Night Theater

by Vikram Paralkar

  “Fine.” The woman’s face had no expression on it, none at all.

  “Are you sure? Was the surgery painful?”

  “No. No pain.”

  “Careful,” the surgeon said. “The inner end of that tube is in her windpipe. We’ll need it in the morning to ensure that she can breathe.”

  The pharmacist wondered if that wouldn’t hurt. If a small crumb in the windpipe could make a grown man fall to his knees and choke, wouldn’t this plastic thing be much worse? And Saheb wasn’t saying anything about how the operation went. Nothing about whether the woman would live. They’d been in the operating room for three hours, and the only things he said now were about the bandages and the tube.

  The teacher kept asking his wife, “Does the tube hurt?” to which she kept saying, her eyes turned away, “No, it doesn’t.” The boy pulled at his mother’s fingers, but she avoided his face as well. Though the pharmacist was afraid of what it might be like to touch the dead, she reached out to the boy. She felt his shoulder, skin and bone and soft flesh, there under the shirt, no different than if she’d touched a living child. She kept her fingers there for a few moments, tentatively feeling with their tips, trying to build up the courage to actually rest her entire palm to comfort him, but the boy turned to her with an expression of such anger and annoyance, and shrugged her off so violently, he might as well have slapped her across the face. In an instant, the words she’d just spoken with the dead seemed more remote than the sight of that ghost floating over the house all those years ago. When the surgeon told her to clear out the instruments and replace them with new ones, she was glad to have an excuse to leave the corridor.

  She put on a pair of gloves and entered the operating room with a sterilization drum, preparing herself for god alone knew what. The boy’s belly had contained so much blood, there’d been a mountain of it at the end of his surgery. It was as if a butcher had sacrificed chickens and goats there and thrown their innards all over the place.

  But this time, the drapes were clean. The scalpels and forceps and trays were barely flecked with red. She’d always assumed that the amount of blood spilled said something about how the surgery had gone. But maybe that rule too, like everything else, no longer held with the dead.

  She collected the instruments and drapes, washed them in the sink, placed them in layers inside the drum. She peered at the dead through a gap between the doors of the operating room, and then tiptoed to the autoclave machine. The drum inside had now cooled enough for her to reach in and jiggle it loose. As she replaced it with the new one, the surgeon came from the consultation room, carrying a narrow-mouthed glass jar with a rubber lid, half filled with water. She’d seen the jar in the cupboard, she’d dusted around it before, but there was something different about it now. Yes, Saheb had made two holes in the lid, and stuck plastic tubes through them.

  He took the sterilized drum from her, pushed the door of the operating room open with his foot, and waited there with his back to everyone else. “It’s my turn now,” the teacher said to his wife and son, and the door closed behind the two men.

  Only mother and son were left on the bench under the fluorescent light. The pharmacist stayed at the end of the corridor. The bulb in the ceiling above her had burned out. She felt like a ghost herself, hidden in the shadows, spying on the dead.

  The boy’s eyes were on his mother’s neck, on the tube sticking out at the front.

  “Doctor Saheb said this is to help you breathe. Is that true?”

  “That’s what he says, so it must be true.”

  “Why did he put this tube in you and not me?”

  “Because my neck is hurt. The air we breathe passes through the throat, right here.”

  “Will Baba need a tube too?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll find out soon, after his surgery is done.”

  “Does this mean that without the tube you wouldn’t be able to breathe?”

  “Saheb’s just being careful.”

  “And is it fixed now?”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  The boy didn’t seem satisfied with her answers. He folded his arms and sat back with a sullen pout.

  The pharmacist remained flattened against the wall, her shoulders aching from the effort of concealment. The autoclave machine whispered beside her instead of making its usual whistling sound. Was the seal not tight enough? She moistened her finger on her tongue and pressed it to the lid.

  The heat was like an electric shock. She bit down on the scream that tried to burst through her throat. Tears squeezed from her eyes as she pressed her fist shut to numb the finger.

  The boy was saying something. She ignored the burn. They still hadn’t noticed her.

