'Unknown': a translated Tamil short story

A note from the translator:.Born in 1986 in a village in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, Mayilan G Chinnappan is a prolific writer in Tamil with a focus on narrative fiction. He is a neurosurgeon by profession. His journey through the realms of medicine and literature has shaped a unique body of work that intertwines the precision of surgical procedures with the artistry of storytelling..Mayilan made his remarkable literary debut in 2020 with Prabhakaranin Postmortem, a medical thriller that delves into the intricacies of the human psyche. Since then, he has published three collections of short stories Nooru Roobilgal, Anaamatheya kathaigal, Sirungaaram) and a novella (Muppogam). In 2023, he was awarded the title of “Inspiring Icon for Literature” by Puthiya Thalaimurai, a leading Tamil news channel. In the same year, he received the CODISSIA Young Writers Award (Fiction) for his short story collection Sirungaaram. Mayilan lives and works as a neurosurgeon in Tiruchirappalli, a major urban centre in Tamil Nadu. .Translator: .N Kalyan Raman is a translator of contemporary Tamil fiction and poetry into English. Over the past 25 years, he has published translations of 15 works of Tamil fiction by important writers such as Ashokamitran, Poomani, Devibharathi, Perumal Murugan, Vaasanthi and Salma. His translations of contemporary Tamil poets have been published widely in journals and anthologies in India and abroad. Kalyan Raman also writes on cinema, politics and literature for leading journals and magazines in India. His translation of Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi was shortlisted for the inaugural JCB Prize (2018), as well as longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature (2020) and awarded the Sahitya Akademi’s Translation Prize – English (2022). In 2017, he received the prestigious Pudumaipithan Award for his contribution to the cause of Tamil literature through his translations. He lives and works in Chennai..Support Southasian literature, become a Himal Patron today!.Nothing annoyed Kishore more than early morning calls, especially insipid calls from the hospital. Deep in the netherworld of sleep, his subconscious mind reassured him that the call was not meant for him, that he could ignore it and wander about in dreams fit for a twenty-six-year-old..Sixth call. When at last a yawning Kishore answered, Sister Nirmala was ranting in disgust at the other end. “Sir, your Rajaraja Chozhan locked himself inside the toilet for forty-five minutes. We had to break down the door to drag him out. Please transfer him to the general ward today.”.Since this was not an unexpected development, Kishore replied with a nonchalant air, “Alright, Sister. We’ll take care of it when I am on my rounds.” “No, sir. I’ll transfer him right now. Just issue the transfer note once you are here,” she persisted. Gritting his teeth, Kishore told her, “No. We can transfer him when I am doing my rounds. Don’t call me again on this matter,” and disconnected the call. .After that, he could not go back to sleep. He had to admit to himself that the problem had reached a critical stage where it could not be evaded any longer. For certain, it would be resolved today. The time was 5:15 in the morning. He got up, walked to the hostel gate, and lit a cigarette..It happened one night, in the last week of March this year, when there had been a sudden downpour. At around two, an attendant from a 108 ambulance turned up, wheeling a patient on a stretcher into the emergency section. Blood-soaked shirt in tatters; dirt-brown matted hair that hung down in long, curly strands; a horrible stench that rose from an amalgam of vomit, blood, filth and dust. .The nurse on duty asked the ambulance attendant as she passed the stretcher, “Unknown, eh?”.“Yes, Sister.”.“How on earth do you find these specimens in this pouring rain?”.“…”.“Make an AR entry, then take this stretcher straight to the zero-delay ward and dump him there.”.“Let’s shift him to the casualty van, Sister.”.“Where can I find a person now to lift him and bring him down? Impossible. Leave him in the ward yourself.” Stretcher attendants in the hospital slipped away discreetly from the scene. .In the zero-delay ward, Kishore was the lone doctor on duty. As soon as the stretcher entered the ward, it made the relatives of other patients screw up their faces. Kishore put on a second mask..“Unknown, eh?”.“Yes, sir. Accident. He is a beggar at the entrance of the Mariyamman temple, they say. Dashing across in the rain, he was hit by a speeding vehicle.”.“Is he conscious?”.“He was raving throughout the ambulance trip, sir. Now he has lost consciousness.”.“Right. You can shift him to a bed.” .The patient was laid on the bed at the end of the ward. Vomit came gushing out of his mouth in spurts and flowed down the sides of his face. Vomit had entered and choked his windpipe, with each raspy breath sounding like the announcement of an emergency. They could let him die simply by not doing anything for ten minutes..Kishore couldn’t approach him immediately to provide emergency treatment. The man was steeped in filth and gave off a horrible stench. Kishore rolled up his shirt-sleeves and pulled on a pair of gloves. He turned the man’s chin to the left and held it there firmly, preventing further streams of vomit from entering the windpipe. A nurse and an MNA came to his assistance. A tube from the suction machine was inserted down the patient’s throat and the vomit collected there was drawn out. Kishore observed the man’s breathing for about thirty seconds. .