I Am an Executioner

by Rajesh Parameswaran

  For Gopi, of course, lost in his own head, the promise was still there, always on the verge of fulfillment. There was opportunity all around in platefuls, and one only had to take his helping.

  Gopi told the man with the rash on his shin that he would take care of him the next day. Then Gopi would have gone home and consulted his library books (which he renewed every two weeks, as he planned to do indefinitely), concluding finally that the rash was either a bacterial infection or a reaction to the sun. He forged a prescription for topical antibiotic, and recommended as well an over-the-counter anti-itch ointment and sunscreen. He charged the fellow thirty-five dollars for the advice, stressing that the price was a discount because this man was the clinic’s first patient. Gopi figured the sum was less than half what a regular doctor would charge someone without insurance. Within five days, the rash disappeared.

  Soon, Gopi was consulting with the workers on a whole catalogue of minor ailments, and they began also to refer their families and their friends to him. He recruited additional patients in bus stops or at the mall, preferring immigrants who looked newly arrived, Indians if we appeared trusting and un-Americanized. He would strike up a conversation to get a sense of the person and then hand out one of the business cards he’d printed up. In this way, Gopi generated business with surprising speed. People with very serious-sounding problems—old men with severe chest pains, for example—Gopi reluctantly turned away, but those with more minor ailments he gamely treated, or tried to, and after two and a half months he was able to cover his monthly expenses.

  Those first months were giddy ones for Gopi. In the evenings, over dinner, he might tell Manju, “I sold seven televisions today.”

  “Very nice,” she might answer. “Bring one home for us one day, that would be something.”

  “Soon, my dear,” he would tell her. “Soon we will have big-screen televisions and nice vacations, too,” and he would grin in his unaccountable way, so pleased with himself. “Don’t you trust me? It’ll happen, Manju. Why not? I say. Why not for us?”

  Manju had become by this point more or less a sensible woman, but she would find something in Gopi’s manner so infectious, so suddenly appealing—almost like the Gopi of old—that she would get up and take her dirty plate to the sink just so he wouldn’t see the smile rising irrepressibly to her face.

  At night, he would push up against her and bite her playfully on the neck.

  “Ouch!” she would yell, and give him a push on the nose. “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Why not? One good reason,” Gopi would ask.

  And Manju would answer, “What would be the point?”

  “The point?” Gopi would laugh. “Now you see the point?”

  And Manju would finally relent, thinking, Okay, why not?

  Of course, when Gopi squeezed himself between Manju’s pudding thighs, in his mind he saw pictures of Deepika Shenoy, our doctor acquaintance Dilip’s wife; or of his old favorite, Dolly Parton.

  “Whose key is in ignition?” he might even blurt, in his exuberance, “Gopi the physician!” And Manju would have snorted a laugh and asked him what he meant, if she could have, but on those first nights, at least, she was too distracted by the discovery that having his warmth inside her should feel so good and familiar, even though so much time had passed.

  After he fell asleep, though, Manju would experience an aftertaste of unplaceable resentment. His behavior had the effect, in other words, of sharpening her long-dormant appetite for happiness, without satisfying it. She sensed Gopi’s newfound sense of purpose but didn’t understand it. She saw the outline of a different life together, but the content was missing. And in this state of directed longing, of contoured emptiness, Manju began to suspect that she was pregnant.

  It was entirely plausible. Manju had confided in some of us years ago that the doctors had only ever said it would be difficult, not impossible. And now, she thought, perhaps a child had finally arrived to pull Gopi back and create the love they had never properly had. Manju could scarcely believe it, but something Gopi had said kept echoing in her mind: Why not? Why not for us?

  When she made the doctor’s appointment, Manju decided not to tell Gopi, or any of us, until she had gotten an answer for sure. The doctor was kind to Manju, and patient, and interested in listening, so Manju would have told her all about her body’s changes, and the discomfort, and the intermittent sickness. And the doctor examined Manju and took her blood, and a week later called her back for more tests, and after this second visit, she was drawn and pale from the strain of spending long hours in cold rooms, half naked, stared at, pricked, pried open, and fingered by more people than she could clearly remember.