  He had snuggled close to his mother. “Aai, I want to taste food again.”

  “Yes.” The woman’s voice broke. “I want to cook for you. When we’re all well and healed, I will cook you the best food I’ve ever cooked.”

  “Will you cook me mutton?”

  “Yes, my baby, I will. I’ll cook it just as you like it—spicy, and with plenty of coconut.”

  “And will you make me solkadhi?”

  “Yes, I’ll make you solkadhi, as sour as you want it to be.”

  “And we’ll have mango pulp?”

  “Yes, fresh mangoes. You can drink the pulp till your stomach is full, so full that you’ll fall asleep at your plate and I’ll have to wash your hands and mouth and carry you to bed.”

  The woman folded her arms around her son and looked out through the doorway of the clinic. She seemed to be pleading with someone, with God perhaps, or the stars.

  Her son rested his head on her pregnant belly. “After we come back to life, what if we die again?”

  “Why are you asking that, my baby?” She combed away a twig stuck in his hair with her finger.

  “What if someone attacks us, and this happens again?”

  “It won’t happen, I promise. Those were bad people, but they’re far away now.”

  “But aren’t there any bad people in this village? What if they don’t want us here?”

  “Don’t say that, my child. Most people aren’t like that. Most people are kind, they want to help others, even strangers.”

  “But not all. How do we find out who the bad people are?”

  “God will keep us safe. He’ll protect us.”

  “And will the angel protect us?”

  “Yes, I’m—I’m sure he will. Baba has great faith in him.”

  The woman sat that way for a while, looking down at the side of her son’s face, and then her eyes moved to the village beyond the hillock.

  “That looks like a school,” she said. “That’s where you’ll study, and that’s where Baba will work, too.”

  “Will we ever go back to our house?”

  “We can never leave this village, no matter what happens, you know that. Maybe when you’re older you’ll understand this better, but for now you have to trust your father and me. You can never cross the boundary of this village, not even for a second. Not even if there’s a pile of gold and diamonds on the other side.”

  “But where will we live?”

  “Saheb is generous. He’ll help us. I’m sure the villagers will help too. It won’t be easy—we won’t have any money, and we’ll have to live on what others give us. But you’re a big boy now. I know you won’t be stubborn if you don’t get everything you want. Someday we’ll have our own house. Right here, at the foot of this hill.”

  The boy pointed at something. “Is that a temple?” The pharmacist could see it from where she stood, and yes, a pennant fluttered above it in the moonlight. The boy had a good eye.

  “Maybe. It looks like one,” said his mother. “We’ll go there to pray every morning. Those white flowers you like, we’ll make garlands out of them. I wonder what kind of statues they have. I hope they’re made of stone, I like those better than the metal—”

  The boy stood up and held his face against his mother’s, pres
sed his forehead and nose to hers, his left cheek to her right. “I’ll take care of you, Aai. I know you’re really hurt, but I’ll take care of you.”

  His mother cupped his cheeks in her hands. “I know you will, my baby, I know you will.” She pulled him to her breast.

  The pharmacist, as she watched this from the end of the corridor, couldn’t help but feel that there was something strange about the woman’s face, something unnatural, though she wasn’t quite sure what it was. Then a drop rolled down her own cheek, and she realized. The woman’s eyes were as dry as paper. They remained dry while she rocked her son back and forth, though her chest shook with sobs. So the pharmacist let her own eyes spill, drop by drop, what the woman strained to spill but could not, for flowing tears, like flowing blood, were denied to the dead.

  ELEVEN

  EVEN WHEN THEY WERE in the operating room and the door was closed, the teacher did not ask, “Will she live?” and so the surgeon did not answer, “I don’t think she will.” The man just took off his shirt and raised himself onto the operating table, and the surgeon put his stethoscope to his ears.

  On the right side of the chest—the side of the stabbing—the surgeon couldn’t hear any air filling the lung. When he tapped in the spaces between the ribs, the cavity rang dull under his fingers, as if he were tapping on stone.

