Cutting For Stone Part 6

CHAPTER 10.

Dance of s.h.i.+va

WE TWO UNNAMED BABIES, newly arrived, were without breath. If most newborns meet life outside the womb with a V V shrill, piercing wail, ours was the saddest of all songs: the still-born's song of silence. Our arms weren't clamped to our b.r.e.a.s.t.s; our hands did not make fists. Instead, we were limp and floppy like two wounded flounders.

The legend of our birth is this: identical twins born of a nun who died in childbirth, father unknown, possibly yet inconceivably Thomas Stone. The legend grew, ripened with age, and, in the retelling, new details came to light. But looking back after fifty years, I see that there are still particulars missing.

After labor stalled, I dragged my brother back into the womb and out of harm's way as lances and spears came at him through our only natural exit. The attack ceased. Then I remember-and I believe I do-the m.u.f.fled voices, the tugging and sawing outside. As the rescuers neared us, I recall the blinding glare and strong fingers pulling at me. The shattering of the darkness and the silence, the deafening racket outside was so great that I almost missed the moment when we were physically separated, when the cord connecting my head to s.h.i.+va's fell away. The shock of that parting lingers. Even now, what I think about the most isn't that I lay there without breathing, immobile in the copper basin, born to the world, yet not alive-instead, I recall only the parting from s.h.i.+va. But, to return to the legend: The probationer unloaded the two stillborns into a copper basin used to hold placentas. She carried the basin to the window. She made a notation in the delivery chart: j.a.panese twins connected by the head but now disconnected. In her eagerness to be useful, she completely forgot her ABC's: Airway, Breathing, and Circulation. Instead, she thought of what she had read the previous night about jaundice of the newborn and the helpful role of sunlight. Shed memorized that pa.s.sage. She wished she had read about j.a.panese twins (the word "Siamese" eluded her) or asphyxiated babies, but the fact was she hadn't; shed read about jaundice. But then, as she set the basin down, she realized that for sunlight to work, the babies had to be alive, which these weren't. Her sorrow and shame made her confusion worse. She turned away.

The twins lay face-to-face, feeling the basin's galvanic touch against their skin. In the chart the probationer used the words "white asphyxia" to describe their deathly pallor.

The sun, which had stage-lit the room moments before, now honed in on the basin.

The copper glowed orange. Its molecules became agitated. Its prana rose into the infants' translucent skin and pa.s.sed into their doughy flesh.

HEMLATHA DISSECTED the broad ligaments, then clamped the uter ine arteries, praying that she wouldn't accidentally clamp the ureters and shut down the kidneys in that b.l.o.o.d.y mess. "Quick, quick, quick!" She was tempted to smack Stone on the forehead instead of on the knuckles. "Retract properly, man!"

She followed his gaze to Sister Mary Joseph Praise's head, which bobbed like a rag doll's as the anesthetist tugged at her arm to find another vein. Matron, teary and lost in her grief, stroked Sister Mary Joseph Praise's other hand.

When Hema finally delivered the uterus, clamps and all, into a basin, she saw no pulsations in the abdominal aorta. Her hands, steady till now, shook as she loaded a syringe with Adrenalin and attached a three-and-a-half-inch needle to it. She lifted Sister Mary Joseph Praise's left breast, hesitated for a moment, invoked G.o.d's name again, then plunged the needle between the ribs and into the heart. She pulled the plunger back, and a mushroom of heart blood appeared in the syringe. Whenever I've had to resort to adrenaline to the heart it has never worked, Hema said to herself. Not once. Maybe I do it as a way to signal to myself that the patient is dead. But surely it must have worked, somewhere, with someone. Why else was it taught to us?

Hemlatha prided herself on being methodical in an emergency, keeping her cool. But she stifled a sob now as she waited, her right hand buried in Sister Mary Joseph Praise's abdomen, palm down, just over the spine, waiting for a throb in the aorta, a slap to register in her fingers. She couldn't forget that this was dear Sister's heart she was trying to jump-start, and whose life was slipping away. They'd shared the bond of two Indian women in a foreign land. The bond extended back to the Government General Hospital in Madras, India, even though they hadn't known each other there. To share a geography and a landscape of memory made them sisters, a family. And Hema could see her sister's hands turning blue, the nail beds dusky, and the skin turning dull. It was the hand of a corpse, and holding it was Matron, her head bowed as if she were asleep.

