It is not an exaggeration to say doctors have an organic relationship with death. Physicians, especially surgeons, come face-to-face with death almost every day. And this familiarity builds in them a nonchalance that helps them negotiate, understand and decipher death, as well the dead, not just as a biological phenomenon but as a philosophical process as well. Arguably, that could be a reason why doctor-writers can instil in their works a closer understanding of the much simpler act of dying and, as a result, the complex art of living. One senses this pretty quickly while reading, say, Siddhartha Mukherjee, oncologist and the author of, what he calls, a military history of cancer — The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer , or the writings of the US-born Indian-origin surgeon Atul Gawande or even Kavery Nambisan.
The closeness and camaraderie they have with death — and life — helps doctors visualise these phenomena in ways that might seem confusingly unreal to others. This perplexity is vividly illustrated in Paul Kalanithi’s painfully sketched autobiographical notes on his life and fatal battle with cancer — When Breath Becomes Air , where he is both the doctor and a patient. To these writers, the reality of death is so up-close that the images emerging out of it might be rather unsettling, as well as revealing, especially when they employ the magic of fiction to capture those experiences.
Such an experience is eerily unravelled in
Evidently, Paralkar is not bothered about the ‘why’ and ‘what’ in his narrative. Why do these three characters appear at the isolated clinic at that hour? Are they really dead? Why does the surgeon agree to their request? Are these events real? One doesn’t get answers. As the narrative progresses, it resembles a mesh of intestines inside a human body, and several questions pop up and go unanswered. One soon realises the absurdity of such mundane concerns even as the surgeon and his ‘dead’ visitors engage in a labyrinthine and Kafkaesque conversation, a discourse on death, village life, human ties, power relations, caste, class and even god.
But Paralkar is no Capote. And he is not constrained by the limited bandwidth of non-fiction; so he takes wild liberties to blend the bizarre with the phantasmal and the allegorical (“Our wounds don’t hurt. We don’t feel any pain for the rest of the night.”) to create an eerily beautiful meta-fiction that demands changes in the way we experience art. This liberates the novel from the shackles of providing a meaning or a message, and attains a unique identity. Such fiction, which demands a course-correction, is a reader’s delight. Always.