  “You bled into your chest. How long was the blade?”

  The teacher held his thumb and forefinger about six inches apart. The surgeon looked at the wound, and the teacher brought his outstretched fingers close to his chest in response. With the thumb placed against the gash, his forefinger curved all the way along the rib to the breastbone. A knife that size, driven to the hilt, could have hit anything. The surgeon scratched his stubble, kneaded a knot in his jaw with his thumb.

  He had the teacher lie on his side, facing away, his right arm folded up over his head. He picked up the razor he’d left on the shelf. Strands of hair still clung to it, long, fine hair from the back of the woman’s head. He unscrewed and washed the razor, snapped on a new blade. With it, he carefully shaved the man’s armpit and part of the right side of his chest, clearing a broad margin around the wound. Then he scrubbed the chest with iodine and covered the upper and lower areas with drapes, leaving only a strip of skin exposed at the level of the injury.

  “Hold your breath.”

  The chest under the drapes stopped moving. The surgeon put his scalpel to the skin and extended the wound in both directions—toward the breastbone alone the line of the rib, and backward, first under the shoulder blade and then curving upward along the spine. The teacher’s arm was raised, and his skin was stretched. The edges of the new incision parted as soon as the scalpel passed through them.

  “There was a palmist at the village fair,” said the teacher. His chest did not move. He too could speak without having to breathe.

  “Um?”

  “Sorry. I can keep quiet if you’d prefer—”

  “No, go ahead. What were you saying?”

  “At the fair, on the day this happened, we had our palms read.”

  “Really? You believe in that kind of thing?”

  “Not me, Saheb, no. But my wife used to. Who knows, maybe she still does, even after everything.”

  “And what did the palmist tell you?”

  “That all three of us had perfect lifelines, stretching all the way to our wrists. Not a single break.”

  “You should ask for your money back.”

  “He was sitting on a mat, Saheb, under a tattered umbrella for shade. He had these dusty signboards around him, with drawings of palms and lines and numbers.”

  “And you took pity on him?”

  “His clothes were torn. He looked old and tired . . . probably hadn’t eaten much that day. People were walking by without even noticing him. It was just a few rupees, and he spoke to my son as lovingly as he would’ve to his own grandchild.”

  “Well, it’s all a question of the right setting,” said the surgeon. “Sit an old man on a mat, and no one looks his way. Put him in a clinic, and even angels refer patients to him.”

  He had finished cutting through the fat under the man’s skin. He pulled aside the fleshy muscle that ran across the surface of the rib cage and cut through others, careful not to injure the nerves in the region. He then sliced through the muscles that held together the ribs flanking the wound, right down to the pleura on the inside of the ribs. He used to have a rib retractor, but the pharmacist had dropped and broken it over a year ago, and he hadn’t felt the need to purchase another. So he just pulled the ribs apart with his hands, as though he were prying open the bony lips of a cavernous maw. The interior of the chest was as he’d expected.

  “It’s full of blood.”

  “Can it be fixed?”

  “Don’t know that yet.”

  If the heart had been punctured, or one of the arteries around it, this was the end. There was absolutely nothing here that would allow him to repair that. But there was just too much blood. Liters of it, from what he could estimate, obscuring everything.

  The teacher’s face was turned away from the surgeon, half covered by the edge of the drape. It was clear the man wasn’t feeling any pain, but the surgeon now wondered if he had any sensation at all, any awareness of what part of him the scalpel was cutting at a given moment. Maybe one could pluck out every organ, disjoint the bones, reduce the man to just a head, then trim even that down—the cheeks, the lips, the tongue. Would words still issue from a bare skull?

  “These villagers are lucky, Saheb.”

  “Are they?”

  “How many villages have someone like you, someone with your skill? There’s so much money to be made in cities, but still, here you are, serving the poor.”

  The surgeon had begun to clean out the interior of the chest, and found that it wasn’t easy holding the ribs apart and digging out clots at the same time without a retractor or an assistant. Removing one of the ribs to make some space wasn’t a bad thought, but it would probably be more trouble than it was worth. It was a mercy the man was thin. No roll of fat around his chest to force apart every time.

