He has been up for nearly twenty-four hours. While Dev was a resident, he worked thirty-six-hour shifts but always sneaked a few minutes of rest: a quiet office, an unoccupied gurney, his head in his hands in a toilet stall. But he is no longer a young man, and one patient shuffles after the next.
He sets a broken arm as best as he can, and the woman screams as bones scrape against one another. Her screams meld into the others. The surgeons have no anesthesia.
— Don’t cry, says Dev. — Save your energy for breathing.
He has no plaster with which to stabilize her arm. He looks around for a plank of wood, a roof tile — even cardboard. At his feet, empty packets of gauze, ankle-deep.
Dev summons a group of soldiers. He sends them into a nearby store to bring back pants, shirts, saris, shawls. Bandages are their first priority.
— Cotton only, please, he instructs them. — The wounds must breathe.
They shred the cloth with bayonets. The unusable clothes — rayons, polyesters — are given to those who have nothing to wear. One young man had been in the bath when the earthquake struck and walks naked, dust crusting on his skin like a shell. He puts on a shirt that extends past his fingertips and pants that expose his ankles, and for these, he thanks the soldiers.
Dev fashions a sling out of a pair of panty hose for the woman with a broken arm.
The jawan watching the generators stands idle.
Dev calls: —You! Break into that chemist’s shop and grab supplies. The soldier, little more than a boy, should be used to taking orders. — Go, Dev says, — I will take the blame.
He breaks the window with the butt of his rifle and emerges with a few boxes: syringes, needles, bottles of glucose.
— Get medicines! Dev yells.
— What kind? the boy asks.
— All of them. Everything you can get your hands on! Dev had almost forgotten what his own voice sounded like; his shouts are a vestigial organ rediscovering its function. — Quick, now, he says. — Quick!
A man, barefoot, approaches. He resembles a ghost who has been wandering for eternity. The lights have brought him here. People have grown inured to the night, vanquishing it with a flip of a switch. Now, it has reconquered them. They cower before its immense power. Even Dev has forgotten how incapacitating darkness is: its unyielding hunger. To banish night, even for a moment, is to reassert humanity’s dominance over nature.
The man carries a girl in his arms. She dangles as limp as laundry.
— Please, he says, — my daughter.
— Her name, Dev says. He tires of asking this question. A formality now.
— Lakshmi.
Dev motions to a nearby cot, and the man places her there. The muscles in his arm tremble. He must have been carrying her for hours.
— Doctor, he says, — please treat her first.
— There are others, Dev says. Screams have faded to moans, the sound a wall that threatens to crush him at any moment. Triage is almost complete; tomorrow, Dev will find a scalpel and enter the surgical theater. There are, perhaps, lives that can be resuscitated. This girl — nine, at most, dressed in a woolen jumper with her school’s seal stitched to the right of her heart — perhaps she was to play some part in the India Day ceremonies. Dev thinks of Arusha briefly — but this girl is not Arusha. This girl cannot be saved.
— Please, the man says again. His voice is flat; his hopes have died with his daughter. — Please examine her, he says. — If she is dead, then I need to look for my wife.
— Go, Dev says. — Go search for your wife.
The man steps back into the all-consuming dark, and only later does Dev realize what he should have said. A simple, elegant statement — a response that should have bubbled up from a place that Dev can no longer recognize. He should have said: Go, and I will attend to your daughter.
Because of the false afternoon cast by the overhead lights, Dev misses daybreak, but now he can see people who were hidden. He recognizes colleagues from conferences and gatherings. He sees the generator guard — not a boy, but a man in his thirties with a wedding ring. And he sees what devastation looks like in the light, how shock gives way to despair.
People resume their efforts to save the trapped, clawing at the stone with whatever they have: hammers, chisels, hands. The rows of injured, laid across the ground, covered with gray army blankets, look like freshly dug graves, even as they stir and respond to the sunlight. The living dead. And then he sees Sushrita. She has changed her clothes.
— Sushrita, he says, — you shouldn’t be wandering. It isn’t safe. Another aftershock and—
— And what? she replies. — If it is my time to die, so be it. But while I live, I will do what I can.
He can’t muster the will to fight. Not with Sushrita, not now. It’s like arguing with his mother — he will never win.
— You should get some rest, she says, and Dev laughs. How bizarre the world has become, that she treats him like a child even while death surrounds them. Dev feels like he’s bleeding, that he’s been bleeding for some time.
— Have you eaten? she asks.
He can’t remember what he did with Sushrita’s samosa. Gave it to someone. Or someone took it. But Dev isn’t hungry. He places his hand on his stomach. There is blood pooling inside of him.
— I knew you wouldn’t eat, she says. — Mithram is the same.
She hands him a cold piece of roti wrapped in a napkin. — Here, she says.
He accepts, too tired to argue.
Then — unexpectedly, like the sun rising in the west — Sushrita asks, — Have you called Padma?
Dev hasn’t even thought about Padma since leaving Delhi. Even if the telephone lines were operational, which he is sure they are not, it would be a drain on resources, a waste.
— No, he replies.
— Tch. Sushrita unzips her purse and, from within its depths, retrieves a moist towelette. The Indian Airlines logo has almost completely rubbed away from the wrapping. It must be years old. She rips it open and unfolds the small square.
— You and Mithram are two of a kind, she says. She takes Dev’s chin in her hand. They look into one another’s eyes. He wonders if what he sees there swimming in her gray irises is sadness. He wonders if she sees something similar in his eyes. Perhaps he’s as blank as the towelette she holds in her hand.
She wipes his forehead in long strokes. The cool moisture; the rough, scouring paper; her strong fingers pressing into his skin. She brings it over his nose, and he inhales the evaporating alcohol, the false, chemical lemon. He remembers when Arusha was one, when he had given her medicine to bring down a fever, but after twenty minutes, it still hadn’t taken effect. She fussed mightily, and he thought she would squirm out of his arms and fall to the floor. Padma took her from him and cradled her in her right arm. With her left, she dripped cool water from her fingertips onto Arusha’s forehead and blew gently on her face.
— Both of you, Sushrita continues, — attending to strangers and leaving your loved ones to worry. Both of you, very careless and very noble.
This is our duty, Dev thinks. Our burden.
But it excuses nothing. If he and Dr. Sengupta are indeed the same, then Padma and Sushrita are the same as well. After all, both women would rather believe that their husbands are saving the world, when, in truth, both men have slipped silently into a landscape of ruin.