Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [142]
“I'm right-handed, and Shiva's left-handed. The swirl on the back of my head is on my left. Shiva's is on the right.”
My hand went to my nose, again something I wasn't telling her. A month before the coup, I had a confrontation with Walid, who'd been teasing me over my name (such an easy target). I found myself flattened by a head butt—a testa—and the fight went out of me. Testa—Italian for “head”—some claim is an ancient Ethiopian martial art, but if so, there are no dojos, no belts, just lots of broken noses. The only defense against the “big knuckle” is to lower your head. Walid used his testa when I wasn't expecting it.
To my surprise, Shiva helped me up. Shiva was so tuned to the distress of animals and pregnant women, yet he could be blissfully unaware of the pain of other humans, especially if he was the cause. I watched in astonishment as Shiva confronted Walid. Walid's answer was another testa. Their frontal bones met with a sickening clash. When I could bear to look, I saw Shiva standing as if nothing had happened. The junior boys came running like vultures around carrion, because the fall of a bully makes big news. Walid was supine on the ground. He came to his feet and tried it again. The dull thud of their heads left me in mortal fear for Shiva. But Shiva hardly blinked while Walid was out cold with a big gash on his skull. When he eventually returned to school, he was a subdued figure.
That night Shiva allowed me to explore his head. Unlike me, he had a gentle peak at the vertex, and his frontal bones were very thick and as hard as steel. My topography was different. I had asked Ghosh why this might be, and he postulated that the instruments used on Shiva at birth might have caused the bones of his head to heal in this “exuberant” manner. Or else it might have had to do with the fact that we were conjoined. I was too proud to ask what exactly that meant.
A folio-size book in the British Council Library had pictures of Chang and Eng of Siam, the most famous Siamese twins. A few pages later was a portrait of the Indian Laloo, who toured the world as a circus freak. Laloo had a “parasitic twin emerging from his chest.” Laloo stood in a loincloth, and from his bare chest sprouted two buttocks and a pair of legs. To me it looked as if the parasitic twin wasn't “emerging” from Laloo, but climbing back into him.
When I could unglue my eyes from the pictures, every word in that text was a revelation to me. I learned that when two embryos just happened to grow in the mother at the same time, the result was fraternal twins—they didn't look alike and they could be boy and girl. But if a single embryo in a mother happened to split very early on in its growth into two separate halves, the result was identical twins like me and Shiva. Conjoined twins, then, were identical twins where the early split of the fertilized egg into two halves was incomplete, so the two halves remained stuck to each other. The result could be like Chang and Eng, two individuals connected at the belly or some other spot. It could also result in unequal parts, like Laloo and his parasitic twin.
“Did you know that Shiva and I were craniophagus? Connected at the head?” I said to Sister Mary Joseph Praise. “They cut that connection at birth—they had to. It was bleeding.”
I was silent for a long while, and I hoped she understood that I was being respectful. It was selfish for me to talk about our births when they coincided with her death. We had another long and awkward silence.
“Can you please get Ghosh out of jail?”
There, I said it.
I waited for a reply. In the ensuing quiet, I felt guilt and shame wash over me. I hadn't told her that Id ripped out the page on Laloo and left the library with it; Id said nothing about killing the army man and how I feared a terrible retribution some day.
There was something else Id held back, something I understood only after seeing the pictures of Chang and Eng, and of Laloo: the fleshy tube between Shiva and me had been cut and it was long gone … but it wasn't gone—it still