Night Theatre

by Vikram Paralkar

  The teacher’s face remained where it was, his eyes turned in the surgeon’s direction without actually looking at him.

  ‘I used to practise in a large private hospital in the city. We had conveniences there – luxuries compared to this place – that I would barely even notice. New instruments, imported machines, trained nurses. I just assumed I would have all of those resources until I retired – all I had to do was snap my fingers.

  ‘And then one day one of my patients became unstable after a surgery. I did everything I could, but he kept worsening, and the patient’s family demanded that he be shifted elsewhere. The hospital they wanted was at the other end of the city. Late that night, an ambulance managed to get him there alive.

  ‘I called early the next morning to find out how things had gone. The staff at that hospital told me that the patient was in the operating room, undergoing a second, emergency surgery. I asked them who was operating, and they told me the surgeon’s name.

  ‘It was a man who’d worked in the same hospital as me. Actually he’d been my subordinate – this was a decade earlier. He was a terrible surgeon – lazy and impatient, bothered only about getting through his quota of cases for the shift and going home. Neglecting so many details that he would routinely put patients’ lives in danger. I had to fix so many of the problems he caused that finally I had him fired. It had been ten years since I’d even thought of him. And now here he was, operating on my patient.

  ‘When the surgery was finally done, they connected me to him. I could hear it over the phone – his triumph – from his very first word, from the way he greeted me. He asked about the old hospital, about how things were, how the other doctors and matrons and ward boys were doing, pretending he had no idea why I’d called. He had been operating since dawn, but there wasn’t a trace of tiredness in his voice.

  ‘I let this go on for some time and then asked about the patient. As if tossing off a minor detail, he said, “Oh, he’s going to die.” And then he told me he’d identified a surgical error when he opened the man up. I had cut something I shouldn’t have cut, he said, tied a vessel I shouldn’t have tied.

  ‘I racked my brain, tried to remember every minute of the surgery, every suture and knot, but I just couldn’t believe I’d done as he claimed. I kept questioning his findings, hoping to clarify some detail that would prove him wrong. I asked to speak to one of the surgeons who’d assisted him, to see if that person had the same opinion of the case. That’s when his voice changed.

  ‘“I don’t have time,” he said, “for fools who can’t accept their own mistakes.”

  ‘It was reasonable that he would want revenge, I understand that now. I was a fool, yes, and like a fool I tried to reason with him. We’d worked together. He knew me, he knew how careful I was. I was just requesting him to consider this a special case.

  ‘“A special case?” he said. “Really? Well, if that’s so, let’s see how special you’re willing to make it. I’m open to changing my report. Assuming you’re willing to reach an arrangement. Five lakh rupees. I don’t need to tell you there won’t be a receipt.”

  ‘I’d been lucky until then, I have to say. I’d managed to get very far in life without being forced into a corner like this. If it took six extra months to get a telephone line installed, that was fine, I could deal with it. If a hundred other people paid under the table to move things along faster, best of luck to them. But I’d never dreamed that this would happen … that I’d be blackmailed for a mistake I couldn’t even remember making.

  ‘I yelled into the phone, cursed him and his kind – termites hollowing out every institution. But every word I spoke just gave him more power over me. He was only trying to help me, he said. It’d be easy. All I had to do was take a briefcase to my bank and then bring it to him. “Don’t try to complicate simple things,” he said. “And don’t try to negotiate me down, I’m not some jewellery salesman.”

  ‘“You’re nothing but a jewellery salesman,” I shouted, “trying to hawk some diamond you’ve dug out of a corpse. Buying a new Mercedes, are you? How many bribes is that going to take? I hope your mother isn’t alive to see this. If she’d known what kind of snake you’d turn out to be, she wouldn’t have let your father fuck her in the first place.”

