Cutting for Stone

The narrative flashed back to Thomas’s childhood in Madras, India, in Fort St. George, a British enclave. His mother is a tutor, and his father, 20 years older, travels for work. His mother becomes religious and dotes on Thomas, rarely leaving his side. She is diagnosed with tuberculosis and taken away to a hospital. Thomas is left with his nanny and is angry with his mother for leaving him. His father, however, does not stop traveling or working. Thomas misses his mother and gets letters from her. One morning, there is blood on Thomas’s pillow, and they take him to his mother’s hospital. They live together at the hospital and are once again inseparable. Thomas gets better, but his mother does not. One night, while she is reading to him, an aneurysm on her chest erupts, and she bleeds to death.

After her death, Thomas remains at the hospital, and his health worsens. Eventually, they have to operate on him using local anesthesia, and during the surgery, Thomas questions the surgeon, Dr. Ross, about aspects of it. As he heals, the doctor continues to explain everything, and Thomas is a strong, interested student, even though he thinks that he is just waiting to die. One day, the doctor invites him on rounds at the hospital.

Thomas recovers after a year and a half at the hospital. His father never comes to visit him, and Dr. Ross becomes his legal guardian and arranges for him to attend boarding school in England. Later, Ross writes that his father is dead, and his inheritance will pay for school and university.

Thomas attends medical school in Edinburgh with single-minded intensity. He realizes that his father had cirrhosis and syphilis, and his mother died of syphilis, which produced the aneurysm. By his final year of medical school, Thomas is always at the hospital and even purchases his own cadaver for dissection. During World War II, he works in a field hospital and then returns to Scotland. Dr. Ross is diagnosed with cancer, so Thomas returns to India and cares for him until his death.

After Ross’s death, Thomas stays in Madras but then answers an ad for Missing Hospital and sails for Ethiopia. He meets Sister Mary Joseph on the ship. Since Sister’s death, Thomas has decided that work creates happiness, and he believed it up until he met Marion.

After Sister’s death, Thomas flees to America with the help of Eli Harris. He does not remember the trip, and after two weeks in America, he has detoxed from his alcohol addiction. He is in New Jersey and stays in bed, retreating from the world and recovering from his mental health crisis.

While recovering, he remembers how in Missing, he would periodically drink to escape his terror and fear. Sister was the only one who could soothe him in these states, and on one such occasion, they had sex. He did not remember this fact until after he was in America. Even though now he knows that the twins are his, he stays away because he believes he has nothing to offer them.

After Thomas tells his story, Marion sees him as a person for the first time. Thomas then saves the surgery program at Marion’s hospital by making it an affiliate of his Boston hospital. As a result, residents from Boston come to do rotations, and the New York residents go to Boston to do the same. Deepak finally becomes board-certified, and Thomas ensures that his article gets published.

A few months after they meet, Thomas invites Marion to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant. At the restaurant, Marion is reminded of home. The waitress is delighted that they share a language, and “Tizita” plays in the background. Marion loves feeling like an insider, and he does not tell the waitress that Thomas is his father. Thomas asks if he wants to finish his residency in Boston, but Marion does not want to leave Our Lady. He considers it his new Missing. The waitress tells him of a place in Boston, Queen of Sheba’s, where he can get authentic Ethiopian food.

Thomas returns Sister’s bookmark to Marion and asks if he also has the letter referenced in the message. Marion always assumed Thomas had it, but he does not. Marion tells Thomas the story of his escape from Ethiopia and then mentions Shiva, whom they have never discussed before. He tells Thomas about their rift and Shiva’s gift of Thomas’s book. Thomas is so upset that Marion says he will ask Shiva if he has the letter. Marion is not quite ready to forgive Thomas, but he does finally pass on Ghosh’s message that he considers Thomas a brother. Marion begins to empathize with Thomas and also recognizes that if Thomas had taken them, the twins’ lives would have been a disaster.

Every month, Marion calls Hema and talks to Almaz, Gebrew, and Matron as well. He told Hema about finding Thomas Stone and the entire story of their interaction. This time, he reports on his dinner with Thomas and asks Hema about the missing letter. She calls Shiva to the phone, and he tells Marion that he never found the letter. Ghosh gave him the book, which he took from Thomas’s room on the day of their birth. Shiva asks him about the operating theaters at his hospital and then asks when he is coming home. Marion invites Shiva to visit instead, and Shiva agrees, as long as he can see the operating theaters. The next time Marion calls, Hema reports that no one in Missing knows about the letter, and Shiva appears to have lost interest in visiting.

For four years, Marion sees Thomas at conferences and observations, but they do not have dinner again. When Marion goes to Boston, he is too busy to feel strange about Thomas, and he even assists him in surgery occasionally. The next year, 1986, Marion is ready to take his exam to become a board-certified surgeon. That same year, Shiva becomes globally famous for his work on fistulas and his efforts to educate women about them. Marion reads about Shiva’s success in the New York Times and is conflicted, still feeling angry about what happened between them. After his oral exams, Marion knows he has passed. When he gets into the taxi, his driver is Ethiopian. Remembering what the woman in the Ethiopian restaurant said, he asks to be taken to the Queen of Sheba’s.

The Queen of Sheba’s is on a desolate street, the only building amid vacant lots. Once inside, Marion finds a small dining room that looks as if it is in Addis, full of Ethiopians, and he feels at home. While he is eating, the Queen herself arrives, and Marion realizes that it is Tsige, whose hand he had held while her baby died. Tsige recognizes him and tells everyone their story.

Later, she tells him that she left Addis just a few months after he did. She came to Boston and worked her way up to owning the restaurant, which has become the first stop in Boston for Ethiopians who are immigrating. Then she tells him that Genet is in Boston as well. She came to Tsige as a refugee with a baby and claimed to know nothing about Marion’s escape. Eventually, she went to New York, but Tsige heard that she is not there anymore. There were rumors that she got married, nearly killed her husband, and is now in prison, her baby given up for adoption. When Tsige offers to arrange a visit at the prison, he says he never wants to see her again. She is surprised, having thought of them as siblings, and he tells her the whole story about Shiva and Genet’s betrayal.

When he relates the story, Marion realizes that he has told no one else that it was Shiva, not him, who had sex with Genet. Tsige tells him that Shiva wanted to have sex with her, but she refused. She also says she would not have refused Marion. Marion admits that he is a virgin, after first saving himself for Genet and then immersing himself in his studies. He thinks they are going to have sex, but she tells him that since he has waited so long, he should think about it first. Marion wonders why he cannot seem to leave the past behind.