“Sister, prepare him for intubation,” he said..“Shall we wait and see, sir? Oxygen saturation is at ninety. Shall we give him oxygen and see if he improves?”.“No, sister. If we don’t do it, he will die of aspiration. Please arrange for a ventilator.”.“That’s not the issue, sir. ET tubes are in short supply. Indent can be filed only on Tuesday. I have only six tubes in hand for emergencies. Should we use one for an Unknown and waste it?” Even as the nurse was talking to Kishore, the man vomited once more. Kishore did not ruminate further. “Sister, give me an 8.5 size tube,” he said in a peremptory tone..Just as the tube was being inserted into the throat, there was another stream of vomit. The spray spattered Kishore’s face and fell away. Finally, a tube was inserted for breathing and artificial respiration was enabled. A nursing student on duty ran to fetch the room spray and sprinkled some around the bed. The jasmine scent of the spray mingled with the reek of the vomit on Kishore and emanated a nauseating odour that brought the meal he had ingested earlier that night momentarily to his throat..The spot was cleaned up shoddily. A student house surgeon sutured the wounds on the patient’s body. He could not suture the head wounds since the barber on night duty had gotten drunk and passed out somewhere. Blood had oozed from the wounds and dried up, turning the unkempt hair on the patient’s head damp and sticky. His tattered clothes were snipped and thrown away. A screen with many holes in it was drawn around the naked patient to hide him from others’ eyes. He was covered with an old veshti that belonged to another patient who had been taken for surgery. .Kishore asked the MNA to tonsure the patient’s head. Though the man agreed somewhat half-heartedly at first, on seeing the nurse make a sign from behind Kishore’s back, he refused, claiming that he did not know how to shave heads. .“Sir, whenever he is on night duty, Alphonse sneaks away to god-knows-where after midnight. And you ask some other worker who is present here to do his job.”.“Sister, is this the time for arguments? His scalp is bleeding profusely, and I want someone to stitch up the wounds.”.“If we keep compromising like this, only those who bow down will get rapped on the head. Let that man come and tonsure the patient.” She was whining because he had wasted an ET tube, overriding her suggestion..The student house surgeon did the job himself by shaving the hair around the wounds with a blade, and sutured them. Kishore did not bother too much about it. Since it was exam season for final-year students, Kishore, who was about to complete his second year, was the senior-most post-graduate student on duty then. Assistant Professor Dr Sankaranarayanan, who was responsible for emergency admissions, would be sleeping in the duty surgeon’s lounge. Whenever he woke up, he would ask Kishore over the telephone, “No problems, I hope? Call me if you have any doubts,” and go back to sleep. In that medical college, which was the chief hospital for four districts, Kishore was in effect the captain on the bridge that night. So he decided that he was not going to strain himself overmuch about trivial issues. .Approximately forty-five minutes after his admission, the patient’s pulse started weakening. Kishore asked the staff to give the patient three bottles of saline urgently through an intravenous drip. There was no significant improvement in the pulse rate. Another student house surgeon nearby, a girl, stuck out her lip. Kishore told her, “Go and get three units of blood and come back.” She rushed off to the blood bank..Since the bleeding from external wounds had stopped, and there was no damage to the bones in his hands, legs and hip, Kishore suspected that the problem must be in the patient’s stomach. When he pressed it with his fingers, it felt harder than before, not giving way under pressure. It was a sign of possible hollow viscus injury and peritonitis setting in. When his blood pressure started dropping rapidly, Kishore plunged a needle into the abdominal cavity and drew back the syringe: blood. The loss of blood was inside the abdomen. He acted fast..“Sister, shift the unknown patient to CT.”.“Sir, for free CT scans, we need Sankaranarayanan’s signature.”.“I’ll sign in his place. Get ready to shift him.”.“He insists on taking what should go to the mortuary to the scan room and theatre,” she said aloud, as if talking to herself..The CT scan attendant insisted that for doing a free CT scan he needed the college dean’s signature along with the institution’s official stamp.“I know those rules, boss. How can we get the dean’s signature at night? Hasn’t the duty surgeon signed it?”.“No, sir. That is our standing instruction. We need the dean’s signature, or that of the chief of radiology.”.“You are demanding precisely what is impossible to get right now.”