  ‘The man disconnected. I kept calling, but he wouldn’t answer, and in the evening, I learnt from a nurse that the patient had died—’

  The surgeon felt a wetness on his forearm. He yanked his arm out of the teacher’s chest, tugged at the knot at his waist, tore off his gown. A red band circled his wrist above the level of the glove. He turned the tap in the sink on full, but only a sluggish stream came out. Under it, he scrubbed a bar of soap into a pink froth. The water’s ropy pressure was excruciatingly gentle. He had to hold his skin against the tap to coax the foam down into the drain.

  Blood, it was just blood. The little that had soaked through his sleeve. It was harmless. It wasn’t acid, it wouldn’t corrode his flesh. Nor were the dead branding him as one of their own with some demonic ink. The surgeon gripped the porcelain rim with his dripping hands to hold the world steady. The water reached from the mouth of the tap to the floor of the sink in a thin, silent column. Every so often, it would lose its inner harmony, and a gurgle from the spout would scatter the glassy stream.

  The surgeon let the thudding in his chest fade. Then he shut the tap, gowned and gloved again, returned to the table. The teacher’s face was blank. Without comment, the surgeon dipped into the man’s open chest again, with greater care for his scrubs this time. The teacher did not react to that either. It was clear he was waiting for the story to resume.

  The surgeon sighed. ‘I’ve often thought about that conversation. Maybe, at the bottom of all this, his findings were real, and I was too conceited to accept them. After all, it had been a routine surgery for a minor condition. The patient was otherwise in perfect health. Maybe I was at fault, and deserved to be fined.

  ‘What happened was much worse. The surgeon released the most incriminating report he could possibly write. He filled it with accusing words, speculations about my skills, things that definitely didn’t belong there. But who can stop an author determined to write a tragedy? And that wasn’t even the worst thing. Then he called the press. And told them I’d tried to bribe him.

  ‘There were no riots that week, no activists going on hunger strikes; so, every news agency descended on his hospital. The bastard told them that I’d offered him money to keep his mouth shut. But he couldn’t be bought, not he, with his conscience bathed in milk. Not even if I gave him a Mercedes. He must have emphasized that word, Mercedes, to every reporter, for it was used in every article. I imagine he wanted to make sure I read it.

  ‘His accusation shattered my life. The telephone company released records of the calls I’d dialled – proof that I’d made all those frantic attempts to contact him. The resident who’d assisted in the surgery was a timid young man, and when the police questioned him, he just repeated everything his superior had said. My name was blackened in every newspaper in the city. Headline news, daily updates, rumours – my photo next to murderers and rapists.

  ‘After two weeks of this, I was summoned by the head of the department. “I sympathize with your position,” he said. “Patients sometimes die from our mistakes, and we as doctors have to accept that possibility. But the public doesn’t see it that way. They expect us to be perfect. And above everything else, they expect us to be honest. Exemplary citizens. All that bullshit.”

  ‘By that point, he didn’t care if the operative report was true. Nor if the claim of bribery was true. He was answerable to the trustees of the hospital, and they to the public. Someone had to be sacrificed, and it wouldn’t be him. As I signed my letter of resignation, he asked why I hadn’t come to him earlier. He knew people in the press, he said. He could’ve paid them to hold their tongues.

  ‘The compensation the court made me pay wiped my savings away. It wasn’t just for medical negligence �
� the accusation of bribery made the penalty ten times higher. I’m still astonished that my lawyer managed to save me from a prison sentence. No hospital would dream of hiring me now. Corruption, the secret friend of everyone from the top to the bottom of the chain, was a landmine when the world was looking. I had no money to open my own clinic. No bank would give me a loan, and no one would have referred me any patients anyway. So I left the city, at my age, and came to work in this government clinic. The villagers respect me because they don’t know my past. The government knows everything, of course, but it’s better to fill a clinic like this with a disgraced doctor than with cobwebs.

  ‘So there it is. It’s a long story, but after everything you’ve been through, you don’t deserve any more lies. I just want you – I need you – to understand that I’m not a saint. And I’m certainly not God. If you mistake me for either, you’ll be very disappointed, I promise you.’

