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.
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
