Night Theatre

by Vikram Paralkar

  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, unravelling. 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.’

  Four

  ‘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 grey that he thought she would faint 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 tightly it held her, like a crab. On the third day, it left her body and went into a coconut. The tantrik broke it open and blood spilled out. So much blood, I thought I would die. My sister woke up, but she didn’t recognize any of us.’

  ‘How long ago was this?’

  ‘Six years. No, more. Eight. She lived, but what kind of life is this? The ghost made her mind weak. She can’t even feed herself. My mother still has to change her clothes every day. No one will marry her.’

  The surgeon had witnessed spectacles such as this before – charlatans with hair that had seen neither comb nor water in god knew how long, wearing bone necklaces around their necks, jumping and chanting to Goddess Kali and spraying so much red water around that the room looked washed with blood. The trickery was always so transparent, but the gullible believed what they wanted to believe. A few days of antibiotics would have done the poor girl more good than a lifetime of holy water and chants.

  But it was hard to dismiss ghosts so glibly now, with three of them waiting on the other side of the wall.

  ‘We have to run away, Saheb. We have to leave the village before something bad happens.’

  The clock in front of them had only one hand. No, there were two, overlapping between eight and nine. A small green lizard was pasted to the wall next to the clock, as still as its hands.

  ‘If the man had wanted to strangle you,’ said the surgeon, ‘he would’ve just done it. He already had his hand around your mouth. There was nothing to stop him.’

  With a click, one hand of the clock stepped out from behind the other. The lizard slithered off to the wall’s edge. If even a word of what the dead had said was true, they couldn’t just sit here and keep talking like this.

  ‘Their w
ounds need to be repaired. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but they need to be repaired.’

  From the look on the pharmacist’s face, he might have been speaking a foreign tongue.

  ‘Look, either we help them, or they die. Die again, that is – however you want to think about it. It’s not a question of whether any of this makes sense. It’s a question of … of whether we’re going to just kick them out of the clinic or not. And if not, we have to do something.’

  Her eyes had already begun to widen. It was clear she knew what he would say next. So he said it.

  ‘I’ll need your help for this.’

  ‘Me? No, Doctor Saheb, no,’ she almost screamed.

  ‘Quiet. We have to be quiet.’

  She dropped her voice, which only made her sound more hoarse. ‘What are you saying, Saheb? I can’t stay here. I can’t. This is not right. These things shouldn’t happen, it’s not right, it’s not right.’

  He leaned against the wall. Whatever he was feeling now – the fear and fatigue – the night would only magnify it. Perhaps her instinct was the right one. Perhaps he should just leap into his car and drive away in any direction, abandon the village and everything in it. In the morning, the villagers would find three cadavers in the clinic. Or the visitors, recognizing the idiocy of their plan, would decide to walk to the boundary of the village and fall there. Either was infinitely preferable to his involvement in this dreadful matter, the raising, no, the mending of the dead.

  ‘You’ve always done everything I’ve asked,’ he said. ‘If you want to leave, I won’t stop you. Maybe if things were any different, I would have left as well. But the woman is pregnant. Her son is just eight. We have to do something.’

  At first it seemed as if she hadn’t heard him, but then her face turned to the ground and her chest began to shake. The way her braid hung between her bony shoulders made her look more like a child than ever. He thought of placing a hand on her head, but couldn’t bring himself to do so, not even at a time like this. ‘It will be fine,’ was all he managed to say, his hands still on his knees. ‘It will be fine.’

  But he couldn’t ask her not to weep. As the lights in the village winked out one by one, he tried to push away his own disquiet while he waited, but it was like trying to sweep a fog aside with his fingers. Whatever this was, this inescapable madness, he would have to get through it. He would pretend that the visitors had been wheeled in on gurneys, with lolling heads and frothing mouths, victims of some mysterious accident. He would just do his job, and let the pieces fall as they would.

  The girl finally wiped her face. Taking that as a sign, he stood up.

  ‘Your husband must be wondering where you are. I’ll need his help as well. Let me explain everything. And we have to be careful. If the villagers hear about this, they’ll bring down the sky.’

  Five

  THE LIGHTS IN THE operating room flickered on. The faintest trace of formaldehyde still hung in the air. Glazed tiles with bluish veins covered the walls to a height of four feet. Many were chipped and broken. Despite the pharmacist’s regular scrubbing, grime had settled into the grout, and the paint on the wall above, once a shiny white, was now blistered with green geographies of mould.

  A loop of sturdy metal hung from the plastered ceiling. The large tungsten reflector lamp that was intended to hang from it had never been delivered, vanishing, like so many things, into the bureaucratic ether. The room was lit instead by a fluorescent tube mounted high on one of the walls, and by two tall anglepoise lamps that the surgeon had himself purchased. Together they cast a modest illumination, suitable for minor procedures like the suturing of shallow cuts or the extraction of glass shards, but certainly not for any real surgery. Only a lunatic would suggest doing anything here in the middle of the night.

  These last few years, the surgeon had wondered if he had the right to operate at all any more. With a well-lit surgical field, he might still have trusted his skills. But in this room, where lamps cast shadows, concealing more than they exposed, every nerve or blood vessel or loop of bowel could hide in a dark corner and conspire to brush against his scalpel’s edge. It was impossible to operate safely here. Inflamed appendices, gall bladders, bowel obstructions – he sent them all to the city hospitals. What did he have to offer anyway? No nurse, no blood bank, no light. If a patient had to die, she would die from her disease, not from his surgery.

