Cutting for Stone

It is 1947, and 19-year-old Sister Mary Joseph Praise is on a boat to Ethiopia from Madras, India, where she trained to be a nun and a nurse, to spread the gospel through healing. On the ship, Sister’s companion, Sister Anjali, becomes sick with typhoid, as do some other passengers. Sister finds out there is a doctor on board, Thomas Stone, but when she finds him, he is so seasick that he cannot rise. She nurses him while taking care of the sick passengers. Finally, she puts him in a hammock, which relieves his seasickness. He is then able to care for Sister Anjali, and Sister admires his skill. Thomas takes charge of the ship, and when they are quarantined offshore, he bullies the harbormaster for medical supplies. Sister Anjali and two other passengers die, and Sister Mary Joseph is shocked and grief-stricken.

Thomas asks Sister Mary Joseph to go with him to his new job at a hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She wants to go with him but has orders to go to Aden, Yemen. When he leaves, she feels as if she is losing something. She arrives in Aden and finds out that the nun who was supposed to host her is dead.

Marion stops the story here for a moment; when his mother told her story to others, this is where it always stopped. All that is known is that something terrible happened to her in Aden, but she escaped and made her way to Addis Ababa.

Sister arrives at Missing Hospital, travel-weary and with a bloodstain on her nun’s habit, at the join of her legs. After a few weeks under Matron’s care, Sister physically recovers and finally sees Thomas Stone. For the next seven years, she acts as his surgical assistant and never speaks of what happened in Aden. Things continue that way until Sister goes into labor.

Dr. Thomas Stone is quiet and shy, and he appears surly. In the operating room, he is an amazing surgeon. On the day of Marion and Shiva’s birth, Sister does not appear in the operating theater to assist him, which is very unusual. He is impatient and angry, and he sends a probationer (a student nurse) to find her. He tells the woman to remind Sister that he was back at work the day after he amputated his own finger. The probationer runs to deliver the message to Sister, who is in her room, lying in bed. She delivers the message, and when Sister does not respond, she leaves.

After he is done with surgery, Thomas goes to Sister’s room. He has never been there before and realizes that she has kept his amputated finger in a jar of formaldehyde. She is near death, and he realizes that he has been in love with her for the past seven years. When he carries her to the operating room, he is incoherent, and the others think he is drunk. Matron examines Sister and announces that she is pregnant. Because the obstetrician is on vacation, Matron must deliver the baby. However, Sister is bleeding too much, and the baby is refusing to come out, so she asks Thomas to take over.

Dr. Kalpana Hemlatha, or Hema, is the obstetrician who would normally have delivered the babies. She is flying home after visiting her family in India. Later, she swears that she felt the twins being born, even though she did not know about them.

She is thinking about Ghosh, her lover, when one of the plane’s propellers stops, and the plane begins to fall. When she looks back, she recognizes that this was the event that changed everything. Hema feels the importance of Sister’s adage, “Make something beautiful of your life” (64), and she knows that she wants to marry Ghosh.

Thomas wishes Hema was operating because he does not know what to do. No one knows this, but he avoids anything obstetrical. When he was in medical school, he found a fetus in a cadaver’s womb. He never recovered from the experience, and Thomas is afraid to give Sister a Cesarean section.

When he finally examines Sister, he is angry at the baby that is threatening her life. He stops seeing it as a baby and starts seeing it as an enemy that he needs to remove. He presumes that the baby is dead and decides that, if necessary, he will destroy it to save Sister’s life. He sends for Ghosh, but the other doctor is unavailable. Matron watches with concern, but, believing that the baby must be dead, she does not intervene when Thomas grips Shiva’s head with forceps, intending to crush the skull so he can remove the baby.

Hema’s plane lands safely. She and another passenger splint a boy’s broken leg. The pilot, a Frenchman, announces that he made the engine fail on purpose to make an emergency landing for an unscheduled pickup. Hema loses her temper and yells at him. When he moves as if to hit her, she squeezes his testicles until he agrees to pay for the boy’s broken leg and refund the family’s tickets.