Cutting for Stone (16 page)

He came back with a long broom. He brushed the spider off the ceiling, and then, with his heel, he ground it into the tile.

Matron understood he was intent on blasphemy; in case the arachnid was God, he was killing God.

“Thomas,” Hemlatha said, using his first name, which sounded strange on her tongue in Operating Theater
3
, because they were always formal here. By this time both babies were in Hema's arms, wiped off and suctioned and swaddled in receiving blankets. The one in whose skull Stone had tried to drill a hole had aspirated some amniotic fluid but now seemed recovered; there was a big pressure dressing in place over the head wound. The other child showed only the stump of the flesh-bridge that had connected him to his brother, a stump now tied off with umbilical cord suture.

Hemlatha had established that the boys could move their limbs, neither of them was cockeyed, and they seemed to hear and to see. “Thomas,” she said, approaching, but he cringed. He turned away. He would not look.

This man she thought she knew well, seven years a colleague, now stood bent as if hed been gutted.

That, she said to herself, is visceral pain. As angry as shed been with him, the depth of his grief and his shame moved her. All these years, she thought, it should have been clear to us that he and Sister were a perfect match; maybe if wed encouraged them it could have been something more. How often did I see Sister assisting him in surgery, working on his manuscripts, taking notes for him in the outpatient department? Why did I assume that was all there was to it? I should have reached over and smacked him at my dinner table. I should have shouted at him, Don't be blind. See what you have in this woman! See how she loves you. Propose to her! Marry her. Get her to discard her habit, renege on her vows. It's clear her first vow is to you. But no, Thomas, I didn't do it because we all assumed that you were incapable of anything more. Who knew that this much feeling was hidden in your heart? I see it now. Yes, now we have these two as proof of what was in your hearts.

The two bundles in her arms propelled her forward, because they were, after all, his, and even as she thought that, she was still fighting her own disbelief. Surely he wouldn't try to deny that fact. She couldn't back away from this moment; she had to force the issue—who else could speak for these children? Stone was a fool who lost the one woman in the world fated for him. But now he had gained two sons. And Missing would rally round these infants. He'd have lots of help.

She moved closer.

“What shall we name these babies?” She could sense the uncertainty in her voice.

He appeared not to hear. After a pause, she repeated the question.

Stone thrust his chin at her, as if to say she could name them whatever she wanted. “Please get them out of my sight,” he said very softly.

He kept his back turned on the infants to gaze once more at Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Which was why he missed the way his words fell on Hema like hot oil; he didn't see the flames of anger shooting out of her eyes. Hema would misread his intentions, and he hers.

Stone wanted to run away, but not from the children or from responsibility. It was the mystery, the
impossibility
of their existence that made him turn his back on the infants. He could only think of Sister Mary Joseph Praise. He could only think of how she'd concealed this pregnancy, waiting, who knows for what. In response to Hema's question, it would have been a simple thing for Stone to say,
Why ask me? I know no more than you do about this.
Except for the certainty that sat like a spike in his gut that it
was
somehow his doing, even though he had no recollection how or where or when.

Sister Mary Joseph Praise lay lifeless and unburdened of the two lives she had carried, as if that had been her sole earthly purpose. Matron had pulled down Sister Mary Joseph Praise's eyelids, but they would not stay closed. The half-mast eyelids, the unseeing gaze, hammered in the reality of her death.

Stone took one last look. He wanted to remember her not as Sister, not as his assistant, but as the woman he should have declared his love for, the woman he should have cared for, the woman he should have wed. He wanted the ghoulish image of her corpse burned into his brain. He had negotiated his way through life by work, and work, and more work. It was the only arena in which he felt complete and the only thing he had to give Sister Mary Joseph Praise. But at this moment work had failed him.

The sight of her wounds shamed him. Thered be no healing, no scars to form, harden, and fade on her body.
He
would bear the scar, he would carry it from the room. Hed known only one way of being, and it cost him. But he would have been willing to change for her had she only asked. He would have. If only she could have known. What did it matter now?

He turned to leave again, glancing around as if to seal in his memory this place in which hed polished and elevated his art, this place that hed furnished to suit his needs and that he thought was his real home. He took it all in because he knew hed never ever return. He was surprised to find Hema still standing behind him, and again the sight of the bundles she carried made him recoil.

“Stone, think about this,” Hema said. “Turn your back on me if you want, because I'll have no use for you. But don't turn your back on these children. I won't ask you again.”

Hema held her living burden and waited on Stone. He was on the verge of speaking to her honestly, of telling her all. In his eyes she saw pain and puzzlement. What she didn't see was any recognition of the infants as being connected to him. He spoke like a man who'd just been hit on the head. “Hema, I don't understand who … why they are here … why Mary is dead.”

She waited. He was circling around a truth that might emerge if she waited. She wanted to grab his ears and shake it out of him.

At last he met her gaze, refusing to look down at the infants, and what he said wasn't what she wanted to hear. “Hema, I don't want to set eyes on them, ever.”

The last of Hema's restraint fell away. She was livid for the children, furious that he seemed to think this was just his loss.

“What did you say, Thomas?”

He must have known a battle line had just been drawn.

“They killed her,” he said. “I don't want to set eyes on them.”

So this is how it will be, Hema thought, this is how we shall pass from each other's lives. The twins mewled in her arms.

