hear the carts carrying equipment or bodies, they couldn’t tell which, racing down the halls. There’d been a massacre, they now heard, a village thirty miles away had been pretty well wiped out. Somebody had to be sent there to see if any were still alive. The child in front of them had a congenital abnormality, a beautiful kid, Gamini kept wanting to take the mask off and see his face again. Wanted to look at the boy’s dark black eyes, which had been full of trust, which had looked up at him as he gave the needle that had put him into uncontrolled sleep.
Fallot’s tetralogy. Four things wrong with the heart, so he would live perhaps only into his early teens if they didn’t operate now. A beautiful boy. Gamini was not going to leave him alone, betray him in his sleep. He kept Fonseka with him, not letting him go to the others as Fonseka thought he should. ‘I have to leave, they keep calling out my name.’ ‘I know. This is just one boy.’ ‘Fuck, that’s not what I mean.’ ‘You have to stay.’
The operation took six hours and all that time Gamini stayed with the boy. He let Fonseka go after three hours. The nurse would have to help him reverse the bypass. He knew her as a starting intern, the Tamil wife of one of the staff. She and her husband had come to the peripheral hospital in the last month. Gamini stood by the boy and explained what they had to do. The boy would have to be rewarmed with blood at a higher temperature, and at the key moment the bypass had to be removed. Fallot’s tetralogy. No one had ever performed the procedure in this country.
So in the fifth hour Gamini and the nurse reversed the process that he and Fonseka had set up. The young nurse watching him for any sign that what she was doing might be wrong. But she was faultless, faultless, calmer, it seemed, than he was. ‘This one?’ ‘Yes. I need you to cut a shallow three-inch line there. No, to the left.’ She cut into the boy’s body. ‘Don’t remain a nurse. You’ll be a good doctor.’ She was smiling under the mask.
As soon as the boy was in Recovery, Gamini left him with her. There was no one else he could trust. He got two beepers and told her to contact him if something seemed wrong. He washed up and then went into the chaos of the triage. There was blood on everyone except him.
It took a few more hours to deal with the crisis. In surgery they wore white rubber boots and all the doors had to be closed. Sometimes if a doctor had heat exhaustion he slipped into the refrigerated blood bank for a few minutes among the plasma and pack cells. Gamini took over in surgery. There was a small Buddha lit with a low-watt bulb in nearly every ward, and there was one in surgery as well.
All the survivors had been brought in by now. The killings had happened at two in the morning in a small village beside the main road to Batticaloa. They had brought him nine-month-old twins, each shot in the palms and one bullet each in their right legs—so it was no accident, a close-range job and intentional, left to die; the mother had been killed. In a couple of weeks those two children were peaceful things, full of light. You thought, What did they do to deserve this, and then, What did they do to survive this? Their wounds, in reality quite minor, stayed with him. It was the formal evil of the act perhaps, he didn’t know. Thirty people had been massacred that morning.
Lakdasa drove to the village and did the postmortems, otherwise relatives would not receive compensation. For everyone in the region was poor as grass. In those villages the father of a family of seven earned one hundred rupees a day working in a wood shop. That meant each of them could have a five-rupee meal a day. For that you could buy a toffee. When political entourages came up to the provinces and received tea and lunch, the visit cost forty thousand rupees.
The doctors were coping with injuries from all political sides and there was just one operating table. When a patient was lifted off, blood was soaked up with newspaper, the surface swabbed with Dettol, and the next patient laid down.