Although reared on different academic diets, doctors and novelists have the same quality at heart: empathy. No one lacking this trait is going to excel at writing a novel or treating a patient, and anyone who has succeeded in doing both must have had it in droves – Dr Chekhov, for instance, who shows us how aligned literature and medicine are as humane pursuits concerned with understanding the condition of others. His classic novella Ward No 6 is about a doctor learning the value of empathy, that “to cultivate indifference to suffering is to aim at a living death”. That’s a lesson worth learning, whether you are writing fiction or prescriptions.
Tell Her Everything by the Kashmiri writer Mirza Waheed is about a doctor who betrays the principle of empathy. But it is through the empathic act of writing – of putting pen to paper and reckoning with those who have suffered at his hands – that he succeeds in recovering his humanity and coming back from his own living death.
Dr K is the son of fallen Muslim aristocrats who have retained, even amid poverty, their entitled sensibility. An uninhibited zeal for advancement, in order to restore wealth and standing to his name and his offspring, has seen Dr K rise from small-town India via a prestigious education in London to a high-ranking position in an unnamed Gulf state. Now retired, from his luxury flat on the Thames K recalls his material rise and moral fall in a series of unsent letters – notes for a conversation he envisages having with his estranged American daughter.
K’s economic uplift, a familiar tale of the transformative impact of Gulf petrodollars on the lives of south Asians, is inevitably less interesting than the story of his ethical corruption. As a well-paid hospital surgeon, K eagerly takes on more and more responsibilities until these ultimately include duties such as hand-chopping for the Department of Corrections. As with so many historic misdeeds, there isn’t one dramatic moment when the protagonist steps out of the light and into the darkness. The evil insinuates itself slowly into the life of an otherwise normal, refined, jazz-loving family man, “starting with tending to botched procedures at Corrections, healing messed-up hands, and then having to do it ourselves”.
Amputating the hands of thieves is an infamous sharia punishment, legal in very few countries, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Out of this fascinating, grisly phenomenon, Tell Her Everything has been plotted with great care. Hands are a leitmotif, as the gifted dexterity of a surgeon becomes the means of severing the hands of others. Ghostly, disembodied fingers wag their accusations in guilty hallucinations. Playing on the oriental trope of kismet, or destiny, K claims at one point the choice wasn’t his, “it was prewritten in the lines of my palms”. His own best friend, Biju, an Indian doctor struggling with addiction, is eventually convicted of stealing. It’s when Biju raises his maimed stump for a farewell handshake that K truly grasps his culpability.
Reviewing this novel (which came out three years ago in India, where it won the Hindu literary prize), critics have invoked comparisons to Kazuo Ishiguro, and K is something of an unreliable narrator in that vein. He hopes to vindicate himself to his daughter, whom he sent away to boarding school to protect her from his own ethical degradation. “We merely helped improve and bring it in line with proper clinical practices,” K intends to say by way of justification. But if it was so inoffensive – progressive, even – why the need to send his daughter away? K’s confession grasps this contradiction. His writing is not really about persuading his daughter or himself, it ultimately becomes a method of self-inquiry – and the narrator even knows it. “The denial of self-deception is the ruse of self-deception,” K declares, introspectively.
Although the subject and setting are far from Kashmir, Tell Her Everything is reminiscent of Waheed’s debut, The Collaborator, shortlisted for the Guardian first book award, in which a well-meaning, intelligent young Kashmiri works on behalf of the Indian army during its murderous occupation. He betrays the cause of his compatriots, just as K betrays his vocation’s Hippocratic principles. Waheed’s novels function a bit like the glass backing of a watch that allows you to glimpse inside its mechanics; only in this case, behind the crystal glass, you can see the cogs of his characters’ guilty consciences whirring. As we read about them in their studied transparency, we realise that these are consciences that might have been any of ours, confronted with the prospect of treachery and collusion in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• Tell Her Everything by Mirza Waheed is published by Melville House (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
