Cutting for Stone (17 page)

And finally, reluctantly, almost as an afterthought, but because you cannot escape your destiny, and so that he wouldn't walk away scot-free, she added our surname, the name of the man who had left the room: Stone.

PART TWO

When a pole goes into a hole
it creates another soul
which is either a pole
or a hole

Newton's Fourth Law of Motion (as taught by the Mighty Se nior Sirs of Madras Christian College during the initiation/ ragging of A. Ghosh, Junior Pisser Kataan, Batch of
1938
, St. Thomas Hall, D Block, Tambaram, Madras)

CHAPTER 11
Bedside Language and Bedroom Language

O
N THE MORNING
of the twins’ birth, Dr. Abhi Ghosh awoke in his quarters to the sound of pigeons cooing on the win-dowsill. The birds had figured in his waking dream in which he swung from the giant banyan tree outside his boyhood home in India. Hed been trying to peek at the wedding being conducted indoors, but even with the birds using their wings to wipe the windows, he couldn't see.

Now that Ghosh was awake, only the ancient banyan tree, which had stood in the shared courtyard, still felt vivid. Its branches were supported by pillarlike aerial roots which to a child appeared to have shot up from the ground instead of the other way around. Immovable through the Madras monsoons and through the dog days of summer, that tree had been his protector and guide. The cantonment near St. Thomas Mount, on the outskirts of Madras, teemed with railway and military brats; it suited a fatherless child, particularly one whose mother was too defeated by her husband's death to be of much use to her children. Anand Ghoshe, a Bengali from Calcutta, had been posted to Madras by the Indian Railways. He met his future wife, the Anglo-Indian daughter of the Perambur stationmaster, at a railway dance to which he had gone on a lark. Neither family approved of the marriage. They had two children, first a girl, then a boy. Little Abhi Ghoshe was a month old when his father died of hepatitis. He grew into a self-sufficient, fun-loving child who met the world head-on. When he came of age, he dropped the
e
at the end of his name, because he thought it redundant, like a skin tag. In his first year of medical school, his mother died. His sister and her husband pulled away, resentful that the cantonment house came to him. His sister made it clear that he ceased to exist for her, and in time he saw this was true.

THE MORNINGS
were when Ghosh felt Hema's absence from Missing the most. Her bungalow, hidden by hedges, was a shout away from his, but it was locked up and silent. Whenever she went on holiday in India, his life became unbearable because he was terrified that shed return married.

At the airport before Hema left, hed been dying to blurt out,
Hema, let's get married.
But he knew she would have thrown her head back and laughed. He loved her laughter, but not at his expense; he had swallowed his marriage proposal.

“Fool!” she had said before boarding when he asked her yet again if she intended to see prospective bridegrooms. “How long have you known me? Why do you keep thinking I need a groom in my life? I'll find a bride
for you,
I tell you what! You're the one who is matrimonially obsessed.”

Hema saw his jealousy as their little joke: Ghosh played at wooing her (or so she believed), and she played her role by fending him off.

If she only knew how tormented he was by uninvited images: Hema in bridal sari weighed down with ten-sovereign gold necklace; Hema seated next to ugly groom, garlands piled around their necks like the yoke on water buffalo … “Go ahead! What do I care?” he said aloud, as if she were there in the room. “But ask yourself, can he love you the way I love you? What's the use of education if you let your father lead you like a cow to the Brahma bull?” That led him to picture a bovine penis; he groaned.

This time, when Hema's departure appeared inevitable, Ghosh did something different: he quietly mailed out applications for an internship in America. Granted, he was thirty-two years old, but it wasn't too late to start again. Mailing the envelope gave him a sense of controlling his destiny, more so when Cook County Hospital in Chicago cabled that they were sending a voucher for a plane ticket. When the letter and contract arrived, they didn't diminish his anxiety about Hema, but it did make him feel less helpless.

From the kitchen Ghosh heard the violent clang of Almaz extracting water from Mussolini. “For the sake of God, be gentle!” he called out as he did most days. The stove had three rings, but it was the bulging oven below, which resembled a certain fallen dictator's potbelly, that gave it its name. Set into its side was a metal cavity so that whenever the stove was lit, water was heated. Almaz grumbled about having to split wood, then stoke the fire in Mussolini—all for what? To make one cup of that vile powder coffee for the
getta?
(In the mornings Ghosh preferred instant to the semisolid Ethiopian brew.) But it wasn't the coffee he valued as much as the hot water for his bath.

