Читать книгу Night Theater - Vikram Paralkar - Страница 12

FOUR

“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, Saheb? I can’t stay here. I can’t. This is not right. These things shouldn’t happen, it’s not right, it’s not right.”

He leaned against the wall. Whatever he was feeling now—the fear and fatigue—the night would only magnify it. Perhaps her instinct was the right one. Perhaps he should just leap into his car and drive away in any direction, abandon the village and everything in it. In the morning, the villagers would find three cadavers in the clinic. Or the visitors, recognizing the idiocy of their plan, would decide to walk to the boundary of the village and fall there. Either was infinitely preferable to his involvement in this dreadful matter, the raising, no, the mending of the dead.

“You’ve always done everything I’ve asked,” he said. “If you want to leave, I won’t stop you. Maybe if things were any different, I would have left as well. But the woman is pregnant. Her son is just eight. We have to do something.”

At first it seemed as if she hadn’t heard him, but then her face turned to the ground and her chest began to shake. The way her braid hung between her bony shoulders made her look more like a child than ever. He thought of placing a hand on her head, but couldn’t bring himself to do so, not even at a time like this. “It will be fine” was all he managed to say, his hands still on his knees. “It will be fine.”

But he couldn’t ask her not to weep. As the lights in the village winked out one by one, he tried to push away his own disquiet while he waited, but it was like trying to sweep a fog aside with his fingers. Whatever this was, this inescapable madness, he would have to get through it. He would pretend that the visitors had been wheeled in on gurneys, with lolling heads and frothing mouths, victims of some mysterious accident. He would just do his job, and let the pieces fall as they would.

The girl finally wiped her face. Taking that as a sign, he stood up.

“Your husband must be wondering where you are. I’ll need his help as well. Let me explain everything. And we have to be careful. If the villagers hear about this, they’ll bring down the sky.”