Digby has been living with Rune for over a month. He worries about the Swede, a man more than twice his age. More than once he has seen him come to a stop while walking, waiting for a “catch” in his chest to pass. As the two men sit together in the living room one evening, Digby broaches the subject but Rune deflects him. So Digby keeps silent, watching Rune work the pipe cleaner, fill and tamp down the tobacco, and finally circle the two matches around the bowl. The ease of the coordinated, complex, and largely automatic movements Digby thinks might be forever beyond his abilities. Sweet-scented tobacco plumes fill the air.
Rune studies his young colleague, a man soon to turn thirty, born just before the Great War. Rune was already in his late thirties when he landed in India. He feels paternal toward the young Scot who was walled in by silence when they first met. Gradually, the walls have come down. One can witness a spirit heal, Rune thinks, just as much as one can see a wound heal.
“So, Digby. You like our Saint Bridget’s?”
“I do.” Digby had thought of Saint Bridget’s as a way station on his journey, but not the destination. Inexplicably, in the time he has been here, enduring his surgeries and the subsequent pain, and waiting to heal, it has begun to feel like home. He’s a pariah in a community of pariahs. “I feel I’m with my tribe here, Rune.”
“What! You’re Swedish and never said?”
Digby’s laugh sounds more human.
“I’m Glaswegian. From the wrong side of the tracks.”
“I’ve been to Glasgow. Is there a right side?”
Digby refills their glasses using both hands. “You understand what I mean. Every hand I see here is related to mine. The ‘flock,’ as you call them, they are . . . my brothers and sisters.” He stops, embarrassed.
“They are, Digby. Mine too.” Rune drains his glass and smacks his lips. “Hands are a manifestation of the divine,” Rune says. “But you must use them. You can’t let them sit idle like a clerk in the land registrar’s office, God help us. Our hands have thirty-four individual muscles—I’ve counted. But the movements are never isolated. It’s always collective action. The hand knows before the mind knows. We need to free your hands, Digby, by getting you started on natural, everyday movements—especially the right hand. So, what do you enjoy doing with your hands?”
“Operating.” Digby cannot help the bitterness in his voice.
“Yes. And what else? Needlepoint?”
“Well . . . a lifetime ago, I liked drawing, painting.”
“Excellent! God knows these walls and doors need some freshening up.”
“Watercolors. Charcoal.”
“Ah, wonderful! That’s what we will do. The best rehabilitation is doing what the brain and the hand are familiar with; it’s good for both. And I have just the teacher for you.”
CHAPTER 33
Hands Writing
1936, Saint Bridget’s
Digby’s new therapist walks over in the afternoon from the Thetanatt house, her ink-black pigtails bouncing off her shoulders, art supplies in her schoolbag. The maid accompanying the nine-year-old squats on Rune’s verandah, keeping her thorthu over her nose, her gaze darting around like a sentry’s. Rune introduces the young surgeon to his even younger therapist; he’s amused to find Digby the shyer of the two.
Rune fusses over Elsie, with hot chocolate and toast and plum jam. Leelamma’s death had stripped the playful, outgoing girl of the innocence she should have enjoyed for a few more years, Rune thought. She was lost, like a flower whose petals turned inward. In her grief she discovered a solace and a gift, all thanks to Rune’s present of a sketchbook, charcoal, and watercolors. Elsie felt no need to proclaim it, but she was going to be an artist.
Elsie sets out paper, hands Digby a charcoal stick, and sits beside him to do her own work. Soon figures populate her paper. Watching her, Digby is reminded of his compulsive sketching in the days when he kept vigil over his depressed mother. Elsie has captured Rune in mid-stride, leading with his beard, his juba’s baggy tail like a sail behind him as he sallies out. The sketch is astonishing for its speed and accuracy. His paper remains blank.
Elsie sets out a new sheet for herself. She pulls down a squat book from Rune’s shelf. Digby recognizes Henry Vandyke Carter’s distinctive illustrations that made Gray’s Anatomy such a classic, by coupling clarity with artistic skill. The text has faded in Digby’s memory, but the figures remain. Does Elsie know that the Londoner, Henry Gray, cheated Henry Vandyke Carter of royalties and acknowledgment? Embittered, Vandyke Carter joined the Indian Medical Service, where he spent the rest of his career, seeing his name vanish from subsequent editions of the iconic textbook, though his illustrations remained. Henry Gray died at thirty-four of smallpox, his name immortalized by his eponymous book. Which Henry’s fate was worse, Digby wonders: Dying young but famous? Or living a full life with one’s best work unacknowledged?
By the time Elsie leaves, Digby’s paper has a few lines and many divots where the charcoal stick, grasped clumsily in his right hand, dug in too far. The image he had in mind, a Vandyke Carter–inspired profile of the muscles of the head and neck, met a roadblock on its journey from his brain to his fingers.
Digby picks up the sketch Elsie left behind. At first he thinks she’s drawn a leper’s hand. But those square nails, the puffy, discolored skin on the back, the suture marks—it’s his hand. He stares in horrified fascination. The stiff, leaden, and bony appendage grasping a charcoal stick is the inverse of the hands in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. The gift Elsie possesses is breathtaking. The young artist shows no revulsion, no recoiling from the subject—quite the opposite. With devastating accuracy and without judgment she has rendered Digby’s hand the way it appears, and accepted it for what it is. He has yet to.
That evening, a letter comes from Honorine; his clumsy efforts with the letter opener wind up tearing it down the middle. The commission ruled that Claude Arnold be dismissed from the Indian Medical Service. Jeb’s family will be compensated generously for his wrongful death. “God knows what Claude will do next,” she writes.
It is little solace. Claude could operate again in private practice anywhere in the world. A murderously incompetent surgeon lives to kill again. And what are you, Digby? Something less than a murderer? The torn halves of the letter remind him that his own hands are better at destroying than anything else. Thoughts of Celeste, never far away, engulf him. If she hadn’t come that day, if . . . So many ifs. His guilt is carved on him as permanently as his Glasgow smile.
The next day, when Elsie arrives, Digby points to her sketch. “That is so very good!”
“Thank you kindly,” she says in formal schoolgirl English, smiling ever so slightly. Digby senses that he has merely articulated what she already knows. She sets fresh paper out for Digby, but then says, “May I please . . . ?” She wedges the charcoal between his stiff thumb and fingers, where it wobbles. He struggles to find the right amount of pressure that won’t snap the stick and yet will keep it firm on the page, something that was once effortless and unconscious. Removing a ribbon from her plait, and biting her lips in concentration, Elsie secures the stick with a few turns. She carefully lowers his hand to the paper like a gramophone needle meeting vinyl. “Now please try?” A dark, jerky line emerges. The movement originates in his shoulders, it seems. The point catches and stops. She nudges his forearm, hoping to jump-start it. Another stuttering line emerges but the charcoal swivels—the gramophone needle is bent. He looks up and meets her gray eyes, slanting at the corners, the irises paler than those of most Indians he has met. There’s compassion in them, but no pity. She won’t give up.
She unwraps the ribbon, hesitates, then places her hand on top of his and binds their hands together, her fingers buttressing the charcoal stick. She makes a “try it now” gesture, her chin leading the head shake. He doesn’t understand Malayalam, but he’s getting better at this shorthand.