Bernini, Ecstasy of St Teresa

Cutting for Stone By Abraham Verghese, Random House, Rs 595

It is strange that plenitude can sometimes leave you with a peculiar sense of emptiness. Although Abraham Verghese has managed to pack everything from the dilemmas of the diaspora, the wounds of colonialism, the disillusionments of liberation to the myth of conjoined twins into his novel, Cutting for Stone, there is a vacuity at its core for which no detailing can compensate. That is in spite of the fact that the story is well told, and its plot is well knit.

The Missing Hospital of Addis Ababa stands at the centre of Cutting for Stone. The name of the hospital comes from “mission” — “a word that on the Ethiopian tongue came out with a hiss so it sounded like ‘Missing”’. Matron Hirst, the “wise and sensible leader” of Missing, had intended the hospital to “resemble an arboretum, or a corner of Kensington Gardens (where, before she came to Africa, she used to walk as a young nun) or Eden before the Fall”. The corrupt spelling of the hospital’s name serves as a continuous reminder of the vanished joys of life in a post-lapsarian world in general and a post-colonial world in particular (especially for someone like Matron, who is a British expatriate in Ethiopia). In an unintended irony, the name also seems to point to the blankness at the heart of this tome of more than 500 pages.

Cutting for Stone is written in the traditional realist style. Long ago, George Eliot had expanded the scope of the realist novel by making the everyday professional concerns of a doctor, Tertius Lydgate, one of the main narrative strains of Middlemarch (1874). More than a hundred years later, Verghese bases his narrative on the ways in which the “metaphors of... faith” can become synonymous with “the metaphors of medicine”, and includes copious medical details in his study of expatriate Indian doctors’ lives. There are references to Middlemarch in this novel. The absent heroine of Cutting for Stone, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, is probably afflicted with the same “Theresa Complex” that plagued Dorothea Brooke.

However, to draw comparisons between George Eliot’s classic and Abraham Verghese’s novel is dangerous since they can serve only to underline the poverty of the latter. In Dorothea Brooke, George Eliot might have explored the dark labyrinths of the mind in which altruism and selfishness mingle, but Verghese’s Sister Mary Joseph Praise can be nothing but a saint in the scheme of the novel. When the narrative begins, she is already dead, a fact which probably facilitates her elevation to sainthood. She dies giving birth to the narrator, Marion Stone, and his identical twin, Shiva, in Missing Hospital. As a child, Marion finds a calendar print of Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa hanging above his mother’s desk and later comes to associate Sister Mary Joseph Praise with St Teresa, although he questions his mother’s choice of this particular saint. Yet the questions are more rhetorical than real. Indeed, there might be controversy as to whether the death-like expression on the face of Bernini’s sculpture is the depiction of sexual orgasm or divine ecstasy. But Sister Mary Joseph Praise could have been “‘pierced’ by divine love” only. The details of her life that Marion unearths and pieces together seem meant to prove how saintly she was in her selflessness, her willingness to serve and in her ability to love. Long after her nun’s habit had been soiled by spots of blood, menstrual or otherwise, her mind remained untouched by vileness.

Sister Mary Joseph Praise is not alone in her holiness. Almost every character in Cutting for Stone is as noble, although in different ways. Evil comes in flashes, glimpsed, for instance, in the man in Aden who had violated Sister Mary Joseph Praise, in the policemen who clubbed an old woman or in the Kerchele Prison yard, “a butcher shop where enemies of the state came to their ends”. Each piece of evidence of violence in the world serves to strengthen Marion’s resolve to become a surgeon, a profession he thinks can help him heal himself and others. But at the same time, he must acknowledge the limits of surgery —“no surgeon can heal the kind of wound that divides two brothers”. The attempt of Verghese to make the birth of the twins into a legend and to sustain that throughout the novel makes for the weakest bits in the narrative. Their story seems no more than a rehash of certain Hindi films, where twins inevitably drift apart as they grow up and one sacrifices his life for the other at the end.

Cutting for Stone can be read as a quest on the part of Marion to return to innocence. His life is marred at its very inception by the death of his mother and the consequent disappearance of his father, Thomas Stone, the eccentric surgeon of Missing. The hospital’s resident gynaecologist, Kalpana Hemlatha, better known as Hema, brings the twins up. In addition to the trauma of his mother’s death, Marion has had to suffer a violent separation from Shiva at birth. Throughout his life he keeps ‘missing’ the wholeness of a family that for him could have existed in prenatal memory only. No amount of love showered on him by Hema, his foster father, Abhi Ghosh, or by the hospital staff could compensate for that original loss.

In his journey to adulthood, Marion has to cope with his personal tragedies on the one hand and with the political troubles of the lost paradise called Abyssinia on the other. Obviously, when there is such a surfeit of difficulties introduced arbitrarily into the plot by the author, the characters need do nothing but fight them from beginning to end in order to ‘grow up’ and give the novel its girth in the process. And their progress can only be immortalized in such maudlin comments as “A childhood at Missing imparted lessons about resilience, about fortitude, and about the fragility of life”, or “the definition of home [—] Not where you are from, but where you are wanted”, or “I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident… the immersion in blood, pus, and tears — the fluids in which one dissolved all traces of self”.

It is a pity that Verghese takes to heart the King’s instruction to the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop” — which is quoted often here — as a prescription for writing a novel. Novels shorter than Cutting for Stone have said as much as it says, and more, without wasting as many words as it does on the details. As an alternative, Verghese could have studied the Duchess’s advice to Alice, “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.”