Pardon The Channel Noise

The twins are conjoined, their heads bridged by a band of flesh that’s divided with no ill-effects. But there’s more to such closeness than tenuous tissue. As they grow, their troubled relationship is sustained by unspoken communication. They have parents—Hema and her lover, the generous and ebullient Dr Ghosh. They have a family—Missing Hospital, whose staff cannot lavish enough love on the children of their beloved Sister Praise. The twins have talent, perhaps even genius. It should make for a good life. But they have Abraham Verghese chatting alongside so incessantly it is difficult, oftentimes, to notice they have a life.

The trouble is, we enjoy the chatter. Verghese is a delightful raconteur, and his stories of surgical heroics and medical serendipities are just this side of the unbelievable. Readers apprenticed as long and hard in medicine as the writer might baulk at a surfeit of chestnuts, but the uninitiated will get their thrills.

The story is narrated by Marion Stone, the ‘older’ twin. ‘Missing’ Hospital is in Addis Ababa; the novel’s strength lies in its warm evocation of locale. Verghese’s talent lies in swift caricatures, sharp vignettes that capture the fleeting moment: "In the late morning, when the chill has gone, and the mist burned away, we play on the lawn till our cheeks are red. Rosina feeds us. Hunger and drowsiness blend together like the rice and curry, yogurt and bananas in our belly. It is an age of perfection, of simple appetites."

Marion and Shiva grow together—and apart. Marion is often Shiva’s voice. Their intimacy makes room for Genet—beautiful, Ethiopian and inscrutable. She is the love of Marion’s life. Marion, earnest and introspective when Verghese permits, leads the story away from Shiva who lurks in the dense shadow of Marion’s sincerity. Yet, when he erupts, Verghese won’t permit him to be bad. Both boys are blase as adults, incurious about anything outside Missing.

Addis Ababa is in a political ferment, and Marion is drawn into complicity with Genet. Instead of bringing them closer, the pact has frightening results. In Genet, Verghese has developed the proverbial ‘bad girl’—the relationship is very like that in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel of that name. The drawback here is that Marion, at 15, responds to intense injury with the sober equanimity of 50.

Since his early teens Marion has been Dr Ghosh’s companion in the hospital. His precocious clinical skills and the passion he feels for understanding disease makes him a natural for medical college. When he eventually gets there, the centre has fallen out of his world.

The reader knows what to expect—the reappearance of the missing father: the brilliant surgeon, Thomas Stone.

Brilliant, dedicated, innovative, humane, courageous and uniformly successful—the people in the book bristle with virtue; there isn’t a single bad egg in the basket. Tragedy rubs shoulders with back-slapping heartiness, there’s simply no time for pathos. Through it all the great happenings in medicine keep the narrator enthralled, and distracted from the emotional heft of his own tragedies.

The picaresque narrative of Missing runs parallel with a breathless inventory of 50 years of medical innovation and discovery. The inside jokes and aphorisms fall cleverly—too cleverly—into place in the narrative. Medicine is protagonist, not prop. A pity, for emotion, not event, sustains fiction. But there’s more here than just a story and Verghese blurs the fault lines with insight and humour. Cutting for Stone is a delightful read.