His eyes were huge with fright and horror-struck resolve. I looked at him full in the face for the first time, and I saw how young he was: sixteen or seventeen years old. He was wearing Puma sneakers, jeans, and a basketball singlet with the number 23 printed on the front. The clothes were Indian copies of famous western brands, but they were considered fashionably hip by his peers in the slum, other young men with lean bellies and heads full of scrambled foreign dreams; young men who went without food to buy clothes that they imagined made them look like the cool foreigners in magazines and films.
I didn’t know the kid. He was one of thousands I’d never seen, although I’d been there for almost six months, and no-one in the place lived more than five or six hundred metres from my hut. Some men, such as Johnny Cigar and Prabaker, appeared to know everyone in the slum. It seemed extraordinary to me that they should know intimate details from the lives of so many thousands of people. It was even more remarkable that they cared-that they encouraged and scolded and worried about all of them. I wondered how that young man was connected to Johnny Cigar. Ameer shivered in the swirling chill of night, pressing his lips into a wide, noiseless whine as he contemplated taking needle and thread to his own flesh. I wondered how it was that Johnny, standing above him, knew him well enough to be sure he would do it; to nod at me with the message,
‘Okay, okay, I’ll do it,’ I surrendered. ‘It’s going to hurt. I haven’t got any anaesthetic.’
‘Hurt!’ Johnny boomed happily. ‘Pain is no problem, Lin. Good you have pains, Ameer, you
I sat Ameer down on my bed, covering his shoulders with another blanket. Pulling the kerosene stove from my kitchen box, I pumped it up, primed it, and set a pot of water on it to boil. Johnny hurried off to ask someone to make hot, sweet tea. I washed my face and hands hurriedly, in the dark, at the open bathroom-space beside my hut. When the water boiled, I put a little into a dish, and threw two needles into the pot to sterilise them with further boiling. Using antiseptic and warm soapy water, I washed the wound and then dried it off with clean gauze. I bound the arm tightly with gauze, leaving it in place for ten minutes to press the wound together, in the hope that it would make the stitching easier.
Ameer drank two large mugs of sweet tea at my insistence, as a counter to the symptoms of shock that had begun to show. He was afraid, but he was calm. He trusted me. He couldn’t know that I’d only done the procedure once before, and under ironically similar circumstances. A man had been stabbed during a prison fight. The problem, between the two antagonists, whatever it was, had been resolved in the violent encounter, and the matter was finished so far as they were concerned. But if the stabbed man had reported to the prison infirmary for treatment, the authorities would’ve placed him in an isolation unit for prisoners on protection. For some men, child molesters and informers particularly, there was no alternative to being placed on protection because they wouldn’t otherwise have survived. For others, men placed there against their will, the protection unit was a curse: the curse of suspicion, slanders, and the company of men they despised. The stabbed man had come to me. I’d stitched his wound closed with a leatherwork needle and embroidery thread. The wound healed, but it left an ugly, rippling scar. The memory of it never left me, and I wasn’t confident about the attempt to stitch Ameer’s arm. The sheepish, trusting smile that the young man offered me was no help.
I drank tea, smoked a cigarette, and then set to work. Johnny stood in the doorway, ineffectually scolding several curious neighbours and their children away from the door. The suture needle was curved and very fine. I supposed that it should’ve been used with some kind of pliers. I had none in my kit. One of the boys had borrowed them to fix a sewing machine. I had to push the needle into the skin, and pull it through with my fingers. It was awkward and slippery, and the first few cross-shaped stitches were messy. Ameer winced and grimaced inventively, but he didn’t cry out. By the fifth and sixth stitches I’d developed a technique, and the ugliness of the work, if not the pain involved, had diminished.
