She’s going mad. Who might she ask? Big Ammachi knew, or so her father thought. But she isn’t here for Mariamma to ask. She paces the room, numb with disbelief. Where did her mother go in that absent year? Who assuaged her grief? Did she begin a new life? If so, why come home again? To give birth?
She’s halfway through her father’s journals, the entries scattered in time. But this is the only mention he’s made of this. He had the knowledge all along, but the words were too painful to write. His every unspoken thought he’d put down except for this one. He could not . . . until he did. Perhaps he never addressed it again in writing, having expunged what festered inside him and found peace.
“Oh, Appa, you found your peace, but you’ve left me upended. You’ve slashed the roots that connect me to this house, to my grandmother, to you . . .” She thinks of waking Anna Chedethi, crawling into her arms. Would Anna Chedethi have known? No, she only came to Parambil when Elsie was about to give birth. It would appear that her father never discussed his suspicions, his sure knowledge with Big Ammachi. And Big Ammachi didn’t talk about it with her son. She carried what she knew to her grave. As did her son . . . but for this note.
She catches sight of herself in the mirror that her father used for shaving, still there in an alcove, as though waiting for him to take it out to the verandah. She recoils because she sees a wild-eyed, anguished, insane woman staring back.
“Who am I?” she says to the apparition in the mirror. She always felt she had her father’s eyebrows, his way of tilting his head to listen; definitely his nose, his upper lip—how can that not be true? Even their hair was so similar, thick, with a slight recession at the temples, though he didn’t have her piebald streak.
Her piebald streak . . . That is her clue. That’s what carries her to the top of the palm like her father, and now her vision is unimpeded.
I see.
I remember. I understand.
I have it now, this terrible knowledge I never wished for.
Part Ten
CHAPTER 80
Failure to Blink
1977, Saint Bridget’s
The shrunken, ancient driver of Mariamma’s tourist taxi is dwarfed by the Ambassador’s large steering wheel, yet he expertly coaxes the column-mounted shifter through its changes with deft thrusts of his palm. Like many in his trade, he sits sideways, pressed against the driver’s door, accustomed to having at least three family members squeezed onto the bench seat with him, in addition to the women, children, and infants in the back, transporting them to weddings or funerals.
From the rear seat, Mariamma looks out at the world with new eyes. Parambil is the home she’s always claimed, but like so much she’s believed about herself up to this point, that is a lie. “The only thing you can be sure of in this world is the woman who gave birth to you,” Broker Aniyan said. Mariamma never knew her mother, and now it turns out that she never knew her father either.
The last time she came this way in Digby’s car, racing to see Lenin, she wasn’t thinking of the Thetanatt house. Her driver has been everywhere, and like a marriage broker, he knows just where the Thetanatt house was, before Elsie’s late brother sold it. On that land now sit six “Gulf mansions”—built by Malayalis who returned from Dubai, Oman, or other outposts to construct their dream homes. The only thing Mariamma can see of her mother’s past is the stately river at the edge of their former land. They press on.
“Here, Madam?” her driver says hesitantly, well before the open gate to Saint Bridget’s leprosarium. In all his travels, she doubts that he has brought a fare here. Perhaps he’s hoping that she’ll hop out and stroll in.
“Drive to that building behind the lotus pond. I’ll have them bring you tea.”
“Ayo, thank you, Madam, not necessary!” he says, panicked. She hands him ten rupees and asks him to come back after lunch. It might be her imagination, but she thinks he receives the note gingerly.
She asks for Digby. Suja, the woman in nurse’s garb whom she’d seen last time, leads the way. Suja’s bandaged right foot, and her sandals, fashioned from old tires, give her a stiff, lopsided gait. They pass through the shady cloister, then the corridor leading to the theater, the disinfectant soapy odors giving way to the steamy hothouse scent of the autoclave.
Digby Kilgour is operating, but Suja encourages her to go in. Mariamma grabs a mask and cap, slips on shoe covers, and enters. Digby’s assistant is short a few digits, the fingerless stalls of her glove taped out of the way. Digby looks up. He smiles above the mask. “Mariamma!” he exclaims happily.
Seeing her expression, he pauses. “Lenin . . . ?”
“He’s fine.”
The pale eyes study her, trying to read what he can in hers. He nods slowly. “I’m about to start. You’re welcome to scrub in . . . ?” She shakes her head. “Shouldn’t be much longer.” The act of surgery supersedes everything. She remembers her surgical professor in Madras, a twice-divorced man, saying that in the theater the messy parts of his life—the disappointments, the debts—vanished. For a time.
Her thoughts no longer feel like her own. She struggles to stay focused. Digby makes three separate incisions on the patient’s hand framed under the green surgical towels. She’s tempted to rap his knuckles. Are you a carpenter using a hammer? Hold that scalpel like a violin bow, between thumb and middle finger. Index finger on top!
The pale lines unfolding in the wake of his blade, then the delayed blossom of blood, are just as she’s used to seeing them. His movements are slow, deliberate.
“I’m not a pretty surgeon to watch,” he says. He fusses over bleeding that she might ignore. After gaining his exposure, he severs a tendon from its insertion and tunnels it to a new location. “I’ve learned the hard way,” he says, “that free grafts of an excised segment of tendon . . . don’t work.”
She bites her tongue. Surgeons like to think aloud. Assistants need quiet hands and quieter vocal cords. Observers, too.
“Rune was a pioneer in free tendon grafts. But I’ve come to believe a tendon needs to remain attached to its parent muscle, for blood supply and for function. The real enemy is scar tissue. I use the smallest incisions and I keep it bloodless.”
She’s grudgingly impressed at what he accomplishes with his stiff fingers—his left hand does most of the work. If she worked at this pace, Staff Akila would say, “Doctor, your wound is healing at the edges already.”
Digby says, “You need the patience of an earthworm nosing between rocks . . . detouring around roots to get to where it must. Even the most rigid structures in the wrist have an almost invisible layer of slippery tissue, or so I believe. It’s not in any textbook. It needs faith. You must believe without proof. I try not to disrupt that layer. Must sound like witchcraft.”
She doesn’t trust her voice. Every surgeon has beliefs, but also a bit of Doubting Thomas in them too. They need proof. Proof is why she is here. Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.
Digby sutures the tendon to its new insertion at the base of a finger. He fusses over it. “These wee fraying fibers at the cut end of a tendon are like vines, but tough as steel cables. One loose tendril can grab onto something it shouldn’t and ruin your result.”
He’s finished. By habit she looks at the theater clock. It hasn’t been as long as it has felt.
“Tourniquet off?” That came out of Mariamma’s mouth, also from habit.
“Don’t believe in them. The best tourniquet is one you can see hanging on the wall.” He dresses the wound and immobilizes the hand in a cast. He strips off his gloves and gown.
He asks his assistant to arrange for tea to be brought to his study. “Do you mind if we pop in on one patient on our way? It’s her big day and she’s waited all morning.”
I mind very much! I’ve only waited all my life.
She follows him.