Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese Page A

dragging on a cigarette, even though he had made a big point of turning on the NO SMOKING light after they landed.
    The little boy whimpered, and Hema rocked him with an adeptness she didn't know she possessed. “I'm going to put a tiny, tiny bandage on your leg, okay? Then the hurt will be all gone.” The young Armenian somehow found a cane, and the two of them fashioned a splint.
    When the throb of the engine ceased, Hema felt the silence within the cabin press on her eardrums. The pilot looked around, a smirk on his face, as if he were curious to see how his passengers had held up. Almost as an afterthought, he said, “We are stopping to pick up some bagg-aje and some Very Important People. This is Djibouti!” He smiled and showed his bad teeth. “They did not give me permission to land unless it is emergency. So I make an engine failure.” He shrugged as if modesty prevented him from accepting their accolades.
    Hemlatha was startled to hear her own voice shatter the silence.
    “Baggage? You bloody mercenary. What do you think we are? Goats? You just shut down an engine and drop out of the sky like that and stop in Djibouti? No warning? Nothing?”
    Perhaps she should have been grateful to him, happy to be alive, but in the hierarchy of her emotions, anger was always trumps.
    “Bloody?” the pilot said, turning red. “Bloody?” he said, clambering out of the cockpit, white knees knocking under his safari shorts, as he struggled free.
    He stood before her, huffing from the effort. He seemed to take far more exception to “bloody” than “mercenary.” His contempt for this Indian woman was greater than his anger. But he had raised his hand. “I will offload you here, insolent woman, if you don't like it.” Later he would claim that he had raised his hand merely as a gesture, with no intent to strike her—God forbid that he, a gentleman, a Frenchman, would strike a woman.
    But it was too late, because Hemlatha felt her limbs move as if by their own volition, fueled by anger and indignation. She felt as if she were observing the actions of a stranger, of a Hemlatha who had not previously existed. The new Hemlatha, whose license on life had just been renewed and its purpose defined, came to her feet. She was as tall as the pilot. She could see the tiny feeder vessel in the starburst on his left cheek. She pushed her glasses up on her forehead and met him eyeball to eyeball.
    The man squirmed. He saw she was beautiful. He fancied himself a lady's man, and he wondered if he'd blown the opportunity to have drinks with her at the Ghion Hotel that evening. Only now did he notice the people huddled over the whimpering boy. Only now did he notice the father's rage, and the clenched fists of some of the other passengers who had lined up behind her.
    What a specimen, Hema thought as she studied him. Spider angiomas all over his exposed skin. Eyes tinged with jaundice. No doubt his breasts are enlarged, his armpits hairless, and his testes shriveled to the size of walnuts—all because his liver no longer detoxifies the estrogen a male normally produces. And the stale juniper-berry breath. Ah yes, she thought, coming to a diagnosis beyond cirrhosis: a gin-soaked colonial resisting the reality of postcolonial Africa. If in India they still are cowed by all of you, it is from long habit. But there are no such rules on an Ethiopian plane.
    She felt her rage boil over, and it was directed not just at him but at all men, every man who in the Government General Hospital in India had pushed her around, taken her for granted, punished her for being a woman, played with her hours and her schedule, transferred her here and there without so much as a please or by-your-leave.
    Her proximity to him, her encroachment of sacred bawana space, rattled him, distracted him. But his hand was still up there. And now, as if he just noticed it, he moved the hand, not to strike her, he would claim, but as if to determine whether it really was