I Am an Executioner (6 page)

“Sit with me, Gopi,” we heard Dilip tell him, with uncharacteristic friendliness, and Gopi wondered if this was a sign of the uncanny success of his deception—the unfriendly doctor now instinctively recognized Gopi as one of his own.

Dilip poised his thin fingers against his Styrofoam lunch plate. “How are you, Gopi?” Dilip said. He had a long, serious face, and his gray hair plumed up softly. “Let’s talk. What’s going on?”

“Just the usual,” Gopi answered.

“Really? Nothing new?”

Dilip’s intent stare, his tone, began now to strike Gopi as odd. “But how are you, Dilip?” Gopi asked.

“Let us not talk about
me
,” Dilip replied. He smiled, just a little. “Because, Gopi, it seems that you are the much more interesting fellow.”

Inside the temple, Manju was looking at the boy Krishna in the altar, the black stone Krishna with wide gold eyes and a wise grin, blowing with his blood-red lips into the flute he held there. A lovely, playful Krishna; a mischievous, hilarious Krishna; and all at once, Manju thought, a terrible, mocking Krishna, grinning at all the capricious misery he had spun.

“Krishna, Guruvayoorappa,” Manju prayed. She clasped her hands and clenched her eyelids and moaned the words quietly, trying in vain to muster the fever of trust and abandon to which she could sometimes move herself at this spot.

Manju looked around at all the other people in the temple, she looked at us chatting and praying, and thought how strange it was for us to behave as if all this were so normal. Her doctors would have given her months, maybe weeks, and now she looked at us as though we were a million miles away.

We didn’t know what she was going through—she never once mentioned the word
cancer
—nor did she have a husband she
could trust or tell, who could share the weight of her dying and make her less alone. She was by herself, floating far above us, and when she turned back to Lord Krishna it was with grief but also with this lonely, exhilarating anger. Is there really no hope? she asked him in silence. All my life you have given me only what you have wanted to give me and not what I have asked for. But that’s another way of saying you have not been there and that you have never listened to me. Is there any sign to show that you are still with me, or that you ever have been? That after loving you so much my whole pointless life, you haven’t abandoned me to die?

It was Deepika Shenoy, finally, who had the presence of mind to walk softly up to Manju and put her arm around her, and to whisper in her ear and dab the tears discreetly with a corner of Deepika’s own green silk sari. She took Manju out to the lunch line in the dining hall and made sure she got a little bit of everything, and brought her to sit down with their husbands, and by then Manju was looking reasonably calm.

We ask ourselves at what point it became inevitable, and perhaps it was then. Gopi looked up from his food and was grateful for the new company. He greeted Deepika and complimented her on her sari. She had always been Gopi’s triple-deluxe dream; it was embarrassingly obvious. Looking at this dream Deepika, Gopi wished Manju would eat better, smile more, wear some jewelry. Deepika laughed at something someone said and put her hand on her shaking bosom. It was a gesture that normally would have made Gopi giddy with pleasure, but now he managed only a wan smile.

Then Manju tried in her way to make small talk, but her husband interrupted her as usual.

“Not now, Manju,” Gopi said, because Dilip had reached his hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card, and was talking now, oblivious of the women.

“My nephew was driving to our place last weekend from College
Station,” Dilip was saying. “You see, he studies hard, just like I did. People like us slog for years. Don’t you find us silly? He was driving home and he stopped at a gas station, where someone gave him this business card.” Dilip paused now to stare sharply at his acquaintance; but Gopi’s eyes stayed fixed on his plate. “Someone who looked very familiar gave him
this card
,” Dilip repeated, extending the business card, clipped between two bony fingers, toward Gopi.

Gopi refused to touch it. And Manju looked at her husband and looked at the card. And at last, she herself took it from Dilip’s hand.

“
DOCTOR RAJU GOPALARAJAN, MD
,” Manju read slowly. “
MEDICAL DOCTOR SPECIALIZING IN ALL THINGS SPECIALLY WOMEN’S HEALTH MATTERS
.”

Dilip finally turned, exultant, to Manju. “But you already know Dr. Gopalarajan, don’t you?”

Manju shook her head no.

“You don’t?” Dilip gave her a mordant smile. “But he’s the great doctor specializing in Women’s Health Matters. One of the most difficult specialities in the world, and he is an absolute master.”

