Abraham Verghese brings back the sweeping, sentimental narrative.
The vast epic, stories within stories, maudlin tales and tales of heroism and valour, immoral happenstance and moral endings, these are all encoded into the subcontinental DNA, and Abraham Verghese, physician, writer, Malayali, Ethiopian-American, couldn’t have escaped it no matter how hard he tried. So he does one better: he traps readers into his world of words and operating theatres, of curing and healing, of belief and make-believe, of an impossible/possible story that spans America and Africa and Asia, so lucidly told it ought to have happened, so ludicrous in its concept there was no way it could have happened…
Cutting for Stone is all of this, possibly the most heroic and sublimely sentimental story of this decade, masterful in its telling, and yet oddly manipulative. Sister Mary Joseph Praise, off a ship from India, lands up in Africa, then follows Dr Thomas Stone to Operating Theater 3 in Missing (as the Mission hospital was phonetically typed up by the license clerk, and was forever to be known). It would be impossible to reduce the sum of what follows to a few sentences, since action and reaction and Verghese’s characters assume a life that is so compelling, you cannot but surrender to the narrative.
Drawn against the theatre of Ethiopia, Operating Theater 3 sees the miraculous births of Marion and Shiva Stone, a “miracle” so cataclysmic, it causes their “father” to disappear, their foster parents, the doctors Hema and Ghosh, to enter into an annual contract of matrimony, and sets off a series of events that hurtles Missing away from the fringes of Addis Ababa’s unfolding narrative to, seemingly, its centre-stage. A book of obvious fiction — the mind cannot possibly fathom that any of this could happen in real life, though perhaps so much did — Verghese plays around with the dates and years to mould Ethiopian history to suit his novel’s requirements.
Verghese was born and brought up in Ethiopia, discovering his roots and India when he was a student at Madras Christian College and later Madras Medical College — which he also uses in Cutting for Stone — but in setting the broadest sweep of his novel in Addis Ababa, Verghese says he is also paying tribute to that country. “The few images one sees of Ethiopia are uniformly negative, about war and poverty,” he responds to a question in a publicity note, “I wanted to depict my love for that land and its people, for their incredible beauty and grace and their wonderful character.”
He also wanted, he says, “to convey the loss many felt when the old order gave way to the new”, when the dictator Mengistu, “a man propped up by Russia and Cuba” who sent the emperor, Halle Selassie, to jail, and whose rampages destroyed so much in Ethiopia to the extent that Verghese’s medical school education was interrupted. “As an expatriate, I had to leave,” he says.
Verghese studied next in India, but his practice of medicine took him to eastern Tennessee in the eighties where, for the first time, he came in contact with HIV-infected persons. “It was an intense, sad, heartbreaking period because we had no real therapy and lots of prejudice and hatred,” which led him to write My Own Country, a gripping, non-fiction account that tugged at the heart’s strings and established Verghese as a writer. A second book, The Tennis Partner, also a non-fiction account, of coming to terms with friendship and loss, followed. In between, he wrote to and was accepted by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for a degree course in fine arts, his way, he notes, “to pace myself, to take a break” in the war against AIDS.
Though he writes about medical procedures, whether as non-fiction, or now, in fiction, as “having emerged out of my love for medicine” he tells Publishers Weekly, he’s clear that it is this practice that is his first love, something he’d continue “till my last breath without actually collapsing on the patient — that would be bad form”, and his compassion for people, for patients, which he told in his first two books, gets re-visited here with the simple Dr Stone homily that the treatment administered in an emergency by ear is, of course, “words of comfort”, for the distinction between healing and curing is what obsesses Verghese. “The skilled exam done with courtesy and done well conveys something important about caring and about professionalism to the patient,” he says, insisting he prefers — unlike most other doctors — “a reasonable diagnosis at the bedside and ordering selective tests rather than the shotgun approach, where we tick off everything that seems remotely interesting on the lab and radiology slips”. It is what emerges in the story of the twins Marion and Shiva, the one ready to take up the surgeon’s scalpel, the other self-taught in the universe of obstetrics, the two steeped in the rhythms of Missing, where the descriptions of surgeries and cures and panaceas receive the loving attention of a writer who turns these sterile tasks into labours of love.