.Kishore rang up Sankaranarayanan at once. The senior doctor listened patiently to all the details. Then he said, “You say the patient’s BP is way down … why do you want to waste time taking a CT scan?”.“Sir, he has signs of solid-organ injury. The scan is to find out the status, sir. We also need to rule out head injury.”.“I can see that, man. Take him to the ward and give him fluid and blood. If his BP doesn’t pick up, wheel him to the theatre – or let him go. He is an Unknown, after all. No one is going to question you about anything. Why are you bickering with a technician late at night? They might call me for an inquiry tomorrow. Just drop it.”.Most likely, he would have gone back to sleep right after this exchange. After a minute’s pause, Kishore asked the staff to wheel the stretcher straight to the theatre. When he wondered later about what had made him take such a decision, he was surprised at himself. Here was a patient with very low blood pressure, extremely weak pulse, breathing through a ventilator, on the verge of dying – a beggar lying on the road with injuries like an orphan that no one cared about. Why had he stubbornly prepared this beggar for surgery? He felt like laughing at himself. Since everyone stood on the opposite pole with respect to this patient, his ego might have been provoked, or he might have liked the challenge of rescuing somebody on the brink of death on his own. In a situation where all the seniors had left and Sankaranarayanan would not come to the theatre, it might have been the aspiration of an overeager student to perform that difficult surgery all by himself. Or, unbeknownst to himself, he might really be a kind-hearted person..After transporting the patient to the theatre, he called Sankaranarayanan as a formality, only to receive a predictable response from the other end.“Please proceed. Call me if you run into any difficulty.” If such a “difficulty” arose and he called him, Kishore knew what Sankaranarayanan would say: “No problem, ’pa. Just close things up. Well, you did your best. What more am I going to do if I come there?”.The nurse who was on duty in the theatre said, “Sir, since the patient is an unknown, I informed Matron. She said that you must inform the RMO and get his consent.”.“I know, Sister. I’ll take care of it. Please focus on your shift here.”.“No, sir. Matron told me not to do the shift without informing the RMO.”.“All right, lady. I’ll talk to him. Please get on with your work. Don’t keep delaying it for personal reasons,” Kishore said as he called the RMO on the telephone. .“Sir, this is Surgery PG Kishore speaking. We are about to do a laparotomy on an unknown patient. Just want to keep you informed.”.“Who is the surgeon on duty?”.“Dr Sankaranarayanan, sir.”.“No problem, then. He will take care of everything. Carry on.”.Sankaranarayanan was custom-built for getting along with senior officers in the administration. During his duty hours, there was no scope for unnecessary interference, no complaints from him about running out of this or that item, or about the shortage of manpower – his complaisance left no room for squabbles. For all that, he would never come out of his lounge during his working hours. No higher-up was concerned about whether work was getting done or about the quality of the work. The machine had to keep running without any problems, that was all. .For the next three hours, it was Kishore’s own kingdom. Though he had performed countless surgeries over the past year without the help of seniors, if something went wrong somewhere he could always depend on senior students for help. During the last two surgeries under similar circumstances, Dr Shenbagaraman was on duty. He was the exact opposite of Sankaranarayanan. By now, to settle the argument over the CT scan, he would have roused the dean from sleep. For not showing up to tonsure the patient, Alphonse would have received a memo. For refusing to do the job despite being present and on duty, he would have made the MNA beg for mercy. Now this was an acid test for Kishore. He prepared himself for it without a second thought..He made an incision across the abdominal cavity and looked inside – there was a litre and a half of blood. The patient’s spleen was shattered. There were three lacerations in the small intestine and one in the large intestine. The spleen, which had cracked and crumbled, was removed. He started repairing the damaged portions of the intestines. Belying the notion that artistry was elegance achieved through working patiently, Kishore’s hands moved swiftly and delicately at the same time..To transport the patient to the ICU after the operation, a stretcher was not readily available. He knew that it wouldn’t be. Who would come forward to push the stretcher of an unknown patient, with no prospect of tips? After the surgery was over, Kishore was watching everything for more than half an hour without taking off his blood-spattered gown and gloves. .