  She drove home that day hoping that her husband at least would have done something about dinner. But when she opened the front door Gopi was hunched over a torn sofa cushion, its foam stuffing strewn over the floor.

  “What in the world are you doing?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Gopi yelled in alarm. “What do you think? Only fixing the cushion.” Gopi had sliced it open with a knife and removed its innards, and now he was stuffing them back in and trying to stitch it all up as cleanly as possible. He was practicing. The following day, he was scheduled to perform his first surgery.

  Vicente was the patient. Gopi had noticed that the young man had a lump on his forearm the size of a kumquat. Vicente said he’d had it for years, that a doctor had told him it was harmless—simply a fat deposit—and that it would cost nine hundred dollars just to remove it. Gopi said it was an ugly thing and ought to be gotten rid of, and that he would do it for a very reasonable price. Somehow, the boy agreed.

  Vicente arrived at the office with a young lady whom Gopi recognized as the woman who always rode in Vicente’s car. She was short and thin and wore loose blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and sneakers. Vicente introduced her as Sandra, and Gopi smiled and shook her hand; from the way he behaved, you could not have known how nervous he was. “Mucho gusto,” said the woman, and Gopi corrected her. “I’m not Spanish, I’m Indian,” he said. “But that’s okay. Se habla español. Right, Vicente?”

  Sandra made a noise that sounded to Gopi like Hmph.

  “Do you want to watch?” Gopi asked her, indicating the examining room. Sandra looked to Vicente, who translated the question for her. She laughed and shook her head. “Oh, no,” she said. She sat down in the waiting room.

  As they walked into the examining room, Gopi asked Vicente, “She your wife?” Vicente grinned, embarrassed. “Not yet, Doctor. Can’t afford to get married yet.”

  If any of us had seen him then, we might for a moment have doubted that this was the Gopi we knew, and not a surgeon long used to taking knives to human flesh. He smiled and spoke so calmly that Vicente himself was not at all nervous when Gopi told him to sit in a chair and roll up his sleeve and lay his arm on the examining table.

  The novocaine had come in the mail from India months previously, but Gopi had not had occasion to use it until now. He opened the box and found his hypodermic, then filled the syringe with the drug, eyeballing the measurement. He injected Vicente in three places around the lump and stared gravely, waiting for the arm to numb.

  After eight or ten minutes, Gopi poked the arm with his finger.

  “Can you feel that?” he asked.

  “Only a little,” Vicente replied.

  Gopi didn’t want to take any chances. He refilled the hypodermic and injected the young man again. After a few minutes, he directed Vicente to close his eyes.

  “Am I touching you or not?” Gopi asked him.

  “Don’t think so,” said Vicente.

  “Now?”

  “Unh-uh.”

  Finally, Gopi touched Vicente’s arm. “How about now?”

  “Nope.”

  Now Gopi couldn’t help himself. He giggled. Then he thwacked Vicente with three of his fingers. “Did you feel that?” he asked.

  “I heard it,” said Vicente. “But I didn’t really feel it.”
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  “Okay then.” Gopi squirmed his fingers into latex gloves and swabbed Vicente’s arm with iodine. He had sterilized the scalpel by putting it into a bowl of water that had been microwaved on high for fifteen minutes, and now without hesitating and without giving himself time to grow afraid, he sank the blade into Vicente’s skin.

  The blade sank softly. Gopi sliced a thin line along the center of Vicente’s lump. Blood welled slowly from the line, and Gopi wiped it with cotton gauze. Vicente didn’t appear to feel anything. It was magical, Gopi thought; it was impossible. Gopi cut smaller, horizontal lines at each end of the vertical one, and then he took a breath and with his gloved fingers pried up a flap of skin. The lump was loosely anchored, and Gopi unmoored it with tentative scalpel cuts until it slipped out, slick and rubbery, into the palm of his hand. Gopi showed it to Vicente, who took one look and slumped down in his chair.

  Gopi tried to catch Vicente up as he fainted, but in doing so he dropped the lump. It slid along the floor, and Gopi dropped Vicente to stop it with one foot. He picked up the lump and put it in the sink, making a mental note to flush it in the toilet later. Then he lifted poor Vicente off the chair as best he could and shoved his limp body onto the metal examining table, which seemed designed to hold, at most, a large dog. Vicente’s legs dangled off awkwardly above the knees.

