Night Theatre

by Vikram Paralkar

  The teacher looked shattered. ‘My wife was right. We should never have come.’

  ‘Yes, you shouldn’t have. You should have stayed where you were.’

  ‘We’ll go, Saheb. We don’t want to make any more trouble for you.’

  The surgeon slammed his hands on the desk and planted his brow on the backs of his knuckles. He blew his breath out against the glass in frustration.

  ‘Yes, keep coming up with more ridiculous ideas like that. Even if you make it to the village boundary without being seen, you’ll still leave your bodies behind. With the surgeries you’ve had, no matter what happens, everything will be traced back to me. And I’ll be the one who’ll die in prison.’

  There was a long silence. And then the teacher spoke, his words so muted that the surgeon had to strain to hear them.

  ‘We could … Saheb, if you know of any abandoned well, somewhere outside the village … Or I could help you dig a hole at night. Like a grave…’

  The surgeon did not lift his face from the glass. And he did not reply. To his shock, his tongue did not lash out to reject the offer the moment it was spoken. Yes, he knew of a spot near the southern edge of the village, behind a decrepit temple that no one visited because the idol in it was said to be cursed. And yes, there was a secluded path to it from the clinic, down the side of the hillock farthest from the farms and huts.

  He couldn’t involve the pharmacist and her husband in this, of course. They’d done so much, and might be willing to do more, but he couldn’t ask this of them. This would have to be his doing and his alone. After midnight, he would have to tiptoe with the dead to the thicket behind the temple. If they were careful, they could manage the journey without being seen. Yes, graves would have to be dug. Deep ones, capable of guarding their secrets. The teacher would have to do most of the digging – he was the younger, stronger man. He would have to ready the earth for the task of swallowing his family.

  And then the surgeon would lead the dead to the village boundary. There they would drop. Return to their true forms. Become corpses like any other. Then they would have to be dragged. Pushed into graves. Soil would have to be shovelled over them.

  The hypnotic horror of this contemplation was unfolding in the face of the surgeon’s efforts to stop it. With the force of a hurricane, it was ripping through every vestige of sanity and decency in his brain. Ever since the dead had appeared in his clinic, he’d spent every minute in detailed planning. Every cut, every stitch, every surgical instrument – he had outlined and rationed them all. How was he supposed to switch off this faculty? Especially now, at the end of all things?

  And indeed a logistical problem was already presenting itself: Where exactly was the boundary of the village? There were stone markers at a few spots where one village ended and another began, but what was the precise location at which the dead would turn inanimate? Did the boundaries marked by the government correspond exactly to those respected by the afterlife? This question had to be answered before the graves could be dug. Otherwise, who knew what distance he’d have to drag their bodies?

  It meant that one of the dead would have to walk ahead of the others. Like a canary meant to be snuffed. A mother couldn’t be expected to endure the demise of her son. And a boy couldn’t be asked to witness it of his parents. The man couldn’t be the first to go, for he had to remain capable of digging. The best option was for mother and son to walk together. She would want to carry her infant. Step after step they would advance, the moon lighting their path. Ten paces behind them would follow the teacher. And the surgeon would trail them all, so that he wouldn’t have to look upon the face of the father at the moment when his beloved ones crumpled to the ground.

  The surgeon sat up with a jerk. The teacher, still kneeling on the floor before him, started at the movement. On the man’s face was a gathering horror. The surgeon couldn’t quite tell if the teacher had been serious when he’d offered his suggestion, but it was clear that he could see now that it was the only way forward. Perhaps he too understood what would be required of him.

  And the surgeon saw in that instant the depths of his own degradation. How completely his soul had been eroded, how the years had torn the stuffings out of his humanity and left him hollow. He should never have become a surgeon. He should have remained a coroner. His place had always been with the dead who remained dead. Those who lay on slabs and did not speak. Who asked nothing of him and to whom he owed nothing.

  A voice called from the corridor. ‘S—Saheb, Saheb.’

