they didn’t want to kill innocent people or scare the country’s intellectuals away from revolution in one stroke. It’s equally plausible that they avoided attacking Kathmandu because a poorly equipped peasant fighting force was reluctant, at first, to challenge a harder target, since the city was surrounded by military garrisons.

  Ruit sympathized with the Maoists’ cause. But he worried that if the violence grew from symbolic attacks to a bloody campaign, the ambitious expansion he and Tabin had set in motion would become infinitely more challenging.

  The uprising was rooted in the desperate poverty of Nepal’s rural population, and its power base rose from Rolpa, one of the most economically depressed districts in the country. Just before the first wave of attacks, the rebels had issued a declaration of forty demands, including the establishment of a democratic secular republic, the elimination of caste- and gender-based discrimination, and free education and health care for all Nepalese. “Nepal had been a feudal system for so long,” Ruit says. “Countries in the region, like India, made tremendous advances in democracy and public welfare. But in Nepal, despite decades of protests, nothing changed. Certainly not the inequity between the elites and the rural people. And the anger had really been building. The country had reached the burning point.”

  The rebels called themselves “Maoists,” which Ruit considered misguided, since the former Chinese leader had never been popular in Nepal. And history was increasingly judging Mao’s legacy by the brutal excesses of his Cultural Revolution, when professionals were forcibly removed from cities to work in agrarian collectives and brigades of armed children were encouraged to denounce and even kill the parents, teachers, and other adults they judg
ed to be enemies of the revolution.

  Despite their unfortunate name, Ruit shared many of the goals of Nepal’s new guerrilla army, and he certainly agreed with their grievances. “Out of that list of forty demands, I agreed with about thirty-eight of them,” Ruit says. “Everything except extremism and violence. Most of their demands were about improving people’s lives.”

  Even after downgrading the power of the monarchy in the early 1990s and taking tentative steps toward democracy, Nepal remained one of the world’s poorest countries. Despite a healthy tourist industry and the capacity to produce abundant hydropower, the nation had a crumbling infrastructure and frequent power outages. Wealth accumulated through foreign investment pooled in the accounts of corrupt police, politicians, and the Kathmandu elite, rarely trickling down to communities in the countryside, where 81 percent of Nepal’s population labored in subsistence agriculture and most lived, as Ruit was acutely aware, as impoverished peasants.

  After dark, one chilly evening late in the winter of 1996, when the children were tucked under heavy quilts, asleep in their unheated apartment, the People’s War approached Sanduk and Nanda Ruit via a ringing phone. Sanduk put down his newspaper and answered it. The voice was female and sounded very young. The Maoists used idealist young women to communicate in Kathmandu during the early years of the war. They often wore their hair in the twin braids common among college intellectuals in Kathmandu that year, a style suggested by the posters depicting fearless female soldiers—rifle in one hand, the clenched fist of the other held high—that the Maoists had pasted all over town. That was how Ruit pictured the woman—a girl really, he judged—on the other end of the line.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you so late, Doctor dai, but there has been a blast.”

  “A blast?” Ruit said, seeing Nanda draw aside the curtain that separated the sleeping area and lean into the living room. He nodded toward her, assuring her that all was well, even though the news had shocked him, and she withdrew, sliding the curtain closed.