“Whose are they, then? Aren't they yours? So didn't you kill her, too?”

His mouth opened in pain. He had no answer, so he turned to leave.

“You heard me, Stone,
you
killed her,” Hema said, raising her voice so that she drowned out every other sound. He flinched as the words lashed into him. It pleased her. She felt no pity. Not for a man who wouldn't claim his children. He pushed the swinging door so hard it shrieked in protest.

“Stone, you killed her,” she shouted after him. “These are your children.”

THE PROBATIONER BROKE
the ensuing silence. She was trying to anticipate, so she opened a circumcision tray and pulled on gloves. The one thing Matron allowed her to do without supervision was to use the foreskin guillotine.

But instead of praising her, Hema pounced on her. “My goodness, girl, don't you think these children have had quite enough? They're preemies! They are not out of danger. Want them to be chip-cock-Charlies on top of all this? … And you? What have you been doing all the time, eh? You should've been worrying about their swallowing ends, not their watering cans.”

HEMA ROCKED THE TWINS,
thrilled by their breathing selves, by their peaceful smiles, the opposite of the usual anxious, panicked face of a newborn. Their mother lay dead in the same room, their father had run, but they knew nothing of that.

Matron, Gebrew, the nurse anesthetist, and others who had gathered were weeping around Sister's body. Word had spread to the maids and housekeepers. Now a funeral wail, a piercing
lululululululu
ripped through the heart of Missing. The ululations would continue for the next few hours.

Even the probationer began to show the first inkling of Sound Nursing Sense. Instead of struggling to appear to be something she was not, she wept for Sister, who was the only nurse who really understood her. For the first time the probationer saw the children not as “fetuses” or “neonates” but instead as motherless children, like herself, children to be pitied. Her tears poured out. Her body slumped as if the starch had vanished not just from her clothes but from her bones. To her amazement, Matron came and put an arm around her. She saw not just sadness but fear in Matron's face. How could Missing go on without Sister? Or without Stone? For surely he was never coming back, that she could see.

Hemlatha shut out the sobbing around her as she rocked the babies, and then she began to croon, her anklets jingling faintly like castanets as she shifted weight from one foot to the other. She felt the loss of Sister Mary Joseph Praise as acutely as anyone, and yet she felt guided— perhaps this was Sister's doing—to give her all at this moment to the two infants. The twins were breathing quietly; their fingers fanned over their cheeks. They belonged in her arms. How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic. Sister Mary, bride of Christ, now gone from the world into which she just brought two children.

Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life in this her thirtieth year was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, to mimic the rigid masking smile of Shiva, to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner tune, a tabla beat.
Thim-thaga-thaga, thim-thaga-thim, thim-thaga …
Hema moved gently, knees flexing, tapping her heels, then her forefoot in time to the music in her head.

The bit players in Theater
3
regarded her as if she were mad, but she danced on even as they tidied the corpse, she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction.

Ridiculous, the thoughts that came to her as she danced: her new Grundig, Adid's lips and his long fingers, the thump of Matron falling over, the revolting feel of the Frenchman's balls but the satisfaction in seeing the color flee his face, Gebrew with chicken feathers stuck to him. What a journey … what a day … what madness, so much worse than tragic! What to do except dance, dance, only dance …

She was surprisingly graceful and light on her feet, the neck and head and shoulder gestures of Bharatnatyam automatic for her, eyebrows shooting up and down, eyeballs flitting to the edges of their sockets, feet moving, a rigid smile on her face, and all this while holding the babies in her arms.

Outside the hospital, as the light faded, the lions in the cages near the Sidist Kilo Monument, anticipating the slabs of meat the keeper would fling through the bars, roared with hunger and impatience; in the foothills of Entoto, the hyenas heard and paused as they neared the edge of the city three steps forward and one back, cowardly and opportunistic; the Emperor in his palace made plans for a state visit to Bulgaria and perhaps to Jamaica, where he had followers—Rastas—who took their name from his precoronation name of Ras Teferi and who thought he was God (an idea he didn't mind his own people believing, but when it came from so far away and for reasons that he didn't understand, made him wary).

THE LAST FORTY-EIGHT
hours had irrevocably altered Hema's life. She had two infants squinting up at her from time to time as if to confirm their arrival, their good fortune.

Hema felt light-headed, giddy. I won the lottery without buying a ticket, she thought. These two babies plugged a hole in my heart that I didn't know I had until now.

But there was danger in the analogy: shed heard of a railway porter at Madras Central Station who won lakhs and lakhs of rupees, only to have his life fall apart so that he soon returned to the platform. When you win, you often lose, that's just a fact. There's no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart—she was thinking of Stone.

Stone had prayed for a miracle. The silly man didn't see that these newborns
were
miracles. They were obstetric miracles for surviving his assault. Hema decided to name the first twin to breathe Marion. Marion Sims, she would tell me later, was a simple practitioner in Alabama, USA, who had revolutionized women's surgery. He was considered the father of obstetrics and gynecology, the patron saint; in naming me for him, she was both honoring him and giving thanks.

“And Shiva, for Shiva,” she said, naming the child with the circular hole in his scalp, the last to breathe, the child she had labored over, a child all but dead until she had invoked Lord Shiva's name, at which point he took his first gasp.

“Yes, Marion and Shiva.”

She tacked on “Praise” to both names, after their mother.