Gamini was working with Janaka Fonseka in children’s surgery when they began hearing news in the corridors that a village had been attacked. In front of him on the operating table was a small boy, naked except for white shorts, a huge mask over his tiny face. The two doctors had been preparing for the operation all week; neither of them had attempted it before, they had been reading the text of the procedure in Kirklan’s Cardiac Surgery over and over. They had to cool the boy’s body down to twenty-five degrees Celsius by running cold blood into him, reducing his temperature until the heart stopped. Then they would operate. As they began cutting, the wounded started coming into the halls and they were aware of the Flying Squad in action around them.
He and Fonseka stayed with the boy, keeping just one nurse. A heart the size of a guava. They opened the right atrium. This was as close to magic as the two of them got in their days there. They talked frantically back and forth to be certain of what they were doing. They could hear the carts carrying equipment or bodies, they couldn’t tell which, racing down the halls. There’d been a massacre, they now heard, a village thirty miles away had been pretty well wiped out. Somebody had to be sent there to see if any were still alive. The child in front of them had a congenital abnormality, a beautiful kid, Gamini kept wanting to take the mask off and see his face again. Wanted to look at the boy’s dark black eyes, which had been full of trust, which had looked up at him as he gave the needle that had put him into uncontrolled sleep.
Fallot’s tetralogy. Four things wrong with the heart, so he would live perhaps only into his early teens if they didn’t operate now. A beautiful boy. Gamini was not going to leave him alone, betray him in his sleep. He kept Fonseka with him, not letting him go to the others as Fonseka thought he should. ‘I have to leave, they keep calling out my name.’ ‘I know. This is just one boy.’ ‘Fuck, that’s not what I mean.’ ‘You have to stay.’
The operation took six hours and all that time Gamini stayed with the boy. He let Fonseka go after three hours. The nurse would have to help him reverse the bypass. He knew her as a starting intern, the Tamil wife of one of the staff. She and her husband had come to the peripheral hospital in the last month. Gamini stood by the boy and explained what they had to do. The boy would have to be rewarmed with blood at a higher temperature, and at the key moment the bypass had to be removed. Fallot’s tetralogy. No one had ever performed the procedure in this country.
So in the fifth hour Gamini and the nurse reversed the process that he and Fonseka had set up. The young nurse watching him for any sign that what she was doing might be wrong. But she was faultless, faultless, calmer, it seemed, than he was. ‘This one?’ ‘Yes. I need you to cut a shallow three-inch line there. No, to the left.’ She cut into the boy’s body. ‘Don’t remain a nurse. You’ll be a good doctor.’ She was smiling under the mask.
As soon as the boy was in Recovery, Gamini left him with her. There was no one else he could trust. He got two beepers and told her to contact him if something seemed wrong. He washed up and then went into the chaos of the triage. There was blood on everyone except him.
It took a few more hours to deal with the crisis. In surgery they wore white rubber boots and all the doors had to be closed. Sometimes if a doctor had heat exhaustion he slipped into the refrigerated blood bank for a few minutes among the plasma and pack cells. Gamini took over in surgery. There was a small Buddha lit with a low-watt bulb in nearly every ward, and there was one in surgery as well.
All the survivors had been brought in by now. The killings had happened at two in the morning in a small village beside the main road to Batticaloa. They had brought him nine-month-old twins, each shot in the palms and one bullet each in their right legs—so it was no accident, a close-range job and intentional, left to die; the mother had been killed. In a couple of weeks those two children were peaceful things, full of light. You thought, What did they do to deserve this, and then, What did they do to survive this? Their wounds, in reality quite minor, stayed with him. It was the formal evil of the act perhaps, he didn’t know. Thirty people had been massacred that morning.
Lakdasa drove to the village and did the postmortems, otherwise relatives would not receive compensation. For everyone in the region was poor as grass. In those villages the father of a family of seven earned one hundred rupees a day working in a wood shop. That meant each of them could have a five-rupee meal a day. For that you could buy a toffee. When political entourages came up to the provinces and received tea and lunch, the visit cost forty thousand rupees.