  It was the pharmacist. Neither the surgeon nor the teacher moved. There was a sound of knuckles rapping against wood, but neither of them responded. The rapping grew louder, more urgent. The surgeon finally stood, and the teacher shifted aside, his face averted, as the surgeon walked to the door. By the time he opened it, the pharmacist had already turned and was running to the back room. ‘Baba, baba,’ the boy called as well, and at that sound the teacher rose from his crouched position and followed them.

  In the middle of the back room was the teacher’s wife, seated with her legs folded under her. The tube in her neck was perfectly still. Her son was kneeling behind her, gripping the side of her arm and pressing his lips into the back of her shoulder. Their eyes were trained on the swaddling of green cloth in her lap. Then the bundle twitched, and the pharmacist fell to her haunches, joined her hands in front of her face, and started to rock back and forth.

  There was a second twitch, and a third. Even though the surgeon could see each one, it took him some time to realize what was – what could be – happening. The woman raised the bundle to him unopened, as though he were a deity to whom she were surrendering an offering. He knelt and took it from her, placed it on the mattress between them, opened it.

  The infant had her arms held up against the sides of her body, bent at the elbows, the fingers with their soft nails curling and straightening in slow grasps at the air. The plump wrists creased, and the feet with their splayed toes kicked away at the fold of the drape in which they were entangled. The eyelids opened, and under them swam large black irises. The lips exposed toothless gums – as smooth as those of an old woman, the surgeon thought, and then realized that the comparison ought to be the other way around. It didn’t matter, really – for whatever reason, life started and ended with the mouth polished of all its weapons. It was just the period in between that made everything so complicated. The baby was still blue – cool to the touch. The surgeon placed his palm on the newborn’s chest and curled his fingers around the ribcage. The chest, delicate as it was, rose against his skin.

  ‘Get my stethoscope.’

  Someone placed it in his outstretched hand, and he ordered them all to be quiet. Too many people were saying too many things, the boy loudest of them all. The surgeon bent over the baby and moved the bell over her chest. The hard plastic earpieces pressed a dull pain into the sides of his head, and a low, quick beat sounded in them now that all other sounds had been silenced. But that wasn’t the infant, no, it was just the beat of his own blood pulsing in his skull. He listened, and when he was convinced he’d listened enough, he peeled the stethoscope from his ears.

  ‘She isn’t…’ he began, his eyes brimming, but found he couldn’t bring himself to add the word alive to the end of that sentence. If this baby, who was stretching her limbs on the green cloth, whose ribs rippled under her dusky skin as she breathed and moved … if such an infant wasn’t alive merely for want of a heartbeat, then it was language and its prejudices that needed remedy. The infant’s eyes were calm, almost solemn, with a slight wrinkle in the skin between them that gave her an expression of deep thought, as though she were indeed some ancient soul reborn, inspecting the world and its inhabitants for the last time before fully assuming the guise of a child.

  ‘She isn’t crying,’ the surgeon said, unable to draw his gaze away from the infant, ‘because she doesn’t have any hunger or thirst or pain. Or fear. You’ve given birth to what might be the first creature on ear
th to ever know peace, because she needs nothing from this world.’

  He then raised his eyes, and moved to hand the infant back to her mother. But the woman and her son were no longer kneeling on the floor before him. He jerked his head to where the teacher had stood, and found no one there either. In his haste to stand, he almost tripped over the infant, and had to balance himself on both palms to keep from falling on her. Raising himself would require more strength than he could summon, and so he twisted and slumped back down, this time facing the door, with the side of his hip and thigh against the floor and his torso propped up on the mattress by a forearm. The baby remained nestled within the arc of his body. Apart from the two of them, only the pharmacist and her husband remained in the room. She was still rocking on her haunches, her awestruck eyes darting between the infant and the surgeon, her palms joined before her lips as she breathed loudly in rhythm with her rocking. Her husband, on the other hand, seemed barely to breathe. He sat with his back against the doorjamb and his hands balled before him, as if braced against some invisible foe who might try to strike him from the air.

