Cutting for Stone (7 page)

“Dr. Stone. Your patient,” she said to the man who everyone believed to be my father, putting in his hands not only the life of a woman that he chose to love, but our two lives—mine and my brother's—which he chose to hate.

CHAPTER 3
The Gate of Tears

W
HEN SISTER MARY JOSEPH PRAISE
felt the herald cramps of labor, Dr. Kalpana Hemlatha, the woman I would come to call my mother, was five hundred miles away and ten thousand feet in the air. Off the starboard wing of the plane Hema had a beautiful view of Bab al-Mandab—the Gate of Tears—so named because of the innumerable ships that had wrecked in that narrow strait that separated Yemen and the rest of Arabia from Africa. At this latitude, Africa was just the Horn: Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia. Hema traced the Gate of Tears as it widened from a hairline crack to become the Red Sea, spooling north to the horizon.

As a schoolgirl studying geography in Madras, India, Hema had to mark where coal and wool were produced on a map of the British Isles. Africa figured in the curriculum as a playground for Portugal, Britain, and France, and a place for Livingstone to find the spectacular falls he named after Queen Victoria, and for Stanley to find Livingstone. In future years, as my brother, Shiva, and I made the journey with Hema, she would teach us the practical geography she had taught herself. She'd point down to the Red Sea and say, “Imagine that ribbon of water running up like a slit in a skirt, separating Saudi Arabia from Sudan, then farther up keeping Jordan away from Egypt. I think God meant to snap the Arabian Peninsula free of Africa. And why not? What do the people on this side have in common with the people on the other side?”

At the very top of the slit a narrow isthmus, the Sinai, thwarted God's intention and kept Egypt and Israel connected. The man-made Suez Canal finished the cut and allowed the Red Sea to connect with the Mediterranean, saving ships the long journey around the Cape. Hema would always tell us that it was over the Gate of Tears that she had the awakening that would change her life. “I heard a call when I was in that plane. When I think back, I know it was you.” That rattling, airborne tin can always seemed an improbable place for her epiphany.

HEMA SAT ON THE WOODEN BENCH SEATS
that ran lengthwise on both sides of the ribbed fuselage of the DC-
3
. She was unaware of how badly her services were needed just then at Missing, the hospital where she had worked for the last eight years. The drone of the twin engines was so loud and unrelenting that half an hour into the flight she felt as if the sound inhabited her body. The hard bench and choppy ride were raising blisters on her behind. Whenever she closed her eyes, she felt as if she were being hauled across a rutted landscape in the back of a bullock cart.

Her fellow travelers on this flight from Aden to Addis Ababa were Gujaratis, Malayalis, French, Armenians, Greeks, Yemenis, and a few others whose dress and speech did not as clearly reveal their origins. As for her, she wore a white cotton sari, a sleeveless off-white blouse, and a diamond in her left nostril. Her hair was parted in the middle and gathered with a clip at the back, and loosely braided below.

She sat sideways looking out. She saw a gray dart below—the shadow cast by the plane on the ocean. A giant fish she imagined was swimming just below the surface of the sea, keeping pace with her. The water looked cool and inviting, unlike the interior of the DC-
3
, which had grown less steamy but was still thick with the mingled scents of the human freight. The Arabs had the dry, musty smell of a grain cellar; the Asians contributed the ginger and garlic; and from the whites came the odor of a milk-soaked bib.

Through the half-open curtain to the cockpit she could see the pilot's profile. Whenever he turned to glance at his cargo, his bottle-green sunglasses seemed to swallow his face, only his nose poking through. The glasses had been perched up on his forehead when she boarded, and Hema had noted then that his eyes were red like a rodent's. The odor of juniper berry on his breath advertised his fondness for gin. She'd developed an aversion to him even before he opened his mouth to herd his passengers onto the plane, snapping at them—
“Allez!”
—as if they were subhuman. She bit her tongue then, because this was the man about to take them aloft.

His face and jug ears resembled a figure a child might draw with crayon on butcher paper. But the details were beyond a child: the fine arbor of blood vessels on his cheeks; muttonchop sideburns dyed bootpolish black; the white ring of
arcus senilis
around his pupils; gray eyebrows that betrayed his pretense at youthfulness. She wondered how a man could look in the mirror and not see the absurdity of his own appearance.

