“We should already have everything,” Piotr says. “We were just in India last year.”
Lorraine muzzles the mouthpiece with her fist. “Wasn’t it two years ago?”
Piotr shakes his head. “Fifteen months. Orissa. Typhoon.”
“Oh,” says Lorraine, “that’s right.”
Piotr returns to his notations. His hand — accumulating faint liver spots and excess skin around the knuckles — pushes out numbers, cross-referencing, calculating. His hand already knows who can be saved, and who cannot. Later this year, in Arequipa, Peru, Ted will look at the damage estimates and think, This is nothing compared to India, and, Only seventy-five killed? In India it was twenty-five thousand. He will try to resist comparisons of scope and scale and misery. Really, he will. Suffering is not a zero-sum game. He won’t want to feel tired, not yet, but maybe he poured the entirety of his being prematurely into India. Aid organizations have a term: donor fatigue, the point at which people desensitize and can’t engage any more bad news. And as he accompanies a mule-drawn cart laden with shelter kits and irrigation tools up a mountain, he will wonder, Is there such a thing as disaster fatigue? What if a person has a limited store of strength, and once it’s depleted, it’s gone for good? He’s not a person for whom good deeds recharge the batteries. So why did he choose this line of work? What did he hope to accomplish? He will see a group of shirtless children on the side of the road. They will look like tree stumps, frozen in place. He will wave, and they will disappear into a copse of trees like rabbits, a flurry of legs and feet, and even if Ted were to pursue them, he knows that he will never catch them.
Lorraine asks Piotr, “What’s the time difference between New York and India?”
“Nine and a half hours,” he replies.
With the tip of her fingernail, she holds down a button on her watch. The hours flick by. Ted does the same, spinning the minute hand until he realizes, My god, the future’s already here.
RESCUE
TWO RUINED CITIES
Four hours after the earthquake, Dev knows that Dr. Sengupta is dead. Presumed dead, at least, which is the same as dead. Dev learned of the Bhuj earthquake as soon as it happened, and within an hour, Médecins Sans Frontières put in a call for medical personnel from New Delhi General. Dev responded without thinking, and only after he boards the Bhuj-bound army plane does he remember that he should have had Geeta cancel his appointments for the week. But he can’t raise a signal in the air. Geeta will know what to do.
Both hospitals in Bhuj have collapsed. It makes sense that Jubilee Hospital, erected in celebration of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee, did not survive. It had been built as a showcase: a band of carved stars circled the second floor and along the roof, a crenellated border of stone pennants. Jubilee was the older hospital, in need of an upgrade, an expansion. But Bhuj Civil — modern, second-best in Gujarat behind Ahmedabad — was an acclaimed service hospital, and Dr. Sengupta had been scheduled to arrive at eight. Dev remembers how, even on the hottest Delhi days, Dr. Sengupta wore a suit and tie and the same pair of polished black wing tips. Dev can see him now, walking into the hospital lobby—One must keep oneself busy, Dr. Sengupta had said — as crisp and pressed as when he was Dev’s advisor in medical school.
The earthquake struck at 8:47. Dr. Sengupta was never late.
Dev last saw Dr. Sengupta five years ago, at Padma’s urging. Dr. Sengupta had retired to Gujarat, and Dev had offered Padma her pick of any place in India, any luxury she could imagine, but she remained steadfast.
You made a promise, she said.
She had her own reasons for visiting Gujarat, of course. She had once entertained the dream of becoming a museum curator, long before she realized her dream of being a dutiful wife and, later, mother. In those days, she had converted her art-history degree into a job working with an antiquities dealer specializing in architectural salvage. From a soon-to-be demolished house on the outskirts of Delhi, she rescued a matching pair of stone pedestals, both in remarkably good condition for being in a home that, once abandoned, grew full with vagrants. Squatters had stripped and sold everything: furniture, bathroom fixtures, copper pipes, and wiring from within the walls. Yet the pedestals remained, blackened with soot from campfires stoked with garbage. Scraps of plastic hung off the heads of devas like shawls. Padma cleaned them with a soft toothbrush until her employer told her to stop because if they were too clean, buyers might think them a repro. He sold them to a Delhi restaurateur who used the pedestals as a repository for toothpicks, matchbooks, and fennel seed.
In particular, she wanted to see the Islamic mausoleums in Lakhpat, a stone’s throw from the Pakistani border. At Lakhpat’s height, she told him, the city had been a port housing nearly ten thousand people; merchants from Karachi sailed down the Indus in wooden ships to trade spices, silk, and fish. From Lakhpat, they continued into the Gulf of Kutch, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the world beyond. The Portuguese built two-storied houses with red-tiled roofs, whitewashed walls, and balconies overlooking the salt marshes of the Great Rann. But perhaps the gods took offense when Jamadar Fateh Muhammad built a wall around the town thirty feet high and eight feet thick. In 1819, the earth shook Lakhpat, sending the sea rolling up Kori Creek as far west as the Goongra River, and when the earth could not completely dismantle the walls, the Indus River himself moved thirty miles westward, abandoning Lakhpat altogether. People evaporated from Lakhpat, a port without water, and now, only a handful of families remained, mud huts among deserted houses, years of sun and sand scourging the whitewash to reveal gray concrete underneath. This was a city cursed by land and water alike.
It was also, Dev thought, a poor place for a honeymoon.
But Padma didn’t mind the dust, the heat, the barren landscape. It was as if she were trying to prove that she hadn’t married him because he was a doctor, that this arrangement was legitimate. Or perhaps she was emphasizing her responsibilities as a wife, because she was as uneasy as he about marriage. At their first meeting in the nayan’s office, she didn’t look at him; she focused instead on the portraits of happy couples on the wall, the groom’s dhoti knotted to the bride’s sari, an inextricable bond, and Dev watched the small flittering movements of her head.
Dev had told Padma only once about the promise he had made. Shortly before he left for his residency at Columbia, Dr. Sengupta had taken him into his office. He was in his sixties and preparing to retire. For Padma, Dev imitated Dr. Sengupta’s voice, the precision of his vowels, the pauses that held uncertain meaning. When you have your own family, Dev repeated, you will come and visit mine in Bhuj.
This was easy to say. Dev kept his voice light and playful, reciting this friendly promise between teacher and student. He did not repeat, however, what had led Dr. Sengupta to that promise.
I see you, Dev, he had said. Rootless and frightened. You think what you cannot find in India, you can find in America. But this is never the case. You cannot find what you need. You must create what you need for yourself. Dr. Sengupta clasped Dev’s hands. The gesture made Dev break into a sweat. The world seemed more immense and frightening than it had ever been previously. Dev had seen classmates swallowed whole by America, its carelessness, its selfishness, and he was as susceptible as they were, perhaps more so.
You must make a family for yourself, Dr. Sengupta said, or you will always be incomplete. You must promise me that when you have your own family, you will visit mine in Bhuj.