‘You realize there were no dogs back there, by the truck.’
‘Yes. I thought that as soon as I spoke. There was something wrong.’
‘Perhaps it was a village of no dogs… We have to go back.’ She took her eyes off the road and looked at him, and the car jerked loose into a half-circle and drove north again.
…
They reached the truck in twenty minutes. The man by the truck was alive but couldn’t move. He was almost unconscious. Someone had hammered a bridge nail into his left palm and another into his right, crucifying him to the tarmac. He was the driver of the truck and as Sarath and Anil approached him a terrified look appeared on his face. As if they were coming back to kill him or torture him further.
She held the man’s face between her hands while Sarath prized the nails from the tarmac, freeing his hands.
‘You have to leave the nails in for now,’ she said. ‘Don’t remove them.’
Sarath explained to the man that she was a doctor. They got a blanket out of the trunk and wrapped him in it and carried him to the back seat. There was nothing to drink besides an inch or two of cordial, which he quickly swallowed.
They were going south again. Every time she turned to see how the man was, his eyes were wide open looking at them. She told Sarath they needed saline solution. She saw a faint light ahead and put her hand on Sarath’s arm to get him to stop. The car pulled over quietly and he shut off the motor.
‘What village is this?’
‘Galapitigama. The village of beautiful women,’ he said, like a refrain. She looked at him. ‘Supposedly. McAlpine said so.’
She climbed out and walked to the door of a house behind which she could see light. She smelled tobacco. Sarath was beside her.
‘We want salt. Hot water. If not hot, then cold will have to do. A small bowl of it-we need to take the bowl with us.’
When the door opened they saw a room busy at knee level. There were seven men around the perimeter, rolling cigarettes, weighing batches of them on scales, packaging them with thin string. Illegal night work. They wore only cotton sarongs in the hot, closed room, which was windowless. Three lamps on the floor where the piles of beedis were stacked up. Everything had a brownness, an orangeness, from the contained weaving flame of the lights. All of the men were in checkered blue-green sarongs.
The bare-chested man who opened the door stared past them to the car, nervous at their possible authority. Sarath explained that they needed a pot of hot water and salt, then as an afterthought asked for some beedis, if they would be willing to sell them. At which the man laughed.
One of the other men went out through the far door while she and Sarath stood on the threshold, then he returned with salt in one hand and a small bowl in the other. Anil enclosed his wrist with her fingers and turned it so the salt clouded into the water.
This time she got into the back seat beside the truck driver. Sarath said something to him over his shoulder and the man tentatively gave her his left hand. Under the faint roof light Anil soaked a handkerchief in the saline solution and squeezed it onto his palm, the bridge nail still in it. Then the other hand, then back again to the first.
Sarath started the engine.
There were forests on either side of the empty road. The motor’s hum filled the quietness, a thread in this silent world, just her and Sarath and the wounded man. Now and then a village, now and then an unmanned roadblock where they had to slow down and twist through the eye of a needle. As they passed a streetlamp Anil saw that what she was squeezing into his palms was now bloody water. Still she didn’t stop, because the movement kept him calm and awake, kept him from drifting into shock. The mutual gestures-her pull, his giving-were becoming hypnotic to both.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Gunesena.’
‘Do you live near here?’
The man rolled his head slightly, a tactful yes and no, and Anil smiled. In an hour they were within the outskirts of Colombo, and later drove into the compound of Emergency Services.
A Brother
In the operating rooms of the base hospitals in the North Central Province there were always four books in evidence: Hammon’s Analysis of 2,187 Consecutive Penetrating Wounds of the Brain in Vietnam; Gunshot Wounds by Swan and Swan; C. W. Hughes’s Arterial Repair During the Korean War; and Annals of Surgery. Doctors in the midst of an operation would have an orderly turn pages so they could skim the text while continuing surgery. After two weeks of fifteen-hour days they no longer needed assistance from books and moved with ease alongside wounds and suture techniques. But the medical texts remained, for future doctors in training.
In the doctors’ common room in a North Central Province hospital someone had left a copy of Elective Affinities among the other, more porous paperbacks. It remained there throughout the war, unread save by someone who might pick it up while waiting, consider its back-cover description, then replace it respectfully on the table with the others. These-a more popular gang that included Erle Stanley Gardner, Rosemary Rogers, James Hilton and Walter Tevis-were consumed in two or three hours, swallowed like sandwiches on the run. Anything to direct your thoughts away from a war.
The buildings that made up the hospital had been erected at the turn of the century. It had been managed in a lackadaisical way before the exaggeration of war. In the grass courtyard, signs from a more innocent time would last throughout the waves of violence. Half-dead soldiers who wished for sun and fresh air rested there and ate morphine tablets beside a BETEL CHEWING IS PROHIBITED sign.
The victims of ‘intentional violence’ had started appearing in March 1984. They were nearly all male, in their twenties, damaged by mines, grenades, mortar shells. The doctors on duty put down The Queen’s Gambit or The Tea Planter’s Bride and began arresting the haemorrhages. They removed metal and stone from lungs, sutured lacerated chests. In one of the hospital texts that the young doctor Gamini read was a sentence he became excessively fond of: In diagnosing a vascular injury, a high index of suspicion is necessary.
During the first two years of the war more than three hundred casualties were brought in as a result of explosions. Then the weapons improved and the war in the north-central province got worse. The guerrillas had international weaponry smuggled into the country by arms dealers, and they also had homemade bombs.
The doctors saved the lives first, then the limbs. There were mostly grenade injuries. An antipersonnel mine the size of an inkwell would destroy most of a person’s feet. Wherever there was a base hospital in the country, new villages sprang up nearby. There was a need for rehabilitation programmes, and the making of what came to be known as the ‘Jaipur Limb.’ In Europe a new artificial foot cost 2,500 pounds. Here the Jaipur Limb was made for 30 pounds-cheaper because Asian victims could walk without a shoe.
The hospital would run out of painkillers during the first week of any offensive. You were without self in those times, lost among the screaming. You held on to any kind of order-the smell of Savlon antiseptic that was used to wash floors and walls, the ‘children’s injection room’ with its nursery murals. The older purpose of a hospital continued alongside the war. When Gamini finished surgery in the middle of the night, he walked through the compound into the east buildings, where the sick children were. The mothers were always there. Sitting on stools, they rested their upper torso and head on their child’s bed and slept holding the small hands. There were not too many fathers around then. He watched the children, who were unaware of their parents’ arms. Fifty yards away in Emergency he had heard grown men scream for their mothers as they were dying. ‘Wait for me!’ ‘I know you are here!’ This was when he stopped believing in man’s rule on earth. He turned away from every person who stood up for a war. Or the principle of one’s land, or pride of ownership, or even personal rights. All of those motives ended up somehow in the arms of careless power. One was no worse and no better than the enemy. He believed only in the mothers sleeping against their children, the great sexuality of spirit in them, the sexuality of care, so the children would be confident and safe during the night.