Night Theater

by Vikram Paralkar

  He placed a tablet on his tongue and gulped it down. “Look, if the man doesn’t show up in another half an hour, send the women away. If they start yelling, tell them to march to the district office and set up a hunger strike there. Just tell them not to bother me. I don’t brew vaccines in my kitchen. Understood?”

  “Yes, Saheb.”

  “And tell them all to be quiet. My head is going to explode. Let me at least have a peaceful meal.”

  “Yes, Saheb.”

  The surgeon was polishing the last morsels off his plate when the pharmacist’s husband knocked.

  “He’s here.”

  The surgeon looked out the window. A corpulent shape in a faded blue safari jacket was puffing up the hillock. The man had an exuberant mustache and square glasses, and was carrying six large polystyrene boxes. The sea of squatting women parted to let him pass.

  The surgeon washed his hands and stepped into the corridor, every ounce of his flesh already pickled with contempt. The visitor laid down his load.

  “Here are the vaccines.”

  “You were supposed to bring these yesterday.”

  “I was delayed.”

  “That’s it? You were delayed? And what about us? Are we beggars, waiting for you to throw us alms?”

  The official looked at the women who had hurried into the corridor after him, and who were now tugging at the corners of their saris, veiling their faces against his eyes.

  “It’s no business of yours why I’m late. I’m here now, am I not?”

  “Not a shred of responsibility. Is this what you’re paid to do? Every other day is a vacation for you people. Who gives a damn about the doctor? For all you care, he can get holy water from the Ganga and drip it down his villagers’ throats.”

  “Don’t raise your voice, Saheb. I’m not some peon.”

  “You think I’m scared of you?”

  “I’ve been placed in charge of this village, this clinic. I’m your supervisor. You don’t want to get into trouble with me.”

  “Really? What kind of trouble?”

  The official rubbed his mustache and then inspected his fingers as if afraid he’d find them stained with dye. “I didn’t want to bring this up here, in front of all these people, but there have been irregularities reported in this clinic. Questions about how your money is spent.”

  The surgeon packed as much derision as he could into his laugh. “You mean the money that doesn’t even reach us? The money that turns to smoke the moment you and your comrades touch it?”

  “Saheb, look, you have vaccines to give out. Why are you wasting time with this kind of talk?”

  “Don’t teach me how to do my work. I would have been dispensing them since eight if you hadn’t been so lazy. But now that you’ve brought up irregularities, let’s talk about irregularities. Just wait. I’ll make sure you learn every financial detail about this clinic.”

  He gripped the official’s arm, digging his thumb and fingers deep into the man’s biceps. The man’s eyes widened. The surgeon strode into the consultation room, dragging the official in with him, and then released him with enough force to make him fall into a chair. The glass door of the wall cabinet gave a piercing rasp as the surgeon slid it aside, and he yanked out his tattered moss-green ledger and slammed it on the desk.

  “Here’s my account book. Pay particular attention to this section, page fifty-two onward, where I’ve listed the amounts I’ve had to spend from my own pocket to keep this place from turning into an archaeological ruin. That’s an irregularity worth noting, isn’t it?”

  The official sat as if every part of him, down to his fingers, were welded to the chair.

  “I’ve been working here without a nurse. I’ve asked the head office to budget me one, to issue advertisements in the district newspaper, but no, my application’s been pending in your office for months. I need a new autoclave machine—the old pressure drum we have could blow up in our faces any minute. I need an EKG machine, a suction unit for the operating room . . . No one can run a clinic like this. A morgue perhaps, not a clinic. Every month I have to spend my own salary to keep this place together. I buy antibiotics and sutures. And kerosene for the generator. I know how much money is assigned to this clinic in the government budget, but you middlemen eat it up, you fat pigs. Sit here, sit with this ledger. Conduct your investigation. Prepare a detailed report for your superiors. I’ll wait.”

