was all he needed.
What the hell was the pharmacist doing, anyway? Last he knew, she was in the storeroom, folding cardboard boxes to line the medicine cabinets. Instead of doing her origami, that girl should have stopped these three at the front steps. “It’s late,” she should have said. ‘The clinic is closed. Come back tomorrow.”
But she was nowhere in sight. He would have to deal with them himself.
“Are you deaf? What do you want?”
The visitors flinched. “We need your help,” the man said. “This will seem like a strange request.”
“Strange request? What nonsense is this? Just state your business or get going.”
Now, finally, the pharmacist rushed in, panicked. “What are you doing here? You can’t disturb Saheb like this. Wait outside, wait outside.” She began to usher them out.
But when the boy moved aside, the surgeon noticed the bulge under the woman’s loose clothing. He raised his hand.
“Is your wife in labor? Did her water break?”
“No. She’s almost at term, as you can see, but that’s not why we’re here. Or at least, not just that.”
The man paused, rubbed his mouth with the back of his palm. His eyelids parted farther, and he stammered out his next words.
“We—we’re seriously injured. All three of us. And we need surgeries. Tonight.”
The visitor clearly wasn’t a bumpkin. He was educated—his choice of words left no doubt about that. But surgeries? Had the surgeon heard him right? What could the man possibly—
“Show me,” said the surgeon.
Like merchants displaying their wares, the boy rolled up his vest and the man unbuttoned his shirt and lifted his right arm over his head. In the man’s side was a slit, its edges white and still, like lips paused in speech. It was enough to fool one into thinking that the ribs had been penetrated. The boy’s abdomen was bloated. Two cuts in the upper left, under the rib cage, formed a cross whose corners curled outward. And then the woman finished peeling away the many loops of odhni wrapped around her neck. It couldn’t be. He had to be mistaken. The wound in her neck—surely it was a trick of the light? Could those be the ends of her muscles? And was that—no, it was impossible—the larynx?
But there was no blood gushing out, not even from that neck. What kind of hoax was this? Who were these charlatans?
Out of the corner of his eye, the surgeon saw a jerking motion. It was the pharmacist. The surgeon had forgotten that she was still in the room. She looked rigid, as though in the grip of a seizure. The man with the cut in his side sprang to her and grabbed both her wrists with one hand. Stepping behind her, he clapped his other hand over her mouth. She was thin, but seemed to match him in strength as they struggled. He grimaced as he twisted her forearms and muscled her to him, her back against his chest, her torso immobilized by the pressure of his arm folded across her, locking her twitching hands against his shoulder.
The air seemed to clot, grow viscous. The surgeon pushed through it, tried to reach the pharmacist. He felt his books fly off the desk as his hand struck them. The woman with the monstrous neck blocked his path, clasped his wrist, pressed a finger to her lips.
“Please, Doctor Saheb, please,” the man said. “I won’t hurt her, won’t hurt you. We are good people. We just need your help.”
“What—” the surgeon began, but could find no suitable words to add. So he just stood and watched—watched the man signal the boy; watched the boy run to the window, close and latch it, bolt the door; watched the woman go to the pharmacist and reach out to cup her cheek, all the while speaking rapidly, calling her “sister,” begging her not to scream.
This was no hoax. The pharmacist, twisting in her captor’s grip, arched her body back like a bow at the woman’s advance, making the man stumble a step back to maintain his hold on her. The girl’s eyelids had opened as far as they could go, and her eyes were fixed on the woman’s obscene neck. The surgeon felt his own muscles knot and pull at the point where the nerves threaded out from his skull. He pressed his hand on the cold glass plate of the desk behind him.
The man with the cut in his ribs opened his mouth, but if he said something, the surgeon could not hear it. The woman fell quiet and, probably realizing the effect her injuries were having, raised her odhni and let it drape back around her neck, removing her wound from view.
The surgeon’s eyes darted around the room. Could he use his pen as a weapon, was it sharp enough, solid enough? It lay on the floor, its nib snapped off. A spray of ink stretched across the tiles. What else? He had scissors in his drawer somewhere, he was sure, but he’d have to dig for them.
He gripped the table’s edge tighter, leaned against it. “What is this? What’s going on?”
The visitors stood like effigies. The woman and the boy turned to the man, who was opening and closing his mouth like a fish thrown to land. The girl he held captive had stopped her struggle and now just hung against him, breathing heavily with her eyes squeezed shut. He, too, closed his eyes and heaved, as though gathering his breath for some feat.
“I’m a teacher, Doctor Saheb. This is my family. We’ve never harmed anyone. We just want to live our lives in peace.”
“WE’D GONE TO A fair near our village,” said the man who called himself a teacher. “It was sunset by the time we left it. The street was dark. The bulbs in the lampposts had burned out. I didn’t think much of it then, didn’t turn back. God knows how much I’ve repented that.”
The pharmacist started squirming again in the man’s grip. His words spilled out faster.
“Four men were hiding there. They jumped out, took our money and jewelry. And then they stabbed us, Doctor Saheb, stabbed us and left us on the roadside. Like sacks of garbage. They just left us there and disappeared.”
The visitors were pale. There was a sickly tone to their skin, that was true. But how—
“When did this happen?” the surgeon asked.
“This evening.”
“But, but there was no fair here. I didn’t hear of any—”
“It didn’t happen here, Saheb. We’re from another district.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. How did you get here? The sun just set, not even an hour ago. And how did you stop your bleeding?”
“We didn’t.”
The surgeon felt his toes curl in his shoes, press hard against the leather. “But then how did you survive?”
“We didn’t.”
This was unacceptable. One could string letters together to say anything, anything at all, no matter how outrageous. The surgeon wished his thoughts would connect, one to the next, turn the man’s words into something that made sense.
He took a step toward the family. The teacher’s wife, as if she’d read his mind, lowered the odhni and tilted her neck away, letting her wound gape. The sight was suffocating, and the surgeon staggered back and collapsed into a chair as his legs gave under him. How was one to shake off such a hallucination? Perhaps he ought to bash his head against something—the desk, the wall . . . fracture his skull if need be. Would that do it?
The silence felt like an awful pressure on his eardrums. His eyes kept flitting to the drawer, the one that supposedly had scissors in it. At one point, he heard a sob, and it took him some time to realize it was the pharmacist. She was hanging limp in the teacher’s hold.
The surgeon sat up in his chair.