She studied her own reflection in the porthole. Hers was a round face, too, the eyes widely spaced with a doll's pert nose. The
red pottu
in the center of her forehead stood out. Her cheeks had a Martian tint cast on them by the cobalt-blue water below, and the hint of green in her eyes—unusual for an Indian—was accentuated. “Your gaze encompasses all men, makes your most ordinary glance seem intimate, carnal,” Dr. Ghosh had told her, “as though you are ravishing me with your eyes!” Ghosh was a tease and forgot what he said as soon as the words rolled off his tongue. But this statement of his lingered with her. She thought of Ghosh's fur-covered limbs and shuddered. Body hair was one of her pet dislikes, or so she'd believed. She knew it was a fatal prejudice for an Indian woman. His was like a gorilla coat, the chest tendrils poking out through his vest and peeking up above his shirt collar. “Ravishing? You wish, you lecher,” she said now, smiling as if Ghosh were sitting across from her.

She had to give him this much: if she stared fractionally too long at a man, she attracted more attention than she intended. It was partly why she used spectacles with large wire frames, because she thought they made her eyes seem closer together. She liked the exaggerated Cupid's bow of her upper lip, but not her cheeks, which she felt were too chubby. What to do? She was a big woman. Not fat, but big … Well, maybe a bit fat, and she'd certainly put on a kilo or two or three in India, but how could she help that in the face of a mother's astonishing cooking? Because of my height, I get away with it, she told herself. Wearing a sari helps, of course.

She grunted, remembering how Dr. Ghosh had invented a special term for her:
magnified.
Years later, when Hindi movies with their song and dance became all the rage in Africa, the ward boys in Addis Ababa would call her Mother India, not in mockery, but in reverence for the tearjerker of the same name starring Nargis.
Mother India
had run for three straight months at the Empire Theater and then moved to the Cinema Adowa; that, too, without the benefit of subtitles. The ward boys could be heard singing “Duniya Mein Hum Aaye Hain”—”We've Arrived in This World”—though they didn't understand a word of Hindustani.

“And if I'm
magnified,
what term shall we apply to you?” she said, carrying on the imaginary conversation, surveying her old friend from head to foot. He was not a conventionally good-looking man. “How about ‘alien’? I mean it as a compliment. I say ‘alien,’ Ghosh, because you are so unaware of yourself, of your looks. There's a seduction in that for others. Alien becomes beauty. I'm saying this to you because you're not here. To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.”

Mysteriously, during her holidays, Ghosh's name kept popping up in her conversations with her mother. Despite Hema's lack of interest in marriage, her mother was terrified that her daughter would end up with a non-Brahmin, someone like Ghosh. And yet as Hema neared thirty her mother had begun to feel that any husband was better than no husband at all.

“You say he's not handsome? Does he have good color?”

“Ma, he's fair … fairer than me, and he has brown eyes. Bengali, Parsi, and God knows what other influences in those eyes.”

“What is he?”

“He calls himself high-caste Madras mongrel,” she said, giggling. Her mother's frown threatened to swallow her nose, and so Hema had changed the subject.

Besides, it was impossible to construct a Ghosh for someone who'd never met him. She could say that his hair was combed flat and parted in the middle, looking sleek and smart for about ten minutes in the morning, but after that, the hairs broke loose like rioting children. She could say how at any time of the day, even after he had just shaved, black stubble showed under his jaw. She could say that his neck was nonexistent, squashed down by a head shaped like a jackfruit. She could say he just looked short because of a slight belly whose size was exaggerated in the way he leaned back and swayed from side to side as he walked, which drew the eye away from the vertical. Then there was his voice, unmodulated and startling, as if the volume knob had frozen on its highest setting. How could she convey to her mother that the sum total of all this made him not ugly, but strangely beautiful.

Despite the rash on the backs of his hands—a burn, really—his fingers were sensual. The ancient X-ray machine, a Kelley-Koett, had caused the rash. Just thinking of the “Koot” made Hema's blood boil. In
1909
, Emperor Menelik had imported an electric chair, having heard the invention would efficiently get rid of his enemies. When he discovered it needed electricity, he simply used it as a throne. Similarly, the big Kelley-Koett had come in the
1930
s with an eager American mission group that soon realized that, even though electricity had arrived in Addis Ababa, it was intermittent and the voltage insufficient for such a temperamental beast. When the mission folded, the precious unpacked machine had been simply left behind. Missing lacked an X-ray machine, and so Ghosh reassembled the unit and matched it to a transformer.

