Hold on to your Slippers

Cutting for Stone
a novel by Abraham Verghese

In a 1950s Ethiopian mission hospital prophetically called Missing, conjoined twin boys survive a traumatic surprise birth. Their mother, a beautiful Indian nun who never revealed her pregnancy, dies, and Thomas Stone, the attending surgeon assumed to be the father, flees. The babies are separated but retain a bond so strong that narrator Marion often refers to them as one person: ShivaMarion.

Adopted by doctors Ghosh and Hema, who find their own love through the boys and return it generously, the twins grow up steeped in medical knowledge and practice, often to humorous effect: "Hema’s departures in the night [to deliver babies]came with cryptic phrases...: `eclampsia' or `postpartum hemorrhage' or, that most chilling term of all, the `Delayed Afterbird.' That one wasn’t even in the medical dictionary. And you never heard of the Afterbird except when it was Delayed. It was feared, and yet its arrival was necessary. Shiva and I looked for that Delayed Afterbird on the trees of Missing, or high up in the sky." Shades of Garp's Undertoad.


Ghosh, the boys' father, tells them an old story about a man who tried to throw away a pair of slippers that kept coming back to haunt him. "The key to your happiness," Ghosh said, "is to own your slippers, own who you are..., own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

In spite of the loving embrace of Ghosh and Hema, and their extended family, conflicting passions destroy the twins' unity in adolescence just as a revolution threatens their homeland. Political events force Marion to flee to America, where he becomes a surgeon and finds new (and old) family. Again and again Marion relearns the lesson of Ghosh's story: Family and homeland are our fate, the slippers we can never cast aside. The complicated denouement that reunites ShivaMarion may seem contrived to some readers, but I found it a satisfying, if sad resolution to an emotionally gripping saga.

Verghese is a Stanford professor of medicine whose early life was similar to Marion's. In an interview with Diane Rehm he talks about the book and about larger issues of medicine today, especially the failure to attend to the patient rather than to test results. Several former students of his called in to the show to pay tribute to the power of compassionate listening he taught them. If you know any young doctors, pass his name on to them. They might not have to skim the descriptions of surgery as I did--but most of Cutting for Stone is storytelling at its best.