He drew the blanket over his head as Almaz stagger-stepped to the bathroom, hefting the steaming cauldron.
“Banya
skin!” she muttered in Amharic. Amharic was all she ever spoke, though Ghosh suspected she understood more English than she let on. After emptying the cauldron into the bathtub, she finished the thought: “It must be so sickly to require washing every day. What misfortune the
getta
doesn't have
habe-sha
skin. It would stay clean without the need for all this scrubbing.”

No doubt Almaz had been to church this morning. When Ghosh first came to Ethiopia, as he walked down Menelik Street, a woman across the road stopped and bowed to him and he waved back. Only later did he realize that her gesture was aimed at the church across the way. Pedestrians bobbed before a church, kissing the church wall thrice and crossing themselves before going on. If they'd been chaste, they might enter. Otherwise they stayed on the other side of the street.

Almaz was tall with oak-colored skin and a shield-shaped face. Her oval eyes sloped down to the bridge of her nose, giving her a sultry, inviting gaze. Her square chin contradicted that message, and this hint of androgyny brought her admiring looks. She had large but shapely hands, wide hips, and buttocks that formed a broad ledge on which Ghosh believed he could balance a cup and saucer.

She was twenty-six when she came to Missing with labor pains, nine months pregnant, her cheeks flushed with pride because
this
baby she would carry to term, unlike all the others that had failed to take root in her womb. In the prenatal clinic visits, nursing students had twice recorded FHSH (Fetal Heart Sounds Heard) in the chart. But on the day of her putative labor, Hema heard only silence. Hema's exam revealed that the “baby” was a giant fibroid of the uterus and the FHSH nothing but a rattle in a probationer's brain.

Almaz refused to accept the diagnosis. “Look,” she said, fishing out an engorged breast and squeezing forth a jet of milk. “Could a tit do that if there were no child to feed?” Yes, a tit could do that and more if its owner believed. It took three more months with no true signs of labor and an X-ray that showed no baby's skull, no spine, for Almaz to concede. At the surgery, which she at last agreed to, Hema had to remove both the fibroid and the uterus which it had swallowed. In the town of Sabatha they still waited for Almaz to return with the baby. But Almaz couldn't bear to go back. She stayed on and became one of the Missing People.

He heard Almaz return and the jangle of a cup and saucer. The scent of coffee made him peek from under his tent.

“Is there anything else?” she asked, studying him.

Yes, I need to tell you that I am leaving Missing. Really, I am! I can't let Hema play me like a harmonium.
But he didn't say this; instead, he shook his head. He felt Almaz understood intuitively what Hema's absence did to him.

“Yesus Christos, please forgive this sinner, but he was out drinking last night,” she said as she stooped to pick up a beer bottle from under the bed. Alas, Almaz was in a proselytizing mood. Ghosh felt as if he were eavesdropping on her private conversation with God. What a bad idea it had been to give the Bible to anyone but priests, Ghosh thought. It made a preacher out of everybody.

“Blessed St. Gabriel, St. Michael, and all the other saints,” she continued in Amharic, confident he would understand, “for I prayed for master to be a new man, for him to one day give up his
dooriye
ways, but I was wrong, your venerable holinesses.”

It was the word
dooriye
that tricked Ghosh into speaking. It meant “lout,” “lecher,” “reprobate”—and it stung him to hear that word.

“What gives you the right to address me this way?” he said, though he didn't really feel the anger his voice carried. He was about to add,
Are you my wife?
—but choked those words off. To his perpetual shame, he and Almaz had been intimate twice over the years, both times when he was drunk. She'd lain down, lifted, and spread, grumbling even as her hips fell into rhythm with his, but no more than she grumbled about the coffee or hot water. He'd decided that grumbling with Almaz was the language of both pleasure and pain. When they were spent she'd sighed, pulled her skirt down, and asked, “Will there be anything else?” before leaving him to his guilt.

He loved her for never holding those two episodes against him. But it had given her the license to nag him, to raise her grumbling to a steady pitch. That was her prerogative, but the saints help anyone else who addressed him in that tone; she defended him, his belongings, and his reputation with her tongue and with her fists and feet if necessary. Sometimes he felt that she owned him.

