Night Theater. Vikram Paralkar

it hit anything else?”

      “Doesn’t seem like it.”

      “Does that mean that if—if it had missed the spleen, he might have survived?”

      “Yes. Perhaps. Yes.”

      The teacher turned away, his lips twisting, his face slowly contorting. He blinked, appeared almost to be in pain himself. Then, shielding his eyes from the surgeon and pharmacist, he buried his face in his son’s hair. He cried for the first time that night, at this unexpected moment, as if some barrel of emotion he’d been balancing had just been overturned.

      The surgeon coughed—two short, blunt coughs—to master any emotion that threatened to spill from himself at the man’s display of anguish. It was a technique he’d perfected early in his training. Perhaps too well, for it’d been far too long since he’d felt any emotion worth mastering. Health itself appeared so bleak a state that sickness and death wrung little pity from him any more. Sometimes, when a patient’s final breaths seemed no more than the last turns of a wheel, leaving behind an object to be removed, charred, turned to ash, and stirred into a riverbed, his indifference terrified even him.

      “In a sense, we’re lucky it’s the spleen,” he said, hoping to clear the gloom. “If the knife had cut the liver or the intestines, or, god forbid, a big artery, we’d have had no chance at all.”

      The teacher raised his head. Not a muscle moved on his face as he listened.

      “It won’t help if I just stitch the spleen shut. It will bleed again. But I can remove the whole thing—he can live without it. I can’t promise you we won’t discover new problems in the morning, but this might be all that’s needed.”

      The man clasped his hands together so hard that his knuckles looked like rows of rounded bones. “You’re our savior, Doctor Saheb, you’re a saint. There’s nothing I could possibly do in a thousand years to repay your mercy. Please save my son, Saheb. Please do whatever you think is best.”

      He rained kisses on his son’s cheeks and forehead. “Saheb is going to fix you. He’s going to make you better.” The boy, infected with his father’s enthusiasm, started to prop himself up on an elbow. “Shhh,” the teacher said, caressing the boy’s brow, trying to calm his son though clearly unable to contain himself. “Don’t move, don’t move. Lie down.”