The real problem was water, and in the larger hospitals, because of frequent power failures, vaccines and other drugs were being thrown away constantly. Doctors needed to scavenge the countryside for equipment—buckets, Rinso soap powder, a washing machine. ‘Surgical clamps for us were like gold for a woman.’
Their hospital existed like a medieval village. A chalkboard in the kitchen listed the numbers of loaves of bread and the bushels of rice needed to feed five hundred patients a day. This was before massacre victims were brought in. The doctors pooled money and hired two market scribes as registrars who moved alongside them in the wards listing and recording the patients’ names and their ailments. The most frequently seen problems were snakebite, rabies caused by fox or mongoose, kidney failure, encephalitis, diabetes, tuberculosis, and the war.
Night had its own activity. He woke and was attached instantly to the sounds of the world. A dogfight, a man running to fetch something, the pouring of water into a vessel. When Gamini was a boy, nights were terrifying to him, his eyes wide open till he fell asleep, certain that he and his bed had lost their moorings in the darkness. He needed loud clocks beside him. Ideally he would have a dog in the room, or someone—an aunt or an ayah who snored. Now, working or sleeping during the night shifts, he was secure with all of the human and animal activity beyond the ward’s light. Only bird life, so vocal and territorial during the day, was shut down, though there was one Polonnaruwa rooster that cried out false dawns from three in the morning on. Interns had been trying to kill it.
He walked the stretch of hospital, from wing to wing, open air on either side of him. There was the buzz of electricity close beside the pools of light as you passed them. You were aware of it only at night. You saw a bush and you sensed it growing. Someone came out and poured blood into a gutter and coughed. Everyone had a bad cough in Polonnaruwa.
He was aware of every sound. A shoe or sandal step, the noise of the bedspring when he lifted a patient, the snapping of an ampule. Sleeping in the wards, he could be one limb of a large creature, linked to the others by the thread of noises.
Later, if he was unable to sleep in the district medical officer’s building, he would walk back the two hundred yards along the empty curfewed main street to the hospital. The nurse stationed at a night desk would turn and see the look on him and find a bed for him. He would be asleep in seconds.
In the village clinic were twenty mothers and their infants. They filled out clinic records and the pregnant women were checked for diabetes and anemia. The doctors talked to each of the women, studying their forms as they moved forward in the queue. On a makeshift table a nurse wrapped vitamin pills in newspaper and gave them to the mothers. A pressure cooker was being used as a steam sterilizer for glass syringes and needles.
The screams began as soon as the first baby got a needle, and within seconds most of the babies in the small shack that served as a medical outpost were howling. After about five minutes they were silent again; breasts had been pulled out and mothers beamed at their infants and there was solution and victory for all. This one clinic served four hundred families from the area as well as three hundred from an adjoining region. No one from the Ministry of Health had ever come to the border villages.
For all of the doctors, Lakdasa was the great moral force, the rough brother of justice. ‘The problem up here is not the Tamil problem, it’s the human problem.’ He was thirty-seven and his hair was grey. When he drank he revealed an intricate set of confabulations, as if he were steering himself through a well-mapped harbour. ‘If I drink more than seventy-two millimetres, my liver plays up. If I drink less, my heart plays up.’
Lakdasa lived mostly on potato rotis. He smoked Gold Leaf cigarettes in his jeep where a fan rotating air was glued to the dashboard. He kept his sarong in the glove compartment and slept wherever he had to—the DMO’s office, a sofa in the living room of a friend. There were months when his weight would suddenly drop ten pounds. Obsessed with