Rohit Gupta

 

The Dead Sea

 

When the doctor saw the state of the baby after only seven days of its birth, he fired the wet nurse, only to hear her say, "How can I tell he's
hungry? He doesn't cry!"

"That's ridiculous. Any fool can tell when someone's hungry. There is always a sign. Look at him, there's no energy. No food."

So they all looked at him, and the only thing they did notice, besides the glaring malnutrition, was a small red boil on the baby's neck.

Next day the doctor hired a different wet nurse, gave her detailed directions (which included the purchase of a good mosquito net) and went
about his business of curing people. His newborn son, the silent baby, was fed more or less at regular intervals, mostly the same protein rich foods from the supermarket. He grew up into a sullen lad, very mindful of his hours, and placid beyond his years. Most people construed him to be an exceptionally insensitive man and, gradually, as his age became more unforgiving, they started calling him Mr. Stone.

When beggars saw him they ran away, and rumor spread that his sight would bring seven days of no alms, which is considered bad luck in some countries. At work they made fun of him, by pretending to be unable to distinguish the Xerox copier with his desk. At least the machine had a low hum of its gears, in contrast to which Mr. Stone rarely emitted the slightest whisper, whether he was cold or sad, suffering in some sickness or simply tired. When his body had had too much for a fortnight, it simply shut down for a few hours. Mr. Stone would collapse in board meetings, shopping malls, coffee houses and bars, at his home, in the train, on the sidewalk.

Sometimes when people would notice his boil, he would say, "I've had it since birth. It came with me." People would twist their lips and tell him
about a cousin of theirs who was born with a hole in one earlobe.

Like salmons jostling against a dam, like a giant saline lake, his life kept accumulating. Mr. Stone still hadn't shed a tear in his entire life.

One evening, in a beautiful spring that the city had never seen, he sat pecking contemplatively at his dinner in a downtown restaurant. The spring
brought no joy to him, until some molecules strayed towards his nose. Overpowering the smell of hot lentils in spice, rising above the steam from
the rice, and subduing the miscellaneous vapors from the kitchen door, a singular streak of jasmine filled his lungs, and his teeth stopped chopping the morsel they were working on. His muscles stiffened like they had never before, and he became aware of another presence.

Afraid that it might just be his imagination, he dared not look in the direction that smell came from. A storm was building up in his head, and
there was only one way he could prevent himself from imploding.

She was sitting squarely, perfect in every visible aspect, her cutlery neatly waiting like the blades of soldiers guarding a strategic fort, less
in number but ready to die at the slightest cause for the treasures they protected. Every droop of her eyelids was a wave that swept the world in
blue. So painted by a genius was every frame in her animation, that she barely seemed to move at all. She stayed still while the space around her
curved like an obedient djinn.

She finished her dinner in an instant, he felt, though any clock would have argued the matter with conviction. When she picked up the glass of wine and drained it, their eyes met, and before it reached the table, the glass knew that something had changed about the hand that held it, and the way it felt about the universe in general. It felt the imperceptible shudder that no one could see.

On the other hand, the plight of Mr. Stone was inconsolable. You have to know what it feels like to have every limb and bone in your body to have a personal heart attack of its own.

Meanwhile, the woman had settled her dues and had started walking away. With each resounding step of hers, receding towards a tragedy, every smell becoming a vision, he saw the reason why hearts have no bone. When the ordeal ended, he fainted.

Three days later he woke up in a government hospital, feeling suicidal. The doctor, deftly preparing another jab of some anesthetic, told him thus: "A lot of doctors will tell you, hell, even people will tell you, that everything has a reason. Every effect has a cause behind it, they say. I say
they haven't come in for an enema often enough. When buildings are blown apart and children die, there's an asshole behind it. Now, open your mouth wide and say, aa!"

"You need rest, but not here, preferably in a private nursing home. Here, keep my card. There'll be a van waiting for you outside the hospital gates."

"I don't think I need to, if I'm discharged, I should catch up with work. What day is it?"

"Okay, suit yourself." Before he made his exit, the doctor turned around and asked him, "By the way, it could have been the food. There was a woman at the same restaurant, who was brought in sick too. I've shifted the poor girl to private care, as you should be. Now, don't eat brinjal for a few days, puts too much water in your boil. And at least one bottle of lager a day, it 's a good diuretic. You never know these days."

Next morning when Mr. Stone groggily left the hospital, the van was there at the gates. Speedily, it delivered him to the private clinic. The girl who he had seen at the restaurant had already left, in a waterfall of tears.

"This is getting uglier and uglier," said the doctor, inspecting the bulbous protuberance on his neck, now the size of a ripe melon. "We need to operate soon."

"Jenny!" he shouted for the nurse, "here's another one of those!"

So they operated on him and punctured the boil. After the operation, which was wholly successful, he walked out of the hospital to search for the woman who was responsible for all this.

After a few hours, when he hadn't found her anywhere--in the public malls, the libraries and the bus stops, he walked into a bar and sat down. On the TV there was the news of a disaster, and then another and another and another. Mr. Stone found that his eyes were swelling somewhere underneath, and soon enough, there issued from them a kind of fluid, which he now knew to be tears. For an hour or so he cried for strangers dying on television.

"There is another like you here today," said the barman. And he pointed to a dark corner of the bar where a woman sat sobbing, loo