“Aha?”

Dilip raised his finger in mock severity. “If something cannot be cured,” said Dilip, who had always been more insinuation than action, and who, after scaring Gopi, was content to leave things there at that. “If something cannot be cured,” Dilip said again, turning back toward Gopi, “then ask Gopalarajan, and Gopalarajan will find the cure!” Was there any hope for poor Manju, for either of them, after that?

The next morning, when Gopi’s office phone rang—it’s hard to believe, but in a way it isn’t—he didn’t even recognize his own wife’s voice, at first.

“Who’s calling, please?” he asked, and she spelled her name as he had heard her spell it so many times to others.

“M like Mary, A-N like Nancy, J-U-K-U-M like Mary, A-R.”

Gopi had not prepared for this moment, but for a few seconds his quick wits came to his aid. He drew in his breath and almost without thinking asked, “Something wrong with you, madam?” He spoke in a gruff tone he hoped his wife wouldn’t recognize.

“Yes,” Manju said. “That’s why people call doctors, isn’t it? Can I make an appointment, please?”

Gopi was surprised to find that Manju’s voice, transmitted over the anonymizing phone, had an authority he had never appreciated in real life, and Gopi felt suddenly uncertain of his ability to bluff through the situation.

“Hello?” Manju asked.

The silence grew, and now Gopi panicked. He hung up, and when the phone rang again, he ignored it.

He had only a few minutes to wonder what in fact was wrong with his wife when he was interrupted again, this time by Vicente and Sandra walking in through the door. They held each other’s hands stiffly.

The look in their faces struck Gopi with alarm. “Sorry to bother you, Doctor,” Vicente said. “But seems like, maybe, there’s a problem.”

“I did everything well,” Gopi said. “What problem? Everything is fine.” Sandra’s face turned red, and Vicente looked at her, then at Gopi. And then Vicente began to cry.

“He has pain,” Sandra tried to explain, as she and Gopi waited for Vicente to compose himself.

Gopi saw that the young man had tied a white cloth around his forearm, and the cloth was soaked through with some dark fluid, and his hand and fingers below were plumply swollen.

When he unwrapped the bandage in the examining room a few minutes later, the smell hit Gopi so hard he staggered to the door and leaned out of it for a few moments. When he came
back, he tried to breathe through his mouth. He already knew from his reading what had to be done, and that there was no time to waste. As Sandra stood anxiously at the far end of the room, Gopi anesthetized Vicente’s arm and began to cut away the blackening flesh. He cut and he threw the sloppy matter into the trash can and closed the lid, but still the stench didn’t go away, so Gopi cut more. Blood oozed from the cavity in Vicente’s arm, filling the hole and spilling to the floor. Gopi spooned out the blood with a plastic cup and cut quickly before the hole filled again. Sandra held her hand to her mouth and cried, and Gopi told Vicente, “Tell her to stop moaning, won’t you?” but Vicente’s eyes were half closed and his head was nodding backward and he didn’t say anything. Gopi cut more and became very frightened when finally he encountered a length of white bone.

After he and Sandra laid Vicente in the back of his car, Gopi watched Sandra drive away (on her way, we know now, to the Manvel General Emergency Room). Then he stood on the pavement, damp and terrified, and let his head slump down to see the footprint-spattered trail of red leading from inside the examining room all the way to the parking lot, to terminate there, at Gopi’s feet. Inside, minutes later, he didn’t notice the sound of the front door opening, or hear the footsteps leading to the examining room door, or see his wife walk in until she was two feet away from him.

Manju and Gopi stared at each other in silence. She studied her husband’s bewildered eyes and looked at the lab coat he was wearing. She saw the gore-caked instruments, and she remembered Dilip Shenoy’s odd expression at the temple the day before, and the voice on the phone when she had tried to make an appointment. She clutched harder the library book she held in her arms, and remembered Gopi’s strange jokes in the bedroom, and the increasingly implausible stories about his advancements in television sales. And she remembered the lies Gopi had told everyone all his life.

And Gopi—exhausted, for once guileless—quietly pried the book from her trembling hands, bookmarked and dog-eared, and stared dumbly at the picture it showed: a woman’s ovaries, bloated and blistering, laid out on a dissecting table, with a label that read
INOPERABLE
. The dull fear in his eyes was obvious to Manju.

