ONE
THE DAY THE DEAD visited the surgeon, the air in his clinic was laced with formaldehyde. His pharmacist had poured some into a beaker in the operating room and given it a night to scour every corner. Once the door was opened, the acrid fumes spilled into the corridor and death leached out of the walls. This was the usual death, the mundane kind—that of insects and vermin.
The previous afternoon, a farmer had slit open the forearm of another with a sickle. They rushed up the hillock and crowded into the clinic, five farmers with a red trail behind them, holding the wound shut with a grimy rag.
The surgeon peeled off the cloth and saw the laceration from elbow to wrist.
“How did this happen?”
The injured man snarled through gritted teeth. “This dog did it.”
Beside him, the accused hung his head. “I was cutting the grain, Doctor Saheb. I didn’t see him bending down to pick up the bundle. Please stitch him up. I’ll pay.”
The surgeon pressed the rag back onto the wound. “It may not be so easy.” His pharmacist was standing by his side, ready with gloves on her hands. He passed the farmer’s forearm over to her and let her lead the man to the operating room. The surgeon followed, stepping over the drops of blood in the man’s wake. The other farmers stayed in the corridor. One of them pulled out a pouch of tobacco from his pocket.
“Don’t spit on my walls,” warned the surgeon, and he closed the door.
The pharmacist laid a drape over the stone slab of the operating table, and the surgeon asked the farmer to sit on a stool and stretch his arm across the cloth. He snapped on a pair of gloves and lifted the rag again. Blood oozed into the gash. The farmer puffed as the surgeon pulled the arm out straight along the length of the table.
The cut was long and irregular but shallow, confined to the skin for most of its length. The sickle had dug a little deeper in one place, but at least it hadn’t nicked the artery. The sun was still up. There was enough light. The surgeon painted the skin brown with iodine and poured some into the wound itself, and with a piece of cotton soaked in alcohol, he traced the margin of the torn skin. The alcohol, as always, spread like oil on a lake, leaking into the cut. The farmer, who’d been biting his lip at the iodine, now threw his head back and started cursing someone’s mother and sister.
“Enough,” the surgeon said. “If you want me to do my work, you’ll have to be quiet.”
“Saheb, the liquid burns.”
“Yes, I know. But it’s necessary. And I’ll tell you right now that I have very little numbing medicine—just two vials. I’ll inject some of it here, but I won’t be able to numb your whole arm. If you’re shouting so much now, god knows what you’ll do when it’s time for the stitches.”
“I’ll be quiet, Saheb.”
“And don’t move your arm. Otherwise you can go to some other clinic and find another doctor to sew you up.”
The surgeon injected lidocaine into the edges of the wound and prepared his needle and suture while the numbing took effect. When he began stitching, the farmer bit down into his turban and whimpered, though without another word. And so it went.
Something scurried across the corner of the surgeon’s vision. It was a cockroach at the base of the far wall, rustling its wings, curling and waving its antennae as though claiming the clinic for itself. The surgeon wanted to bellow at someone, but the pharmacist had stepped out to hand medicine to an old woman with a porous spine who visited the clinic every week with her unending complaints, and the farmer just sat there with his eyes clenched and his bloody arm extended before him. There was no one at whom the surgeon could holler: Why is there a filthy cockroach in my operating room? Am I supposed to play the exterminator around here as well? Mortar the cracks in the tiles? Pack the walls with poison?
The numbness in his fingers made the surgeon realize how hard he was gripping his forceps. He tried not to pour his anger into the needle and suture, but the more the cockroach scampered, the louder the farmer puffed into his turban. Then, after a stab that the surgeon himself thought regrettably brutal, the farmer gasped and raised his wet eyes. The surgeon slammed down his instruments and marched to the wall. The roach darted away. The surgeon stamped, but twice, thrice it dodged him. Then he suspended his leg in the air, waited until the cockroach stopped running around, and, when the moment was right, ground it under his heel. The rest of the suturing, he completed without interruption.
Just when he’d started to wonder if the pharmacist had fallen down a well, she returned to help him bandage the forearm. He wrote out a prescription for a tetanus shot and a course of antibiotics. The farmers outside the room had all left, except for one, who snapped up from his haunches as soon as the surgeon walked out into the corridor.
“You’re the culprit, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry. I swear on my mother I didn’t cut him on purpose. I didn’t see—”
“Go buy these things from the city pharmacy. There should be a train leaving in fifteen minutes.”
“As you say, Doctor Saheb.” The man bowed and ran off.
The surgeon called the pharmacist, who’d left the operating room after bandaging the man’s arm. “Sterilize my instruments and fumigate the room.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes, tonight.”
“But, Saheb, there’ll be children here tomorrow. For the polio drops.”
“Children? What do they have to do with this? There’s a dead cockroach in there, and god knows how many live ones hiding in the walls. A cockroach in my operating room. What a disgrace. Only in this bloody clinic.”
The pharmacist winced as the door slammed in her face. Perhaps Saheb’s back was troubling him again. She peeled away a fleck of rust from the edge of a metal tray and gathered the used instruments and the drape from the operating room on it. Saheb had clearly spent some energy in flattening the cockroach, and it took her some time to scrub its remains off the floor. A line of ants had already started to form, so she swept and mopped the rest of the room as well.
Then she taped shut every gap she could find in the windows, all the cracks in the frames, the spaces around their blunt, rounded corners. From the cabinet under the sink, she pulled out a large beaker and set it in the middle of the room. She poured the formalin halfway up to the black line—the clinic would be unbearable the next day if she filled it all the way. After confirming that she hadn’t dropped anything in the room, especially not her mangalsutra, she added a few tablespoons of permanganate to the beaker. The mixture started bubbling, and she hurried out with the roll of tape and sealed the door behind her.
“What about the vaccines?” the surgeon called from his consultation room. “Have they been delivered?”
“No, not yet, Saheb. They were going to come today.”
“Then what are we supposed to do for the polio drive? Spray the children with rose water? Worthless, all of them. Some lazy official must have spent the day eating mutton at his aunt’s place instead of delivering