“If you tell me the rate for a stretcher. I’ll pay.” The job was done only after he yelled at them. The patient was finally delivered to the ICU at 7:15 that morning. To a friend on ICU duty, Kishore said with a wink and smile, “This man must survive. I don’t know what you’ll do, but keep him alive somehow,” and left..The next day at ten in the morning, Kishore briefed Dr Shenbagaraman during his rounds about the patient and what had transpired the previous night. Shenbagaraman got on the telephone with the hospital supervisor to ask why certain vaccines that were required to be administered after the spleen was removed were not available in the hospital’s pharmacy. Meanwhile, the head professor had arrived..“What’s the matter, Shenbagaraman? You seem perturbed so early in the morning.”.“Good morning, sir. An emergency splenectomy was done last night. Unknown patient. I am asking about the availability of vaccines for that patient.”.“They won’t be of much use, sir. Leave it. No need.”.Shenbagaraman never argued further with people who were stuck with what they learnt in their college days and refused to accept the discoveries of today’s science..“Who did the splenectomy – Kishore?”.“Yes, sir.”.“When we were in college, splenectomy cases were taken up only by the chief. PGs couldn’t go anywhere near them. But you’ve done it all by yourself in your second year. You should give us a treat, man.”.“Sure, sir… after the patient recovers.” As soon as he said it, Kishore realised that he shouldn’t have made such a remark.“So, even you have decided that he won’t survive.” A loud guffaw..Kishore offered no reply..Shenbagaraman intervened and said, “About those vaccines… can you speak to the dean and arrange through local purchase, sir?” “Unknown, after all. Put your shoulders down.” Again, the same laughter..At one that afternoon, Shenbagaraman sent the vaccines from his private nursing home. At long last, the dean’s signature had been obtained and a CT scan of the patient’s head had been taken. It revealed a linear crack on the occiput and some minor contusions on the frontal lobe. Though the head injury did not require surgery, the trauma was severe enough to make the patient lose consciousness. Once it became clear that the patient would need mechanical ventilation for a few days or weeks, Kishore informed Shenbagaraman..“In that case, get a tracheostomy done tonight. Unknown patient. The man is very odd. If all the staff stay away from him because of the stench, he may die of a blocked tube.”.Though he was overcome by physical exhaustion from lack of sleep the past thirty-six hours, Kishore made a hole in the patient’s throat that very night and enabled continuous artificial respiration. For the next two days, there was no problem. On the afternoon of the third day, when he entered the ICU casually on some other work, the unknown patient was missing from the bed allotted to him..“It seems the new patient is the father of Ganapathi Babu’s housemaid. Liver abscess. He was admitted only a short while ago at eleven, but they operated on him in no time and brought him to the ICU. The dean himself followed behind the stretcher. It seems he got the post only through the ruling party’s influence. He has that loyalty. They are also of the same caste,” Kishore’s friend on ICU duty explained..“That is no reason to take away this man’s ventilator, is it? Don’t you have any other machines?”.“Out of a total of twelve, only four are running properly. No one has come from the supplier to service the machines. If they are operated round the clock without pause, how could they not get damaged?”.“Without ventilator support, the man might collapse and die, da.”.“What do you want me to do? The dean himself ordered me to remove it and put this fellow on it.”.“Instead of being treated like this, the man would have been better off dying at the accident spot.”.“Don’t get tense. He is coping well without a ventilator. I, too, thought that he would be knocked out once the machine was removed, but he is standing upright like a pole. Come and see for yourself.”.Kishore was not happy. The man did show signs of difficulty in breathing and extreme fatigue. In a few hours, his suffocation would get worse and he would die. It was the inexorable truth..“If they need a ventilator so badly, they should arrange to service the machines that are out of order. Instead of that, they are snatching a man’s life-breath and giving it to someone else.” In his mind, he spat at them in disgust. In no position to do anything further, he told his friend wearily, “Make sure that things don’t deteriorate.”.“He’ll come around, machi. Leave it to me. I’ll take care.” .How can this guy ensure that the patient’s condition doesn’t go downhill? When the patient is choking, will he blow air into his lungs with his mouth? If the patient declines, he will document it in his report. That is all he can do. If the suffocation becomes acute, a curtain will be placed around the bed. This “curtaining off” is roughly the equivalent of “Anyone who wants to see the face one last time can do so now”..If the same patient had some relative waiting at the door of the ICU, would they have shifted his ventilator like this? Just because he was an unknown, he was treated like garbage.“Even if you or I were seriously ill and lying in the ICU, they would give our ventilator to someone else if the MLA asked them to.”