Right of Thirst by Frank Huyler: book review

Right of Thirst (2009) is set in an undisclosed location in an indefinite time among unnamed villages in which conflict and natural disasters are evident. However, from the story it is not difficult to deduce the location.

The narrator is cardiologist Charles Anderson. At 58 years, after the death of his wife, he embarks on volunteer relief work after an earthquake devastates villages in mountainous regions. The “right of thirst” refers to a scripture of the Islamic faith in which a person must give water or a beverage, such as tea, to travellers – in this case, Charles.

Living in a tent, in a winter of frequent snowfalls and avalanches, his job is to administer medical assistance to refugees. He treats a line of ‘patients’ and attends to arthritis, toothache, skin infections, a scarred hand, and a man with a failing heart. “I’ll give him some pills … and his breathing will improve. He’ll feel better for awhile” but “he’s an old man with a bad heart and there’s nothing anyone can do … He’ll be dead soon.”

From a village emerges a family with a young girl. She has a crushed foot, damaged after a rock fell on it while she was gathering firewood weeks previously. “Her foot was black, twice the size of the other … pus began oozing from the deep, jagged, scabbed-over wound.” He knew he’d have to amputate her foot. “An amputation is a simple thing. But I’d never done one and had only the dimmest memory, across a gulf of thirty years, as a medical student … I could remember nothing more than that.” But it was a remote and isolated location, and soldiers of two nations were in conflict.

The genesis of the story, says the author in a postscript, is from his time trekking in the 1990s in northern Pakistan and of two historical events afterwards – the Kargil conflict between Pakistan and Indian troops in 1999 and the Kashmir earthquake of 2005.

The novel is a thought-provoking expose of the fragility of life in a remote and isolated location, and what little one person, or a handful of relief workers, can do to ease the suffering of villagers, not only in times of natural and man-made disasters, but in an ongoing effort to ease poverty, sickness, and despair.

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