  A glass cabinet on the wall housed his instruments – relics of his past. It was the pharmacist’s job to keep them sterilized and bundled in thick green cloth. Their shine was rarely marred by use. The surgeon would just unwrap the green wombs and sort through his collection, arrange his tools by size and type, hold them up to the light one by one as though approving them for a surgery, until he could no longer ignore the absurdity of this farce.

  ‘These need to be autoclaved,’ he would say, and drop them back on the tray.

  ‘Yes, Saheb.’

  The instruments were sterilized far more often than they were used, but the pharmacist never complained. She would just wrap them back in the squares of cloth, pack them into fenestrated metal boxes, set them in the autoclave drum, and wait while the machine steamed and whistled. Then she would extract the contents with sterile gloves and stack them back in the glass cabinet until the surgeon felt the need to inspect them again. Because of this pointless routine, all the instruments in the cabinet were always ready for surgery. And they were ready now.

  Still, it was just a humble set of implements – basic tools for mundane surgeries, nothing very specialized. The dead seemed to think him a magician, with mystical devices and superhuman powers. How many disappointments was he destined to inflict on them?

  And what agonies? The surgeon had worried about this since the beginning. Would they feel pain? He had no equipment for anaesthesia – no propofol, no thiopental. And even if he did, how could the drugs work on the dead without a bloodstream? He might have to crack their chests open without the basic luxury of lowering them into slumber. Did they understand that?

  To these concerns, the teacher said, ‘Our wounds don’t hurt. We don’t even feel them. It’s part of our state. We won’t feel any pain for the rest of this night.’

  ‘And what about tomorrow morning?’

  ‘We’ll have life and blood at dawn, Saheb, so I assume we’ll also have pain. When that happens, we will endure it. We’ll endure whatever we have to.’

  The surgeon knocked on the door of the pharmacist’s house. The pharmacist stood at his side, wringing her hands as though trying to scrub them clean of some unseen stain.

  Her husband opened the door. ‘What is it, Saheb? You here? At this time? Is there a problem?’

  ‘Yes, a problem. You could call it that.’

  ‘Go get Saheb a glass of water,’ the man said to his wife, but his eyes didn’t leave the surgeon.

  ‘No need for water.’ The surgeon waved his hand. ‘This will seem like a strange request.’ It struck him, after he’d spoken, that these were the same words with which the dead had begun explaining their predicament.

  ‘Saheb?’

  ‘Walk up the hill with me.’

  The clinic sat on the hillock like a lantern. They walked in silence past the houses and huts of the village, and then, once they had started climbing, the surgeon spoke in slow, careful words, some of which he had to dig out of a vocabulary he’d never dreamed he’d use. The windows of the clinic seemed to grow brighter with every step. The moon had not risen, and it was as though the foot of the hillock were the rim of the world, with only nothingness beyond it. When they reached the top, the surgeon found himself short of breath, as if he’d hiked a great distance, and he stopped speaking.

  A few yards from the entrance, the pharmacist’s husband squatted on his heels and slapped his hands to his cheeks. A string of fearful questions poured out of his mouth. What good could possibly come of this? The only reason ghosts ever came back was to harass the living. What if they wanted to posse
ss them all? Haunt them and drive them mad? Maybe even kill them?

  The surgeon, exhausted by his own incomprehension, offered answers that barely convinced even himself. What right had he to the allegiances of these two? It humiliated him to be placed in this position, but how else would he get through the night? The pharmacist just knelt at her husband’s side and avoided the surgeon’s eyes.

  The man would run, and he would take her with him, the surgeon felt sure. It was futile to hope for anything different. And why indeed should the man not do as he wished? If corpses could walk, what remained to guide any other action?

  A silhouette moved in the clinic’s light. The teacher’s son was leaning against the entrance. With the bulb at his back, his outline threw a long shadow across the bright strip that stretched from the clinic door, out over the grass. Behind everything was the sky – an inky spread with pinpricks of white. When the surgeon’s eyes met his, the boy inched back into the corridor, and his face fell in the bulb’s light. He looked guilty, as if he knew he didn’t belong there, in this place and this world. The boy’s parents appeared behind him. ‘What are you doing here? Saheb told us to wait inside,’ said the teacher. He cast a nervous glance at the pharmacist’s husband, then at the surgeon, and began to lead his son away, but the surgeon gestured for them to stay.

  The pharmacist clutched her husband’s arm. ‘There they are, there they are.’

  ‘Yes, there they are,’ said the surgeon. ‘The dead. They’re here to regain their own lives, not to steal yours.’

  The pharmacist’s husband slumped back. He rubbed his eyes, stared, rubbed them again, trying perhaps, as the surgeon had tried not that long ago, to scrub away the hallucination. The surgeon himself, observing the dead for the first time from outside his clinic, was struck by how like the living they looked, standing there surrounded by bulbs and benches and discoloured paint, as though the corridor were the place where all the entities of this world and the next could blend together seamlessly. Nothing more than a doorframe separated the dead from the living now, and who could say in that moment who stood on which side?