  “Needle and thread, please, Nurse,” Gopi chuckled to himself, and then he picked up the surgical needle that he had laid out earlier on a tray, already strung with clear catgut medical suture.

  Vicente woke up halfway through the stitching, and Gopi talked to him reassuringly. “Feeling better?” he asked. “Don’t look. Almost done.” Gopi tied a little knot and appraised his handiwork. The sutures were cragged and haphazard, but Gopi marveled that a man whose mother and wife had never let him so much as stitch a button on his own shirt could have done such a relatively clean job. Gopi covered the wound with a bandage. He washed his hands and took Vicente’s cash, and advised him to go home and take lots of Tylenol. Then he gave Vicente a firm handshake, making the poor man wince.

  “See me back in a month?” Gopi said.

  When the two men came into the lobby, Sandra stood up. Her face was blanched.

  “¿Qué pasó?” she asked.

  She and Vicente spoke to each other in quick overlapping sentences, and Gopi interrupted. “Why is she excited? What happened?”

  Vicente turned to Gopi. “She heard the commotion in there,” he said. “She thought something bad happened. That’s all.”

  “Nothing wrong,” Gopi said in English. He took Sandra’s hand in his. “He’s a good boy. Take care of him.”

  Sandra frowned. As she and Vicente turned around to leave, Sandra cried out again: the back of Vicente’s shirt was covered with Gopi’s bloody fingerprints.

  After they left, Gopi sat down. We see him as the adrenaline slowly ebbed, and he began to realize what he had just done. He had used a knife to cut into another man’s body, and the man had been helped, not harmed. He had performed a surgery, and what’s more, while doing so he had not had a self-conscious thought. He had become a doctor, unselfconscious, and at this realization, Gopi floated with elation. He floated above himself and understood that he was enjoying a delicious and slightly terrifying dream. And in this state of queasy exhilaration, Gopi walked outside, eager for the calming society of the men in the parking lot. But they had left already, so he visited the dry cleaner next door, hoping to make conversation with the teenage-looking girl who worked there (“Where do you get so many hangers?”). She had gone to lunch, so Gopi walked in the gravel by the side of the long road until he reached the field of grazing cows. He talked out loud to the dumb, death-destined animals, and somehow this calmed Gopi down.

  When he went home that night, before making love to his wife, he asked her, “How is it we came to be here, you and me, all alone in this country? Isn’t it strange? That we thought certain thoughts that led to certain actions, and a lot of other things happened just by chance, and the net result is me lying here on top of you?”

  “It is strange indeed,” replied Manju, who, we would learn, had gotten some news from her doctor that day and, unbeknownst to Gopi, was experiencing her own private wonder. At temple, on the festival of Krishna’s birthday, Dr. Dilip Shenoy surprised Gopi by beckoning him over to sit at his table in the lunch hall.

  “Sit with me, Gopi,” we heard Dilip tell him, with uncharacteristic friendliness, and Gopi wondered if this was a sign of the uncanny success of his deception—the unfriendly doctor now instinctively recognized Gopi as one of his own.

  Dilip poised his thin fingers against his Styrofoam lunch plate. “How are you, Gopi?” Dilip said. He had a long, serious face, and his gray hair plumed up softly. “Let’s talk. What’s going on?”

  “Just the usual,” Gopi answered.

  “Really? Nothing new?”

  Dilip’s intent stare, his tone, began now to strike Gopi as odd. “But how are you, Dilip?” Gopi asked.

  “Let us not talk about me,” Dilip replied. He smiled, just a little. “Because, Gopi, it seems that you are the much more interesting fellow.”

  Inside the temple, Manju was looking at the boy Krishna in the altar, the black stone Krishna with wide gold eyes and a wise grin, blowing with his blood-red lips into the flute he held there. A lovely, playful Krishna; a mischievous, hilarious Krishna; and all at once, Manju thought, a terrible, mocking Krishna, grinning at all the capricious misery he had spun.

