percolate to the other side.
“Come.” He helped her up, began to steer her to the door.
“Wait,” said the teacher. He looked desperate. “We can’t go to the city. Whatever you can do here, in this clinic, is all we’re allowed. If we even step beyond the boundary of this village, the angel will snatch our lives back.”
“What? But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would angels care about village boundaries?”
“I swear to you, Saheb, it’s the truth. It was his most important condition.”
“But that’s just ridiculous. You must have heard him wrong. Look, I’ll just drop this girl off with her husband and get my car ready. Let’s not waste time.”
He was almost at the door, reaching for the bolt, when the teacher spoke, so softly that even a breeze might have swept his voice away. “If we were to drive with you, Saheb, our bodies would stop moving at the boundary, and you would be left with three corpses to keep you company for the rest of your journey.”
The surgeon jerked to a stop. Something settled in his skull, dense as lead, a sudden condensation of all the grotesquerie of this evening. He could already imagine the family on his operating table, lying there as he worked on their bloodless flesh, corpses laid upon stone slabs in preparation for autopsies—his mind rebelled against that word, but what other name could one give to surgeries on the dead? This night contained nothing but absurdities.
“Have mercy on us,” the teacher was saying. “If our wounds aren’t closed, we’ll die another death, as bloody and horrible as the first. If you can’t do anything for me, at least help my wife and son. Give life to them, to my unborn child, I beg you. I have nothing on me, no money, but I’ll do anything you ask. Just don’t turn us away.”
The man threw himself at the surgeon’s feet. The doctor stood like an imbecile, unable even to recoil from the dead fingers clutching his shoes, able only to repeat, “No, no, don’t do that, don’t do that.”
“WAIT HERE, IN THIS room. I need some time,” said the surgeon to the dead as he helped the pharmacist out into the corridor. She hung from him like a dead weight, her face so gray that he thought she would faint at any moment.
He closed the door behind him and set her down on a bench, propped against the wall. After raising her lids with a thumb against her eyebrows to confirm that there was life still there, he sank beside her.
To be freed, even for a moment, from the dead and the dreadful hope in their eyes was an intense relief. The breeze wafting in through the entrance of the clinic was warm, and outside the shuttered room, no longer faced with bloodless wounds, he could once again breathe. Far below, oil lamps flickered in the windows of the village at the bottom of the hill. Behind those windows, the villagers were probably washing dishes, tossing leftovers out for the crows, dousing embers, unrolling mattresses. As though this night were no different from any other. As though it were obvious that the sun would rise again.
The girl was whimpering. The surgeon knew that something was required of him, consoling words perhaps, but all he could do was grip his kneecaps. It was the only way he could still the shaking of his hands. There would be no one to console him—it was best he accepted that first.
“This is just . . . just so impossible,” he said. “I don’t know what to think.”
The girl swallowed, then coughed, choking on her tears. “They’re ghosts, Saheb.” She could barely get the words out past her chattering teeth.
Something rustled outside the entrance, and even though the surgeon could tell it was only a rat in the grass, the muscles in his arms and shoulders tightened. The pharmacist didn’t even notice. The effort of speaking seemed too much for her.
“A ghost climbed into my sister’s body, Saheb. We had to tie her to a bed. She kept turning, one side to the other, kicked at everyone. Said things, Saheb, that no one could understand. Her eyes, they were rolled up; her body became hot, like burning coal—so hot that no one could touch her. And her mouth was full of foam, as if she’d eaten soap.”
The girl had never mentioned her sister before. Would he have remembered if she had?
“My father, he called a tantrik. Told him to do whatever magic he could to save her. The tantrik had to beat her with a broom to drive the ghost out—that’s how tightly it held her, like a crab. On the third day, it left her body and went into a coconut. The tantrik broke it open and blood spilled out. So much blood, I thought I would die. My sister woke up, but she didn’t recognize any of us.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Six years. No, more. Eight. She lived, but what kind of life is this? The ghost made her mind weak. She can’t even feed herself. My mother still has to change her clothes every day. No one will marry her.”
The surgeon had witnessed spectacles such as this before—charlatans with hair that had seen neither comb nor water in god knew how long, wearing bone necklaces around their necks, jumping and chanting to the goddess Kali and spraying so much red water around that the room looked washed with blood. The trickery was always so transparent, but the gullible believed what they wanted to believe. A few days of antibiotics would have done the poor girl more good than a lifetime of holy water and chants.
But it was hard to dismiss ghosts so glibly now, with three of them waiting on the other side of the wall.
“We have to run away, Saheb. We have to leave the village before something bad happens.”
The clock in front of them had only one hand. No, there were two, overlapping between eight and nine. A small green lizard was pasted to the wall next to the clock, as still as its hands.
“If the man had wanted to strangle you,” said the surgeon, “he would’ve just done it. He already had his hand around your mouth. There was nothing to stop him.”
With a click, one hand of the clock stepped out from behind the other. The lizard slithered off to the wall’s edge. If even a word of what the dead had said was true, they couldn’t just sit here and keep talking like this.
“Their wounds need to be repaired. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but they need to be repaired.”
From the look on the pharmacist’s face, he might have been speaking a foreign tongue.
“Look, either we help them, or they die. Die again, that is—however you want to think about it. It’s not a question of whether any of this makes sense. It’s a question of . . . of whether we’re going to just kick them out of the clinic or not. And if not, we have to do something.”
Her eyes had already begun to widen. It was clear she knew what he would say next. So he said it.
“I’ll need your help for this.”
“Me? No, Doctor Saheb, no,” she almost screamed.
“Quiet. We have to be quiet.”
She dropped her voice, which only made her sound more hoarse. “What are you saying,
