In the evening of a tiring day at work, a nameless surgeon in a nameless Indian village is already preparing to close his wretched, nameless clinic (there are cockroaches in the corners, old instruments, no medicine), when suddenly a strange trinity appears on his doorstep: a young man, his wife on the runway, and a little wobbly boy, their son. All three are terribly pale and look exhausted, and when the woman unwinds the handkerchief, the surgeon sees with horror that she has wounds on her neck that are clearly incompatible with life. In response to the surgeon's silent question, the man who came (in the future, the author will call him a teacher, since he used to teach at school) decides to tell his story - and ask for help.
"The lack of gods in the clinic troubled her, though. In a place that people visited for fear of death there needed to be some source of hope." ― Vikram Paralkar, Night Theater
On the way from the fair, he, his pregnant wife and little son became victims of robbers, who robbed them of all their valuables, and then killed them. After spending some time in the afterlife, the teacher managed to beg one of the local ministers for the right to a second chance: he and his family can return to earth for one night, and if during this time the doctor will be able to sew up and heal their wounds, then with the onset of dawn the blood will again will flow through their veins, their lungs will be filled with air and they will be able to return to the world of the living. If the doctor refuses to help them (or simply does not cope with the task), then with the first ray of the sun all three will die a second time - this time completely.
After a short hesitation, the surgeon decides to help the aliens - and his clinic turns into a night anatomical theater. In the wrong light from an old lamp, a surgeon will mend the dead, curse the poverty of the public health system, hastily deal with a bribe-seeking local official, and anxiously await sunrise. The teacher will share with the surgeon the news from the other world (in his description it appears as a Kafkaesian institution with a clear hierarchy of bureaucratic angels, but without a hint of the presence of God), the surgeon, in turn, will tell the teacher for what sins he himself was expelled from the paradise of a large city hospitals in the purgatory of the village first-aid post. Fear and mistrust will give way to irritation, understanding, and then warm sympathy, until - closer to dawn - additional details emerge in the history of the dead that will force the surgeon to take a fresh look at the events of the passing night.
The sensational debut novel by Vikram Paralkar, a native of Mumbai and now an oncologist in one of the American hospitals, is an intricate ethical charade with a whole set of possible keys. What will change in the soul of an atheist surgeon upon the news that the afterlife still exists - does it somehow modify his behavior or not? Where do the boundaries of compassion lie, and is it legitimate to extend the usual moral norms to those who themselves are outside of them due to the fact that they simply do not belong to our world? What can be at stake to save your own family - and should someone who is in danger through your fault be informed about the possible risks?
The heroes, deprived of any expressed individuality (it is no coincidence that none of them have names - "surgeon", "pharmacist", "teacher", "teacher's wife", "husband of a pharmacist", "boy") do not pretend to the reader's love and empathy - they are just puzzle elements that the reader can rearrange and reassemble in different ways, achieving the most harmonious pattern. However, no matter how entertaining the reflections with which Paralkar entertains his reader throughout the endlessly stretching night of the novel (and these reflections can really be very entertaining), in fact, at the end we still expect to receive the master key to the novel. It is important for us to find out what the hell is going on in the village clinic, whether the dead will come to life with the onset of morning, whether the teacher is lying about the afterlife or not, whether the afterlife official wished the heroes good or evil, giving them a second chance, and whether, in the end, it came down, the surgeon is crazy - in a word, we need some kind of reliable, tangible and clear interpretation of what is happening.
And this last reader's expectation Paralkar does not quite satisfy. All the way, effectively balancing on a fine line of extremely sharpened medical reliability and abstract metaphor, in the finale "Night Theater" lays a confident turn towards the latter, leaving the reader in deep bewilderment. Probably, in this way the author is trying to avoid the frustration, which is inevitably fraught with a clear answer to any of the above questions: any certainty kills, emasculates magic and mystery. However, it must be admitted that the path of shimmering and meaningful uncertainty chosen by Paralkar does not look much better.
This article was sponsored by Ed Ammerlaan
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