The teacher turned to his wife with an anxious look, then pinched shut his eyes and loosened his grip. The girl tore away from him and flung herself into the farthest corner of the room. There she whimpered, high and soft, but did not scream.
The surgeon leaned forward, pressed his thumbs hard into his eyelids. Webs and vortices danced in the darkness.
“We need you, Doctor Saheb. There’s no one else.”
“What are you saying? What are you—”
“Without your help we will remain dead.”
“The dead do not walk,” said the surgeon, his head reeling with vertigo. “The dead do not speak. The dead have no choice but to remain dead. You are lying to me.”
“I understand what you’re feeling, Saheb, believe me. If I were in your place, I would have found this as impossible as you do. When I was alive, I never believed stories of ghosts and possessions and haunted houses—the tales that old men told their grandchildren to scare them. All nonsense, I knew. I always taught my students to reject superstition. You have no reason to trust my words, Doctor Saheb, I understand that. But trust our wounds. Examine them, and then tell me. Who could stay alive with injuries like ours?”
The surgeon released the pressure on his eyes. The vortices spun away and vanished, but the family remained, shrouded by a haze as though their bodies were fraying at the edges, unraveling. He couldn’t will them out of existence. Every blink of his eyes brought the family more into focus, made them more solid.
“Look, are you a thief of some kind? Just say so if you are. I have money in my safe. Take it and go. You don’t need to do this elaborate—”
“Please, Doctor Saheb, please listen. At dawn, we will live again.”
It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t. “Why have you come to me? Go find a priest, a sorcerer. Leave me alone.”
“We need you to fix our wounds. At sunrise, our bodies will fill with blood again, and we’ll no longer be walking corpses.”
“How? Why? How is that possible?”
“The answer is long and complicated, Saheb, and I don’t understand everything myself. I can only tell you now that an angel took mercy on us. I’ll explain everything else later. We have so little time. I know nothing about surgeries, but I’m sure that injuries as severe as ours will take you all night to stitch up.”
The surgeon’s chest felt cold, tight. “Are you mad? You want me to operate on you here? In this clinic? I don’t even have instruments to set a fracture, let alone repair torn blood vessels and whatever internal injuries you have. Whatever this is, this insanity, it can’t be done here. You must go to the city. Go.”
“But, Doctor Saheb—”
“There’s a train that leaves every hour. It will take you there.”
“Saheb—”
“Maybe the train isn’t a good idea. You can drive there. Here, take my car. I don’t care, you don’t even have to bring it back. Can you drive? No? Okay, then, I’ll drive you. I’ll drop you off at a proper hospital. You can explain everything to the doctors there, get them to treat you.”
He went to the pharmacist. She was pressed to the wall, as though trying to percolate to the other side.
“Come.” He helped her up, began to steer her to the door.
“Wait,” said the teacher. He looked desperate. “We can’t go to the city. Whatever you can do here, in this clinic, is all we’re allowed. If we even step beyond the boundary of this village, the angel will snatch our lives back.”
“What? But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would angels care about village boundaries?”
“I swear to you, Saheb, it’s the truth. It was his most important condition.”
“But that’s just ridiculous. You must have heard him wrong. Look, I’ll just drop this girl off with her husband and get my car ready. Let’s not waste time.”
He was almost at the door, reaching for the bolt, when the teacher spoke, so softly that even a breeze might have swept his voice away. “If we were to drive with you, Saheb, our bodies would stop moving at the boundary, and you would be left with three corpses to keep you company for the rest of your journey.”
The surgeon jerked to a stop. Something settled in his skull, dense as lead, a sudden condensation of all the grotesquerie of this evening. He could already imagine the family on his operating table, lying there as he worked on their bloodless flesh, corpses laid upon stone slabs in preparation for autopsies—his mind rebelled against that word, but what other name could one give to surgeries on the dead? This night contained nothing but absurdities.
“Have mercy on us,” the teacher was saying. “If our wounds aren’t closed, we’ll die another death, as bloody and horrible as the first. If you can’t do anything for me, at least help my wife and son. Give life to them, to my unborn child, I beg you. I have nothing on me, no money, but I’ll do anything you ask. Just don’t turn us away.”
The man threw himself at the surgeon’s feet. The doctor stood like an imbecile, unable even to recoil from the dead fingers clutching his shoes, able only to repeat, “No, no, don’t do that, don’t do that.”
“WAIT HERE, IN THIS room. I need some time,” said the surgeon to the dead as he helped the pharmacist out into the corridor. She hung from him like a dead weight, her face so gray that he thought she would faint at any moment.
He closed the door behind him and set her down on a bench, propped against the wall. After raising her lids with a thumb against her eyebrows to confirm that there was life still there, he sank beside her.
To be freed, even for a moment, from the dead and the dreadful hope in their eyes was an intense relief. The breeze wafting in through the entrance of the clinic was warm, and outside the shuttered room, no longer faced with bloodless wounds, he could once again breathe. Far below, oil lamps flickered in the windows of the village at the bottom of the hill. Behind those windows, the villagers were probably washing dishes, tossing leftovers out for the crows, dousing embers, unrolling mattresses. As though this night were no different from any other. As though it were obvious that the sun would rise again.
The girl was whimpering. The surgeon knew that something was required of him, consoling words perhaps, but all he could do was grip his kneecaps. It was the only way he could still the shaking of his hands. There would be no one to console him—it was best he accepted that first.
“This is just . . . just so impossible,” he said. “I don’t know what to think.”
The girl swallowed, then coughed, choking on her tears. “They’re ghosts, Saheb.” She could barely get the words out past her chattering teeth.
Something rustled outside the entrance, and even though the surgeon could tell it was only a rat in the grass, the muscles in his arms and shoulders tightened. The pharmacist didn’t even notice. The effort of speaking seemed too much for her.
“A ghost climbed into my sister’s body, Saheb. We had to tie her to a bed. She kept turning, one side to the other, kicked at everyone. Said things, Saheb, that no one could understand. Her eyes, they were rolled up; her body became hot, like burning coal—so hot that no one could touch her. And her mouth was full of foam, as if she’d eaten soap.”
The girl had never mentioned her sister before. Would he have remembered if she had?
“My father, he called a tantrik. Told him to do whatever magic he could to save her. The tantrik had to beat her with a broom to drive the ghost out—that’s how