  The look on the official’s jowly face was the most satisfying thing the surgeon had seen in months. As if he were thawing himself out of a block of ice, the man started tapping his fingers and making grinding sounds with his teeth. A woman in the crowd behind him giggled. The official scowled, pulled a small booklet out of his pocket, and compared some scribblings in it to the numbers in the ledger. A few times he made as if to write something, but his pen never actually touched paper. Finally, the formaldehyde seemed to get the best of him, and he pressed a handkerchief to his nose.

  “I’ll need to look around the clinic.”

  “Look all you want. It’s just four rooms, so take as long as you need. Do you require a magnifying glass?”

  The official turned and went into the corridor. The women moved aside as they might have for a serpent.

  The surgeon snorted. This one was a novice. The experts among his kind knew how to play their hands with more skill. They knew how to sniff out the naïvely dishonest; erode confidence with pointed observations, ominous frowns, knowing hmms and tsks; apply the slow, escalated pressure that they’d all learned from their bastard supervisors, who’d learned it from the endless hierarchy of bastard supervisors above them. Once the prey was cowed enough to reveal some slight indiscretion, some minor misuse of government funds for personal gain, the bastard’s work was done. He could then put his feet up and recite his lines: “Never mind, never mind, everyone makes mistakes. A single mistake doesn’t make you a bad person. Of course the government is very strict about its rules. It has a responsibility to the public. But I would never wish your reputation to be soiled. Perhaps we can reach an arrangement. Seal everything within these four walls.”

  The seas would boil before he’d tolerate such nonsense in his clinic.

  While the surgeon was unpacking boxes and arranging vaccines in the refrigerator, someone pointed at the window. He looked up to see the official worming his way out through the crowd. The surgeon cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Next time forget the vaccines. Just bring us some water from the Ganga.”

  The safari jacket receded at a faster pace.

  If only the day could have ended there. But now there were these women. The hillock was crawling with their offspring.

  The pharmacist’s husband stood in the corridor like a traffic guard, organizing the crowd into queues, directing them either to the surgeon or the pharmacist.

  The surgeon squeezed two pink drops onto an infant’s tongue. It coughed and burst into a wail, the vaccine bubbling on its lips in pink spittle, and its mother gathered it up on her shoulder and patted it.

  “Done. Next.”

  “Thank you, Doctor Saheb. Your blessings on my daughter.”

  “Come on, come on. Next. What am I, a priest? There are other people waiting.”

  The young mother, barely more than a girl herself, was replaced by another who could well have been her twin, for all he knew. This one had a three-year-old in a shabby brown tunic. He was rubbing his eyes and mewling.

  “My eyes hurt.”

  “I know, I know.” She was trying to hold him steady. “Just take this medicine and we’ll go.”

  “But it’s burning. My eyes are burning.”

  “Saheb is waiting, my child.” She tried to pry the little mouth open, but the boy squirmed, twisted his head this way and that.

  The surgeon clenched his jaw. Who did they think they were? They could take the vaccine or get out, it was nothing to him either way. What did they know of his qualifications? Of his skills? He was glad the fumes were burning their
eyes, the eyes of their brats too, so they could know that he was a surgeon and not some village quack. He hoped their eyes would burn all the more with that knowledge.

  He said little else as the chain of mothers and children trickled through the clinic. The afternoon passed, and the assembly on the hillock thinned.

  After the last of them had left, and the formaldehyde had wrung out all the tears it could and drifted away, the surgeon sank into his chair. The sun was a bag of blood sliced open by the horizon, smearing the squat brick houses. The parched ground stretched before him, covered with a rash of dry yellow weed.

  Every speck of this village seemed created to crush the life out of him. He felt an intense hatred for it all—the dust that lay heavy on the earth, the bone-white trees clawing with ludicrous ambition at the sky, even the mongrels that limped from door to door for scraps of meat. If it could all vanish, the world would only be enriched.

  He faced the window and ran his fingers through his hair—what little was left of it—as the sun extinguished itself on the huts in the distance and darkness dripped like pitch over the dreary village. “No more.” He yawned. “No more.” From this day on, not a paisa of his own money would be spent on this place. Whatever savings he had, he would gather them and leave. Two months at the most while he arranged for a house somewhere. Anywhere. The official could take this bloody clinic and turn it into a tomb.