Hema waited longer than she might have under normal circ.u.mstances. It was some time before she could bring herself to say, her voice breaking, "No more. We have lost her."

IT WAS DURING this hiatus of activity in the room that the firstborn, the one who'd been spared a skull puncture, signaled its presence. It rapped its hands on the copper basin. It brought its left heel down to produce a m.u.f.fled gong. Now that it had come wholly forth from a dying womb, it reached both arms skyward and then to its right, to its brother. Here I be, it announced. Forget the shoulds and coulds and might haves and hows and whys. I am sympathetic to the situation, the circ.u.mstance, and in due course we can explore the details, and, in any case, Birth and Copulation, and Death-that's all the facts when you come down to bra.s.s tacks ... I've been born, and once is enough. Help my brother. Look! Here! Come at once! Help him.

Hemlatha ran over at this summons, saying "s.h.i.+va, s.h.i.+va," invoking the name of her personal deity, the G.o.d whom others thought of as the Destroyer, but who she believed was also the Transformer, the one who could make something good come out of something terrible. Later she would say that she'd a.s.sumed the worst about the twins. One of them had his head bloodied, and then there was the matter of her dividing the fleshy tube that connected them, and G.o.d knows how much distress they'd been in before she cut them free of the womb. But she'd also a.s.sumed that Matron or the probationer or both would be reviving the infants while she worked on the mother, though she recalled seeing Matron seated and immobile.

The probationer was mortified at the sound of a baby that had come alive right behind her back, confounding her most basic clinical a.s.sumptions. The child was no longer white, but pink, and not jaundiced. The other infant was a robin's egg blue, and it was still and unmoving as if it were the discarded chrysalis from which the crying baby had emerged. Matron, hearing that newborn cry, jumped off her stool. Her glance let the probationer know she was a hopeless case. Hemlatha went to work on the twin that was unmoving while Matron hastened to clean up the living one.

THE BREATHING TWIN gazed out from the copper vessel. Its puffy newborn eyes surveyed the room, trying to make sense of its surroundings.

There stood the man everyone took to be the father, a tall, sinewy white man, looking lost in his own theater. The father's hands were preternaturally pale from the talc that lingered on them after he'd stripped off his gloves. His fingers were clasped together in a posture shared by surgeons, priests, and penitents. His blue eyes were set deep in the orbits under a ledge of a brow which could make him look intense, but on this day made him look dull. From the shadows sprung the great ax blade of a nose, a nose that was sharp, in keeping with his profession. His lips were thin and straight as if drawn with a ruler. Indeed, the face was all straight lines and sharp angles, coming to a point in a lancet shaped chin, as if it had all been carved out of a single square of granite. His hair was parted on the right, a furrow that originated in boyhood with every follicle tamed by the comb to know exactly which direction it was to tilt. The top was cut unevenly, as if after saying, "A short back and sides," he'd risen from the chair when that was accomplished, despite the barber's protests. It was the kind of obstinate, determined face that with a spygla.s.s held to the eye and a ponytail wouldn't have been out of place on the deck of an English man-of-war. Except, of course, for the tears rolling freely down the cheeks.

And from that tear-stained face, a voice emerged: "What about Mary?" startling everyone because it had been silent for so long. The measured syllables had the quality of a slow fuse.

"I'm sorry, Thomas. It is too late," said Hemlatha as she suctioned the infant's pharynx, then pushed air into the baby's lungs, her movements speedy and almost frantic. The irritation with Stone was gone from her voice, and pity had taken its place. She stole a glance at him over her shoulder.

A wrenching noise emerged from Stone's mouth, the cry of an unsound mind. Hed been a pa.s.sive observer and a worthless a.s.sistant ever since Hema's arrival. Now he leaped forward and grabbed a scalpel from the tray. He placed a hand on Sister Mary Joseph Praise's chest. Hemlatha thought of restraining him and then decided it wasn't prudent to approach a man wielding a knife.

