Cutting for Stone

“Maybe you don't think you are my father.”

“No, it's not that. I am your father. I—”

“No, you're not! Ghosh was my father. He raised me. He taught me everything from riding a bike to hitting a square drive off the back foot. He gave me my love for medicine. He raised me and Shiva. I am here because of Ghosh. A greater man never lived.”

I had baited the trap, lured him in. But I was the one who snapped.

“ ‘Lived’ … ?” he said, leaning forward, the foot no longer wagging.

“Ghosh is dead.”

His features turned leaden, then pale.

I let him ruminate on that. I'm sure he wanted to know how, why, but he couldn't ask. The news had stopped him cold, saddened him, I could see. Good. I was touched. But I wasn't done kicking him. I was impressed that he took it, waited for more.

“So you are off the hook,” I said. “I had a father.”

He sighed. “I don't expect you to understand,” he said again.

“Tell me anyway.”

“Where shall I start?”

“ ‘Begin at the beginning and go on until you come to the end,’ the King said, very gravely, ‘then stop.’ Do you know who said that?”

I was enjoying myself. The famous Thomas Stone being grilled, getting screwed, getting a dose of his own medicine. Sure, he could rattle off the branches of the external carotid artery, or the boundaries of the foramen of Winslow, but did he know his Lewis Carroll? Did he know his Alice in Wonderland?

He surprised me with his answer. It was wrong but it was right.

“Ghosh,” he said, and the air went out of his lungs.

45. A Matter of Time

WHEN THOMAS STONE WAS A CHILD, he asked the—the gardener—where little boys came from. The ma-alt, a dark man with muddy eyes and acid breath from the previous night's arrack, said, “You came with the evening tide, of course! I found you. You were succulent and pink with one long fin and no scales. Such fish they say only exist in Ceylon, but there you were. I almost ate you, but I wasn't hungry. I cut off the fin with this very sickle and brought you to your mother.”

“I don't believe you. My mother and I must have washed in from the sea together. We were one large fish. I was in her belly and came out,” the little boy said, walking away. The maali could coax roses out of the earth where their neighbors failed. But Hilda Stone would have fired him for telling such tales to her only child.

The little boy's home was just outside the rock walls of Fort St. George in Madras, India. The spire of St. Mary's poked up from behind the incomplete battlements. Its quaint, well-tended cemetery was his playground, a place where more than five generations of English men, women, and babies were buried, taken by typhoid, malaria, kala azar, and rarely old age.

Fort St. George was the first home of the East India Company. St. Mary's, built in 1680, was the first Anglican church in India (but by no means the first church, that being the one built in A.D. 54 by St. Thomas the Apostle, who landed on the Kerala coast). A plaque inside St. Mary's commemorated the marriage of Lord Clive, and another that of Governor Elihu Yale, who later founded a university in America. But the little boy saw no plaque to commemorate the marriage of Hilda Masters of Fife, tutor and governess, to Justifus Stone, civil servant in the British Raj and almost two decades her senior.

Thomas thought every child grew up as he did—in sight of the Indian Ocean, hearing the fearsome-sounding waves crashing around Fort St. George. And he assumed that all fathers were like his, crashing into furniture and making alarming sounds at night.

Justifus Kaye Stone's voice rumbled down from a height, and his bottle-brush mustache kept little boys at bay. District collectors in the Indian Civil Service were demigods, with secretaries and peons hovering around them like flies around overripe mangoes. Collectors went on tours for weeks at a time, holding court in each city. When Justifus Stone was home, despite his noisy presence, he was somehow not there. Thomas understood (in that way that children do, even though they lack words to express themselves) that Justifus was a self-centered man and neglectful of his wife. Perhaps this was why Hilda turned to religion. To imagine Christ's suffering allowed her to live with hers.

Blessed are the meek.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Blessed the young governess who marries a DC hoping to clear his yellow-tinged skin of quinine and cure his taste for gin and native women, for hers is the kingdom of heaven.

Hilda's blessing came in the form of her blue-eyed, towheaded boy whose feet she hardly let touch the ground, even when he was old enough to walk.

The little boy's ayah, Sebestie, had nothing to do other than join in the play since it was Hilda who let him ride on her back pretending he was Jim Corbett, the big-game hunter, and she the elephant carrying him to the tiger blind. Hilda drew red-chalk wickets on the whitewashed walls and bowled to him with a tennis ball. She sang hymns to him, and fanned him when it was too humid to fall asleep. The bell-like clarity of her voice caused somnolent lizards on the wall to snap to attention. Her brown hair, parted in the center, fell from a steepled head. Regardless of how she restrained it, a frizzy halo framed her face.

In the middle of the night he reached for her and she was there. But on the nights Justifus Stone was home, the little boy slept poorly, fearful for his mother because those were the only times she left his bed. He kept vigil with his cricket bat outside the closed bedroom door, prepared to break in if the noises did not subside. They always did and only then would he retreat to his room. In the morning, when he opened his eyes, she would be back in his bed, awake and peering out through her fringe of hair.

Every child should have a mother of such even temperament, her rare displeasure evidenced so gently that the effect was lasting. Thomas lived to please his mother and he was earnest in his pleasing. It was as if they both knew, though they could not have known, that life was short, the moment fleeting.

HE WAS EIGHT when Hilda had to excuse herself from the St. Mary's choir. A cough that at first was like distant artillery soon sounded like nails rattling in a paper bag. Dr. Winthrop, an overdressed man who did not converse as much as make pronouncements, said mother and son were to sleep apart, “for the child's betterment.”

The little boy heard her nightly paroxysms from the other room and covered his ears with the pillows. “Undoubtedly consumption,” Dr. Winthrop said to Thomas one day, using a delicate word for tuberculosis as he put away his stethoscope and thermometer. “It has turned dry. The sicca form of phthisis, you know.” He talked to the little boy as if to a colleague and shook his hand with gravity. When would she get better? “Rest and diet and hydrotherapy,” said the doctor. “Some of the time— let's say, much of the time—it becomes quiescent. After all, it's not up to us, is it, Master Stone?” When Thomas asked, Please, sir, whom might it be up to, Winthrop raised his eyes to the ceiling. It was only later that the little boy understood the doctor did not mean Justifus, whose heavy tread shook the chandelier. He meant God.

One morning Thomas awoke dreaming of horse-drawn carriages, and with the thunder of hooves echoing in his ears. He discovered that in the night his mother had coughed up blood, lots of it, and Winthrop had been summoned. They bundled her off, not letting her kiss her son's brow. She traveled to Coimbatore, and from there the narrow-gauge toy train took her up the mountain to a hill station sitting just below Ooty. Dr. Ross had built a sanatorium in the Nilgiri Hills fashioned after Trudeau's famed Saranac Lake in New York. The white cottages around the hospital were replicas of those at Saranac, with the same airy porches and trundle beds.

Thomas wept himself to sleep on Sebestie's bony chest. He was angry with Hilda for getting sick, for having fostered such a closeness with him so as to make this separation unbearable. He was not like his schoolmates who