Chapter 29 #3
The question forms by itself, in my father's voice, the way it used to when I was a boy and I had done something inexplicable and he would sit me down at his desk in the library and ask, not unkindly, why, beta, why did you do that?
Not as accusation. As inquiry. As the genuine and curious question of a man who believed that every action had a reason and that locating the reason was the first step toward understanding the action.
Why am I sitting on this bed?
Why am I not in a car?
I close my eyes. I let the question do what my father taught me to let questions do: I let it find its own answer.
And what surfaces, in the dark behind my eyelids, is not Casey's face. It is not the corridor. It is not the library.
It is the rally.
I was nine years old. My father was forty-two.
He was, by the gentle insistence of my grandfather and the louder insistence of my mother, standing at a microphone on a wooden stage in a public square in Jaipur, two hours from this estate, on a hot, dry afternoon in March, addressing a crowd of perhaps three thousand people on the subject of agricultural reform.
He had not wanted to run for office. He had not, by any reasonable assessment, even wanted to be a Kapoor.
My father was a Mehrotra. He had married into the family at twenty-eight, after meeting my mother at a function in Delhi, and had spent the next fourteen years discovering, by slow accumulation, what kind of contract he had signed at his parent’s behest. He had a doctorate from Oxford in the political economy of the Mughal succession, and his ambition, the ambition that was his and not anyone else's, was to write a book that no one outside of three universities would ever read.
But the Kapoors did not marry historians.
The Kapoors married potential candidates.
And so he had agreed, with the quiet, dutiful sadness of a man who has lost an argument he was never going to be allowed to win, to stand for the Lok Sabha seat the Kapoor family had been quietly preparing for him since the engagement.
I was not at the rally. Children were not brought to rallies.
I was at the estate with Priya, who was five, and Yash, who was four, and Daadi, who was knitting on the veranda and listening to the radio.
The radio was tuned to the rally. We could hear my father's voice, tinny and far away, saying something about minimum support prices for wheat.
Then we could not hear my father's voice.
We could hear, instead, a sound that I now understand was the sound of a microphone being knocked over, and a sound that I now understand was the sound of three thousand people beginning to scream at once, and a sound that I now understand, because I have heard it many times since, in operating theatres and emergency rooms and trauma bays, was the sound of a person who has been shot in the head producing the involuntary respiratory response that follows such an injury before the body has fully registered what has happened to it.
Daadi turned the radio off. She turned it off very carefully, as if she were defusing it. Then she stood up, and she walked into the house, and I heard her on the telephone, and her voice was steady and her hands, when she came back to the veranda, were not.
“Arjun,” she said to me, “your father has been hurt. We are going to the hospital. Help me get your sister and brother ready.”
The man who shot him was twenty-three years old.
He was the son of a tenant farmer my grandfather had evicted from a property in Uttar Pradesh eleven years earlier, and he had been planning the act for, according to the documents the police later found in his rented room, approximately fourteen months.
The bullet entered my father's skull above the right ear, traversed the right temporal lobe, and lodged in the left parietal cortex, where it remained, because the neurosurgeons at Jaipur General were, with no disrespect to them, not equipped for the procedure required to extract a fragmented projectile from the dominant hemisphere of a brain that was, by the time he arrived, already showing the signs of catastrophic intracranial pressure.
They tried. I have read the surgical notes.
I requested them, when I was a medical student at Edinburgh, and Dr Helena Bourdain, my supervisor, sat with me in her office while I read them, because she understood, in the way that good mentors understand things, that I had not chosen my specialty by accident.
The notes are seventeen pages long. They describe a six-hour operation conducted by two surgeons, one of whom had been called in from his daughter's wedding, who did everything that could be done with the equipment and the imaging and the techniques available to a regional hospital in Rajasthan in 2002.
They could not retrieve the bullet. They could not relieve the pressure. They could not save him.
My father died at 11:47 on the evening of the day he gave a speech about wheat.
I was back at the estate. I was in this room, in fact.
The guest suite. Daadi had put us here because it was furthest from the front door, furthest from the telephones, furthest from the journalists who had begun to gather at the gates.
Priya and Yash had fallen asleep on this bed, this exact bed, in the corner of which I am now sitting, and I was awake, sitting precisely where I am sitting now, and Daadi came into the room at 12:14 in the morning and her face did the thing that faces do when the world has just changed and the person whose face it is has not yet caught up, and she said, very quietly, Arjun, your father has gone to be with Bhagwan.
Gone.
A word that contained nothing, that explained nothing, that gave the nine-year-old me no information whatsoever about what was happening or what would happen or what I was supposed to do.
Gone is a thing a guest does at the end of an evening.
Gone is a thing a train does when it leaves a station.
Gone is not a word that takes a father out of a body on a stage in a public square in Jaipur because a tenant farmer's son had been planning, for fourteen months, to make a political point with a firearm.
I open my eyes.
The guest suite is exactly as it was. The bed is made.
The sticker is in my hand. The lamp is on.
Nothing has changed in the room, and everything has changed in me, because I have just understood, in a way that I have spent twenty-four years not allowing myself to understand, what every choice I have made since I was nine years old has been organized around.
A bullet entered my father's brain and could not be retrieved.
So I learned, with the obsessive, monastic precision of a child who had been given a problem he believed he could solve if only he was good enough at it, how to retrieve them.
I read anatomy textbooks at twelve. I shadowed a neurosurgeon at fourteen.
I finished school. I deferred Cambridge for three years while my mother decided, with a degree of opposition I did not at the time understand, that perhaps a son who wanted to be a surgeon could be permitted to be one.
I went to Cambridge at twenty-two, when she finally relented, and to medical school at Edinburgh after that, and I chose neurosurgery, and within neurosurgery I chose paediatrics, because adult brains are mostly already what they are going to be, and children's brains are still becoming, and a fragmented projectile lodged in a developing brain is, theoretically, the most retrievable bullet of all.
I have spent years removing things from the brains of children.
I have spent years performing, on small skulls, the operation that two exhausted surgeons in Jaipur could not perform on my father.
And I have told myself, in language I find almost unbearable to look at now, that I chose the specialty because of intellectual interest and technical challenge and the elegance of microsurgical precision.
I did not choose it for any of those reasons.
I chose it because I could not save him, and the only thing left to do was save everyone else's father instead.
The sticker shifts in my hand. The hologram catches the lamplight.
And there is more. There is, my father would say, sitting at his desk in the library, always more, beta, you have only located the first answer, look for the second one.
I do not control because I am precise. I am precise because I do not control.
I lay out my scrubs the night before because if I do not, something will happen.
I index my notebook because if I do not, something will happen.
I wrap my produce in cellophane because if I do not, something will happen.
The something is never specified. The something has never been specified, because the something already happened, and it happened when I was nine years old at this estate, in this room, on a March evening in 2002, and a man whose name I know and whose face I have seen in court documents and whose sentencing I attended at sixteen, took my father out of the world because my family had not been careful enough.
Because someone had evicted someone. Because someone had not anticipated the consequence.
Because a Kapoor had stood on a stage in a public square and trusted the architecture of public life to hold him, and the architecture had not held him, and the lesson — the lesson, which is the thing my father always wanted me to take from a difficult experience — was that nothing holds unless you yourself are holding it.
So I held everything.