  Seventeen

  THE SURGEON CHECKED every room of the clinic, and checked again. He tried a different sequence of rooms each time, as if it were possible for an entire family to play hide-and-seek with him in a place this small, and in broad daylight. The dead had vanished. All except the infant. The parts of the dead he’d extracted through the night – those were still in trays in the operating room. The things he’d attached to their bodies – the tubes and bottle and surgical dressing – had gone with them.

  After his fourth circuit of the clinic, when it was clear that nothing more would be gained by his aimless wandering, the surgeon sat in the chair in his consultation room. This had to be the doing of the official from the afterlife. Perhaps he had realized that none of the three would survive their surgeries, and had pulled them back to spare them another death.

  But why take them all back? The boy would have lived. His spleen was out. His wound wasn’t bad. Why not give him a chance? Perhaps the official just couldn’t make dead blood flow. Dawn had come and gone, after all, and nothing had happened. Who knew what other warnings from the official the teacher had ignored in his haste to regain life? The official, if he had any intelligence at all, must have had a plan for exactly such a scenario. If he couldn’t make their blood flow, he wouldn’t just leave the dead stranded in the middle of a village, waiting for someone to stumble upon the truth. Or for a surgeon to devise a monstrous scheme to bury their corpses.

  But why leave the bloodless infant behind?

  And what if this weren’t the doing of the teacher’s official? What if other officials were involved? Perhaps the teacher’s official, the benevolent one, had been working away in the afterlife, hammering the gears of his plan into motion, restoring movement to the infant as the first step of his grand resurrection, when others discovered his plot. Perhaps they immediately pulled back the three people he had sent, without realizing that portions of their bodies had been left behind.

  The surgeon realized that the clicking sound he was hearing was the tips of his incisors striking each other as they slipped over the smooth edge of his thumbnail. He placed his hands before him on the table, and watched his fingers quiver against the glass. Was he even permitted to think about the afterlife and its officials? Perhaps the officials could read thoughts, and were spying on him this very moment. If he chanced upon the right explanation for all of this, would they consider him too much of a risk and snatch him up?

  And in the midst of all this was the awful feeling of relief that the dead were gone. They were no longer his problem, he wasn’t responsible for them any more. At this thought, the surgeon pounded a fist on the table, making a pen on the edge rattle and fall off. What kind of person was he, to think like this? To have thought all those appalling things? What kind of selfish beast—

  ‘Saheb?’

  The pharmacist and her husband were standing in the doorway of his consultation room, at the precise spot where he had first seen the dead. They looked strange, but then so did everything else. The surgeon felt an urge to confirm their pulse.

  ‘Don’t ask me what’s going on. Just … don’t ask me,’ he said, rising from his chair and walking to the window. A glare of sunlight fell on his face, and he used the excuse to cover his eyes.

  When the surgeon told the pharmacist and her husband to return to their home, the man looked relieved, but his wife pulled him aside. They argued in whispers outside the clinic for some time and then entered, having resolved their disagreement, one could say, though she did most of the talking while he stood by her side in glum silence. They couldn’t leave Saheb here like this, she said. He was tired. Who knew what would happen next? It wasn’t right that he should be alone. And if some calamity were to strike them, they wanted him to be around when it did. Besides, it was best if they didn’t try to walk home in broad daylight. The neighbours would take one look at them and realize that something was wrong. And the baby, even if she weren’t a child like every other, needed a woman to look after her.

  The pharmacist’s husband looked subdued – too tired to argue any further. It was clear that he was struggling with his wife’s resolve.

  The surgeon asked for a few minutes to think. The pharmacist went to the back room to check on the baby, while her husband followed her and stood with a listless expression outside the door. Then they both returned and waited for him to speak, forcing him to come up with a plan.

  ‘We’ll make the clinic look like it’s closed,’ the surgeon said. ‘Like when we go to the city for supplies. Hopefully the villagers will see the shutters and not disturb us. It’ll allow us to get some rest. My head feels like it’s packed with rocks, but after I’ve had some sleep, I’ll decide how we should keep the baby hidden.’ He wanted to add ‘until she vanishes as well’, but realized that would be unnecessarily cruel, especially in front of the pharmacist.