“Why do you harass me like this?” he said, the fire gone from his voice. He knew hed never have the courage to break the news of his leaving to her.

“Who said I was talking to you?” Almaz replied.

But when she left he saw the two aspirins in the saucer with his coffee, and his heart melted. My greatest consolation, Ghosh thought, for only the hundredth time since his arrival in Ethiopia, has been the women of this land. The country had completely surprised him. Despite pictures he'd seen in
National Geographic,
he'd been unprepared for this mountain empire shrouded in mist. The cold, the altitude, the wild roses, the towering trees, reminded him of Coonoor, a hill station in India he'd visited as a boy. His Imperial Majesty, Emperor of Ethiopia, may have been exceptional in his bearing and dignity, but Ghosh discovered that His Majesty's people shared his physical features. Their sharp, sculpted noses and soulful eyes set them between Persians and Africans, with the kinky hair of the latter, and the lighter skin of the former. Reserved, excessively formal, and often morose, they were quick to anger, quick to imagine insults to their pride. As for theories of conspiracy and the most terrible pessimism, surely they'd cornered the world market on those. But get past all those superficial attributes, and you found people who were supremely intelligent, loving, hospitable, and generous.

“Thank you, Almaz,” he called out. She pretended not to hear.

IN THE BATHROOM
Ghosh felt a sharp pain as he peed and was forced to cut off his stream. “Like sliding down the edge of a razor blade using my balls as brakes,” he muttered, his eyes tearing. What did the French call it?
Chaude pisse,
but that didn't come close to describing his symptoms.

Was this mysterious irritation from lack of use? Or from a kidney stone? Or was there, as he suspected, a mild, endemic inflammation along the passage that carried urine out? Penicillin did nothing for this condition, which waxed and waned. He'd devoted himself to this question of causation, spending hours at the microscope with his urine and with that of others with similar symptoms, studying it like the piss-pot prophets of old.

After his first liaison in Ethiopia (and the only time he'd not used a condom), he had relied on the Allied Army Field Method for “post-exposure prophylaxis,” as it was called in the books: wash with soap and mercuric chloride, then squeeze silver proteinate ointment into the urethra and milk it down the length of his shaft. It felt like a penance invented by the Jesuits. He believed the “prophylaxis” was partly behind the burning sensations that came and went and peaked on some mornings. How many other such time-honored methods out there were just as useless? To think of the millions that the armies of the world had spent on “kits” like this, or to think that before Pasteur's discovery of microbes, doctors fought duels over the merits of balsam of Peru versus tar oil for wound infection. Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion. Still, each generation of physicians imagined that ignorance was the special provenance of their elders.

There was nothing like a personal experience to tilt a man toward a specialty, and so Ghosh had become the de facto syphilologist, the venereologist, the last word when it came to VD. From the palace to the embassies, every VIP with VD came to consult Ghosh. Perhaps in the county of Cook in America, theyd be interested in this experience.

AFTER HE BATHED
and dressed, he drove the two hundred yards to the outpatient building. He sought out Adam, the one-eyed com-pounder, who, under Ghosh's tutelage, had become a natural and gifted diagnostician. But Adam wasn't around, and so he went to W. W. Gonad, a man of many titles—Laboratory Technician, Blood Bank Technician, Junior Administrator—all of which were to be found on a name tag on his oversize white coat. His full name was Wonde Wossen Gonafer, which he'd Westernized to W. W. Gonad. Ghosh and Matron had been quick to point out the meaning of his new moniker, but it turned out that W.W. needed no edification. “The English have names like Mr. Strong? Mr. Wright? Mr. Head? Mr. Carpenter? Mr. Mason? Mrs. Moneypenny? Mr. Rich? I will be Mr. W. W. Gonad!”

He was one of the first Ethiopians Ghosh had come to know well. Outwardly melancholic, W.W. was nevertheless fun-loving and ambitious. Urbanization and education had introduced in W.W. a gravitas, an exaggerated courtliness, the neck and body flexed, primed for the deep bow, and conversation full of the sighs of someone whose heart had been broken. Alcohol could either exaggerate the condition or remove it entirely.

Ghosh asked W.W. to give him a B
12
shot; it was worth a try—even placebos had
some
effect.

As he readied the syringe, W.W. made clucking noises. “You must be sure to always use prophylactics, Dr. Ghosh,” he said and immediately turned sheepish, because W.W. was hardly one to proffer such advice.