Stone lifted Sister Mary Joseph Praise's breast. The motto of those pioneers of resuscitation, the Royal Humane Society, resounded in his ears: Lateat scintillula forsan-a small spark may perhaps be hidden.

He pushed the breast up and out of the way, and under his knife a red gash appeared between the fourth and fifth ribs. He drew the knife over the wound again, and yet again till he was through muscle. If he was clumsy earlier, his movements now were those of a man incapable of tentative strokes. He cut the cartilages that connected the two ribs to the breastbone. He spread the ribs and watched in disbelief as his ungloved hand slid out of sight and into the still warm cavity of her chest. The spongy lung he pushed away. And there, under his fingers like a dead fish in a wicker basket, was Sister Mary Joseph Praise's heart. He squeezed, surprised at its size, barely able to encircle it. Meanwhile, he exhorted the nurse anesthetist to keep pus.h.i.+ng air into her lungs, not to stop.

His right hand was buried within her thorax, but his eyes were on Sister Mary's engorged left breast, which he held out of the way with his left hand. The breast felt firm, unlike the slippery, soft heart. He saw blotchy blue shadows creep into her face, a hue that her brown skin shouldn't have been capable of. Her abdomen had collapsed, its surface crinkled like an airless balloon, its two halves splayed open like a book whose spine had given way.

"G.o.d? G.o.d? G.o.d?" Stone cried with every squeeze, calling on a G.o.d he had renounced once and didn't believe in. But Sister Mary believed, rising before dawn to pray, and lingering in prayer at night before she slept. Every beat of her life and each day of her calendar had been filled with G.o.d events, and no morsel of food entered her mouth without G.o.d's blessing. Make your life something beautiful for G.o.d. If Thomas Stone never understood it, he respected it, because it was the same quality she brought to the operating theater, and to the textbook she'd helped him with. That was why he called out G.o.d's name now, because if there was a G.o.d, G.o.d b.l.o.o.d.y well owed His devoted servant, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a miracle. Otherwise, G.o.d was the shameless fraud Stone had always found Him to be. "If you want me to believe, G.o.d, I'll give you another chance."

The theater doors swung open.

All eyes turned to the figure that entered.

But it was only wide-eyed Gebrew, priest, servant of G.o.d, and watchman. The covered bowl he carried held the injera and wot, and their scent was added to that of placenta, blood, amniotic fluid, and meco-nium. Gebrew had hesitated to come into this sanctum sanctorum. He held the food container in front of him, unsure if it were the ingredient that might save the day. His eyes almost popped out of their sockets when he saw, on the altar of this hallowed place, Sister Mary Joseph Praise opened like a sacrificial lamb with Stone's hand in her chest. He started to shake. He put the food on the floor, squatted down against a wall, pulled out his beads, and swayed in prayer.

Stone redoubled his efforts. "I demand a miracle and I want it right now," he said, his body rocking back and forth. He kept it up even when the heart had turned mushy in his hand, and he was shouting now. "The b.l.o.o.d.y loaves and fishes ... Lazarus ... the lepers ... Moses and the Red Sea ..." Gebrew's chanting in ancient Geez matched Stone, call and response, as if Gebrew were translating because in this hemisphere G.o.d didn't know English.

Stone looked up to the ceiling, prepared for the tiles to part and for an angel to intercede where surgeons and priests had failed. All he saw was a black spider hanging down from its web, with its compound eyes taking in the scene of human misery below. Stone's shoulders slumped, and though his hand was still in Sister Mary's thorax, he was now merely caressing her heart, no longer squeezing. His chest heaved, tears falling onto the body of Sister Mary Joseph Praise. His head fell forward so it rested on his arms, which rested on Sister's chest. No one dared approach. They were transfixed by the sight of their surgeon so defeated, so destroyed.