.Kishore tried to get over the outrage. There was no use brooding about it. It was not the first time. Even death was something he was inured to. Still, the man deserved to survive. Why did some passerby notice him in the pouring rain as he lay on the road with grave injuries? Why did that passerby, instead of moving on, call the 108 ambulance? Why did this man cling on to his life instead of dying right there at the accident spot? Why did Kishore give up his sleep at dawn and perform this operation for three hours, overcoming fatigue and exhaustion? If some meaning was contained in everything that had happened, what was the meaning now of all these chance events?.Even if there was such a thing, all of it had been rendered meaningless by a politician’s phone call. Though Kishore was hardly the type to worry about all the begging bowls in the universe, he was inclined to fill the hands that were stretched out before him. What could he do in this matter? He could not say anything against the MLA. He could not speak up against the dean. He could not even say anything against Sankaranarayanan. He was merely one among the millions of citizens that Indian democracy had created. He had no option but to accept it..Before leaving, he told his friend not to inform him if there was any deterioration in the unknown patient’s respiratory efforts and he passed away; then he walked away briskly from the ICU. .Follow all things books in Southasia. Sign up for our monthly Southasia Review of Books newsletter!.What a fine salve is sleep for the troubled mind. It sows so many lame excuses deep down in our minds and turns us into insensitive cretins. What better armament does one need in life than being insensitive? By the next morning, Kishore harboured no anger against anyone. Calmly, he got ready for the day..When he entered the ICU, as expected, some other patient was lying in the bed. Despite the equanimity afforded by the passage of time, he was assailed by a strange feeling of chagrin. It was not anger. It could be called a sense of defeat. As he was leaving the ICU after examining two of his patients there, the duty nurse interrupted him and said, “We needed an ICU vacancy this morning. Of everyone here, he was somewhat stable. That’s why we have shifted him downstairs to the post-op ward.”.“Who?”.“That unknown case.”.A tremor passed through Kishore for a moment. Even though he rushed downstairs and saw the man as a living being, and the screens surrounding him confirmed that he was indeed alive, when, upon touching him with his hand, that body yielded a slight movement, Kishore was shaken to his core and broke out in gooseflesh. Just because the man was a destitute, how could life be denied to him? His was a grand life that redeemed itself, casting the rules of the world aside..After that day, his health remained on the upswing. His breathing became regular. On the seventh day, they inserted a tube through his nose to the stomach and started feeding him. Once he was able to open his eyes and look around, he was seated in a chair. Though he seemed unemotional in general, they said that he smiled faintly only when he saw Kishore. With the hair on his head and beard shaved off completely, his face looked like a thin skull covered by dark skin. The tracheostomy tube was removed from his throat. Having lost control of his faculties because of the head trauma, he kept babbling and screaming. Most of the time, he had to be restrained in the bed and given sedatives. Since there were no relatives to watch over him at night, to avoid the risk of him rolling off the bed he was made to sleep on the floor .The prime mover behind all these improvements was Jegathammal Sister, the nurse in charge of the ward. More than her concern for a man in a helpless condition, it was her belief in doing her work sincerely that proved crucial. During her daily six-hour shift, she would complete everything that had to be done for the man – cleaning his teeth and body, two meals, making him sit in a chair in a well-lit spot, training him to practice walking with the help of physiotherapy interns. Jegathammal prepared that nameless person to survive in the world. When Kishore gave a few of his old clothes that he no longer used to the ward attendant, asking him to pass them on to that man, people saw the ward attendant strolling in the bazaar next evening wearing some of that clothing neatly ironed..At one stage the unknown patient started talking somewhat incoherently. To those around him, it was funny as well as disgusting. The relatives of other patients made several requests to shift him to a different ward. Kishore deliberately took no action. It would not be easy to find a sincere worker like Jegathammal Sister in any other ward. But for how much longer could he continue in the present mode? Where would it end? Kishore had not thought about these aspects at all. One day he asked the man, “What is your name?”.Without thinking, he said clearly, “Rajaraja Chozhan.”.“Which is your native village?”.“Rajaraja Chozhan.”.“Village… I am asking you, which village?”.“Rajaraja Chozhan.”.“Do you know where you are now?”.“Rajaraja Chozhan.”.During the days that followed, it was his only answer for all the questions put to him. The only good thing to come out of it was that fewer people referred to that man as an unknown. When he was able to move around on his own, the problems increased. Getting up from his bed and urinating in the middle of the ward, spewing unintelligible words of abuse, screaming at night. It was at this point that Kishore was forced to think seriously about the next stage. He consulted Jegathammal Sister. He sought answers from her experience of thirty years. .