  At the surgeon’s instructions, the pharmacist’s husband went from window to window, securing each one from the inside. A few of the latches were broken, and he had to tie their handles together with rope. Almost all of the windows were made entirely of wood, and the ones in the operating room were of frosted glass, opaque from the outside.

  The clots, the spleen, the placenta, all had to be disposed of before the heat and flies could start acting on them. The dead themselves had shown no evidence of decay while they were here, but who knew if their entrails would retain this immortality once separated from their bodies? The pharmacist ladled everything into plastic bags and, with the surgeon, carried them to the compost ditch. The sight of them puttering outside the clinic was familiar enough to the village for no one to give them a second thought. Nonetheless, as the surgeon emptied the bags into the hole, he could feel the muscles in his shoulders tense. It was deeply unpleasant, this feeling that he was disposing of evidence. He imagined everyone in the village stopping their work to look up at the hillock and memorize his every move. It reminded him also of the horrible thoughts he’d allowed himself to think. But there really was no other option. There were just two ways of doing this – fire or earth. It was no different from when the bodies of entire humans were bid farewell – either you sent up corkscrews of smoke to announce it to the heavens, or you chose the discreet path.

  They packed enough soil over the ditch to prevent stray dogs from digging up its contents, and returned to the clinic. The pharmacist’s husband closed the front door, placed a padlock on the outside, and climbed in through the small window where the pharmacist usually sat – the only window in the whole place without metal bars across it. He shut it from the inside, and the surgeon switched off the lights. Enough sunlight filtered through the cracks in the wood for them to see each other.

  The pharmacist had peeled her blood-covered gloves off into the pit and, once back in the clinic, scrubbed her hands with soap until they were raw. Drying her hands on her dress, she walked to the back
room. The baby was still on the mattress, as Saheb had left her. Her skin still blue and her face still calm, she was kicking her legs in the folds of the green drape tangled around them. The pharmacist brought her face close to the baby’s and took a deep breath, but the infant gave off no smell. She tickled the baby’s ribs and feet, but there was no response. The eyes were open, and the pharmacist moved her face back and forth in front of them. With the windows closed, the room was dark and, though the baby’s eyes wandered, occasionally seeming to cross, it wasn’t clear that she could truly see her. The pharmacist was struck by how seldom the baby blinked, and she realized that she’d never before seen a newborn this awake, one without a hint of drowsiness. She gathered the infant up in the drape, rested the head in the crook of her elbow, and held the scalp against her lips. After kissing it a few times, she placed the baby in the crib she had fashioned, and left the room.

  At the far end of the pharmacy, she pulled out a sack of rice from beneath the stone platform. She pumped the stove to a high flame, set a pot of water on it, and added three cups of rice. While the water came to a boil, she picked around in a basket of vegetables for any still fresh enough to eat. Two potatoes, an onion, a few small tomatoes, a packet of legumes, an inch of ginger – it wasn’t enough to make a single decent dish, so she just chopped them all up together. When the rice had softened, she took the pot off the flame and replaced it with a skillet. The tablespoon of oil she poured in took very little time to start rippling from the heat, and she added mustard and cumin and turmeric, let them crackle on the fire.

  She thought of the boy, and the prison he had carved out of the thermocol box. She would never see him again, she knew that now, and she felt a rush of sorrow. She hoped he was at peace, and cared for, wherever he was. She hoped he was with his parents.

  She added the chopped vegetables to the skillet, and the hot oil sent up its fumes, making her cough. After draining the excess water from the rice, she swept it into the mix and covered it with a lid. A sound behind her made her turn. It was her husband, carrying the supplies from the corridor into the pharmacy and arranging them on shelves. She caught his eye, and he stopped. He looked morose, but she knew it wasn’t the moroseness of someone forced to act against his will. It was the anxiety of someone afraid of false hope. Hope had been unkind to them in their young marriage. He placed a hand on her shoulder, and she rested her cheek against it. Then the skillet spluttered, and she returned to it, and her husband to his boxes.