The doctors were coping with injuries from all political sides and there was just one operating table. When a patient was lifted off, blood was soaked up with newspaper, the surface swabbed with Dettol, and the next patient laid down. The real problem was water, and in the larger hospitals, because of frequent power failures, vaccines and other drugs were being thrown away constantly. Doctors needed to scavenge the countryside for equipment—buckets, Rinso soap powder, a washing machine. ‘Surgical clamps for us were like gold for a woman.’
Their hospital existed like a medieval village. A chalkboard in the kitchen listed the numbers of loaves of bread and the bushels of rice needed to feed five hundred patients a day. This was before massacre victims were brought in. The doctors pooled money and hired two market scribes as registrars who moved alongside them in the wards listing and recording the patients’ names and their ailments. The most frequently seen problems were snakebite, rabies caused by fox or mongoose, kidney failure, encephalitis, diabetes, tuberculosis, and the war.
Night had its own activity. He woke and was attached instantly to the sounds of the world. A dogfight, a man running to fetch something, the pouring of water into a vessel. When Gamini was a boy, nights were terrifying to him, his eyes wide open till he fell asleep, certain that he and his bed had lost their moorings in the darkness. He needed loud clocks beside him. Ideally he would have a dog in the room, or someone—an aunt or an ayah who snored. Now, working or sleeping during the night shifts, he was secure with all of the human and animal activity beyond the ward’s light. Only bird life, so vocal and territorial during the day, was shut down, though there was one Polonnaruwa rooster that cried out false dawns from three in the morning on. Interns had been trying to kill it.
He walked the stretch of hospital, from wing to wing, open air on either side of him. There was the buzz of electricity close beside the pools of light as you passed them. You were aware of it only at night. You saw a bush and you sensed it growing. Someone came out and poured blood into a gutter and coughed. Everyone had a bad cough in Polonnaruwa.
He was aware of every sound. A shoe or sandal step, the noise of the bedspring when he lifted a patient, the snapping of an ampule. Sleeping in the wards, he could be one limb of a large creature, linked to the others by the thread of noises.
Later, if he was unable to sleep in the district medical officer’s building, he would walk back the two hundred yards along the empty curfewed main street to the hospital. The nurse stationed at a night desk would turn and see the look on him and find a bed for him. He would be asleep in seconds.
In the village clinic were twenty mothers and their infants. They filled out clinic records and the pregnant women were checked for diabetes and anemia. The doctors talked to each of the women, studying their forms as they moved forward in the queue. On a makeshift table a nurse wrapped vitamin pills in newspaper and gave them to the mothers. A pressure cooker was being used as a steam sterilizer for glass syringes and needles.
The screams began as soon as the first baby got a needle, and within seconds most of the babies in the small shack that served as a medical outpost were howling. After about five minutes they were silent again; breasts had been pulled out and mothers beamed at their infants and there was solution and victory for all. This one clinic served four hundred families from the area as well as three hundred from an adjoining region. No one from the Ministry of Health had ever come to the border villages.
F
or all of the doctors, Lakdasa was the great moral force, the rough brother of justice. ‘The problem up here is not the Tamil problem, it’s the human problem.’ He was thirty-seven and his hair was grey. When he drank he revealed an intricate set of confabulations, as if he were steering himself through a well-mapped harbour. ‘If I drink more than seventy-two millimetres, my liver plays up. If I drink less, my heart plays up.’
Lakdasa lived mostly on potato rotis. He smoked Gold Leaf cigarettes in his jeep where a fan rotating air was glued to the dashboard. He kept his sarong in the glove compartment and slept wherever he had to—the DMO’s office, a sofa in the living room of a friend. There were months when his weight would suddenly drop ten pounds. Obsessed with his blood pressure, he tested it daily, and any session at a clinic ended with his weighing himself on the scales and checking his blood sugar. He noted the bell curves and continued as usual driving through jungles and garrisoned land to meet his patients. It didn’t matter what state he was in as long as he knew what state he was in.
