style="font-size:15px;"> “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