AT LONG LAST he looked up, seeing as if for the first time the green tile going halfway up the wall, the swinging green door to the autoclave room, the gla.s.s instrument case, the b.l.o.o.d.y uterus with its necklace of hemostats lying in the green towel, the blue-black placenta right next to it on the specimen table, and the jade-colored ground-gla.s.s windows through which sunlight filtered. How did these things dare to exist if Mary did not?

That was when his eyes fell on the twins, no longer in their copper throne; that was when he saw the orange halo of light that surrounded the two boys. Somehow both children were alive, bright-eyed, one of them seeming to study him, the second one now as pink as the first.

"Oh no, no, no," he said in a pitiful voice. "No. That was not the miracle I asked for!" When he withdrew his hand from Mary's body it made a gurgling sound. He left the theater.

He came back with a long broom. He brushed the spider off the ceiling, and then, with his heel, he ground it into the tile.

Matron understood he was intent on blasphemy; in case the arachnid was G.o.d, he was killing G.o.d.

"Thomas," Hemlatha said, using his first name, which sounded strange on her tongue in Operating Theater 3, because they were always formal here. By this time both babies were in Hema's arms, wiped off and suctioned and swaddled in receiving blankets. The one in whose skull Stone had tried to drill a hole had aspirated some amniotic fluid but now seemed recovered; there was a big pressure dressing in place over the head wound. The other child showed only the stump of the flesh-bridge that had connected him to his brother, a stump now tied off with umbilical cord suture.

Hemlatha had established that the boys could move their limbs, neither of them was c.o.c.keyed, and they seemed to hear and to see. "Thomas," she said, approaching, but he cringed. He turned away. He would not look.

This man she thought she knew well, seven years a colleague, now stood bent as if hed been gutted.

That, she said to herself, is visceral pain. As angry as shed been with him, the depth of his grief and his shame moved her. All these years, she thought, it should have been clear to us that he and Sister were a perfect match; maybe if wed encouraged them it could have been something more. How often did I see Sister a.s.sisting him in surgery, working on his ma.n.u.scripts, taking notes for him in the outpatient department? Why did I a.s.sume that was all there was to it? I should have reached over and smacked him at my dinner table. I should have shouted at him, Don't be blind. See what you have in this woman! See how she loves you. Propose to her! Marry her. Get her to discard her habit, renege on her vows. It's clear her first vow is to you. But no, Thomas, I didn't do it because we all a.s.sumed that you were incapable of anything more. Who knew that this much feeling was hidden in your heart? I see it now. Yes, now we have these two as proof of what was in your hearts.

The two bundles in her arms propelled her forward, because they were, after all, his, and even as she thought that, she was still fighting her own disbelief. Surely he wouldn't try to deny that fact. She couldn't back away from this moment; she had to force the issue-who else could speak for these children? Stone was a fool who lost the one woman in the world fated for him. But now he had gained two sons. And Missing would rally round these infants. He'd have lots of help.

She moved closer.

"What shall we name these babies?" She could sense the uncertainty in her voice.

He appeared not to hear. After a pause, she repeated the question.

Stone thrust his chin at her, as if to say she could name them whatever she wanted. "Please get them out of my sight," he said very softly.

He kept his back turned on the infants to gaze once more at Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Which was why he missed the way his words fell on Hema like hot oil; he didn't see the flames of anger shooting out of her eyes. Hema would misread his intentions, and he hers.

Stone wanted to run away, but not from the children or from responsibility. It was the mystery, the impossibility of their existence that made him turn his back on the infants. He could only think of Sister Mary Joseph Praise. He could only think of how she'd concealed this pregnancy, waiting, who knows for what. In response to Hema's question, it would have been a simple thing for Stone to say, Why ask me? I know no more than you do about this. Except for the certainty that sat like a spike in his gut that it was somehow his doing, even though he had no recollection how or where or when.

Sister Mary Joseph Praise lay lifeless and unburdened of the two lives she had carried, as if that had been her sole earthly purpose. Matron had pulled down Sister Mary Joseph Praise's eyelids, but they would not stay closed. The half-mast eyelids, the unseeing gaze, hammered in the reality of her death.

