Hippocrates

Afterwards, I let her lie there for an hour, but I did not see her sleep. When I returned with another suture kit for her ear, and the plaster for her nose, I had her sit up. When I tilted her head away from me so I could see the ear in the waning light, she opened her mouth and started talking.

I had four brothers, she said.

I hesitated before I spoke. But then: I had four brothers, too, I said, swabbing her ear with cotton.

What did they do to yours? she asked me.

I dipped the needle in alcohol and lit a match to sterilize it.

The army killed one of my brothers, I said. The eldest. The second one was a Tiger. They buried him at Kopay. The third has gone overseas. And the fourth one, my younger brother – he killed himself.

The army killed all four of my brothers, she said.

I know, I said. I am very sorry.

I inserted the needle. She had made no noise before, but now she hissed at the pain.

Do you want the morphine? I asked.

No, she said. I am feeling something, you know? I want to know what is happening and if the pain goes away then that might be worse.

She was right. Pain informs. Pain draws a map. Doctors resolve to relieve pain, but pain is information, and to lose it is to lose something valuable. Pain is useful, even as a distraction. If it hurts, it is there. And if your body hurts, then your mind is occupied and cannot think too deeply about what has happened to you.

I held the pieces of her ear lobe together and tried to make the stitches small. I do not know why I thought about making her scar as small as possible. It should have been obvious to me that she no longer cared about the evidence of damage. But perhaps that was part of my job: to care on her behalf.

Am I bleeding inside? she asked.

No, just outside, I said. Her bruises were beginning to colour, the dappled plums of swelling standing out on her forehead and cheeks.

It hurts when I breathe, she said.

Her ribs were probably fractured. I picked up the morphine syringe again.

I am afraid of falling asleep, she said.

Talk to me, I said.

She talked about her brothers and I did not listen to her. I thought about my own. We did not know where Dayalan was buried, but a neighbour had told us that he had been taken into a detention centre with a classmate of his, a man whose death had been confirmed. Velan’s grave at Kopay was marked with the name of our village and the date of his death, but not the date of his birth. None of those stones had the dates of birth – my mother said the Tigers did not want to remind people how young some of the rebels were. And Aran was gone, spirited out of the country by an old professor who had seen that his prize student’s engineering intelligence would go to ballistics and weaponry if he stayed. Seelan had joined the Tigers, only to bite his cyanide capsule not at a moment of torture, but in a moment of loneliness. Some people told us he had died fighting, but one of his friends had come to us and told the truth.

Saavi was starting to speak slower, her voice slurring from the morphine, and I wished that I could share it, that I could lean over, exchange the syringe and pump my own arm full of sleep, that I could lie down next to her on the sheet, that we could both close our eyes and not worry. She was beautiful, and she was shorter than me, but we were not so different: two girls, from villages in Jaffna, each of us with four brothers, gone.

What about their bodies? she said. What will happen to their bodies? What will my parents do?

Go to sleep for now, I said.

She sobbed suddenly and finally – a dry, sharp sob that sounded almost like a cough. She closed her eyes, but I stayed awake by her for a long time.

I was grateful that day that I had been there to treat her. I had gone to the Tigers because of my belief that everyone deserved medicine. Still, treating them felt like wading into swampy territory. This felt different: it felt like pure medicine, medicine the way I had dreamed of it as a child. Sitting with her in the tent, at that moment, I thought that finally I had a patient whose treatment itself held no consequences, a patient who could go back to her village and lead a life – a damaged life, but a life made slightly more bearable by what I had done. I thought, truly, that someday we might both be able to return to the places where we had been born. I did not know then that I would leave. I did not know that she would go into that building, that she would ride the elevator to the top floor.