On Saturday mornings Gamini and Lakdasa drove back to Polonnaruwa listening to the cricket. A long day at a clinic. Sometimes along the road, now and then, there were thirty-foot strips of grain being dried on the tarmac, strips laid so narrow a car could pass over them without having the wheels touch the drying grain. A man with a broom stood nearby to signal to passing cars to be aware of it, and to sweep the grain back to the centre if they were not.
In the cafeteria of the base hospital—a half-hour break in his shift—a woman sat down at Gamini’s table and drank her tea, ate a biscuit with him. It was about four in the morning and he didn’t know her. He just nodded to her, he felt private and too tired to talk.
‘I helped you with an operation once, some months ago. The massacre night.’ His mind wheeled back a century.
‘I thought you got transferred.’
‘Yes, I was, then I came back here.’
He hadn’t recognized her at all. She’d had a mask on when he spent the crucial long hours with her over the boy. When she was not wearing a mask, in pre-op, he had probably only glanced at her. Their comradeship had been mostly anonymous.
‘You’re married to someone here, right?’ She nodded. There was a scar at her wrist. It was new, he would have noticed that during the surgery.
He looked up quickly at her face. ‘It is very good to meet you.’
‘Yes. For me too,’ she said.
‘Where did you go?’
‘He’—a cough—‘he got stationed in Kurunegala.’
Gamini kept watching her, the way she was selecting the words carefully. Her face was young and lean and dark, her eyes bright as if it were daylight.
‘Actually, I have passed you in the wards a lot!’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No. I know you didn’t recognize me. Why should you.’ A pause. She put her hand through her hair and then was very still.
‘I’ve seen that boy.’
‘That boy?’
She looked down, smiling to herself now. ‘The boy we operated on. I have visited him. They . . . they renamed the boy Gamini. The parents. After you. It was a lot of trouble, red tape, for them to do that.’
‘Good. So I have an heir.’
‘Yes, you do. . . . I am training now extra hours in the children’s ward.’ She was about to continue, then stopped.
He nodded, suddenly tired. What he wanted in his life now seemed a huge thing. What he wished for would involve the lives of others, years of effort. Chaos. Unfairness. Lying.
She looked at her tea and drank the last of it.
‘It was good to meet with you.’
‘Yes.’
Gamini rarely saw himself from the point of view of a stranger. Though most people knew who he was, he felt he was invisible to those around him. The woman therefore slid alongside him and clattered about in the almost empty house of his heart. She became, as she had done that night of the operation, the sole accompanist to what he thought, what he worked on. When later he turned over the hands of a patient, he thought of the scar at her wrist, the way her fingers had slipped through her hair, what he wished to reveal to her. But it was his own heart that could not step into the world.
*
There is a break before the ward visits at six p.m. Gamini pulls down the registrar’s log from the shelf. Since the scribes have taken over, the entries are much better—the handwriting immaculate and small, green ink underlining the months and Sundays. He cannot remember the date so he looks for a flurry of entries, as there would have been around the time of the killings. Then goes down the list of interns and nurses.
Prethiko
Seela
Raduka
Buddhika
Kaashdya
He moves his fingers down the ledger to check the assignments, discovers her name.
He walks almost a mile to the event, in his only good jacket. The rest house is serving the usual bad food in the glassed-in dining room that hangs over the water. The children wait with unlit sparklers, in delirium for any kind of ceremony. Cake in one hand, a sparkler in the other. Lakdasa is organizing the fireworks display and is on the raft lining up his catherine wheels and burning schoolrooms. Gamini has caught a glimpse of her in the distance. He hasn’t seen her since the cup of tea they shared two weeks earlier.