No one but Ghosh dared touch the Koot. Cables ran from its giant rectifier to the Coolidge tube, which sat on a rail and could be moved this way and that. He worked the dials and voltage levers until a spark leaped across the two brass conductors, producing a thunderclap. The fiery display had caused one paralyzed patient to leap off the stretcher and run for his life; Ghosh called that the Sturm und Drang cure. He was the Koot's keeper, repairing it, babying it so that three decades after the company went under, the Koot was still operational. Using the fluo-roscopy screen, he studied the dancing heart, or else he defined exactly where a cavity in the lung resided. By pushing on the belly he could establish whether a tumor was fixed to the bowel or abutted on the spleen. In the early years he hadn't bothered with the lead-lined gloves, or a lead apron for that matter. The skin of his probing, intelligent hands paid a visible price.

HEMA TRIED TO IMAGINE
Ghosh telling
his
family about her.
She's twenty-nine. Yes, we were classmates at Madras Medical School, but she's a few years younger. I don't know why she never married. I didn't get to know her well till we were interns in the septic ward. She's an obstetrician. A Brahmin. Yes, from Madras. An expatriate, living and working in Ethiopia these eight years.
Those were the labels that defined Hema, and yet they revealed little, explained nothing. The past recedes from a traveler, she thought.

Sitting in the plane, Hema closed her eyes and pictured her schoolgirl self with the twin ponytails, the long white skirt, and white blouse under the purple half sari. All Mrs. Hood Secondary School girls in Mylapore had to wear that half sari, really nothing more than a rectangle of cloth to coil around the skirt once and pin on the shoulder. Shed hated it, because one was neither child nor adult but half woman. Her teachers wore full saris while the venerable headmistress, Mrs. Hood, wore a skirt. Hema's protests triggered a lecture by her father:
Do you not know how fortunate you are to be in a school with a British headmistress? Do
you not know how many hundreds have tried to get in there, offered ten times the money, but were turned down by Miz-Iz-Ood. She goes by merit only. Would you prefer the Madras corporation school?
And so, each day she put on the hated uniform, feeling half dressed, and feeling as if she were selling a piece of her soul.

Velu, the neighbor's son whod once been her best friend, but who had turned insufferable at ten, liked to perch on the dividing wall and tease her:

The girls who come from Miz-Iz-Ood, parlez-vous?
The girls who come from Miz-Iz-Ood, parlez-vous?
The girls who come from Miz-Iz-Ood,
Haven't grown their womanhood,
Inky Pinky parlez-vous!

She ignored him. Velu, who was as dark-skinned as she was light, said, “So proud you are of being fair. Monkeys will nibble your sweet flesh thinking it is jackfruit on a jackfruit tree, mind you me!” There she was, eleven years old, setting off for school, dwarfed by her Raleigh bicycle, trading barbs with Velu. Her books were in a tasseled
sanji
slung over her shoulder, the strap running between her breasts. Already in her posture and in her steady pedal strokes there were signs of a certain immutability.

The bicycle, once so tall and perilous, soon shrunk beneath her. Her breasts thrust out on either side of that
sanji
strap, and hair sprouted between her legs. (If that was what Velu had meant about not growing her womanhood, she had proved him wrong.) She was a good student, a captain in net ball, a senior prefect, and showing promise in Bharat-natyam, finding in herself a talent for recapitulating a most intricate dance sequence after being shown it just once.

She felt neither an obligation to join the herd nor any urge to try to stand out from it. When a close friend told her she always looked cross, she was surprised and a little thrilled that she could pull off such mis direction. In medical school (in full sari and now riding the bus) this quality grew stronger—not crossness, but independence and misdirection. Some classmates considered her arrogant. She drew others to her like aco lytes only for them to discover she wasn't recruiting. The men needed pliancy in their women friends, and she couldn't bring herself to act coy or silly for their sakes. The couples who huddled in the library behind oversize anatomy atlases and whispered themselves into the notions of love amused her.