Stone took one last look. He wanted to remember her not as Sister, not as his a.s.sistant, but as the woman he should have declared his love for, the woman he should have cared for, the woman he should have wed. He wanted the ghoulish image of her corpse burned into his brain. He had negotiated his way through life by work, and work, and more work. It was the only arena in which he felt complete and the only thing he had to give Sister Mary Joseph Praise. But at this moment work had failed him.

The sight of her wounds shamed him. Thered be no healing, no scars to form, harden, and fade on her body. He would bear the scar, he would carry it from the room. Hed known only one way of being, and it cost him. But he would have been willing to change for her had she only asked. He would have. If only she could have known. What did it matter now?

He turned to leave again, glancing around as if to seal in his memory this place in which hed polished and elevated his art, this place that hed furnished to suit his needs and that he thought was his real home. He took it all in because he knew hed never ever return. He was surprised to find Hema still standing behind him, and again the sight of the bundles she carried made him recoil.

"Stone, think about this," Hema said. "Turn your back on me if you want, because I'll have no use for you. But don't turn your back on these children. I won't ask you again."

Hema held her living burden and waited on Stone. He was on the verge of speaking to her honestly, of telling her all. In his eyes she saw pain and puzzlement. What she didn't see was any recognition of the infants as being connected to him. He spoke like a man who'd just been hit on the head. "Hema, I don't understand who ... why they are here ... why Mary is dead."

She waited. He was circling around a truth that might emerge if she waited. She wanted to grab his ears and shake it out of him.

At last he met her gaze, refusing to look down at the infants, and what he said wasn't what she wanted to hear. "Hema, I don't want to set eyes on them, ever."

The last of Hema's restraint fell away. She was livid for the children, furious that he seemed to think this was just his loss.

"What did you say, Thomas?"

He must have known a battle line had just been drawn.

"They killed her," he said. "I don't want to set eyes on them."

So this is how it will be, Hema thought, this is how we shall pa.s.s from each other's lives. The twins mewled in her arms.

"Whose are they, then? Aren't they yours? So didn't you kill her, too?"

His mouth opened in pain. He had no answer, so he turned to leave.

"You heard me, Stone, you killed her," Hema said, raising her voice so that she drowned out every other sound. He flinched as the words lashed into him. It pleased her. She felt no pity. Not for a man who wouldn't claim his children. He pushed the swinging door so hard it shrieked in protest.

"Stone, you killed her," she shouted after him. "These are your children."

THE PROBATIONER BROKE the ensuing silence. She was trying to antic.i.p.ate, so she opened a circ.u.mcision tray and pulled on gloves. The one thing Matron allowed her to do without supervision was to use the foreskin guillotine.

But instead of praising her, Hema pounced on her. "My goodness, girl, don't you think these children have had quite enough? They're preemies! They are not out of danger. Want them to be chip-c.o.c.k-Charlies on top of all this? ... And you? What have you been doing all the time, eh? You should've been worrying about their swallowing ends, not their watering cans."

HEMA ROCKED THE TWINS, thrilled by their breathing selves, by their peaceful smiles, the opposite of the usual anxious, panicked face of a newborn. Their mother lay dead in the same room, their father had run, but they knew nothing of that.

Matron, Gebrew, the nurse anesthetist, and others who had gathered were weeping around Sister's body. Word had spread to the maids and housekeepers. Now a funeral wail, a piercing lululululululu ripped through the heart of Missing. The ululations would continue for the next few hours.

Even the probationer began to show the first inkling of Sound Nursing Sense. Instead of struggling to appear to be something she was not, she wept for Sister, who was the only nurse who really understood her. For the first time the probationer saw the children not as "fetuses" or "neonates" but instead as motherless children, like herself, children to be pitied. Her tears poured out. Her body slumped as if the starch had vanished not just from her clothes but from her bones. To her amazement, Matron came and put an arm around her. She saw not just sadness but fear in Matron's face. How could Missing go on without Sister? Or without Stone? For surely he was never coming back, that she could see.