  “Krishna, Guruvayoorappa,” Manju prayed. She clasped her hands and clenched her eyelids and moaned the words quietly, trying in vain to muster the fever of trust and abandon to which she could sometimes move herself at this spot.

  Manju looked around at all the other people in the temple, she looked at us chatting and praying, and thought how strange it was for us to behave as if all this were so normal. Her doctors would have given her months, maybe weeks, and now she looked at us as though we were a million miles away.

  We didn’t know what she was going through—she never once mentioned the word cancer—nor did she have a husband she could trust or tell, who could share the weight of her dying and make her less alone. She was by herself, floating far above us, and when she turned back to Lord Krishna it was with grief but also with this lonely, exhilarating anger. Is there really no hope? she asked him in silence. All my life you have given me only what you have wanted to give me and not what I have asked for. But that’s another way of saying you have not been there and that you have never listened to me. Is there any sign to show that you are still with me, or that you ever have been? That after loving you so much my whole pointless life, you haven’t abandoned me to die?

  It was Deepika Shenoy, finally, who had the presence of mind to walk softly up to Manju and put her arm around her, and to whisper in her ear and dab the tears discreetly with a corner of Deepika’s own green silk sari. She took Manju out to the lunch line in the dining hall and made sure she got a little bit of everything, and brought her to sit down with their husbands, and by then Manju was looking reasonably calm.

  We ask ourselves at what point it became inevitable, and perhaps it was then. Gopi looked up from his food and was grateful for the new company. He greeted Deepika and complimented her on her sari. She had always been Gopi’s triple-deluxe dream; it was embarrassingly obvious. Looking at this dream Deepika, Gopi wished Manju would eat better, smile more, wear some jewelry. Deepika laughed at something someone said and put her hand on her shaking bosom. It was a gesture that normally would have made Gopi giddy with pleasure, but now he managed only a wan smile.

  Then Manju tried in her way to make small talk, but her husband interrupted her as usual.

  “Not now, Manju,” Gopi said, because Dilip had reached his hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card, and was talking now, oblivious of the women.

  “My nephew was driving to our place last weekend from College Station,” Dilip was saying. “You see, he studie
s hard, just like I did. People like us slog for years. Don’t you find us silly? He was driving home and he stopped at a gas station, where someone gave him this business card.” Dilip paused now to stare sharply at his acquaintance; but Gopi’s eyes stayed fixed on his plate. “Someone who looked very familiar gave him this card,” Dilip repeated, extending the business card, clipped between two bony fingers, toward Gopi.

  Gopi refused to touch it. And Manju looked at her husband and looked at the card. And at last, she herself took it from Dilip’s hand.

  “DOCTOR RAJU GOPALARAJAN, MD,” Manju read slowly. “MEDICAL DOCTOR SPECIALIZING IN ALL THINGS SPECIALLY WOMEN’S HEALTH MATTERS.”

  Dilip finally turned, exultant, to Manju. “But you already know Dr. Gopalarajan, don’t you?”

  Manju shook her head no.

  “You don’t?” Dilip gave her a mordant smile. “But he’s the great doctor specializing in Women’s Health Matters. One of the most difficult specialities in the world, and he is an absolute master.”

  “Aha?”

  Dilip raised his finger in mock severity. “If something cannot be cured,” said Dilip, who had always been more insinuation than action, and who, after scaring Gopi, was content to leave things there at that. “If something cannot be cured,” Dilip said again, turning back toward Gopi, “then ask Gopalarajan, and Gopalarajan will find the cure!” Was there any hope for poor Manju, for either of them, after that?

  The next morning, when Gopi’s office phone rang—it’s hard to believe, but in a way it isn’t—he didn’t even recognize his own wife’s voice, at first.

  “Who’s calling, please?” he asked, and she spelled her name as he had heard her spell it so many times to others.

  “M like Mary, A-N like Nancy, J-U-K-U-M like Mary, A-R.”

  Gopi had not prepared for this moment, but for a few seconds his quick wits came to his aid. He drew in his breath and almost without thinking asked, “Something wrong with you, madam?” He spoke in a gruff tone he hoped his wife wouldn’t recognize.