  Only as the surgeon neared the end of his tale did he truly realize he was delivering it to a patient, and to one so young. But the chasm between them – the living and the dead – had already made all earthly hierarchies seem pointless.

  For a long time, the teacher remained quiet. Once or twice, he made as if to say something. When he finally did speak, it seemed to take him some effort to control his voice.

  ‘Doctor Saheb, how does it matter if we think of you as God or man? When we were dying on the roadside, no one came to our help. No man, no God. For us, you are more than either. We’re thankful for whatever you can do for us, and we won’t have any complaint, no matter how this should end. I can only apologize again for everything, for all the trouble we’re causing you.’

  The man’s chest had finally been emptied of blood. A shrunken lung was crushed deep inside it. Behind it, the heart hid like a timid animal that had retreated into the depths of its cave. There was no flowing blood to inflate it, but it still appeared to have a beat, or, more precisely, a throb. It shivered under the surgeon’s fingers, as though in fear or yearning for the moment when it would once again be entrusted with life.

  The light was miserable, and even with the ribs propped apart with an improvised retractor, the lamps lit only a sliver of the interior brightly enough. Most of the cavity remained dark. There was a small battery torch on the windowsill, but it wasn’t sterile. The surgeon wondered if it was worth spraying it with alcohol and holding it in one hand while he examined the interior of the chest with the other, but he decided against it. He would never be able to get it acceptably clean. So he just started feeling with his fingers, inch by inch, along the surface of every structure that could possibly have been the source of the bleed.

  ‘Tell me, why do you want to come back? Some day or the other, all of us have to die and end up in the afterlife, don’t we? So why endure this anxiety, the uncertainty of this night?’

  The teacher’s eyes were fixed on the far wall. He was following, it seemed, an ant meandering up the tiles. So the fumigation hadn’t accomplished anything after all, had it? But the surgeon felt no anger towards the black dot. The hapless little thing – even it had the right to live, on this night when the dead themselves were being smuggled across the border. It crawled across the cracked tile and vanished into the grime at its edge.

  ‘We were murdered. My son deserves a full life.’

  ‘Yes, yes, you’ve said that before, but that isn’t everything, is it? You’re hiding something.’

  The teacher’s ribs now moved for the first time in quite a while. The motion didn’t disturb the surgeon, so he let the man breathe.

  ‘When I first told you about the afterlife, Saheb, I was careful with my words. For the sake of my son. I would like to think he’s still a child – that I have some control over what he should and shouldn’t know. Or believe.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s not here now. You can speak openly.’

  ‘But, Saheb, it’s not supposed to be this way, the living aren’t supposed to learn about the afterlife. Please understand, I don’t want to hide anything from you, but there are some things you might be better off not knowing.’

  ‘And why do you think you have the right to decide what to keep from me?’

  The teacher appeared wounded by the question. He straightened the arm that was folded under his head, and let it stick out from beneath the drapes, over the edge of the operating table.

  ‘The afterlife is a barren place. There’s no valley or mountain to catch your eye. Every direction looks like every other. You could walk up and down it forever, and so many have – the dead who don’t even know why they’re wandering any more. Who would want to live in a place like that, Saheb? It’s like being exiled to a desert. Worse. All we can do there is wander, hope that relief will come if we walk just a little bit more, find some magical resting place. Our legs don’t get tired, we don’t need food or sleep. But the soul, it gets tired. It wants to feel something, even pain.’

  ‘But that doesn’t answer my question. You, all three of you, could live here till you’re old and bent, and after everything’s done, you’ll still end up there. So how is this, all the suffering you’ll have to face at dawn, how is any of this worth it?’