“What’s the matter?” Manju asked. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “You’re such a famous doctor. Can’t you help me? Hm?”

Gopi was unsure, for a moment, if his wife was credulous or mocking, but something in her tone seemed to demand an answer.

“I can try,” he said simply.

There are those who will never accept what must have happened next. They don’t understand what Manju saw in Gopi, for a few moments, here at the dying-ember end of our story. But there is a reassuring certainty to some unlucky lives, which is to say that fear has no place for persons already doomed; and a kind of calmness descended on Manju, seeing her husband covered in some other man’s blood, seeing him drained and frightened. And isn’t it possible that Manju herself found in Gopi’s examining room the iodine and the novocaine, the knife and the needles? Manju herself lay down on the examining table, just as the Manvel General doctors, having gotten the details from Sandra, were phoning the police station.

Gopi was still nervous, no doubt. It took him some time to fathom the hopeless clarity of the situation. But Manju’s calmness would have calmed him, and soon he understood there was no help for either of them outside of that room. The news stations had even somehow gotten hold of the story—didn’t some of us hear the name on the radio and wonder who this doctor was, and if maybe we had met him at a function somewhere? And on his own, without asking, Gopi picked up the scalpel, knowing the red and blue lights would soon be shimmering through the cracks in the window blinds. We are with them as
he picked up the scalpel and looked in Manju’s eyes, knowing what the police would have no choice but to do when they came through the door and saw him doing what he was about to do.

But now those anxious police officers were still miles away along the highway. Vicente’s friends had left for work already. The dry cleaner’s clerk was late as usual. Only the skinny cows in their dirt-patch field could know what noises came from that desolate office building, and so there are some who will always have doubts—who will cling to their versions with the same shiftless confidence with which those cows stood waiting under the midday sun, dulled to their own fate or anyone else’s—and who will never believe what happened when Manju looked down, and followed the sure movements of Dr. Gopalarajan’s fingers, and smiled.

DIRECT YOUR ATTENTION, RAJESH
,
to this yellowed photograph you purchased in a South Indian antiques market, a portrait of my own distinguished self: a turn-of-the-century Brahmin standing outside a mud-walled train station, wearing a crisp white vaishti edged in gold and a dark shut-coat buttoned smartly to the neck. My handsome face is capped with a majestic white turban; in my stern gaze and thin, unsmiling lips, you detect an autocratic temperament and anxious dignity reminding you of certain men in your own extended family. Around my neck, a garland of roses lies heavily, and the markings on my forehead show that, like you, I am an Iyer. Moreover, my name—P. Rajarajeshwaran Iyer—written across the portrait in a fine hand beneath my feet, seems a version of your own. (A grander version, to be sure.) Yet another coincidence: Painted on the building behind me, in block English letters, above some fuzzy chalk marks, is the word
ROMBACHINNAPATTINAM
—the name of your own ancestral village.

Who was I, you wonder? Some distant ancestor, some early echo of yourself? What were my days like? To answer you: I was manager of Rombachinnapattinam’s first rail station, and, for all our similarities, my life was nothing like yours. For one, I lived in Rombachinnapattinam, a hamlet that had changed
but little—prior to the introduction of the railroad—in its four hundred years of existence. The things you care about had nothing, and yet everything, to do with me. What do I mean? Allow me to tell you, in explanation, about a singular and profound incident in my life, to wit, my relationship with a peculiar young clerk in my office, to whom I will refer simply as R. (
Allow me
to tell you? My dear boy, having imagined my voice into existence, you give me little choice!)

I was still new to my post when I met R. I sat writing at my desk and spied him peeking awkwardly into my office door. He stood there in vaishti and topknot, his face round with boyfat, barefoot and totally shirtless. He was a Brahmin, clearly, but a poorer sort than I. At once, I took him for one of the countless busybodies and bores who loitered at the station of a lazy afternoon to watch the
Madras Mail
arrive, pause briefly, and depart, and I was a little peeved that my attendant and factotum, Dhananjayan Rajesupriyan, had not intercepted the lad, to direct him on to the platform where he should more properly have waited. Little did I know what impact this humble visitor would have on my life! But at the time, I fancied myself too busy to give him more than an irritated thought. I called out curtly, “Can I help you?”