When she is close to him later, he sees the small red earrings against her darkness. They were her grandmother’s, and the shortness of her boyishly cut hair allows him to see them clearly, the red gem on each lobe tiny as a ladybug. ‘I bury them when I am not wearing them,’ she says. They stroll towards the ruins, away from the rest house. A sign says: PLEASE DO NOT ENTER AND PUT YOUR FEET AGAINST THE IMAGE AND TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS.
Behind her are old fragments of colour, the white-red borders on the painted stone he can see even in this moonlight. From the promontory they watch the start of the fireworks. Some of the extravagant explosions are cut short, crashing too soon into the water, or they skitter dangerously like flung lit stones towards the rest house.
He turns to her. She is wearing his jacket over her ruffled shirt.
And she realizes there is an emotional seriousness in this distant man. She needs to step backwards out of the maze they have innocently entered. He is content to be near her, the beauty of this ear and earring, then a comparison with the other side of her head, the way the moon is over them and also in water, the way the water holds the night lilies and their reflection. The false and true alternatives surround them.
She takes his hand and brings it to her forehead. ‘Feel that. Do you feel that?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘That’s my brain. I’m not as drunk as you, so I am smarter than you. Or even if you were not drunk I might be clearer about this than you. A little.’ Then a smile from her that will make him forgive anything she says.
She talks to him, more strongly than what the scar on her wrist suggests, her shirt open in a billow at the neck.
‘You look, at some moments, like my brother’s wife.’ He laughs.
‘You are going to be my husband’s brother, then. That’s how I’ll treat you. That is a kind of love.’
He leans back against the pavilion of stone, someone or other’s cosmic mountain, and she moves forward, he thinks it is to him, but she is only returning his black jacket.
He remembers swimming later that evening, entering the dark water naked and climbing out onto the abandoned firework raft. He sees a few silhouettes in the glassed room over the water. The Queen of England came to this rest house years ago, when she was young. He sits out there clearing his head of the way she disappeared into the throng with the subtlest of courtesies. The way . . .
A year from now he will return to Colombo and meet his future wife. Gamini? A woman named Chrishanti will say, approaching him. Chrishanti. He knew her brother at school. It is another fancy-dress party. Neither of them is wearing a costume, but they are both disguised by the past.
There were some passengers on the train squatting i
n the aisles with wrapped bundles, pet birds.
I was the one she should have loved, Gamini said.
Anil sitting beside him assumed she was to get a confession. The mercurial doctor about to expose his heart. That category of seduction. But there was nothing he did or said during the remaining journey—to the ayurvedic hospital he had offered to show her—that used the reins of seduction. Just his slow drawl as the train swept unhesitatingly into the darkness of tunnels and he would turn from looking at his hands towards his reflection in the glass. That was how he told her, looking down or away from her, and she seeing him only in a wavering mirror image lost when they moved back into light.
I saw her often. More than most people knew. With her job at the radio station, my strange hours, it was easy. And we were ‘related.’ . . . It wasn’t a courtship. That suggests two people in a dance. Well, maybe one dance at my wedding, I suppose. ‘The Air That I Breathe.’ Remember that song? A romantic moment. It was a wedding after all, you could embrace each other. I was getting married. She was married already. But I was the one she should have loved. I was already on speed, in those days, when I would see her.
Who are you speaking of, Gamini?
I’m always awake. I’m good at what I do. So when she was brought in to Dean Street Hospital, I was there. She had swallowed lye. Suiciders decide on that method of death because, since it’s the most painful, they might stop themselves doing it. The throat is burned out, then the organs. She was unconscious, even when she woke she didn’t know where she was. I ran her through into Emergency with a couple of nurses.
With one hand I was giving her painkillers and with the other using ammonia to snap her awake. I needed to reach her. I didn’t want her to feel alone, in this last stage. I overloaded her with painkillers but I didn’t want her asleep. It was selfishness on my part. I should have just knocked her out, let her go. But I wanted her to be comforted by me being there. That it was me, not him, not her husband.