Reading Abraham Verghese

Over the summer, in Sri Lanka, I read Shehan Karunatilaka's masterpiece Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. The story revolves around an alcoholic journalist's search for an elusive cricketer. I am fussy about what I read so I didn't expect to come across another good work of fiction for a while. How wrong I was. Along came my old friend Govindan Parayil for a visit to Hong Kong and he persuaded me to buy Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone. This is Verghese's first "novel"; the quotations marks are because I can see that it's heavily autobiographical.  


A few personal stories are intertwined with Cutting for Stone. The first is the shared interest I have with Govindan on politics and books; we often read the same books and have lengthy, agreeable discussions on the stories and the authors. The second is my interest in Ethiopia. The third is my fascination with the writings of Abraham Verghese.


I read good reviews when Cutting for Stone first came out in 2009 but was discouraged by its size and the disappointments I've had with autobiographers who become novelists. Paul Theroux is a case in point. 


Over the years, I've been fascinated by Haile Selassie and the story of Ethiopia. For an African country to have a real life Emperor was interesting enough, but his eventual downfall and the story of being driven away from the palace in a lowly Volkswagen beetle was even more memorable. In the late 1960's, I had a Zoology teacher in Sri Lanka, Neville Fernando, who left for Ethiopia to teach in a secondary school in Addis Ababa. I  heard he did well there. Later, at The American University in Washington DC, I was working temporarily at student registration when someone standing in line thrust her ID card at me. The magic name of Selassie was on the card and when I looked up, I stared straight into the face of the Emperor. The student happened to be the Emperor's granddaughter.


My Own Country, Verghese's first book, appeared in 1994. It relates the moving story of a doctor in Johnson City, Tennessee, who begins to treat patients with AIDS, then an unknown disease. With understanding and compassion, Verghese tends to these patients. Occasionally, he is the only person at a patient's bedside when family and friends, either fearing the disease or in denial, stayed away. The time he spent with his patient ultimately costs him his marriage, but what stayed with me is the story of a doctor whose compassion only rivaled his writing skills. Mira Nair later made a TV movie based on the book, but I only got to see a pirated copy of poor quality.


The Tennis Partner, Verghese's second book, was a disappointment. It describes is the drug addiction of a young doctor in El Paso, Texas. I felt that there wasn't enough story material for a book and some parts were padded. But Verghese's delightful stories kept appearing in The New Yorker so I knew that he was still writing.

To cite from the blurb on the back cover, Cutting for Stone covers "from the 1940s to the present, from a convent in India to a cargo ship bound for Yemen, from a tiny operating theatre in Ethiopia to a hospital in Bronx, this is both a richly visceral epic and a riveting family story." Two Indian expatriate doctors struggle to provide medical care to destitute Ethiopians. Two boys, twins, the result of a hurried affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon, grow up in a country that is changing from an Empire to a military dictatorship. Verghese, with his thorough knowledge of the local languages, culture, and life style, and his empathy for the local population, brings a depth no expatriate writer could match. Interestingly, cricket intrudes into the story, in Ethiopia as well as in the Bronx. 

I copy below the first and second paragraphs of a short article I wrote back in 1998 on nonnative speaker English teachers, which I began by citing Verghese. Not knowing that he was born in Ethiopia, I made a mistake with Vergheses' birth place.

If I am to have surgery, I hope Abraham Verghese will be my doctor. 

NNS and Invisible Barriers in ELT

George Braine

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

In a delightful article in The New Yorker, the Indian-born doctor Abraham Verghese recalls an incident which occurred soon after his arrival in the United States. Emboldened by his medical abilities and high scores in the required examinations, Verghese is confident of obtaining an internship at a “Plymouth Rock” hospital affiliated to a prestigious medical school. However, a more experienced compatriot warns him that these hospitals “have never taken a foreign medical graduate” and advises Verghese “not even to bother with that kind of place.” Instead, he is told to apply to more humble “Ellis Island” hospitals, those situated in inner-cities and rural areas, which American doctors avoid. “We are” Verghese's compatriot continues, “like a transplanted organ--lifesaving and desperately needed, but rejected because we are foreign tissue. But, as they say in America, tough ….”

Although many foreign medical graduates eventually get internships, filling positions that Americans refuse to accept, NNS English teachers are less fortunate in finding employment. What chances do foreigners have in a market glutted with American teachers willing to accept even low-paying adjunct jobs with heavy workloads? Further, for many NNS English teachers, qualifications, ability, and experience are of little help in the job market.