Hemlatha shut out the sobbing around her as she rocked the babies, and then she began to croon, her anklets jingling faintly like castanets as she s.h.i.+fted weight from one foot to the other. She felt the loss of Sister Mary Joseph Praise as acutely as anyone, and yet she felt guided- perhaps this was Sister's doing-to give her all at this moment to the two infants. The twins were breathing quietly; their fingers fanned over their cheeks. They belonged in her arms. How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic. Sister Mary, bride of Christ, now gone from the world into which she just brought two children.

Hema thought of s.h.i.+va, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life in this her thirtieth year was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of s.h.i.+va, to mimic the rigid masking smile of s.h.i.+va, to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner tune, a tabla beat. Thim-thaga-thaga, thim-thaga-thim, thim-thaga ... Hema moved gently, knees flexing, tapping her heels, then her forefoot in time to the music in her head.

The bit players in Theater 3 regarded her as if she were mad, but she danced on even as they tidied the corpse, she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction.

Ridiculous, the thoughts that came to her as she danced: her new Grundig, Adid's lips and his long fingers, the thump of Matron falling over, the revolting feel of the Frenchman's b.a.l.l.s but the satisfaction in seeing the color flee his face, Gebrew with chicken feathers stuck to him. What a journey ... what a day ... what madness, so much worse than tragic! What to do except dance, dance, only dance ...

She was surprisingly graceful and light on her feet, the neck and head and shoulder gestures of Bharatnatyam automatic for her, eyebrows shooting up and down, eyeb.a.l.l.s flitting to the edges of their sockets, feet moving, a rigid smile on her face, and all this while holding the babies in her arms.

Outside the hospital, as the light faded, the lions in the cages near the Sidist Kilo Monument, antic.i.p.ating the slabs of meat the keeper would fling through the bars, roared with hunger and impatience; in the foothills of Entoto, the hyenas heard and paused as they neared the edge of the city three steps forward and one back, cowardly and opportunistic; the Emperor in his palace made plans for a state visit to Bulgaria and perhaps to Jamaica, where he had followers-Rastas-who took their name from his precoronation name of Ras Teferi and who thought he was G.o.d (an idea he didn't mind his own people believing, but when it came from so far away and for reasons that he didn't understand, made him wary).

THE LAST FORTY-EIGHT hours had irrevocably altered Hema's life. She had two infants squinting up at her from time to time as if to confirm their arrival, their good fortune.

Hema felt light-headed, giddy. I won the lottery without buying a ticket, she thought. These two babies plugged a hole in my heart that I didn't know I had until now.

But there was danger in the a.n.a.logy: shed heard of a railway porter at Madras Central Station who won lakhs and lakhs of rupees, only to have his life fall apart so that he soon returned to the platform. When you win, you often lose, that's just a fact. There's no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart-she was thinking of Stone.

Stone had prayed for a miracle. The silly man didn't see that these newborns were miracles. They were obstetric miracles for surviving his a.s.sault. Hema decided to name the first twin to breathe Marion. Marion Sims, she would tell me later, was a simple pract.i.tioner in Alabama, USA, who had revolutionized women's surgery. He was considered the father of obstetrics and gynecology, the patron saint; in naming me for him, she was both honoring him and giving thanks.

"And s.h.i.+va, for s.h.i.+va," she said, naming the child with the circular hole in his scalp, the last to breathe, the child she had labored over, a child all but dead until she had invoked Lord s.h.i.+va's name, at which point he took his first gasp.

"Yes, Marion and s.h.i.+va."

She tacked on "Praise" to both names, after their mother.

And finally, reluctantly, almost as an afterthought, but because you cannot escape your destiny, and so that he wouldn't walk away scot-free, she added our surname, the name of the man who had left the room: Stone.

PART TWO.

When a pole goes into a hole

it creates another soul

which is either a pole or a hole.

Newton's Fourth Law of Motion (as taught by the Mighty Se nior Sirs of Madras Christian College during the initiation/ ragging of A. Ghosh, Junior p.i.s.ser Kataan, Batch of 1938, St. Thomas Hall, D Block, Tambaram, Madras).