“How do we discharge unknown patients like this, Sister?”.“Many people who are admitted as unknowns become known fairly soon. Using some identity card, we can get hold of their relatives; you know that, of course. It’s easy for us. If an abandoned patient like him becomes conscious and recovers to normal health, they leave on their own. A few would refuse to go because they get three meals a day here without having to do any work. We shift them to the general ward ourselves, show them later as ‘absconded’ and close the case sheet. It’s difficult to show anyone in the ICU or post-op ward as absconded. It will create problems for us. Once in a while, we land someone like this man. He will never be in a condition to be shifted to the general ward, nor can you keep him here. Yes, it’s difficult. Nirmala Sister on the night shift is fed up already. No amount of sedatives is enough to calm him down, she says. She was whining that she should ask you to shift him to the general ward.”.“To shift him there and make him ‘absconded’?”.“Yes. I heard that he used to beg daily in some temple. We can take him in an auto and dump him there, and close the case sheet here as ‘absconded’.”.“How can we do it in his condition, Sister? Doesn’t he need support even now?”.“It’s true, but it is the only way.”.“How about some ashram or home?”.“Nothing suitable around here. We can’t confine a man like him within four walls. We should let him out.”.“No. Can you wait for a few days? I’ll ask around for a suitable home.”.Kishore inquired with two ashrams for destitute persons. They were not willing to accept a man in such a condition, who was violent and out of control. When he asked the psychiatrist at the hospital whether the man could be shifted to their ward, he wrote out a conventional prescription for four pills, said that he would need to see the patient again after two weeks, and disengaged himself..Rajaraja Chozhan’s unruly behaviour kept escalating day to day. At one stage, he began to be perceived as a nuisance by everyone, including Kishore. If the same hands are held out daily in supplication before the same person, it exhausts the kindness in the benefactor’s heart. But he could not get rid of the man. Nirmala Sister argued with him a couple of times; since it proved futile, she complained to Sankaranarayanan. .“We can transfer him to the general ward on Thursday, Sister.”.Kishore knew it. Sankaranarayanan was going to take leave on Thursday. If the patient was “absconded” on Thursday, he wouldn’t have to sign on the form. That was his calculation..That Thursday was today; hence the early morning call. It was 8:50 now. He had smoked three cigarettes already since morning. He remembered the vomit that had spattered his face on the first day. The reek of it. When he removed the pancreas, the blood that had dripped on his toes. Its damp stickiness. He remembered making a hole in the man’s throat and the Rajaraja Chozhans that were spewed once it was closed. What was all that for? Though a ventilator was denied to him, life was not; he had recovered and come back to life. What for? .Leaving all that aside, what would have happened if he had been cured completely? He would have walked away on his own to the temple and sat at the entrance. Beyond the clarity of mind to choose a space for himself, what else could good health restore to him? Everything seemed like a series of foregone conclusions. Kishore could not change any of them. No one could have changed those pre-ordained decisions. At one stage, all these realisations made Kishore feel dejected. He rang up Shenbagaraman and informed him that he was taking the day off. He called the post-op ward and asked them to shift Rajaraja Chozhan to the general ward. In some way, this gave him a feeling of liberation. From weariness or relief, he slept until noon. On waking up, he rang the general ward and inquired about the man. The nurse who was on the afternoon shift said that his case sheet was closed in the morning..Kishore could see it all clearly. After his transfer to the general ward, he would have been bundled into an auto with the help of some hospital attendants. He would have protested and resisted stubbornly; all along the route, he would have spewed the same meaningless words of abuse; he would have been forcibly evicted from the auto at the Mariyamman temple or some other spot. .In some corner of this sprawling city, that Rajaraja Chozhan would have certainly found a small fortress for himself. A fortress without walls or a ceiling. An animal with the jungle embedded in his memory, the sun’s heat would have been a consolation for him. Well, the heat was not going to last, was it? Even now, the sky was darkening in the west. On another rainy day, he might run across the road again. Then, too, a vehicle might come speeding down the road. It could happen at any time. Why, it could happen right now. Suddenly, a heavy rain began to pour outside; along with it, a little sunshine. The day’s fourth cigarette was dangling unlit from his lips for a long time.