Night Theatre by Vikram Paralkar: book review

Night Theatre (2020) is set in rural India in a health clinic. This book is also called The Wounds of the Dead.

Doctor Saheb is a former surgeon, working for almost three years in a rural health clinic, with a female pharmacist. Her husband helps out with repairs.

A family arrive at the clinic: a male teacher, his pregnant wife, and 8-year-old son, but they are not there to receive a polio vaccine, nor assistance with the pregnancy. They have an unusual request. They need help. They all have unspeakable injuries after four men attacked them with knives, so severe that no-one could possibly survive.

The clinic has no anaesthesia, few instruments and equipment, and limited medicine. With fear and fatigue, Doctor Saheb must perform miracles. He begins with the boy.

This is the valley between life and death, the difference between knowing and understanding, a question of fate, guilt, and the atonement of past sins.

This is a blow-by-blow account of the surgeries. Yet, amid the challenging and macabre details of the operations, there are many poignant scenes. The style is intriguing for its use of metaphysics and absurdism, yet it is also exquisitely evocative, with sentences such as ‘The sun was a bag of blood sliced open by the horizon, smearing the squat brick houses.’

The novel is so well-written, and so suspenseful, that I couldn’t put it down. I had to read every word, right to its masterful end.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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