Ten beds skirted the edge of the room, and in the centre was a nurse’s desk. Gamini loved the order of these closed wards. If he had a few free hours he avoided the doctors’ dormitory and came here to lie on one of the empty beds, so that even if he could not sleep he was surrounded by something he would find nowhere else in the country. He wanted a mother’s arm to hold him firm on the bed, to lie across his rib cage, to bring a cool washcloth to his face. He would turn to watch a child with jaundice bathed in the pale-blue light as if within a diorama. A blue light that was warm rather than clear, with a specific frequency. ‘Pass me a gentian. Give me a torch.’ Gamini wished to be bathed in it. The nurse looked at her watch and walked from her desk to wake him. But he was not asleep. He drank a cup of tea with her and then left the pediatric ward, which had its own woes. He reached out and touched the small Buddha in the niche of the wall as he passed it.
Crossing the open grass lot, Gamini returned to the war rooms, where there seemed little difference between pre-operative and post-operative patients. The only reasonable constant was that there would be more bodies tomorrow-post-stabbings, post-land mines. Orthopaedic trauma, punctured lungs, spinal cord injuries…
A few years earlier a story had gone around about a Colombo doctor-Linus Corea-a neurosurgeon in the private sector. He came from three generations of doctors, the family name was as established as the most permanent banks in the country. Linus Corea was in his late forties when the war broke out. Like most doctors he thought it was madness and unlike most he stayed in private practice; the Prime Minister was one of his clients, as was the leader of the opposition. He had his head massages at Gabriel’s at eight a.m. and saw his patients from nine till two, then golfed with a bodyguard at his side. He dined out, got home before curfew and slept in an air-conditioned room. He had been married for ten years and had two sons. He was a well-liked man; he was polite with everyone because it was the easiest way not to have trouble, to be invisible to those who did not matter to him. This small courtesy created a bubble he rode within. His gestures and politeness disguised an essential lack of interest or, if not that, a lack of time for others on the street. He liked photography. He printed his own pictures in the evening.
In 1987, while he was putting on a golf green, his bodyguard was shot dead and Dr. Linus Corea was kidnapped. They came out of the woods slowly, unconcerned about being seen by him. It meant it did not matter to them and that frightened him more than anything. He had been alone with the bodyguard. He stood beside the prone body and was surrounded by the men who had shot him from a distance of forty yards precisely through the correct point in the head. No thrashing around.
They spoke to him calmly in a made-up language, which again increased his anxiety. They hit him once and broke a rib to warn him to behave, and then they walked back to their car and drove away with him. For months no one knew where he had got to. The police, the Prime Minister, the head of the Communist Party were called in, and all were outraged. There was no communication from kidnappers wanting payment. It was the Colombo mystery of 1987, and offers of rewards were made throughout the press, none of which was answered.
Eight months after Linus Corea’s disappearance, his wife was alone in the house with their two children when a man came to the door and handed her a letter from her husband. The man stepped inside. The note was simple. It said: If you wish to see me again, come with the children. If you do not wish to, I will understand.
She moved to the phone, and the man produced a gun. She stood there. To her left was a pool where some flowers floated in shallow water. All her valuables were upstairs. She stood there, the children busy in their rooms. It had not been a joyous marriage. Comfortable but not happy. Affections on the thin scale of things. But the letter, while it held his terseness, had a quality she would never have expected. It gave her a choice. It was laconically stated but it was there, graciously, with no strings. Later she thought that if it had not been for that she would not have gone. She muttered to the man. He spoke back to her in an invented language that she did not understand. Some of the news reports at the time of her husband’s disappearance had spoken of UFO kidnappings, and this strangely came to her mind now, there in her front hall.
‘We’ll come with you,’ she said again, out loud, and this time the man came towards her and gave her another letter.
This one was just as abrupt and said: Please bring these books. A list followed, eight titles. He told her where they could be found in his office. She told her sons to get a few extra clothes and shoes, but she packed nothing for herself. She carried only the books, and once they were outside the man directed them to an already humming car.
Linus Corea made his way to the tent in the dark and lay down on the cot. It was nine at night, and if they came they would be there in about five hours. He had told the men when it was most likely for her to be home alone. He needed to sleep. He had been working in the triage tent for close to six hours, so even with the brief nap after lunch he was exhausted.
He had been at the camp of the insurgents ever since they had picked him up in Colombo. They had got him a little after two in the afternoon and by seven he was in the southern hills. No one had spoken to him in the car, just the idiot language, a joke of theirs. What good it did he wasn’t sure. When he reached the camp they explained in Sinhala what they wanted him to do, which was to work as a doctor for them. Nothing more. It was not an intense conversation, he wasn’t threatened. They told him he could see his family in a few months. They said he could sleep now but in the morning he would have to work. A few hours later they woke him and said there was an emergency, and led him into the triage tent with a lantern and hung it on a hook above a half-dead body and asked him to operate on the skull in lamplight. The man was too far gone, still they asked him to operate. He himself was uncomfortable with his broken rib and whenever he leaned forward pain tore through him. Half an hour later the man died and they carried the lantern to another bed, where someone else who had been shot had been waiting in silence. He had to remove the leg above the knee, but the man lived. Linus Corea went back to sleep at two-thirty. At six a.m. they woke him again to begin work.
After a few days he asked them to get some smocks for him, some rubber gloves, some morphine. He gave them a list of things he needed, and that night they attacked a hospital near Gurutulawa and got the medical essentials and kidnapped a nurse for him. She too, strangely, did not complain about her fate, just as he hadn’t. Privately he was irritated, and tired of a world that necessitated this, but the device of courtesy that had been false in his other life continued. He thanked people for nothing much and he didn’t ask for anything unless it was badly needed. He became accustomed to this lack of need, was rather proud of it. If he wanted something-syringes, bandages, a book-he would write out a list and give it to them. Maybe a week later, maybe six weeks, he’d get them. The first hospital attack was the only one they planned just for him.
He did not know how long they would keep him so he began to teach the nurse everything he could about surgery. Rosalyn was about forty, very smart under her seeming complacency. He had her operating alongside him when they were overrun with wounded.