to keep this place from turning into an archaeological ruin. That’s an irregularity worth noting, isn’t it?”
The official sat as if every part of him, down to his fingers, were welded to the chair.
“I’ve been working here without a nurse. I’ve asked the head office to budget me one, to issue advertisements in the district newspaper, but no, my application’s been pending in your office for months. I need a new autoclave machine—the old pressure drum we have could blow up in our faces any minute. I need an EKG machine, a suction unit for the operating room . . . No one can run a clinic like this. A morgue perhaps, not a clinic. Every month I have to spend my own salary to keep this place together. I buy antibiotics and sutures. And kerosene for the generator. I know how much money is assigned to this clinic in the government budget, but you middlemen eat it up, you fat pigs. Sit here, sit with this ledger. Conduct your investigation. Prepare a detailed report for your superiors. I’ll wait.”
The look on the official’s jowly face was the most satisfying thing the surgeon had seen in months. As if he were thawing himself out of a block of ice, the man started tapping his fingers and making grinding sounds with his teeth. A woman in the crowd behind him giggled. The official scowled, pulled a small booklet out of his pocket, and compared some scribblings in it to the numbers in the ledger. A few times he made as if to write something, but his pen never actually touched paper. Finally, the formaldehyde seemed to get the best of him, and he pressed a handkerchief to his nose.
“I’ll need to look around the clinic.”
“Look all you want. It’s just four rooms, so take as long as you need. Do you require a magnifying glass?”
The official turned and went into the corridor. The women moved aside as they might have for a serpent.
The surgeon snorted. This one was a novice. The experts among his kind knew how to play their hands with more skill. They knew how to sniff out the naïvely dishonest; erode confidence with pointed observations, ominous frowns, knowing hmms and tsks; apply the slow, escalated pressure that they’d all learned from their bastard supervisors, who’d learned it from the endless hierarchy of bastard supervisors above them. Once the prey was cowed enough to reveal some slight indiscretion, some minor misuse of government funds for personal gain, the bastard’s work was done. He could then put his feet up and recite his lines: “Never mind, never mind, everyone makes mistakes. A single mistake doesn’t make you a bad person. Of course the government is very strict about its rules. It has a responsibility to the public. But I would never wish your reputation to be soiled. Perhaps we can reach an arrangement. Seal everything within these four walls.”
The seas would boil before he’d tolerate such nonsense in his clinic.
While the surgeon was unpacking boxes and arranging vaccines in the refrigerator, someone pointed at the window. He looked up to see the official worming his way out through the crowd. The surgeon cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Next time forget the vaccines. Just bring us some water from the Ganga.”
The safari jacket receded at a faster pace.
If only the day could have ended there. But now there were these women. The hillock was crawling with their offspring.
The pharmacist’s husband stood in the corridor like a traffic guard, organizing the crowd into queues, directing them either to the surgeon or the pharmacist.
The surgeon squeezed two pink drops onto an infant’s tongue. It coughed and burst into a wail, the vaccine bubbling on its lips in pink spittle, and its mother gathered it up on her shoulder and patted it.
“Done. Next.”
“Thank you, Doctor Saheb. Your blessings on my daughter.”
“Come on, come on. Next. What am I, a priest? There are other people waiting.”
The young mother, barely more than a girl herself, was replaced by another who could well have been her twin, for all he knew. This one had a three-year-old in a shabby brown tunic. He was rubbing his eyes and mewling.
“My eyes hurt.”
“I know, I know.” She was trying to hold him steady. “Just take this medicine and we’ll go.”
“But it’s burning. My eyes are burning.”
“Saheb is waiting, my child.” She tried to pry the little mouth open, but the boy squirmed, twisted his head this way and that.
The surgeon clenched his jaw. Who did they think they were? They could take the vaccine or get out, it was nothing to him either way. What did they know of his qualifications? Of his skills? He was glad the fumes were burning their eyes, the eyes of their brats too, so they could know that he was a surgeon and not some village quack. He hoped their eyes would burn all the more with that knowledge.
He said little else as the chain of mothers and children trickled through the clinic. The afternoon passed, and the assembly on the hillock thinned.
After the last of them had left, and the formaldehyde had wrung out all the tears it could and drifted away, the surgeon sank into his chair. The sun was a bag of blood sliced open by the horizon, smearing the squat brick houses. The parched ground stretched before him, covered with a rash of dry yellow weed.
Every speck of this village seemed created to crush the life out of him. He felt an intense hatred for it all—the dust that lay heavy on the earth, the bone-white trees clawing with ludicrous ambition at the sky, even the mongrels that limped from door to door for scraps of meat. If it could all vanish, the world would only be enriched.
He faced the window and ran his fingers through his hair—what little was left of it—as the sun extinguished itself on the huts in the distance and darkness dripped like pitch over the dreary village. “No more.” He yawned. “No more.” From this day on, not a paisa of his own money would be spent on this place. Whatever savings he had, he would gather them and leave. Two months at the most while he arranged for a house somewhere. Anywhere. The official could take this bloody clinic and turn it into a tomb.
THE SURGEON, HIS HEAD buried in a ledger, was adding a long string of numbers when someone said, “Doctor Saheb.”
The nib of his pen halted, and he watched an inky halo blossom around it and spread through the cheap paper. The calculations in his mind evaporated. He looked up.
There were visitors in his doorway. He hadn’t heard them step into the clinic.
“The polio drive is over. The vaccines are all finished. Nothing left.”
With his pen, the surgeon pointed at the boy, an oval-faced child with untidy hair sticking out behind his ears. “How old is your son?”
“Eight,” replied the man.
“Then he doesn’t need this vaccine. It’s only for children five years and younger.”
“We aren’t here for the vaccine, Doctor Saheb.”
Fingerprints smudged the surgeon’s bifocals, and he had to pick them off his nose and wipe them clean to take a better look. He couldn’t remember having seen these people before. The man was slim, his face oval like his son’s, but stubbled. The woman standing behind the boy was perhaps a little younger than the man. Probably the wife. Her odhni was wrapped so strangely around her neck and chin that he couldn’t see a mangalsutra.
“What is it, then?” the surgeon asked, returning to his ledger. First the encounter with the official, then his confinement in this room, monotonously forcing drops into bawling children—it had ground him down to his marrow. And then there was his misplaced perfectionism, his inability to fill the vaccine ledger with meaningless scribbles and be done with it. The ledgers would be filed away in some government archive and never opened again,