blood, I thought I would die. My sister woke up, but she didn’t recognize any of us.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Six years. No, more. Eight. She lived, but what kind of life is this? The ghost made her mind weak. She can’t even feed herself. My mother still has to change her clothes every day. No one will marry her.”
The surgeon had witnessed spectacles such as this before—charlatans with hair that had seen neither comb nor water in god knew how long, wearing bone necklaces around their necks, jumping and chanting to the goddess Kali and spraying so much red water around that the room looked washed with blood. The trickery was always so transparent, but the gullible believed what they wanted to believe. A few days of antibiotics would have done the poor girl more good than a lifetime of holy water and chants.
But it was hard to dismiss ghosts so glibly now, with three of them waiting on the other side of the wall.
“We have to run away, Saheb. We have to leave the village before something bad happens.”
The clock in front of them had only one hand. No, there were two, overlapping between eight and nine. A small green lizard was pasted to the wall next to the clock, as still as its hands.
“If the man had wanted to strangle you,” said the surgeon, “he would’ve just done it. He already had his hand around your mouth. There was nothing to stop him.”
With a click, one hand of the clock stepped out from behind the other. The lizard slithered off to the wall’s edge. If even a word of what the dead had said was true, they couldn’t just sit here and keep talking like this.
“Their wounds need to be repaired. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but they need to be repaired.”
From the look on the pharmacist’s face, he might have been speaking a foreign tongue.
“Look, either we help them, or they die. Die again, that is—however you want to think about it. It’s not a question of whether any of this makes sense. It’s a question of . . . of whether we’re going to just kick them out of the clinic or not. And if not, we have to do something.”
Her eyes had already begun to widen. It was clear she knew what he would say next. So he said it.
“I’ll need your help for this.”
“Me? No, Doctor Saheb, no,” she almost screamed.
“Quiet. We have to be quiet.”
She dropped her voice, which only made her sound more hoarse. “What are you saying, Saheb? I can’t stay here. I can’t. This is not right. These things shouldn’t happen, it’s not right, it’s not right.”
He leaned against the wall. Whatever he was feeling now—the fear and fatigue—the night would only magnify it. Perhaps her instinct was the right one. Perhaps he should just leap into his car and drive away in any direction, abandon the village and everything in it. In the morning, the villagers would find three cadavers in the clinic. Or the visitors, recognizing the idiocy of their plan, would decide to walk to the boundary of the village and fall there. Either was infinitely preferable to his involvement in this dreadful matter, the raising, no, the mending of the dead.
“You’ve always done everything I’ve asked,” he said. “If you want to leave, I won’t stop you. Maybe if things were any different, I would have left as well. But the woman is pregnant. Her son is just eight. We have to do something.”
At first it seemed as if she hadn’t heard him, but then her face turned to the ground and her chest began to shake. The way her braid hung between her bony shoulders made her look more like a child than ever. He thought of placing a hand on her head, but couldn’t bring himself to do so, not even at a time like this. “It will be fine” was all he managed to say, his hands still on his knees. “It will be fine.”
But he couldn’t ask her not to weep. As the lights in the village winked out one by one, he tried to push away his own disquiet while he waited, but it was like trying to sweep a fog aside with his fingers. Whatever this was, this inescapable madness, he would have to get through it. He would pretend that the visitors had been wheeled in on gurneys, with lolling heads and frothing mouths, victims of some mysterious accident. He would just do his job, and let the pieces fall as they would.
The girl finally wiped her face. Taking that as a sign, he stood up.
“Your husband must be wondering where you are. I’ll need his help as well. Let me explain everything. And we have to be careful. If the villagers hear about this, they’ll bring down the sky.”
THE LIGHTS IN THE operating room flickered on. The faintest trace of formaldehyde still hung in the air. Glazed tiles with bluish veins covered the walls to a height of four feet. Many were chipped and broken. Despite the pharmacist’s regular scrubbing, grime had settled into the grout, and the paint on the wall above, once a shiny white, was now blistered with green geographies of mold.
A loop of sturdy metal hung from the plastered ceiling. The large tungsten reflector lamp that was intended to hang from it had never been delivered, vanishing, like so many things, into the bureaucratic ether. The room was lit instead by a fluorescent tube mounted high on one of the walls, and by two tall Anglepoise lamps that the surgeon himself had purchased. Together they cast a modest illumination, suitable for minor procedures such as the suturing of shallow cuts or the extraction of glass shards, but certainly not for any real surgery. Only a lunatic would suggest doing anything here in the middle of the night.
These last few years, the surgeon had wondered if he had the right to operate at all any more. With a well-lit surgical field, he might still have trusted his skills. But in this room, where lamps cast shadows, concealing more than they exposed, every nerve or blood vessel or loop of bowel could hide in a dark corner and conspire to brush against his scalpel’s edge. It was impossible to operate safely here. Inflamed appendices, gall bladders, bowel obstructions—he sent them all to the city hospitals. What did he have to offer anyway? No nurse, no blood bank, no light. If a patient had to die, she would die from her disease, not from his surgery.
A glass cabinet on the wall housed his instruments—relics of his past. It was the pharmacist’s job to keep them sterilized and bundled in thick green cloth. Their shine was rarely marred by use. The surgeon would just unwrap the green wombs and sort through his collection, arrange his tools by size and type, hold them up to the light one by one as though approving them for surgery, until he could no longer ignore the absurdity of this farce.
“These need to be autoclaved,” he would say, and drop them back on the tray.
“Yes, Saheb.”
The instruments were sterilized far more often than they were used, but the pharmacist never complained. She would just wrap them back in the squares of cloth, pack them into fenestrated metal boxes, set them in the autoclave drum, and wait while the machine steamed and whistled. Then she would extract the contents with sterile gloves and stack them back in the glass cabinet until the surgeon felt the need to inspect them again. Because of this pointless routine, all the instruments in the cabinet were always ready for surgery. And they were ready now.
Still, it was just a humble set of implements—basic tools for mundane surgeries, nothing very specialized. The dead seemed to think him a magician, with mystical devices and superhuman powers. How many disappointments was he destined to inflict on them?
And what agonies? The surgeon had worried about this since the beginning. Would they feel pain? He had no equipment for anesthesia—no propofol, no thiopental. And even if he did, how could the drugs work on the dead without a bloodstream? He might have to crack their chests open without the basic luxury of lowering them into slumber. Did they understand that?
To these concerns, the teacher said, “Our wounds don’t hurt.