  ‘It will be worth it, Saheb, I’m telling you. The suffering will be temporary, it will go away, and then we’ll be able to feel things again, all the little things that we can only feel on earth. I want to drink water again, Saheb – ice-cold water. Sometimes I imagine it’s collecting on my tongue, that I can roll it against my teeth, feel it in the bones of my head, smell it – water has smell, I never realized that before my death – and then feel it in my throat when I swallow, that feeling right here in my chest, spreading outwards, rib after rib, down to my stomach … I know I must sound half-mad when I talk like this, but it’s these things that really separate life from death. Yes, I’ll have to return someday, but now that I know what it’s like, the time I spend on earth will be different. I know the value of every breath. I will live a life in which I teach others to appreciate it, help them lead better lives themselves. Maybe even become a farmer, grow my own food so that I know what it’s like to sow life into the soil. All of these things … maybe they’ll help me tolerate the afterlife better when I return.’

  The surgeon grimaced. It was too naïve, all of this. Not what he’d expected at all, certainly not from someone whose knowledge of life was supposed to surpass his own.

  ‘Fine, but why not just wait until it’s your turn to be reborn? Through a woman’s womb? Why this plan to return in the middle of the night?’

  The rapture that had entered the teacher’s voice at the talk of water now drained out of it just as quickly. ‘I don’t believe it, Saheb. I don’t think anyone is ever reborn. Everyone talks about it in the afterlife. In fact, that’s all they talk about. But I … I don’t believe it.’

  ‘But didn’t you say that your angel told you about it? Or were you lying to me?’

  ‘Not lying, Saheb. Please understand, I just said what I did for my son’s sake. All useless, I’m sure. My boy has seen so much – all it takes is a moment in the afterlife, and children remain children no more. But what else can a father do?’

  ‘Get to the point.’

  ‘The angel isn’t an angel. He’s an official of the afterlife.’

  The surgeon stopped dead in his work. ‘An official?’

  ‘Yes. One of the many who run the afterlife.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Officials? The afterlife is run by officials?’

  ‘Yes. It’s all based on the promise of rebirth. Everyone needs hope, Saheb – the dead as much as the living. So they pray to the officials, who are said to be the gatekeepers.’

  ‘What—what are you saying?’

  ‘That’s how it starts, Saheb – appeals and rejections, rejections and appeals. The officials have different conditions for rebirth. Some say our lives are important, others our deaths. Some go through our sins, other talk about our penance. Every thought, every word we’ve ever said – things we did
as children, before we even knew right from wrong – we are forced to justify it all until we have no dignity left. But nothing ever satisfies the officials. They say they need to think about it, they need to check with their superiors. They tell us they’ll return when they’ve reached a decision, and we never see them again.’

  A crow, perhaps the insomniac from earlier in the night, cawed outside the window, and the night wind drew a soft rattle from the shutters.

  ‘So you’re saying the afterlife is like a bureaucracy? A government bureaucracy?’

  ‘Much worse. No government on earth could create a bureaucracy like this. It’s endless. There are probably more officials in the afterlife than there are dead people. The reason the three of us are here, the reason I’m telling you all this, Saheb, is that one official was different, and we were lucky enough to find him. Our story moved him, I don’t know why. We had nothing to offer him, but still he decided to break his laws for us. Please, Saheb, don’t tell my son these things. He’s just a child. He deserves to grow up with some hope about life, maybe even about death.’

  The surgeon just stood, forearm-deep in the teacher’s ribs. Because he had to do something, he tried to return to his work, but his hands kept falling still. The insane turn of the teacher’s narration wouldn’t let him focus, nor would the patina of sleep that, despite everything, kept building over his eyes. How much of the teacher’s account had truly come from the man’s lips, and how much had his own brain fabricated in its exhaustion? He was now passing his fingers in an unending circuit inside the man’s chest, but he still wasn’t sure that the large vessels hadn’t been harmed. The walls had gained a darker tint, and it seemed that the door and windows of this shuttered room would never open again. The two of them – the dead and the living – would continue this conversation until the tiles blackened and crumbled.

  ‘Is there a God?’ the surgeon asked.

  The teacher turned to the wall.

  ‘Answer my question. You’ve been talking about all these officials, but not about gods.’