  TWO

  THE SURGEON, HIS HEAD buried in a ledger, was adding a long string of numbers when someone said, “Doctor Saheb.”

  The nib of his pen halted, and he watched an inky halo blossom around it and spread through the cheap paper. The calculations in his mind evaporated. He looked up.

  There were visitors in his doorway. He hadn’t heard them step into the clinic.

  “The polio drive is over. The vaccines are all finished. Nothing left.”

  With his pen, the surgeon pointed at the boy, an oval-faced child with untidy hair sticking out behind his ears. “How old is your son?”

  “Eight,” replied the man.

  “Then he doesn’t need this vaccine. It’s only for children five years and younger.”

  “We aren’t here for the vaccine, Doctor Saheb.”

  Fingerprints smudged the surgeon’s bifocals, and he had to pick them off his nose and wipe them clean to take a better look. He couldn’t remember having seen these people before. The man was slim, his face oval like his son’s, but stubbled. The woman standing behind the boy was perhaps a little younger than the man. Probably the wife. Her odhni was wrapped so strangely around her neck and chin that he couldn’t see a mangalsutra.

  “What is it, then?” the surgeon asked, returning to his ledger. First the encounter with the official, then his confinement in this room, monotonously forcing drops into bawling children—it had ground him down to his marrow. And then there was his misplaced perfectionism, his inability to fill the vaccine ledger with meaningless scribbles and be done with it. The ledgers would be filed away in some government archive and never opened again, but still he needed the serial numbers on the invoices to match the boxes, the boxes to match the aliquots, the aliquots to tally with groups of children. And he was almost done. Fifteen minutes without interruption—that was all he needed.

  What the hell was the pharmacist doing, anyway? Last he knew, she was in the storeroom, folding cardboard boxes to line the medicine cabinets. Instead of doing her origami, that girl should have stopped these three at the front steps. “It’s late,” she should have said. ‘The clinic is closed. Come back tomorrow.”

  But she was nowhere in sight. He would have to deal with them himself.

  “Are you deaf? What do you want?”

  The visitors flinched. “We need your help,” the man said. “This will seem like a strange request.”

  “Strange request? What nonsense is this? Just state your business or get going.”

  Now, finally, the pharmacist rushed in, panicked. “What are you doing here? You can’t disturb Saheb like this. Wait outside, wait outside.” She began to usher them out.

  But when the boy moved aside, the surgeon noticed the bulge under the woman’s loose clothing. He raised his hand.

  “Is your wife in labor? Did her water break?”

  “No. She’s almost at term, as you can see, but that’s not why we’re here. Or at least, not just that.”

  The man paused, rubbed his mouth with the back of his palm. His eyelids parted farther, and he stammered out his next words.

  “We—we’re seriously injured. All three of us. And we need surgeries. Tonight.”

  The visitor clearly wasn’t a bumpkin. He was educated—his choice of words left no doubt about that. But surgeries? Had the surgeon heard him right? What could the man possibly—

  “Show me,” said the surgeon.

  Like merchants displaying their wares, the boy rolled up his vest and the man unbuttoned his shirt and lifted his right arm over his head. In the man’s side was a slit, its edges white and still, like lips paused in speech. It was enough to fool one into thinking that the ribs had been penetrated. The boy’s abdomen was bloated. Two cuts in the upper left, under the rib cage, formed a cross whose corners curled outward. And then the woman finished peeling away the many loops of odhni wrapped around her neck. It couldn’t be. He had to be mistaken. The wound in her neck—surely it was a trick of the light? Could those be the ends of her muscles? And was that—no, it was impossible—the larynx?

  But there was no blood gushing out, not even from that neck. What kind of hoax was this? Who were these charlatans?