Cutting for Stone is an old-fashioned book, drawing on pathos and tragedy and humour to keep the pace from flagging, and the end is as heart-wrenching as it is moral. The twins, once inseparable, have fallen out, but fate will not just bring them together, it will also offer them astonishing retribution. It is this that makes Abraham Verghese old-fashioned and an oddity in America, and Cutting for Stone a book about values and goodness and morality. It is an American book with an Ethiopian sweep and an Indian heart.
| ‘Life has many wet hankies’
Q&A: Abraham Verghese It’s fascinating how descriptions of medical procedures keep you hooked, whether in your non-fiction books, or in this book of fiction. Why do you think readers respond so positively to these descriptions, even though they may have little interest in medicine? |
For us in India, this might qualify as a diasporic work — if so, which country could legitimately claim it as its diaspora: India, Ethiopia, the United States?
I think the Indian diaspora is endlessly fascinating, and this one is Indian at its heart I would have to say. So many Ugandan Indians migrated to the UK, for example, never having seen India. But I still see that as an Indian migration.
The background of Ethiopian politics and civic society form the background to this book. How much of it did you experience personally, and how involved do you remain with the country’s fortunes/ misfortunes?
I described the political strife that I saw, though I changed the exact year of the attempted coup to suit the narrative and the ages of my characters. I feel my disconnection with the country came when I had to leave, when the military government took over. Ironically, many years later, one of my medical school classmates [Meles Zenaweis] who fought as a guerrilla fighter against the military government, is Prime Minister. I feel invested in Ethiopia at one level because it is my birth land and because of the great affection I have for the people and the geography. But I also feel quite removed from it now by time and distance, and even though I have been back twice for different purposes, I don’t have the same feel for it being home the way I do when I visit my old haunts in Madras or my relatives places in Kerala or Bangalore.
Births, deaths, twins, loss, body part transplants, love requited and love unrequited — there’s something Bollywoodian about the whole epic: did it have to be so soap-operaic? Readers are saying nothing else comes as close if the goal was to see how many wet hankies you can get per reader! Is the ending perhaps too cliched? Too romantic?
I think critics are shy about admitting to liking stories that move them emotionally. It’s no wonder critics like minimalist stories because they don’t take as long to read! The success of the Bollywood, and for that matter the Hong Kong film industry, has to do, I think, with the fact that they tell old-fashioned stories that move people. If that is what “Bollywoodian” means, I’m delighted to be in that camp. (Slumdog Millionaire is Bollywoodian, I would presume, and it kicked ass in Hollywood this year — people are hungry for stories!)
That’s the ultimate goal of a writer I would say: a good story well told. I love the kind of story where you feel you enter a world, live through many years and many events, and when you are done and come back it’s still Tuesday but you have learned the lessons of a lifetime. In that sense, I think a good novel has the possibility to bring out the truth more powerfully than non-fiction. (Uncle Tom’s Cabin started the Civil War in America, after all).
I’d say life has many wet hankies, and life is ultimately full of surprises and life is relentlessly ironic — I’d argue that there is nothing clichéd about the kind of ending that affirms those truths about life. “Soap-operaic” is an adjective that I associate with stories that lack meaning, where inelegant and deux ex machine coincidences and fireworks try to stand in for a moving narrative. I’d like to think what I spun out was imaginative, but no less impossible or far-fetched than a boy with a Kenyan father and a white mother who grows up partly in Indonesia, who has a Moslem name, rising in the post 9/11 America to be President of the United States.
Dare we ask, a book in/on India?
I’d love to write a book that is more specifically about India and the Indian diaspora. Right now I am just ruminating, kicking ideas around.
CUTTING FOR STONE Author: Abraham Verghese
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 548
Price: Rs 595