  “There are very few people like you, Saheb, who willingly sacrifice their comforts for others. Everyone’s just concerned with their own lives, interested in adding to their wealth. All greed and selfishness.”

  The teacher paused, considered his own words.

  “But what right do I have to judge anyone else? I want life, don’t I? Life on earth, even after my death. The one thing that no one’s really supposed to have. Maybe that’s real greed, worse than wanting money or fame.”

  The surgeon smiled. “Philosophy is for the elderly. You’re much too young for thoughts like these. Leave them to people my age.”

  “But don’t they say that philosophy is for those who struggle with death? If that’s true, who could be more qualified than me?”

  The cuffs and sleeves of the surgeon’s gown were a deep red by now. The sides of the incision closed over his forearm each time he reached in, and a wet, sucking sound accompanied every handful of clots he pulled out. They came in clumps and threads—dark, shiny, teasing their way free through his gloves. Try as he did, he couldn’t keep some of them from slipping to the floor. He would have to remember to clean them off later, or the whole clinic would be smeared.

  “My son’s feet ached,” the teacher said. “He wanted to take a rickshaw home from the fair, and I teased him, ‘You’re a big boy, you should be able to walk, it isn’t that far.’”

  “Don’t say that. It wasn’t your fault. You shouldn’t blame yourself.”

  “If only I’d listened to him, Saheb, if only I’d taken a minute to stop and think. It was getting dark. My wife shouldn’t have been walking in her state anyway. But I wasn’t thinking. I just wasn’t thinking.”

  It was clear where this conversation was headed. The surgeon thought of enforcing silence on the teacher, under the pretence of medical requirement if need be. But the time
when he could have done so came and went, and the man just kept speaking. The surgeon pulled his hand out from between the ribs and placed his bloody glove on the cloth covering the teacher’s shoulder. He knew full well that the man would feel this gesture as little as he did the cuts and tugs on his insides.

  “They twisted my arms behind my back, Saheb. Held me as if I were nothing more than a child. They started pulling off our valuables. ‘Take everything,’ I begged them. ‘Take her mangalsutra, her bangles. Take my ring, my watch. My wallet has a week’s pay. Take it. We won’t fight, won’t make a sound.’ And still the knives, Saheb. Why?

  “I could see their teeth. They were smiling. And then this pain . . . I’d never felt pain like this. Every single breath, it felt as if someone were tearing out my ribs. My wife’s clothes were covered with blood. My son was on the ground, he was holding his stomach, ‘Baba, I’m hurt, I’m hurt.’ The men had already run away. Imagine me, Saheb, trying to breathe, trying to stop her bleeding. It kept flowing through my fingers, hot as boiling water. Imagine, Saheb, her face all red, her eyes rolled back, and my child . . . our child, our baby, ready to be born . . . we even had names for it, one if it was a boy, another if a girl, dying inside her, and I could do nothing. I couldn’t even kneel there and cry. My son was screaming behind me, so I left her. She was gone. There was nothing I could do, so I left her.

  “His shirt was wet. I grabbed his arms, dragged him—my boy, whom I used to swing over my back but whom I couldn’t even lift off the ground now. Who knows how long we went like this . . . it was so dark, the street was swaying from side to side, it was as if I were walking on a rope. So I fell. What lies I whispered in his ears then. ‘Don’t be afraid, help is coming, I’m here with you.’ Yes, I was there with him, Saheb, as nothing but a witness. My boy stopped breathing in my arms, and I could do nothing. May this never happen to any father, Saheb, may no one ever have to feel what I felt. I tried to scream, but there was no air left in my lungs. And who was there to listen? I felt only hate, nothing but hate. And my greatest hatred wasn’t even for the bandits. It was for that palmist at the fair. That poor old man, he had done nothing to hurt us, but as the pressure in my chest became unbearable, and the next breath became impossible to take, I could only think of his promises, about our lifelines and how long they were supposed to be. And then I died.”