  Out of the corner of his eye, the surgeon saw a jerking motion. It was the pharmacist. The surgeon had forgotten that she was still in the room. She looked rigid, as though in the grip of a seizure. The man with the cut in his side sprang to her and grabbed both her wrists with one hand. Stepping behind her, he clapped his other hand over her mouth. She was thin, but seemed to match him in strength as they struggled. He grimaced as he twisted her forearms and muscled her to him, her back against his chest, her torso immobilized by the pressure of his arm folded across her, locking her twitching hands against his shoulder.

  The air seemed to clot, grow viscous. The surgeon pushed through it, tried to reach the pharmacist. He felt his books fly off the desk as his hand struck them. The woman with the monstrous neck blocked his path, clasped his wrist, pressed a finger to her lips.

  “Please, Doctor Saheb, please,” the man said. “I won’t hurt her, won’t hurt you. We are good people. We just need your help.”

  “What—” the surgeon began, but could find no suitable words to add. So he just stood and watched—watched the man signal the boy; watched the boy run to the window, close and latch it, bolt the door; watched the woman go to the pharmacist and reach out to cup her cheek, all the while speaking rapidly, calling her “sister,” begging her not to scream.

  This was no hoax. The pharmacist, twisting in her captor’s grip, arched her body back like a bow at the woman’s advance, making the man stumble a step back to maintain his hold on her. The girl’s eyelids had opened as far as they could go, and her eyes were fixed on the woman’s obscene neck. The surgeon felt his own muscles knot and pull at the point where the nerves threaded out from his skull. He pressed his hand on the cold glass plate of the desk behind him.

  The man with the cut in his ribs opened his mouth, but if he said something, the surgeon could not hear it. The woman fell quiet and, probably realizing the effect her injuries were having, raised her odhni and let it drape back around her neck, removing her wound from view.

  The surgeon’s eyes darted around the room. Could he use his pen as a weapon, was it sharp enough, solid enough? It lay on the floor, its nib snapped off. A spray of ink stretched across the tiles. What else? He had scissors in his drawer somewhere, he was sure, but he’d have to dig for them.

  He gripped the table’s edge tighter, leaned against it. “What is this? What’s going on?”

  The vi
sitors stood like effigies. The woman and the boy turned to the man, who was opening and closing his mouth like a fish thrown to land. The girl he held captive had stopped her struggle and now just hung against him, breathing heavily with her eyes squeezed shut. He, too, closed his eyes and heaved, as though gathering his breath for some feat.

  “I’m a teacher, Doctor Saheb. This is my family. We’ve never harmed anyone. We just want to live our lives in peace.”

  THREE

  “WE’D GONE TO A fair near our village,” said the man who called himself a teacher. “It was sunset by the time we left it. The street was dark. The bulbs in the lampposts had burned out. I didn’t think much of it then, didn’t turn back. God knows how much I’ve repented that.”

  The pharmacist started squirming again in the man’s grip. His words spilled out faster.

  “Four men were hiding there. They jumped out, took our money and jewelry. And then they stabbed us, Doctor Saheb, stabbed us and left us on the roadside. Like sacks of garbage. They just left us there and disappeared.”

  The visitors were pale. There was a sickly tone to their skin, that was true. But how—

  “When did this happen?” the surgeon asked.

  “This evening.”

  “But, but there was no fair here. I didn’t hear of any—”

  “It didn’t happen here, Saheb. We’re from another district.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. How did you get here? The sun just set, not even an hour ago. And how did you stop your bleeding?”

  “We didn’t.”

  The surgeon felt his toes curl in his shoes, press hard against the leather. “But then how did you survive?”

  “We didn’t.”

  This was unacceptable. One could string letters together to say anything, anything at all, no matter how outrageous. The surgeon wished his thoughts would connect, one to the next, turn the man’s words into something that made sense.

  He took a step toward the family. The teacher’s wife, as if she’d read his mind, lowered the odhni and tilted her neck away, letting her wound gape. The sight was suffocating, and the surgeon staggered back and collapsed into a chair as his legs gave under him. How was one to shake off such a hallucination? Perhaps he ought to bash his head against something—the desk, the wall . . . fracture his skull if need be. Would that do it?