Cutting for Stone

In Chapter 6, the narrator returns to Hema, who is unaware of what is happening in her absence. By switching between the scene at the hospital and Hema’s return, Verghese builds narrative tension. He also employs dramatic irony, as the reader knows what awaits Hema and feels urgency that she does not experience. With her near-death experience, Hema had a revelation about her love for Ghosh and the way she should live her life. Hema’s rebirth happening in parallel with Sister’s death emphasizes Sister’s philosophy, “Make something beautiful of your life” (64). This parallel also foreshadows Hema’s decision to parent Sister’s children, taking on Sister’s role and finding purpose as a mother.

When Hema passes the site of a hanging, Verghese widens his narrative lens and pulls Addis Ababa and Ethiopia into this story. Throughout the novel, he weaves Ethiopian history into the otherwise cloistered world of Missing. For Hema, the site reinforces the differences between her home and Addis but also reminds her of how much she has changed. Although we see little of Hema’s experiences in Addis, Verghese raises the experience of Feeling Like a Foreigner here, both in terms of how she felt seeing the hanging and the difference in how she feels now, having lived in Ethiopia for years. Throughout her trip, she reflects on how she feels like Ethiopia is home now. It is the same feeling that Marion will have, much later, about America.

In Gebrew’s act of opening the hospital’s doors and windows, Verghese shows one facet of the complex Community of Faith that exists at Missing. Religion and medicine are intertwined, and the religion that is practiced takes many forms and is open to different interpretations. For example, opening doors and windows during childbirth is a common tradition in many cultures. This is also illustrated in the scene where Verghese contrasts a very graphic surgery with Sister and Matron’s prayers, a blend of scientific healing and faith. While other characters exercise their faith, Thomas loses his. When he is unable to save Sister, he reflects, “[Work] was the only arena in which he felt complete and the only thing he had to give Sister Mary Joseph Praise. But at this moment work had failed him” (126). This crisis of faith changes Thomas’s life and eventually leads to a further commitment to medicine. In the end, this decision leads him back to the twins he turns from at this moment.

While this traumatic scene is going on, the underlying question of how Sister, a devout nun, became pregnant remains. Everyone assumes that Thomas is the father—he is the obvious choice because everyone knew about the love between Thomas and Sister. The omniscient narrator, who has insight into Thomas’s thoughts, reveals Thomas’s anger and confusion, which indicate that the children are not his. Verghese will not solve this mystery until later in the story, and while it is not the focus of the novel, it does create underlying tension that continues until Marion meets Thomas as an adult and hears his story. Thomas’s emotions and actions here also foreshadow his abandonment of the twins.

The twins’ arrival in the world is dramatic, as is the revelation that they are conjoined. This is the reader’s first introduction to ShivaMarion, and the connection between the brothers is the book’s central theme. Their physical connection is quickly severed, as it has been damaged, and Marion will not feel fully connected to Shiva again until the end of the novel. For now, although the twins are physically separated, they seem to act as one entity.